Wearing Paper Dresses

by Anne Brinsden

  ‘Hey! Don’t touch those. They’re my tin plates,’ one of the crazy men would protest. And he would lunge at her and stretch his insane eyes to their limits at her. But he was mistaken if he thought his insane eyes were a match for Elise’s. He didn’t frighten Marjorie. And Marjorie was quick. She would just step aside and let him sprawl on the floor, or stagger into chairs or other inmates. She really didn’t care which. ‘That girl is stealing all the biscuits again! Stop her! Someone get the help!’ one woman with painted nails and impeccable diction would screech. But Marjorie was not deterred by her either.

  There was never a thought to look around for her mother when she arrived. Marjorie didn’t need or care to do that. She knew where she would be. Elise would be jammed as she was every time in that timid expanse of a visitors’ room. With its silent, watchful orderlies in their white coats. Elise and all her companions sitting on those metal chairs. Or slumping, or squatting. Or not sitting at all. Elise always was sitting, though. Upright. Her head naked of any decent tea cosy.

  And Marjorie didn’t know either if Elise cared to watch out for her in those early days. Because Marjorie never bothered to look. She just went straight to work. She straightened the tables and chairs – even the occupied chairs, if she felt like it. She would push the chairs equidistantly into the tables and arrange the chairs equally among the tables. Then she would place the lukewarm cups of tea – equally, comfortingly, squarely in front of each chair. Then she would arrange the tin plates with the biscuits – grabbing them out of hands if needs be. She was methodical. She was at peace and with purpose as she carved out sensibility and order. As she set the tables.

  She did speak to her mother, though. ‘So this is your lunatic asylum, is it?’ she said the first time she went. On subsequent visits Marjorie would say the following when she had finished her table-setting chore: ‘There,’ Marjorie would proclaim. ‘The tables are set, Mother. There are no tablecloths. Or serviettes. It is a bit of a handicap to set a proper table under these conditions. I have done it appropriately otherwise.’ And she would turn as she spoke to the empty fireplace near the window. Because that was where Elise would always be. Sitting in a chair beside the empty fireplace – staring at its emptiness. Marjorie would go over to her mother and would reach down. It looked like she was putting her arms around her mother to give her a hug. But she wasn’t doing that at all. Marjorie had no hugs left these days. ‘Why don’t you spit some more tablets into the fire before I go, Mother?’ she sometimes said.

  Or: ‘So, are you happy now?’ she often asked.

  Sometimes Marjorie left her mother a different message. It was a simple one. ‘We did it, you and I,’ she would murmur into her mother’s ear.

  Her mother never replied.

  Aunty Agnes wouldn’t ask Marjorie how Elise was after these visits. She knew better than that – even if she didn’t know enough to realise that Marjorie might not even have been to the mental hospital at all.

  Marjorie always telephoned the farm, though. Every month. Because how were they to know whether she had visited or not? Certainly Elise wasn’t in any fit state to tell them. And all Marjorie had to do anyway was visit the confessional and say, ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I have been telling lies,’ and everything would be alright again.

  Bill would ask about Elise, though. Or Pa would ask. Depending on who got to the telephone first. And Aunty Agnes would always listen. Aunty Agnes and the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

  ‘How’s your mother then?’ Bill would ask.

  ‘She’s alright.’

  ‘How are you then, Marjorie? You keeping your chin up? Aunty Agnes says you are doing a fine job at that library.’

  ‘I’m alright.’

  And Pa would say: ‘Oh, it’s you, then. How’s that mother of yours? It’s about time she started coming good. She’s been bloody months in that place. She coming good yet?’

  ‘She’s alright.’

  ‘What about you then, girl? Are you coming good?’

  ‘I’m alright.’ As she wondered at the spindly voice of Pa that crept now through the Bakelite. Pa’s voice is not steady on its feet anymore. These telephone lines are wearing him out, she would think.

  ‘Everybody roundabout’s been asking after you. I let them know I reckon you’re coming good,’ her father would say.

  Coming good? Or going bad? Marjorie would wonder. And Marjorie would listen to the dry whisper of her father’s voice and ponder on what had gone wrong with the modern telephony system that it had lately turned her father’s voice into the sound of a thousand wheat husks in the wind.

  ‘Did your mother ask after me?’ the wheat husk voice might ask.

  Marjorie would shrug. ‘No.’

  ‘Your father’s thinking of coming down. What do you think, Marjorie? I can’t seem to make up my mind on things these days. He’s just been down. What’s he gunna do while Elise just stares at him with those eyes of hers and never a word to say?’ Pa might ask.

  ‘Is the ploughing finished?’ asked Marjorie of the spindly voice.

  ‘Why don’t you come up and help with the ploughing? There’s still a bit to be done,’ the voice might reply. ‘You could tidy up about the place for us. We rattle around in the house by ourselves these days, I don’t mind telling you. This house has too much of a man’s feel about it and it could do with a girl’s touch now even if I do say so myself,’ Pa’s delicate, skinny voice might offer.

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Marjorie would shake her head at the telephone on the wall.

  ‘Put Aunty Agnes on, love,’ Bill would say.

  ‘Put Agnes on, girl,’ Pa would say.

  And Marjorie would hand the Bakelite receiver to Aunty Agnes. She would wander off down Aunty Agnes’s hallway and into her bedroom. She would shut the door – softly. And lean against it – carefully. And watch the gentle city lights outside her bedroom window as the whispers went to and fro between the adults.

  ‘It is funny how silent a screaming place can be,’ Marjorie said one Friday night after she had truly been to visit her mother. She said it to the front door as she slammed it shut.

  ‘What’s that you’re saying, Marjorie?’ asked Aunty Agnes. She had rushed from her kitchen when she heard Marjorie at the door and now she stood and she wiped her hands over and over on her apron as her eyes went red. Because she had recently indulged in a timid hope that things were beginning to come good for Marjorie. ‘That sounds like nonsense talk,’ she said. ‘You stop with that, you hear?’

  ‘Lonely too,’ Marjorie said. ‘A messy heap of lunatics all cluttered together and tripping over themselves in their own little imprisonment creations. All shouting or crying or muttering or screaming. Which is ridiculous. Because no one hears. Because they are all deaf – by choice. They don’t want to hear anyone or anything. Not even themselves.’

  ‘Don’t talk about the less fortunate like that, Marjorie.’

  Marjorie had taken off her double-breasted, worsted wool coat and matching hat with velvet trim and had flung them at the hallstand while she was talking. She was peeling off her gloves now, carelessly, as you would a peel a banana. She tossed those just as carelessly in the same direction. She paused then, after all the tossing and flinging, to straighten Aunty Agnes’s pearls that Marjorie now wore. ‘Oh no, Aunty Agnes,’ she said. ‘They are not the less fortunate. We are. We are the ones who have to slog on in the realities of this world. We are the ones left behind to face things, to clean up the mess, while they flee and fuss and pamper themselves in their madnesses.’

  ‘Marjorie! You are being cruel and unchristian. That comment is uncalled for!

  Marjorie shrugged. ‘Thank you for that, Agnes, you sound just like my mother. And that is certainly just what I need! Any chance of a cup of coffee?’

  *

  It ended up taking the best part of a year for any proper words to
be spoken on those fitful visits to that mental hospital. Which gave Marjorie plenty of time to perfect her encrustations. No soft, delicate baby coral for Marjorie. Running helped with the process. Marjorie hadn’t let the city stop her running. After all, she had run from the Mallee there to this city here, so she just kept on going all through that year. But she ran on her own these days. There was no Ruby. No Jesse.

  She would run early in the mornings before work. Especially on Fridays. Especially on the Fridays she had appointed as mental hospital visiting days. Running around and about the streets and lanes, train lines and yards and factories. All around this lovely place. Running with all those dependable engines. She would run past the awakening trams – blinking and shuffling and screeching their morning calls. Their mouths yawning open and shut. She would run alongside the solid, dependable trains – shunting and shoving at each other in the goods yards. She would circle around lines of utes. Empty. Waiting quietly to lend a hand. Marjorie loved these engines. All that metal. They smelt like blood. Marjorie ran for a year before her mother spoke.

  ‘There is no tablecloth.’ Those were the first words Elise said to her daughter at that mental hospital.

  Marjorie’s arms jerked up and folded themselves across her chest. She lifted her chin and did her best to glare at this mother of hers who had killed Ruby and then abandoned Marjorie for nearly a year. ‘You talk, Mother,’ she said. ‘I am here, and your words are for a tablecloth.’ And Marjorie didn’t go back there for a long time.

  Chapter 16

  It seems that those few words were enough to satisfy Elise, though. She didn’t seem to mind that Marjorie didn’t go back for months. Elise retreated back into her silence and didn’t say anything more to anybody until well after a specialist book conservator had taken Marjorie under his wing at the library. ‘You have a talent for fixing all things material in this library, I can see,’ he had said.

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ she said.

  ‘Well I do. It is a delicate and precise art. And you could be really good at this. How would you like to become a book conservator?’

  Marjorie flushed. A lifetime being paid to fix broken things. Who could conceive such a mighty thing? So that was that. Marjorie began training as a conservator. She became officially responsible for saving things. If those things needing saving had been made out of paper, that was. She was a dab hand at saving those papery things.

  And Marjorie loved her work. It was a place of organisation and logic and trustworthiness. It was a place where precious things were held gently and treated kindly. And given a place to be. There was nothing at all shifty about her work.

  Even when Ruby interrupted it. Like she did sometimes. There she would be. Ruby – drifting there in the corner of her bedroom while Marjorie straightened the piles of broken books stacked on her bed. One side of Ruby’s face hidden by the room’s soft shadows. One side – the still beautiful side, turned to Marjorie. You know you are incorrectly using the word ‘ephemera’ to describe your work, don’t you? she would say. Ephemera means ‘something of no lasting significance’. That is not how you would describe your work, is it? Or is it me, maybe, that is of no lasting significance? Or is that you, perhaps? Is that how you are describing yourself now?

  Marjorie would stop. ‘It’s old newspapers today,’ she said as her pillows began translating themselves into fragments of torn newsprint. But Ruby was never interested. She didn’t look at Marjorie. So Marjorie ran her hands down the length of the starched linen tablecloth on her bed. ‘Are you still there, Ruby?’ Marjorie whispered. She didn’t turn around to see.

  No. I’m not here. How can I be? You know that better than anybody, don’t you?

  But Ruby had gone too far. ‘You have gone too far, Ruby. That is much too far. That is too much,’ Marjorie cried.

  And Marjorie jerked and flailed herself awake. Waking to a city swaddled in morning mist. Holding its breath within the softest of breezes. That mist surrounding and dampening the distant trams as they clattered and called to her. The air secure with the remains of last night’s rain and that morning’s coffee. Marjorie waking to the taste of a Mallee dust storm in her mouth.

  She flicked back the hair that had fallen across her face – glistening black like it was wet. Like the leaves were now on the tree outside her window. They were quiet, absent-minded leaves. Absorbed in their job of hoarding the rain hanging murky in the air. Not at all interested in a stark, brutal dream that has assaulted a girl just now on the other side of the window. Marjorie sagged there in her bed. Dawn was creeping into her bedroom. She watched it greet her stained-glass window. Dawn sun battling the mist – a weak skirmish as it tried for a foothold on the day. Fragments of it playing in the tree in Aunty Agnes’s front yard, lighting up the raindrops wobbling on the branches. Marjorie’s head turned and she watched that. Watching it hard. Blinking so very hard. So that her eyes could do a proper job and stay dry and hard. Dawn never compromised. It was like engines – always there. But not everything in the world was safe like that. Marjorie knew now that most things were unpredictable, like bees. And Marjorie knew all about the danger of bees.

  She blinked and did what she always did these days. She went to work. Her father and Pa were coming down for the weekend.

  *

  ‘Marjorie seems to be getting back on her feet, don’t you think?’ they whispered. Their hope cradled in their gentle talk, speaking softly when they thought she wasn’t watching.

  Marjorie pedalled away at the Singer sewing machine.

  ‘Does she have any friends yet?’

  Marjorie could glimpse Aunty Agnes shrugging. ‘The sewing is good for her. She is always making something. And she helps me about the place,’ she said.

  ‘That young lad Jesse keeps on asking after her. At least she still has him,’ said Pa. His words were constricted. He was choking the life out of them in a death-tight grip because he knew that words were weak and could turn on you anytime and betray you.

  Aunty Agnes nodded. What could she say? She could say: I know. I have seen each letter as it arrives. I have heard the postie blow his whistle, I have seen him put another one in the letterbox, I have collected it and put it on the hallstand for Marjorie when she comes home from work. She couldn’t say that, though. Not with Marjorie over there in the corner pretending she couldn’t hear them.

  ‘What about that job of hers? That still going alright?’ asked Pa.

  Yes, it is, thank you, Pa. It is going quite nicely, Marjorie whispered to herself.

  ‘It’s time we went. Do you want to come and visit your mother, Marjorie?’ Bill asked as he stood up from the kitchen table.

  Marjorie treadled hard on the Singer sewing machine.

  ‘Marjorie?’

  Marjorie laid her hand flat on the comfort of the raw silk trussed and trapped with its multiple stabbings from the machine needle. She looked up at the face of her father, then across at the face of Pa. She looked back at her father – at all that worry piled up and hiding behind the grip of hands on his hat and in the bend of his shoulders. She shook her head. ‘I don’t need to,’ she replied. ‘I visited my mother a couple of weeks ago. You go on without me.’

  But Marjorie made a mistake. She shouldn’t have listened to their drought-stricken, rickety voices. She shouldn’t have glanced at Pa and seen the shameful, unmanly beseech of his eyes. She shouldn’t have then turned away from that to look instead at the face of her father. Where she was waylaid. Where she didn’t have any time to duck out of the road of the pain that charged at her – tearing past all that piled-up worry, all that strangulated love, to hit her in the face. Marjorie surprised herself then by deciding she had no choice but to offer a bit of ointment for the pain. What else could she do? ‘She spoke to me last time I went,’ she offered. ‘She said, There is no tablecloth.’ Marjorie said no more. She didn’t move to explain when ‘the last time I w
ent’ actually was; or if any words had been spoken since.

  Aunty Agnes and Bill and Pa didn’t notice those left-out things, however. The three of them were open-mouthed and struck silent at the thought of those four wonderful words so magically appearing from Elise. Marjorie wasn’t, though. She bent her head to return to the solace of the sewing.

  ‘She’s on the mend for sure then,’ said Pa when it was obvious the Singer sewing machine had stitched up the possibility of any further words from Marjorie. He stood up to go. ‘A woman’s on the mend if she’s talking, that’s a fact.’ He nodded. ‘And you’re up and about too, working in that library of yours. Not lying around all day in your bed. You’ll be right as rain soon enough, Marjorie. You keep on. You keep your chin up, girl.’ He nodded and nodded.

  So Marjorie put her chin up and watched the three of them walk out of the kitchen. Then she lowered her chin again and went back to her sewing.

  And went back to her real Friday nights. Where she was spending her time since those four words ventured into the air, now bent on trying to understand, even just a tiny bit, about what purgatory would be like for someone like Elise. Or for someone like herself. Because though Aunty Agnes would say over and over, It was an accident, Marjorie! Nobody is to blame. Just a terrible accident, what would kind, wrinkly old Aunty Agnes know?