True Stories

by Helen Garner

  So those innocent, patrolled affairs on school premises prepared us poorly for what happened at the end of the year in the great metropolis Melbourne forty-five miles away, in that supposedly magic time between exams and Christmas when anything seemed possible but nothing in particular was.

  What use to us now were the counsels of our elders, distilled in whispers down the ranks of girls? ‘Don’t wear patent leather shoes: boys see your underwear reflected. Don’t wear red: it excites them. Don’t wear white: it reminds them of sheets. Don’t smoke: it’s common. Don’t drink: there is no more disgusting sight than that of a woman drunk.’

  We were going to the City of the Plain, where Merton Hall girls talked to boys in their drawling voices (we knew in our provincial hearts that they were more desirable than we were) and wore slinky dresses and had long voluptuous black hair and black eye make-up without being common and had probably been to jazz clubs, and one of them had even had an abortion, her cousin told us, because once you start doing it it’s like a drug and you can’t ever stop, you have to do it again and again.

  Everybody knew that in the public toilets of Melbourne, girls from the country were injected with something and taken off to the White Slave Trade. Whatever that was.

  ‘Get a guernsey, did you?’ said my father, cruelly deflating me as I ran in the back door with my expensive embossed envelope. Who paid for those End of Year dances? For the printing of the invitations, the suppers, the bands of old men in dinner suits who could play ‘The Golden Wedding’? The hiring of the Dorchester, of Nine Darling Street? There were strings of these dances, each school gave one, and it was rumoured that some girls had a different dress for each one. For mere children schooled as we were, kept in dumb ignorance, it was the massacre of the innocents, those hot December nights.

  My mother had told me that Pimms No. 1 cup was ‘what they call a leg-opener’. I only dimly visualised what this could mean. I was too scared and prim to drink, anyway, even if anyone had offered me any, which they didn’t.

  At Nine Darling Street, the steps were carpeted in red, as I recall them now, but perhaps I’m confusing this with the entrance of the stars to the palace at the Cannes festival. The tinselled significance was the same. My feet and hands in white were too big and the rest of me was too small. Who were those parents in the doorway? Where were the toilets?

  My partner was a lumpy boy whose mother knew my auntie. We sat side by side, not touching, and discussed the exams and blushed during the long silences. He said there was an ice sculpture in the other room, with oysters in its crevices. We edged through the crowd to look at it. Everyone else seemed to be laughing. What would I do with an oyster, in these white gloves? I pretended not to be hungry and we returned to our seat.

  He asked me to dance. I placed my pristine white glove upon his dandruffy shoulder, he seized a pawful of the back of my dress at the waist and away we clomped, enveloped in a malodorous cloud of Clearasil which even the piercing perfume of the gardenia (stalk wrapped in silver paper) pinned to the place where my bosom ought to have been could not disperse. Up to the end, turn 180 degrees, head back the other way, like a man mowing a lawn.

  My shoes were blackened, my stockings torn and twisted, my knees ringing from collisions with his. Where he gripped me I was damp. I drew a vicious satisfaction from the fact that many of the successful girls dancing with future graziers and flashing their teeth in their big mouths had got badly sunburned that afternoon in the All Schools’ Tennis Tournament at Kooyong: their backs under the shoestring straps blazed in ugly patterns of white and red. Poor things: perhaps their smiles were as fake as mine.

  The music stopped, I turned around, and it happened.

  A boy I knew (his cousin later married my sister) stood up suddenly and was sick all down the back of a stranger’s dress. She sprang up appalled. Minutes later I went to the toilet and found her there, her back to the big mirror, weeping while her friends clucked about her mopping and scrubbing with roller towel yanked out of the dispenser. ‘He’s revolting, revolting,’ she sobbed, ‘and I don’t even know him.’ I pushed open the first toilet cubicle.

  Two girls were lying face down on the floor, insensible, gardenia corsages bruised beneath their shoulders. They lay as if dead. They would not be roused. I stepped back and opened the second cubicle. A third girl lay there on her back, vomiting even as I stared. Who could I tell? There were no teachers present. It was all out of control. I poked the wretched girl with the toe of my ruined shoe. I rolled her on to her stomach, leaned down and shook her limp shoulder. ‘Leemealone,’ she groaned. ‘Leemealone.’ She had stopped vomiting and her eyes were closed, her greenish cheek pressed out of shape against the tiles.

  So this was Melbourne.

  Later a kind girl called Jenny Kerr brought me a glass of fruit-cup (had someone slipped something into it? I left it untouched) and a bowl of trifle. While we were eating and talking about the exams, a photographer appeared and took our picture. When I got my copy, I looked plain but not modest: I was grinning stupidly, mouth open, leaning back like an oaf in my seat with my knees apart under the skirt of my pink cotton dress. Jenny Kerr, on the other hand, had posed on an angle and looked soignée, relaxed, at ease.

  I went home the next day to unfashionable Geelong. I looked at the photo many times, in many different lights. Then I burnt it: an act I have never regretted.

  1979

  A Scrapbook, an Album

  Children with the same family, the same

  blood, with the same first associations and

  habits, have some means of enjoyment in

  their power, which no subsequent

  connections can supply.

  Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

  I WENT TO visit my four sisters, carrying a tape recorder and my imagined map of the family. It was unsettling to learn that each sister has her own quite individual map of that territory: the mountains and rivers are in different places, the borders are differently constituted and guarded, the history and politics and justice system of the country are different, according to who’s talking. Now I’m in possession of the tapes and I don’t know what to do with them. I thought of adding them to some as yet non-existent family archive—our father has burnt the slide collection—but they are too…blunt. I don’t mean bitchy, though at certain points on each tape there are moments of intense silence followed by sharp laughter. I encouraged bluntness. But I was surprised. The ones I expected to hold back did not, while the usually talkative ones were discreet.

  And because I, the eldest, was the one with the tape machine and the pen, this account lacks a blunt view of me. I got off lightly, this time. I tried hard to be irresponsible, to vanish, to be swallowed up by the texture of the writing. Because the one who records will never be forgiven. Endured, yes; tolerated, put up with, borne, and still loved; but not forgiven.

  Already, a few weeks after we taped the interviews, regretful postcards, letters and phone calls are flying. ‘What with my big mouth,’ writes one, ‘and your big ears…’

  In the bunfight of a big family, each member develops a role. Everyone gets behind a persona and tries to stay there. Selective amnesia is required in order to maintain that persona. So the conversations on which this essay are based have stirred things up. And now I can’t find a shape for the material I’ve got. The best I can do is a sort of scrapbook, or album. I certainly can’t analyse my sisters. They keep taking over, bursting out of the feeble categories I devise to order the material: they keep heightening themselves, performing themselves with gusto. All I’ve done, really, is to tone them down. I feel panicky. We are five sisters and it doesn’t even seem right to name us. The others wouldn’t like it. ‘The others’, four women for whom I have feelings so dark and strong that the word love is hopelessly inadequate. I’ve used a chronological numbering system. We have one brother, by the way. He comes between sisters Four and Five. He’s a chef. He makes the best lemon tarts in Australia. He has two sons. We love
him, and we’re proud of him. But he belongs to the male strand of the family: to a different species.

  Work

  I note that I have immediately defined our brother by mentioning his job. It would never occur to me to do this about my sisters. Work is what interests us least about each other. Work is our separateness, what we do when we’re apart.

  We know that good manners dictate an interest in other people’s jobs, so we ask each other perfunctory questions; but often the questioner has tuned out before the answer is complete. (Four is the exception to this.) In childhood she seized the role of family clown, and every tale she tells is cleverly fashioned for maximum grip: ‘He was wearing a rather bad pork-pie hat. Get the picture? A real “bohemian”. So I say to him, “Can I get you something? Like the bill?” ’

  Otherwise, each sister’s working life is a mystery to the others. Two of us were nurses, but I have never seen either of them in uniform. Four is in a band, which is more public, so she is often cranky because her sisters rarely come to hear her play. The three of us who write and publish live in a cloud of unknowing: has anyone in the family ever read our stuff? We are brilliant withholders. We behave as if we subscribed to Ernest Hemingway’s dictum from Paris in the 1920s: ‘Praise to the face is open disgrace.’ Praise from each other and from our parents is what we really crave; but we will not gratify each other. Our pride in one another is secret and oblique. One winter Four’s funk band collapsed and she had to take a job selling donuts from a van outside the Exhibition Buildings. Far from complaining, she kept me entranced with stories about her workmates and their customers. Once, on her night off, we were driving downtown to the movies and passed the van. She detoured in to say hullo, and came running back with a steaming bag of free donuts. Behind her back I brag about her: ‘Four can turn her hand to anything! She can pick fruit or pull cappuccinos. She’s got no vanity about work. The people she works with love her because she makes them laugh.’ But would I say these things to her face? That’s not the way we do things, in this family.

  ‘Three was complaining to me,’ says Four, ‘that whenever she visits Mum and Dad they never ask about her work, but are always reporting about the others, and praising them. Doesn’t she realise that this is what happens to all of us? When I go out there, full of news, I have to sit in silence and be told in detail about One’s latest book, or Five’s new baby. I hate it, but I’ve got used to it.’

  We are furious with our parents for their withholding, but we all do it too.

  A Squad

  Because I am the eldest, my sisters have always been behind me. My face has always been turned away from them, towards the world. I don’t know what they looked like—that is, without photos I’d have no memory of what they looked like, though when I recently saw one of John Brack’s etchings from the 1940s, of a tiny, sulking schoolgirl, I recognised her at once as me or one of my sisters: the chunky stance, the shoulders high with dudgeon, the scowling brow, the tartan skirt and the hair brushed back and held to one side with a ribbon. And yet I also have no memory of a time when they weren’t all there— the first three, anyway. I have always been part of a squad. There are photos of me as a tiny baby, mad-eyed, box-headed, being held correctly positioned on the bent arm of my young, nervous mother, or bundled with my back against the chest of my grinning father, my blanket awry, my beady eyes popping with the force of his hug (see The Favourite, below); but now, when I look at these pictures, I am completely unable to believe that outside the frame my sisters aren’t hanging around, squinting in the sun, picking at their knee-scabs or twiddling their ribboned ‘bunches’, waiting for me to climb down and turn back into a kid and come outside to play.

  Laughter

  Whenever I try to live in another town, my phone bill rockets; and when I look carefully at the breakdown of the call times, I see that I make the largest number to my sisters between four and five o’clock—that is, after-school time. I am fifty but I still have this habit, this longing to hear their stories of the day. I want them to make me laugh.

  Two women are sitting in a fashionable cafe when their sister walks past, carrying a briefcase and looking cool and purposeful. She does not look in, but passes wearing the kind of expression one adopts when passing the grooviest cafe in town without looking in. The two sisters inside don’t speak, but lower their heads to the table in silent fits. But we don’t laugh at each other. We laugh about each other.

  They knew that Virginia Woolf was about to crack up again when she wrote in her diary that she and her sister ‘laughed so much that the spiders ran into the corners and strangled themselves in their webs’. Perhaps her case was extreme but I cannot say that such laughter is unknown to me and my sisters. There is something ecstatic, brakeless, about the way we laugh together. We laugh in spasms and paroxysms. Almost anything—a glance, a word, a mimicked grimace—can act as a trigger. When any (or all) of us are together we are quivering in readiness for the thing that will push us off the edge of rational discourse into freefall over a bottomless canyon of mirth; laughing together is a way of merging again into an inchoate feminine mass. (Again? When was this previously the case?)

  Perhaps ‘hysterical’ is the right word: I’ve heard this wild laughter among nurses, waitresses, nuns. If you are not included in it, it can be alarming—not because you are the butt of it; it’s not ‘bitchy’ laughter—but because there is something total about it, shameless; it’s a relaxation into boundarylessness. Of course, as a spectacle, it is probably boring. It is ill-mannered of us to indulge in it in company. Sometimes two or three of us will withdraw from the table, at a big gathering, and be found in another room shortly afterwards, doubled up in weak, silent laughter. ‘What, what is it?’ the discovering sister will beg. ‘What? Oh, tell me!’

  The Favourite

  ‘I was the favourite for eighteen months,’ says One. ‘I think I’m the only one who can categorically state that. A short blessed period which ended when Two was born and usurped my position. I’ve spent the rest of my life, in a warped way, trying to regain it through merit. Fat chance. This is the theory of the driven, perfectionist eldest child, and I subscribe to it.’

  ‘I remember distinctly,’ says Two, ‘feeling that I was the favourite child. One and Three were in the poo for some reason, and I remember thinking, “Mum and Dad aren’t cross with me—therefore they must like me best.” It was a transitory feeling. Two years ago, when Mum and Dad were coming back from overseas, some of us went to the airport to meet them. Three had gone to the toilet, and Mum and Dad came out of the customs hall before she got back. We had the regulation pecks on the cheek, then Dad looked around and said “Where’s Three?” He saw her coming from a long way away, and he put out his arms to her while she walked towards him. He gave her a huge hug.’

  ‘Two turned to me as we all trooped towards the car park,’ says Three, ‘and she said to me, “You always were his favourite.” What Two doesn’t know is that for five years I’d been chipping away at Dad, after watching Grandma die lonely in that nursing home, looking for affection from anybody who’d give it, because she’d wasted her chances in life—I was with her when she was dying, and I couldn’t bear it. I thought, “I’m not going to wait till Dad gets that old. I’ll teach him if it kills me.” So for five years I’d been insisting on giving him a hug and a kiss every time we met or parted. I even knocked on the car window and made him wind it down, when he’d got into the car to avoid doing it. I’d been pushing through that barrier. I was on some kind of mission, thinking, “I will find something on the other side of this.” I didn’t even need to earn acceptance or approval any more. I just wanted to break through that lonely barrier around him. I never felt the favourite.’

  ‘Oh, Two was the favourite,’ says Four. ‘It was obvious. She was always the golden-haired girl. She was given a twenty-first at the Southern Cross. The Beatles had just been staying there. In 1965 it was the grooviest place in town. Later I remember Five being Dad’s favourite.
Ohh—indubitably. When she was little.’

  ‘Everyone loved me endlessly,’ says Five. ‘I was born so many years after Four that I didn’t have to fight anybody for anything. But sometimes now I feel a rather pathetic figure in the family—like the dregs of the barrel. As if what I’ve got to offer is somehow less. Everything’s been done before, and better. If I’m patronised or ignored, I bow out. With my friends I feel more entertaining and clever than I do with my sisters—more relaxed and free.’

  ‘Once,’ says One, ‘I was in the kitchen at Two’s with Five and our brother. And in whispers we agreed that we were probably the three favourites: the eldest, the youngest, and the only boy.’

  ‘Still, I had the best roller-skates, I thought,’ says Three. ‘Mine were German, and yours were only English.’

  Are we in competition? And if so, what for? What’s the prize?

  Likeness

  Once, during a visit, Three and One were standing behind Three’s children who were watching TV. One grabbed the scarf Three had on, and Three put on One’s denim jacket. Three called out, ‘Hey, you kids!’ The kids gave a perfunctory glance, looked back at the television, then swung round in a slack-jawed double-take. Yes, just for a split second they couldn’t tell the difference. Why did Three and One find this satisfying?

  What if each sister should keep an album of unflattering photos of the others? ‘Ooh, she’ll hate this. She looks like something by Francis Bacon.’ No, we’re really not that kind of family. But we all examine photos with meticulous care, glancing up with narrowed eyes at the subject, and down again.

  We look like each other. Strangers stare at us in the street and say, ‘You wouldn’t be So-and-So’s sister, by any chance?’ For some, obviously, this is more flattering than for others. One, as eldest, embodies a version of the others’ fates: a heavy burden. Covertly we check each other for signs of ageing, signs of giving in. When One started to wear what in our family are known as ‘old duck sandals’, a tremor of apprehension ran down the ranks. But our ex-sister-in-law saved the situation. She looked at the sandals for a long time, then said, ‘Yes, they’re daggy all right. But they’re so daggy that they’re almost clever.’ A week later Four turned out to a party wearing an identical pair.