So This Is Life

by Anne Manne

  Male dominance was then commonplace in marriage, bearing out the truth of feminism. Yet while ideology can grasp the outlines, the contours, of lives from times past, it can never quite capture the queer vitality of things as they really were. People have a habit of sneaking their way out of categories. The straitjacket of female submissive-ness can’t quite account for Ruth Park’s story of her aunts dressed in pearls and silks, reeking of perfume, riding on an elephant, standing up and shouting, belting it over the ears with their umbrellas to make the poor beast go faster.

  Or maybe most women did respond at some level to what was considered appropriate female behaviour, but Old Ma Doak was subject to something else which I noticed operated in the country—The Invisible Law of Exemptions. If someone was declared ‘a character’, then they were happily exempt from normal proprieties. It was not that Old Ma Doak was frowned upon for not conforming, nor did her non-conforming affect the women who tottered among the puddles in skirts and heels at the football while helping in the ladies auxiliary. It was just as if there was an invisible tribunal who had looked at Old Ma Doak and declared her exempt from the usual strictures of Australian womanhood. When newcomers asked why a woman should work on the road gangs, and dress like a man, the townspeople would look puzzled and squint at them, surprised, as if it were an impossible, almost existential question. It was as if the newcomer had asked: ‘Why, exactly, is that old gum tree growing where it is?’ ‘Old Ma Doak?’ they would say, suddenly startled. ‘Oh well …’ (their voices would trail lamely away), ‘… she just is, that’s all’. There was no rhyme or reason, no explanation. Old Ma Doak just—well—was.

  Old Ma Doak was indistinguishable from a man, except for two things. One thing was her breasts. The other was doting on her daughter Carleen. Old Ma Doak might have been immune to femininity but she was not immune to mother-love. There was a general invisible, unspoken agreement that there was a lot to be said for Old Ma Doak. She was good-hearted, generous to a fault, and always helped out when anyone was in need. Most importantly, she had never missed a pony club working bee. Equally, it was agreed, invisibly, silently, that there was not a lot to be said for Carleen. Carleen had thick, greasy, yellow plaits and acne. Personal hygiene was not Old Ma Doak’s strong point, but lapses which were forgiven her were never forgiven in Carleen. The loathing which swelled, swirled and bubbled around the person of Carleen didn’t, however, have to do with her violations of any feminine stereotype. It was that she violated something much deeper, the deepest country ethic of all—stoicism. Carleen was an appalling whinger.

  Carleen whinged, whined, moaned, and bleated about everything. She whinnied discontent. Any happening within the vicinity of Carleen meant people had to brace themselves for the torrent of whinge. Carleen was a one-person culture of complaint. This, as they say, did not go down well in a milieu that Helen Garner once described as having a force field of privacy around the hidden parts of ordinary families—alcoholism, infidelity, unhappy marriages, nervous breakdowns, madness, and death. Everywhere was silence. Fate hung heavily over everyone’s life, disasters could not be averted, so the gods were appeased by shutting up about it. A world where I asked a man how he was just after he had almost died of a red-back spider bite, and he flushed red with embarrassment and then choked through closed lips: ‘Good’. He looked angry and walked away. Life was tough, but you took it how it came. Life was not so much lived as endured. And you shut up about it.

  Peculiarly, none of the loathing which attached itself to Carleen was ever expressed. This was not due to inhibition, for country people are adept at ostracising and punishing someone they dislike. None of the fierce disapproval ever penetrated the Doak’s family circle because something always held it in check. Maybe it was the respect people felt for Old Ma Doak, or perhaps just for her mother-love. Or maybe Ma’s status as An Exemption extended itself, vicariously, to Carleen. Whatever the case, Old Ma Doak was completely oblivious of the public low regard her daughter was held in. Carleen often fell off her pony, an ugly black thing with an axe for a head, which was forever dumping her. All the other children jumped up quickly after a fall, to make it clear they had not been hurt, but Carleen would just lie there wailing. Old Ma Doak would come running, crying out: ‘Mama’s coming, darlin’ heart’, over and over. She cut, I suppose, a ridiculous figure, but for some reason nobody laughed. They looked away, silent, respectful, when Carleen lay sprawled on the ground after a fall, as Old Ma Doak lumbered across the dusty ground towards the squawking child, round red face huffing and puffing, white hair stuck to her scalp, breasts swinging beneath the old khaki jumper. And her face full of love.

  It was in the days before emotional tourism, when one may pass from one unsatisfactory spouse to the next with the ease with which one travels from Sydney to Singapore. It happened in the country, in a world generally bereft of interesting husbands. Most as I recall, were solid citizens—butchers, motor mechanics, sometimes a schoolteacher—who treated their wives with great loyalty and profound respect. Their attitude to their wives, and sometimes to other women, was most often one of baffled reverence. When they spoke of their wives their brows would form furrows of perplexity, as if they were silently asking, like Freud, ‘What is it that women want?’ They took it as an article of faith that no woman should be left with heavy physical work, and regarded any woman who was husbandless with great pity, and as needing special help. Likewise women often sprang into action if a man was wifeless, gathering around a widower with casseroles and slices, and performing domestic tasks with the solemnity of a Country Fire Authority brigade putting out a spot fire. Interestingly, if the man died first, their wives soldiered on with quiet stoicism, but if the wife died first, the men, often as not, collapsed.

  Some men referred reverentially to their wives as ‘Mum’. There were few things more shocking or reprehensible than a child being rude to Mum. Mum was never to be dishonoured or upset, or, one had the impression, the universe might crack open. ‘Don’t Speak Like That to Your Mother’, intoned in a voice of deepest horror, was a frequent phrase lingering in the cold, quiet air of wintry afternoons at the local pony club. Mr Bennet, the butcher, a great burly man with a face as red as his meat, always handed his wife, a nervous woman with a delicate complexion, over puddles with exceptional care. On no account were her dainty little feet, clad in stockings and heels even on pony club days, to get wet. She was terrified of horses and whenever it was their son’s turn at the showjumps (he was a pale lad, an only child doted upon by Mrs Bennet, and an indifferent horseman) she would shriek, turn her back and cover her face with her hands. Mr Bennet would place his great arm awkwardly around her frail shoulders, and say ‘Now, now, Mum, let him go now, the boy is alright, he’s alright’.

  Husbands like Mr Bennet were often to be found, wearing aprons, obediently manning the barbecues at pony club fundraisers, behind pungent wraiths of smoke and steam, dispensing singed sausages and half-cooked hamburgers. They were nervous before any cut of meat more exotic than a T-bone. My mother, who although a member of the genteel poor, nonetheless (reflecting better days) was a meat snob, once gave me a small, expensive piece of fillet steak to place on a barbecue. Poor Mr Greenacre, the grocer, had never espied any meat so small and delicate-looking, and expressed long and loudly his concern over the meagre nature of my portion as it lay there before him, sizzling gently among great tough slabs of T-bone and rump quivering with white fat. These husbands were as reliable and sensible—and as erotic—as hot water bottles.

  But not Roman. Roman was what country folk called (as if an unparalleled exotic) ‘A Continental’. People would say, in half-hushed voices, as if it explained everything (and indeed, perhaps it did), ‘Oh, he’s a Continental’. Anything Continental, meaning European, in the homogeneous, modest Anglo-Celtic world of country Victoria was extraordinarily mysterious, attractive, unpredictable, and perhaps dangerous. They often had obscure titles, like ‘The Colonel’, although colonel of what was quite unclear
. It did occur to me that these titles were quite possibly inventions by the humble antipodeans before what they felt to be continental distinction.

  God knows what accident of fate, refugeedom I suppose, had brought Roman among us. He was an aristocratic Pole, tall, always in breeches and long riding boots, black hair, black expressive eyes, with long eyelashes usually lowered in contemplation of someone of the fairer sex, a dark complexion. He exuded sexual magnetism. In a world full of Mr Bennets and Mr Greenacres, Roman was a glittering prize. He was married to Gwendoline of the luscious red lips, who though ten years older, was still very attractive, or perhaps it was just being besotted that gave her a kind of vibrancy. She was in love with a desperation born of the certainty that one day her prize would leave. If it was hard to imagine, growing up, sexual passion between the women who wore twinsets and the men who wore woolly cardigans stretching comfortably over paunches, between Mr and Mrs Bennet, it was not at all difficult with Gwendoline and Roman. Theirs was a stormy relationship, everyone knew everyone else’s business of course, and there were regular reports of furniture smashed and crockery flung. Electric tension always crackled between them, or rather from her to him—for he was always looking away, gently disengaging, gaze drifting off. She could not look at him without anguish. I once saw a glance pass between Roman and a girl groom who worked at their Arabian stud—it was enough for me to know there was good cause for that anguish. Gwendoline was always watching him, as if he might disappear at any moment, before her very eyes. And one night, in the silence of a heavy frost of late autumn, bare branches of the trees outlined starkly against a savage sky, disappear he did.

  The next day Gwendoline took her rifle, and walked out in the silence of the morning into the paddocks, boots cracking thick frost, and stood among her beloved horses that she had so painstakingly bred. As she walked among them, they came to her, curious, half-prancing, half-shyly, soft brown eyes hidden by tangled forelocks, nostrils blowing gently into her outstretched hand, before she stroked their sleek necks. Then the rifle rang out in the ice-cold air as she shot them—one by one, she shot those beautiful horses. They lay there, their great bodies slumped on the ground, manes flowing over necks, red blood on white frost.

  I saw her some years later, when returning to the town. She had married again and had apparently recovered. Yet the strange thing was I did not, at first, recognise her. She was before me physically but I had the feeling that Gwendoline had disappeared, that her spirit had vanished along with Roman. She was no longer Gwendoline, but merely Gwen. She was—well—commonplace. There was no trace of her former beauty. Even her voluptuous lips were gone. They were thin and unpainted. The spark was gone. Her eyes, once vivid and sharp, were expressionless, as if where once she saw everything, she now saw nothing. Her face, once mobile and fierce, was bland. There was no trace of the past. It was as if these things had been called out by Roman, and had flown with him; as if in leaving he had taken more away from her than just himself. She had remarried, one of the town’s many garage proprietors, a Mr Bennet look-alike. People sometimes referred to her first husband, although never within her earshot. They would say, nodding their heads sagely, as if it explained everything: ‘Well, he was a Continental’. And the troubled waters of the past, full of passion and possibility, closed over quietly, as if they had never been.

  Daisy walked carefully, placing one foot dully in front of the other. Heel to toe, toe to heel, across the wooden classroom floor. Her head was down, her chin sunk almost onto her chest. Her eyes were closed, her mouth was open but moving, perhaps counting the steps. She was breathing loudly. When she reached the wall on the other side she would bump into it, seem to awaken from her sleepwalking, look startled for a moment, and turn around and walk back again.

  Daisy was our high school English teacher. This mesmerised performance would follow a brief introduction to a lesson before setting us to our grammar exercises in neat workbooks. Back and forth, banging into the wall, and back again, one clumpy, low-heeled ladies shoe in front of the other.

  Daisy wore bright floral dresses in large patterns in a 1950s style, tightly waisted, with a belt, and wide flared skirts. This was the late 1960s when everyone else was hitching their hemlines steadily higher, in straight shifts, and, for the younger women, mini skirts. But Daisy kept her hemlines mid-calf, from which emerged a thick seamed stocking, wrinkled around heavy ankles. She wore little makeup, a vivid slash of unfashionable bright red lipstick the only gesture towards some long-lost vanity.

  Daisy was quite competent at spelling, grammar and the structure of the English language. With anything like poetry or prose which spoke to an emotional life, however, she floundered badly. She could not read poetry, except in a bleating, singsong voice, brow furrowed as if before a mystery. She would often ask me for an explanation, squinting at me hard, as if to figure out not only the mystery of the words, but the deeper mystery of a student responsive to them. When she had finished quizzing me, she would look at me uneasily. In those moments her face looked crumpled, vulnerable.

  The singsong poetry reading and the hopeless effort of explaining what it meant now over, she would set us some exercises to occupy us. Then she would sit down at the teacher’s desk in front of the class, ostensibly to correct some students’ work, but in reality to fall asleep. Slowly, she would sink deeper and deeper into her slumber, oblivious to the pandemonium breaking out among the boys, the paper darts flying, the teasing of the girls and the farting competition at the back of the room. To the girls’ horror and the boys’ delight, she would slump asleep with her legs wide apart. The 1950s dresses with their wide skirts would fall open, displaying thick tan-coloured stockings held in place by suspenders, voluminous underwear above white legs mottled with purple veins. Sometimes she would snore loudly, mouth open. When the bell rang she would start awake, rouse herself and try to get some order. But it was too late, and she was shouting at our careless backs; we were already streaming rowdily out of the room.

  I was so sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued as a teenager, my mother briefly rechristened me ‘The Viper’, joking that one blow from my tongue could kill someone stone dead. So, too, were my friends, ever-sharp on the comedy of life in a country high school. Our material was rich, and we laughed all the way to Year 12. But that was to do with puncturing hubris, seeing through inflated egos, satirising and re-presenting a humorous and deflated reality to those guilty of pretension. With Daisy, however, we did much less of that than we might. Her reality was already so dismal, so utterly diminished. She was already on the floor of life, and everybody knew it. Somehow so far gone she seemed lost even to humiliation. To be humiliated one needs some residue of pride, and she seemed to have none left. The Education Department sheltered such people; they did not get promoted, but they weren’t sacked either. On paper, of course, one wants excellence and so on. But institutions can also let someone limp on, and not let them fall by the wayside. And there can be something humane in that.

  In reality, this job kept her afloat. Without it, one sensed she might have sunk. But sunk from what? What was Daisy’s story? Why was she like that? After all, those gaily printed floral dresses and the slash of red lipstick surely spoke to a very different youth. A young womanhood full of hope. What had happened to her?

  It was my mother, also a teacher, who found out Daisy’s story. My mother often seemed to know what was hidden behind respectable suburban façades. Like a radio tuned into a different frequency from everybody else, she was attuned to certain vibrations of suffering, especially in the lives of women. Her own life as a divorcee and sole parent was unusual at that time, especially in a country town, but it was by no means exceptional. Sometimes newly separated women would ask her advice, as someone who had made a go of it on her own. She would give it in a quiet, understated, undemonstrative way. I remember her talking to a fragile neighbour at a kitchen table, the woman seeping despair as she wept over the end of her marriage, twisting a sodden yellow handkerchief aroun
d and around her fingers. Her bewildered, pale eyes looked vaguely this way and that, never quite focusing, spidery fair hair sticking out over a thin neck. She had somehow managed not to see what was obvious to everybody else: the affair between her husband and a woman boarder living with them, who had a long, black mane of hair and knowing, scornful eyes. Now they were both throwing out the wife. My mother was explaining to the jilted one that she could go back to her own name, have her own bank account, and get a job.

  But Daisy’s story turned out to be rather different. Daisy had a husband who was suffering from a severe, intractable mental illness. So severe that he was more or less permanently institutionalised at the local psychiatric hospital. She had a son, who was profoundly disabled. She did not abandon either but slogged her way through life as a teacher, earning enough to keep them there, visiting them, but living alone. Her strange behaviour—sleepwalking through lessons—was because she was heavily drugged with valium or a similar sedative. It was the only way she coped with an unbearable reality.

  I remember my shock when I found that out. Daisy was somebody’s wife, somebody’s mother. There had been a whole life before the person we saw, the creature the adolescent boys laughed at and mocked, the desires that the sashed, faded dresses and vivid lipstick spoke to. There had been love, a marriage, the birth of a child, a life-beginning adulthood full of ordinary but deep hopes, before giving way to torment, grief and despair. All hope was gone. Yet she kept going. She had a mad husband and a damaged son, and all she could do in life was endure it, keep going, paying medical bills and visiting them in the psychiatric hospital, putting one heavy foot in front of the other.