Wearing Paper Dresses

by Anne Brinsden

  The school bus trip was hard, Elise and her commitments now being everyone’s business. So Marjorie made sure she had a book with plenty of pages in it. The classrooms were the same, so Marjorie made sure she sat up the front where nobody else wanted to sit. And at lunchtimes, Marjorie developed a passion for study and the benefits of solitary library research.

  All the school watched. But Jesse Mitchell was the only person game enough to interrupt. He waited for Marjorie against a corner of a classroom block one lunchtime. ‘Sorry to hear about your mother,’ he said, stepping out in front of her.

  ‘Thanks,’ Marjorie said to the ground as she attempted to sidestep Jesse.

  ‘How is she going?’

  ‘Fine,’ muttered Marjorie to the ground as she attempted another sidestep.

  ‘She’ll be alright,’ offered Jesse. ‘She’ll get better.’

  ‘What?’ snapped Marjorie, and she couldn’t stop her eyes from leaving their contemplation of the ground to glare at Jesse.

  ‘That mental hospital will fix her up,’ he said.

  Marjorie jerked her head up high. ‘What would you bloody know? She is not mental. So bugger off, Wheat Bag Boy.’

  And Marjorie ran for the girls’ toilets, where she locked herself in a cubicle for the remainder of the lunchtime – biting on the bunch of school dress she had shoved in her mouth to stop water bursting from her eyeballs and sobs bursting from her mouth. She was safe after that. And left alone.

  *

  Bill went back to the city after the weeks and weeks of necessary repairs to the nerves had been completed. He collected Elise from the mental hospital. Elise gathered together as much of herself as she could manage from the bits and pieces she had scattered around the place, and packed them into her suitcase. She brought back as much as she could find. Bill drove Elise back all those hundreds of miles. And so much of Elise came back most people hardly noticed it was not all of Elise.

  Even so, everyone tiptoed around her. Because of all the breakdowns that occur regularly in the Mallee, a nervous breakdown was not one of them. And a major nervous breakdown was not what the Mallee knew about.

  Marjorie and Ruby held their breath for days and days. But nothing out of the ordinary seemed to happen. Elise seemed tired – but she was tired before. She seemed also to have left the glittery smile in the mental hospital – and that made Marjorie and Ruby think maybe things had a chance to settle back down. Perhaps their mother’s tight stringing nerves had taken the opportunity to ease off a bit while she was in that mental hospital.

  Old routines re-emerged. Ruby and Marjorie got themselves ready for school. Bill took the tractor out to the back paddock. Pa dealt with the rabbits. Elise sat in the kitchen – next to the stove – next to the coffee percolator – and wore the tea cosy hat. Things were pretty normal.

  Except for those plastic flowers. One day Ruby and Marjorie came home from school to find Elise had collected the whole twisted and contorted and boiled bunch of them, and planted them in those bare red-dirt front gardens.

  Marjorie saw them first, out of the driver’s-side window. ‘Ruby, look.’

  The girls got out of the ute cautiously. Trying not to disturb those gaudy plastic petals bent to the sun and bowed to the dirt.

  ‘I’m scared,’ whispered Marjorie.

  ‘Of what?’ asked Ruby. ‘A bunch of plastic flowers?’

  ‘Yes,’ whispered Marjorie, trying to climb behind Ruby.

  They walked up that dirt path, never taking their eyes off the flowers. Every one of those bent and twisted flowers had been stuck in the flowerbeds, with their edges of perfect pointed bricks. The flowers were in rows. Perfectly distanced from each other in every direction. Sensible plastic flowers in the barren red dirt. It was a work of art.

  The two girls walked into the kitchen. But Elise seemed alright. ‘There you are, dears,’ she said with a smile. And went back to sipping her coffee.

  ‘Those plastic flowers are in the dirt out the front,’ said Marjorie.

  Ruby watched Elise.

  ‘Yes, dear,’ said Elise, smiling still. ‘I planted them. I’ve always wanted some flowers at the front of the house.’

  ‘They’re not real,’ said Marjorie.

  ‘Of course they are real,’ chided Elise.

  ‘They’re plastic.’

  ‘They are, Marjorie. They are plastic. They are modern and will not wilt and will not need water. We will not need to prune them or spray them for insects.’ Elise lost interest in the subject and went back to drinking her coffee.

  ‘Are you peeling the vegetables tonight?’ asked Ruby, very carefully.

  Elise looked at her and smoothed her tea cosy hat. ‘Vegetable preparation is Marjorie’s job,’ she said. ‘I am too tired for such matters.’

  Ruby and Marjorie looked at each other.

  The girls waited for Bill or Pa to say something that night at the tea table. But no mention was made of the plastic flower garden. The girls waited another day and then a few more. But nothing was said by Bill or Pa. So the girls decided to say nothing to them.

  Elise took to caring for that gaudy, garish garden of curved and crooked plastic in the same way she had cared for its predecessor garden of dirt. Meticulously.

  And Marjorie would creep between the garden beds, hugging the middle of the dirt path and trying not to look. But, try as she might not to look, her eyes always made her – she had to note the gardening. She wanted to ask Elise why she changed the flowers perpetually. Because Elise did. Elise would move them from row to row. From side to side. From front to back. And back again.

  But Marjorie was too scared to talk about those plastic flowers. She was too scared because no one else in the house seemed to be scared about the plastic flowers. No one else seemed to notice them at all. Only Marjorie and Ruby.

  Chapter 10

  But in the end, it was Elise’s art that snuck up and tripped Marjorie over. It wasn’t the plastic flowers at all. Marjorie had never been scared of art because art made Elise happy. So Marjorie was caught off guard. She was ambushed because she was not on the lookout.

  It happened some time after Elise had fulfilled her commitment at the damn fool mental hospital. It seemed her commitment included a reassessment of the value of some, but not all, paper. Like Elise’s charcoal-and-ink drawing of Marjorie with her elbows on the kitchen table and her chin propped up in her hands. One day that paper disappeared and it took its drawing with it. ‘Where is the drawing of me?’ asked Marjorie. They were in the kitchen. And the kitchen was calm and unperturbed. Elise was painting. Ruby was doing her homework and Marjorie was sitting there, leafing through Elise’s folio while she painted. It was a lazy, contented leafing.

  ‘That dreadful thing? It is over there.’ Elise’s paintbrush waved in a vague way towards the back of the kitchen.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Under the cocky’s perch. The cocky needed some paper.’ And Elise went back to concentrating on her painting.

  Marjorie looked over at the cocky, sitting in its pink-and-grey perfection on the back of a kitchen chair. The cocky caught her gaze and began walking with quick and imperious cocky steps – back and forth, back and forth along the back of the chair. He held her gaze and started nodding with intent – up and down, up and down – and raised his beautiful crimson cocky crest at her. Marjorie looked down at what the cocky was trying to show her. And there indeed was the drawing of Marjorie. Sitting on the chair. Put to a much more important use than being a more than half-decent study of Marjorie, drawn by her mother. She stared at the drawing, now embellished by the efforts of the cocky. The cocky looked Marjorie in the eye and bobbed up and down once more before pausing to deposit a further glistening pearly blob onto the paper. The drawing had become a collaborative piece.

  The cocky put its head on one side and gazed at Marjorie out of one pink-circled
eye. What do you think? it asked Marjorie. Collaborations can often be tricky. More opalescence to the left, perhaps?

  Marjorie had learnt things about struggle by now. About when it was wise to be scared. About when it was prudent to be careful. But she still grappled with rushing things. She wished she was like Ruby, who was so careful, so delicate. Ruby never rushed. Ruby was a shimmering circus juggler in the middle of the circus ring, performing while the stars and the moon and the midnight sky moved outside. Beautiful and poised. Serene and calm in the concentration of her craft. Never dropping the juggle, no matter how complicated it was. Elise and the tea cosy hat, and the garish plastic flowers bobbing in the blazing sun, and the hot red dirt could be kept aloft – spinning and spinning and spinning – by Ruby. It seemed effortless.

  Marjorie was already feeling the prickle warnings as she watched the cocky. She should have trod cautiously at that point. But she rushed. Like a bull in a china shop. ‘Why did you do that? I liked that drawing.’

  ‘The cocky needed some paper,’ said Elise, concentrating on her painting.

  ‘What was wrong with using newspaper?’

  ‘For Pete’s sake, what is the problem?’ Elise put down her paintbrush and looked at Marjorie. ‘It was a frightful drawing.’

  ‘But it was a drawing of me,’ said Marjorie. ‘You did it.’

  ‘I know that, Marjorie. I also know it was a very bad drawing. And being my drawing, I have the right to do with it what I jolly well want!’ Elise picked up her paintbrush and resumed her painting.

  ‘You only did it because it was a drawing of me. You could have used newspaper,’ said Marjorie.

  Ruby had put down her schoolbooks and was watching her mother now. ‘I am sure Mum will do another drawing of you, Marjorie.’ She spoke slowly and quietly.

  ‘You couldn’t be bothered with any newspaper, could you?’ said Marjorie, ignoring Ruby’s efforts to rebalance the spinning.

  ‘The drawing had no redeeming artistic merit. It was an embarrassment for any true artist,’ sniffed Elise, shaking her head and dislodging fragments of glitter.

  You could do that, though, couldn’t you, Mum?’ coaxed Ruby. ‘You could do an even better drawing of Marjorie.’

  ‘You’re just raving on, Mother. You couldn’t be bothered and gave it to the cocky to shit on because it was just a drawing of me. You wouldn’t have done it with any of the drawings of Ruby!’

  So the bull trampled and crashed all over the place and the delicate, paper-thin porcelain of Elise’s mind wobbled and swayed. And Ruby’s juggle was toppled.

  ‘You are nothing but a selfish and self-centred little article, Marjorie,’ said Elise, throwing her paintbrushes down. ‘For Pete’s sake! It was a piece of paper. The world does not revolve around you, young lady, and it’s about time you realised that!’

  Marjorie scrambled off the kitchen chair. She abandoned that marvellous folio and that sea of art paper and ran for the back door.

  ‘Why don’t you have a rest, Mum? Let me make you a cup of coffee,’ Ruby was saying as Marjorie slammed through the flywire door as hard as she could. The door slapped against the asbestos sheeting of the porch as she ran. Slapping again and again as it watched her stumble off the back step and onto the baked-hard red dirt of the backyard. Slapping and clapping while Marjorie’s tears splotched onto the limestones and splattered and bounced on the red sand.

  It was getting dark when Marjorie walked back into the kitchen. Her tears were out of sight. They were dammed and drowned. Elise and Ruby were still there. All Elise’s art materials were put away. There was no sign of the collaborative effort under the cocky either. Marjorie wasn’t surprised. The collaboration would have ended a long time ago – in the kitchen stove.

  Ruby looked at Marjorie. Elise looked at her coffee. Marjorie went to the pantry cupboard and started doing her jobs. No one said anything.

  ‘Why did you upset Mum like that?’ Ruby asked later, when they were in bed.

  ‘She was using that drawing of me for the cocky to shit on.’

  ‘There’s a time and a place to talk to her about those things,’ said Ruby. ‘And that wasn’t it.’

  ‘I didn’t start out to upset her. I just wish it wasn’t always all about her. That sometimes she could see how other people feel.’

  ‘That’s what Mum said about you.’

  Marjorie stared into the dark. She blinked her eyes hard and for a long time, before rolling onto her side and facing the bedroom wall. She could hear the house smirking.

  *

  Marjorie did a queer thing that night. She lay stiff as a board in her bed. She stared at her bedroom wall and contemplated the blessings of darkness while she listened for Ruby to fall into a deep sleep. And for the house to settle into its midnight quiet. She waited a very good length of time – a sensible scared-of-getting-caught length of time. Then Marjorie squeezed quietly out of bed and did something she had never done before. She collected her clothes and shoes and crept out of the bedroom, crept carefully down the hallway – avoiding the squeaky floorboards just itching to turn her in – and crept out the back door.

  Marjorie stood in the middle of the backyard. She got dressed. Supported by the light of the blazing, inscrutable stars. She shoved her nightie under the tank stand and set off. Heading out the back gate, down the hill, across the paddock and towards Jimmy Waghorn’s place. It was the first time she had ever gone there in the night.

  Marjorie walked quietly and carefully for longer than she needed so she could be sure she would not be heard by the house. Then she started running. Sure-footed in the dark. With only a thin moon to help the stars in any guidance. A loping, easy stride. She could have run into town and back.

  The night air was cool and it brushed Marjorie as she passed. You are not like your mother, said the soles of her feet and they beat a softly padded drum to supplement their message. The night air daubed its soothing ointment and whispered its agreement with the feet.

  Marjorie squeezed through the wire triangle at the gate, and kept running. You are not like your mother, you are not like your mother, her feet kept chanting. She was running to Jimmy’s place. But she had to make a stop before she got there. She had never had to do that before. But this time Marjorie had to pull her run up short when she saw, in the night distance, the glow of a fire right next to Jimmy’s place.

  She swallowed an enormous mouthful of panic: hands scrabbling at her face as the dread tried to force its way past her teeth. There was a paddock fire ahead! A grass fire in front! A racing, roaring out-of-control monstrosity galloping amok in the middle of the night through the tinder-dry stubble in Jimmy Waghorn’s paddock! Blazing negligently away. Cavorting across the wheat stalks while all decent CFA volunteers were blissfully ignorant and asleep in bed. When any half-decent wet wheat bag that she might have used to bash the fire out was bone dry and stashed miles back in the grain shed.

  Why didn’t she always carry a wet wheat bag with her? She raged at herself. How stupid could she be? She mustn’t have put the fire out properly earlier on. And now here she was without a wet wheat bag. Only a selfish, self-centred and thoughtless person would run off into the night with never a thought to bring a wet wheat bag in the very likely case of a raging grass fire in a stubble paddock. She was going to be responsible for letting the whole bloody farm burn down, didn’t she know?

  But an instant later Marjorie realised that she, and the whole bloody farm, were safe, despite her abject stupidity. The fire was burning constant and contained; it was not spreading. Marjorie blew out an enormous mouthful of relief – equal to the enormous mouthful of panic she had just swallowed. And started off running again.

  She ran right up to that fire. It was an ordinary Jimmy Waghorn fire, burning in his old campfire space: just like she and Ruby might have lit. She walked around it, double-checking to be sure none of the fire had escaped int
o the surrounding paddocks, before she sank down on the old blue bench.

  And sucked in her second enormous mouthful of panic for the night when a voice spoke to her from the base of the peppercorn tree.

  ‘Night-time is the best time to come here,’ said Jesse, unfurling his long legs and pushing himself up from the sculptured bole of the tree. He pushed aside the drooping fronds – aromatic and delicate on the slight, middle-of-the-night breeze. ‘Don’t know why you haven’t tried it before.’ He glided – casual and taut – towards open-mouthed Marjorie. ‘Shut your mouth, Marjorie,’ he added. ‘If the sun hadn’t gone down already you would have a gob full of flies by now with your mouth hanging open like that.’

  Marjorie slammed her mouth shut and watched Jesse move over to the old blue bench – her old blue bench! She watched Jesse fold himself up again, settle to the red dirt and lean against the bench. Right next to her. One elbow casually resting on the seat. Both eyes casually resting on Marjorie.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ demanded Marjorie.

  ‘Visiting Jimmy Waghorn’s place,’ said Jesse, watching Marjorie.

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘Can’t what?’

  ‘Can’t come here to Jimmy’s place.’

  ‘Yes I can,’ said Jesse – suddenly fierce.

  ‘No you can’t,’ said Marjorie – missing Jesse’s fierceness.

  ‘You don’t own this place,’ said Jesse. And Jesse lurched to his feet. ‘This is not your place. This is Jimmy’s place.’ Jesse was standing over her. His eyes – hot and angry – stared at her as he threw himself back down to sit beside her, this time on the bench.

  Marjorie knew enough from her own life about probable consequences of sudden anger. She did not press the point. She chose instead to stare at the fire. ‘How long have you been coming here?’ she asked.

  Jesse glanced at her before looking away at the fire. ‘Years,’ he said softly. ‘I’ve been coming for years.’

  ‘What?’ Marjorie’s arm shot out sideways and whacked Jesse in the chest. ‘Don’t be bloody ridiculous.’