by Helen Garner
On tape our voices sound eerily similar.
Each sister manifests for the others a version of our common looks. Each performs her version of the inherited character. Each is a cautionary tale for the others, in different ways and at different times.
One day, when one of my sisters came and complained to me bitterly and at length, laying out in front of me what our mother used to dismiss as ‘some great tale’, I watched her in growing dismay. I saw the expressions that passed over her face and felt the sympathetic movements of my own facial muscles. I saw myself, my rigidity and pride, my pleasure in being aggrieved, my drive to power. And then, as we were saying goodbye on my verandah, under a climbing rose in bloom, each of us turned as if choreographed, picked a flower, and thrust it through the other’s buttonhole. Perhaps after all we are not so horrible.
And it did happen that the ‘rejected’ one, when her life seemed to have collapsed, went to church one Sunday morning, wanting to be absolved, comforted, blessed, she didn’t care any more who by. She went up to the communion rail and got down on her knees. She looked up, as the chalice approached her, and saw that the robed person offering her the wine was her sister.
‘I saw you recognise me,’ says One. ‘It rocked you—I saw it go through you like a lightning bolt. I thought you were going to keel over.’
‘I didn’t even know you were in the church,’ says Three. ‘And when you put out your hands and turned up your face, for a second I thought it was myself.’
House
A certain humility is appropriate in a sister’s kitchen. Respect is owed to the one wearing the apron. We enter each other’s kitchens, however, as if we were coming home to our mother: straight to the biscuit tin, the nut jar, cram in a handful and stand there chewing, leaning on the cupboard and talking.
Our kitchen and household customs, while not identical, resemble each other strongly: the use and abuse of the dishcloth, the order in which things are done, the theory of storage.
But when Three has been minding Five’s new baby, Five remarks, upon changing a nappy after the baby-sitter has gone home, ‘Three always does the pins backwards.’
We are drawn to stand in each other’s bedrooms. Perhaps it’s simply for the scent of the place where a sister’s body has slept. Even a husband’s smell can’t mask the deep familiarity of the first person you shared a room with. I love to put my head on my sisters’ pillows, and breathe in. I like the smell of clean skin, something sweet and cottony. Maybe that smell is not just sisterly, but motherly.
‘When I got my first period,’ says Two, ‘I told One. She laughed. But then she was nice, and took me out to the toilet and showed me how to put the pad on. I didn’t tell Mum. Do you remember the toilet, at that house at Ocean Grove? It was like a brown coffin.’
‘Do you mean the room, or the toilet itself?’
‘The room,’ says Two patiently. ‘It was painted brown, and sort of curved.’
‘I don’t remember that,’ says One. ‘I thought it was white.’
Two visits One and they discuss the problem of curtains for the big back windows of One’s kitchen. ‘It faces south,’ says One, ‘so it doesn’t get direct sun.’
‘South west,’ says Two, firmly. ‘That’s south west, so it must get direct sun, late on a summer afternoon.’
‘Oh…yes, I suppose it does,’ says One, ‘in summer.’
Two is very happy about this. She sits down at the kitchen table and says, with a big smiling sigh, ‘I’m much more of a sun and moon person than you, aren’t I!’
Sisters have no truck with one another’s finer feelings. Once I visited a friend and helped her in the kitchen where she was preparing a meal. I remarked, as I laid out the cutlery, ‘This table is too low. Whenever I sit at it I knock my knees. You ought to get a higher one.’
She turned round from the bench and stared at me; her face was blank with shock.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘That table,’ she said, ‘has been in my family for generations. I love that table.’
‘Oh—sorry!’
We went on with our work. A week or so later she brought it up again.
‘I think I was so shocked,’ she said, ‘because I’ve got no sisters. I’m not used to that bluntness. Thwack—you just hit me with it. But I realised later that you hadn’t meant to offend me.’
There are no beloved historic objects in our family. There is no family home. Every time our mother gets settled somewhere, our father gets itchy feet and they sell up and move on. They have moved so often that some of their children have not even visited every house they’ve lived in.
Going in to Bat
‘I remember,’ says Four, ‘when some hoon friends of Five’s flatmate terrorised her one time, when she was home alone. After they’d gone she rang me up. Her voice was so faint that I thought she’d been raped. So One and Five and I found out the name of the main hoon, and we put on our best black jackets and drove out to his parents’ house where he lived, to sort him out. Remember? It was a horrible cream brick veneer house, with a shaven lawn and no trees, and we presented ourselves at the front door, after dinner one evening, and asked for him. And when his mother said he wasn’t home, One said, in a polite and icy voice, ‘Perhaps we could have a word with you, Mrs So-and-so.’ She sat us down in her lounge room on some fancy chairs, and we dobbed her son, in detail. She was struggling to look as if she didn’t believe us; but I bet he was home. I bet he was hiding in his bedroom, letting his mother take the rap.’
‘I was so nervous,’ says Five, ‘that I kept letting off huge odourless farts into the upholstery.’
‘It didn’t do much good, I guess,’ says Four, ‘but we shrieked and yelled all the way home down the freeway. And probably went out dancing for the rest of the evening.’
‘I went in to bat for you, Two,’ says One, ‘at Ocean Grove State School in the 1940s, when someone had swindled you out of your best swopcard. I marched over and forced her to swop it back.’
‘I don’t remember that,’ says Two.
‘Three took me on a secret trip to Sydney,’ says Four, ‘so I could meet my boyfriend when he’d gone interstate to university. We went on the train. We walked around Kings Cross.’
‘One took me to Bright and Hitchcock in Geelong to help me buy my first bra,’ says Three. ‘She protected me from those thin ladies in black with the tape measures round their necks. Because I didn’t really have much to put in a bra. I needed one for other reasons.’
‘When I came back from Sydney to live,’ says One, ‘Two arrived at my front door with a huge picnic basket full of wonderful food.’
‘I was responsible for Five,’ says Two, ‘when Mum and Dad put her into boarding school so they could go overseas. Mum said to me, “You were wonderful to Five.” I was, too. I liked doing it—but sometimes I get this narky feeling that I’d like to send in an account.’
‘Three had dared to come to my first wedding,’ says One, ‘when Dad forbade everyone to go. And she took it right up to Dad when he called my husband a conman.’
‘Wait till your father dies,’ says somebody’s husband. ‘You’ll be like the Baltic states at the collapse of the Soviet Union. You’ve been formed and bound together in opposition to him. When he goes there’ll be hell to pay.’
‘Let’s try to keep it on sisters,’ says One. ‘Don’t let’s talk too much about our parents.’
‘But aren’t they sort of the point?’ says Five.
‘Yes, but it’s obsessive. We all swerve and swerve back to our parents. I want us to talk about being sisters, not daughters.’
Other People’s Sisters
I mention to a friend that I am trying to write this. She remarks, ‘The best way for sisters to get on is to talk about their parents.’
Some sisters are sisters with a tremendous, conscious, public conviction. I remember a woman I knew, years ago, who would get up from the lunch table and retire to her room for the afternoon, sayi
ng, ‘I’m going to write a letter to my sister.’ We felt respectful, and tiptoed round so as not to disturb her. She would emerge, hours later, looking purged, satisfied, and slightly smug.
Another friend, one of whose sisters recently died in a freak accident, says to me, ‘I’ve lost our shared childhood. I depended on her memory. I loved going out with her. When we walked down the street together with our youngest sister, the three of us, I used to be so proud and happy. I used to feel we were invincible—that nothing could touch us.’
This is the kind of story I think of as sisterly: once a woman was driving along a street in West Melbourne when she was attacked by severe abdominal pains. She tried to ignore them and drove on, but they became so violent that she was obliged to park her car outside a friend’s house and stagger in, doubled over, to lie on a bed. Gradually the pains abated. When she was able to go home, she phoned her mother for a chat and learnt that, the same day, her sister had given birth to her third child in Geelong, and had had to agree to a hysterectomy because of unstoppable bleeding.
A striking example of telepathic contact, yes; and it happened, in our family. But the story is rarely told, sixteen years later, because this gut empathy had no practical application. The flaw is that when Three needed help, after that hysterectomy, none of the rest of us thought of offering any; she did not feel able to ask for it, and thus got none. The spirit of our family is ‘Pick up your lip before you trip over it.’ Is that sisterly?
The Different One
I asked my sisters, separately, to characterise themselves. Each of them, in slightly varying phrases, saw herself as the different one.
‘I felt for years the rejected one,’ says One. ‘I couldn’t go near the place without getting into a fight with Dad. But when I sent Mum a birthday telegram signed The Black Sheep, she got upset.’
‘I remember feeling I was very different from the rest of you,’ says Two. ‘I was the first to marry and I lived in the suburbs, whereas you all (except Three) saw each other a lot and lived that sloppy rock&roll life, which was anathema to me, with a husband and two kids. I’m the only one who doesn’t vote Labor. At family gatherings I still feel out of it, a bit. I dress differently.’
‘I was always the odd one out,’ says Three. ‘I was a nuisance to One and Two, when I was little. Later I was the only one interested in having a spiritual life. Two came into the bedroom once and found me on my knees. I don’t know which of us was more embarrassed. Then I struck out on my own and went to Papua New Guinea straight from school, and worked on the mission. It was a great shock, after growing up in a middle-class family. I was always looking for a way of doing life more simply. But then I burrowed into a conventional marriage.’
‘I got the short end of the stick,’ says Four, ‘because I was the fourth girl. They must’ve looked at me and thought, “Bloody hell—not another one!” I’ve always thought that was the basis of my problem with Dad. Remember how when he was trying to tell childhood stories about everyone, at his birthday party? He couldn’t remember anything about me to tell. I’ve constantly felt the odd one out—constantly. And I feel it now, specially since Five had a baby, because I’m the only one without children, and the only one who never wanted any.’
‘I,’ says Five, ‘am the odd one out only in the sense that. I’m the youngest by ten years. Otherwise I don’t feel that way at all. Oh—if you all get together and I haven’t attended, I feel miffed or excluded. But I must have received a lot of attention when I was young. Mum and Dad had more time to spend with me. They took me travelling round the world with them. My relationship with them is different from the others.’
What Did You Pay For Those?
We are not so different that we can’t wear each other’s clothes. When one sister arrives at another’s house, the first thing they do together is dash to the bedroom and starting trying on shoes.
At Christmas, One and Two arrive at Five’s house for the big family dinner. They walk down the hall and become instantly aware of a certain quality of silence issuing like smoke from one of the bedrooms. They rush in. There stand Four and Five, bent over a table, heads together, backs to the door, working hard at something. They glance up as One and Two barge in, but their eyes are blank with concentration and without speaking they return at once to their task. One and Two push in beside them and see what is on the table: Five’s six-month-old daughter, flat on her back, looking patient but slightly puzzled. Four and Five are trying to squeeze the baby’s fat feet into a tiny pair of red leather boots. The boots are much too small, but Four and Five will not accept this. Quivering with suppressed giggles, they lace and tug, applying force to the leather and the flesh as if the baby’s life depended on it. It is a bizarre initiation rite into the family passion for shoes. Shoes bought in haste, that don’t fit.
One day in winter, One leaves her muddy Doc Martens on the front verandah. Next morning they are gone. She searches everywhere, then curses thieves and gives them up for lost. Several days later, in the afternoon, the doorbell rings. One opens the door and sees Four on the mat, beaming at her with a wicked look. Instinctively One’s eyes drop to Four’s feet. On them are the missing Docs.
‘That’ll teach you,’ says Four suavely, ‘to take better care of your possessions.’
In David Jones’ ‘perthume’ department, Two says to One, ‘Here—let me squirt this on you, in case I hate it.’
Four possesses an absolutely reliable brutality when it comes to clothes. ‘Should I buy these trousers, Four? Look, they’re only thirty dollars.’ Four runs a cold eye over them, and turns away. ‘Buy them if you want to look like a stump. Like a mallee root.’
One and Three enter a shop. Three scans, then heads unerringly for a rack of dark, sober, important-looking garments. One grabs her by the back of her jacket and steers her firmly towards a row of pretty, soft, pale, flowery dresses. The expression of suspicion, self-dislike and severity on Three’s face, while she tries on a dress and examines herself in the mirror, reminds One so much of herself that it squeezes her heart. Three buys a dress. Next time One approaches Three’s house, she sees a slender, long-haired girl standing out on the pavement, with the wind swaying her loose skirt. ‘Oh, how pretty,’ thinks One. She gets closer and sees that it’s Three, aged forty-five, wearing the dress they chose together.
A Deeply Wounded Postcard
If there are five of you, you form a complex network of shifting alliances.
‘For six months,’ says Five, ‘I’ll mostly hang out with Four. Then she’ll say or do something that shits me, but instead of slugging it out with her on the spot, I’ll show her the door in a restrained manner and then get straight on the phone to One: “Can you believe what Four just said to me? Fuckin’ bitch!” And then I’ll move over to a different camp, for a while.’
‘I was outraged,’ says Three to One, ‘by what you said about that African movie as we came out into the foyer. I’d been so moved by it—and you ruined it, in one smart crack. I had to get away from you, before you completely destroyed it for me. I came home and wrote you a letter about it. Which I didn’t send.’
‘I wrote Three a terrible letter,’ says One, ‘and I posted it. I quaked for a week, then she sent me a deeply wounded postcard. I apologised, and it was never mentioned again. But ooh, I’d love to have a fight with her.’
‘Sometimes,’ says Five, ‘I despise myself after I leave one sister’s house, thinking about how I’ve curbed my behaviour in her company. To please her. It’s so easy to slip into a style of dialogue that suits the one I’m visiting.’
‘Yes,’ says Four, ‘and when you get home you write the letter.’
‘Five had the nerve,’ says One, ‘to write me an extremely snippish letter. I had to go for a walk to calm down. And then I wrote her a scorcher which said all the things I’d been bottling up for years and hadn’t had the nerve to say before. I said, You listen to me. I said, How dare you. I said, I should come over and kick your arse right roun
d the block. That sort of thing. I censored the worst bits, and then I posted it.’
‘When I got the letter from you,’ says Five. ‘I was paralysed. I also noticed you’d cut off the bottom of one page, so I realised there’d been even worse things. I sat on the end of my bed. I could hardly move for half an hour.’
‘The bits I cut off,’ says One, ‘I pasted into my diary. That’s how I remember what I originally said.’
‘Why don’t we yell at each other?’ says Four.
‘Because,’ says One, ‘we’re so in love with the idea of our family continuing that to speak truly and honestly would jeopardise it.’
‘Isn’t that a bit pathetic, though? I think we should yell at each other.’
‘You start.’
‘All right. “Get out of my sight, you moll.” How’s that?’
‘This is serious, Four—do you mind?’
‘OK. Sorry. But you did yell at me once—don’t you remember? I came over to borrow some money and you lost your temper.’
‘I remember now I yelled at you that you were so selfish you never asked me how I was, or anything about my life—all you did was whinge about your problems. You bawled and howled, it was dreadful, and I said, “I’m sorry if this hurts you,” and you said, howling away, “It’s all right, because I need to know why nobody likes me.” And that of course was so tragic that I started bawling, and then you looked at me with your red eyes and said in a weird, polite, choked sort of voice, “And how’s work going lately?” We both cracked up laughing—and then I lent you five hundred bucks and you went home.’
‘I had a fight one night with Two,’ says One, ‘outside Trinity Chapel after evensong. We’d gone to hear the choir. I’d left a cake in the oven before I came out of the house and I was worried about getting home in time. I was strapping on my bike helmet, and Two started in on me about the Old Testament readings, which had been about the parting of the Red Sea. She said, “It’s awful. It’s racist.” I said, “Oh, don’t be ridiculous.” She said, “I am not being ridiculous! Imagine if you were an Egyptian and had to sit there listening to that!” I lost my temper and yelled at her. She didn’t turn a hair. You can say anything to Two—she never takes umbrage, she just keeps on arguing. I realised how grotesque I must be looking, scowling and red-faced with my hideous helmet on, and I broke off and said “I’ve got to go straight home.” Two said, “Yes, go on—go home to your cake.” I pedalled away, to cross the university grounds, and I suddenly thought, “Goodness—we’ve had a fight!” But I didn’t feel bad. I felt great. I felt exhilarated. And I yelled back to her, “The music was fabulous!” I could see her rippling along behind the fence railings as she strode back to her car—she didn’t answer, but just waved and kept walking. I zoomed home on my bike, thinking, “Hey! Fighting’s not so bad!” The next day I wrote her a postcard saying something to that effect. And she sent one back, quite cheerful and dignified, saying, “That wasn’t a fight. It was a disagreement.” ’