by Helen Garner
‘Yes, you can really have a fight with Two,’ says Five. ‘There’s something thrilling about her bluntness. She’s got no shame. And she doesn’t get so personal.’
‘It must be because she’s done assertiveness training,’ says One. ‘I think it must teach you to do your best to get your own way, but if you don’t, you don’t sulk. You just cop it. It’s quite impressive, in a gruesome sort of way.’
‘I fought with Four,’ says Five. ‘It was very beneficial. I realised I wouldn’t be able to go on with Four unless we had a fight. I said dreadful things. She was crying and crying—but she was taking it all on board. I had to respect her for that. I kept trying to put her to bed. She said, “Fuck you—I don’t want to go to bed!” But I kept on trying to force her to.’
‘That would’ve been because of what I said about Whatsisname, I’m sure,’ says Four. ‘He was a pretty vile guy, which Five later came to realise…whereas I knew it all along, and said so.’
‘Three and I were building up to a smash,’ says One, ‘but we sidestepped it. She played the martyr, basically, and I panicked and became feeble and began to appease her.’
‘We’re always very quick to apologise,’ says Three.
‘That’s our way,’ says One, ‘of keeping everything on a safe, superficial level. We say, I’ve hurt her. I’ll call it rudeness and say I’m sorry.” Whereas if we were really going to have some form of intimacy, we’d yell at each other—“damn it, get that look off your face!” ’
‘I hold back from fighting, usually,’ says One, ‘because if I say to my sister what I really think about her, I’m licensing her to tell me what she really thinks about me. And I don’t know how to defend myself against that. I’m afraid of it. Because sisters don’t subscribe to each other’s mythology. To the myths of each other.’
‘I’m scared of you,’ says One.
‘I’m scared of you, too,’ says Three.
They laugh, and look away. Then they glance at each other again, curiously. Gently.
Theatre
There is a tendency in our family to brood on slights. Each likes to tell a story in which she appears more sensitive and more hard done by than another. We would rather be wounded, and glory in our outraged sensitivity, than take it up to the offender and make a protest to her face. Thus we end up with a series of shrines. Each of us (with the exception perhaps of Two, who is more robust, frank and fearless) keeps a private shrine to herself, with a little lamp inside it eternally flickering, and the oil that feeds it is the offences dealt out by her sisters. The misplaced smirk, the thoughtless crack is stored away, and for a while the little ego-lamp burns more brightly—until there’s the shift, when the incident is related to one of the other sisters as a story, constructed and pointed with the primary aim of provoking laughter and a momentary sense of alliance. It becomes another chapter in our fanatically detailed, multi-track story about ourselves, which is hilarious, entertaining, appalling, obsessive. It is related in a secret language composed of joke pronunciations, silly accents, coded phrases whose origins were forgotten long ago but which are heavy with meaning and will always raise a laugh. We are major characters in the stories of each other’s lives; we are all acting in an enormous comedy that will go on till we die. It has no audience but its own performers: our children and husbands roll their eyes and walk out of rooms. Its time scale is an endless, immediate now.
Obsession and Intimacy
‘Once I was raving on,’ says One, ‘about my family to a bloke I know who’s got four brothers. After a while he started twisting in his seat, and then he burst out, “Anyone would think you were the only person in the world who had a family!” I felt foolish. But I sort of couldn’t help it.’
‘I have to hold myself back,’ says Five, ‘with anyone I meet, from talking about our family. My friends are probably driven bonkers by the way I go on about it. They never seem to need to talk about theirs. I prod them. I say, “I didn’t know you had a brother. Tell me about him.” But they say they can’t be bothered. “Why?” “Because he’s boring.” How can a brother or sister be boring?’
‘I think it’s something wrong with us,’ says One. ‘I’ve spent my life trying to have friendships outside the family which will provide as much intimacy as I get from my sisters. It’s a doomed enterprise. So I keep crashing and smashing and falling out with my friends. They can’t stand the demand for intimacy and attention. I bore them, I irritate them, I wear the friendship out.’
‘I don’t think intimacy is the problem,’ says Two. ‘It’s because you’re too bossy. We’re all too bossy.’
‘I never got this intimacy from our family,’ says Three. ‘A lot of people say they envy me having four sisters—but no one ever hugged or cuddled, to comfort. It wasn’t done. I was at a friend’s place recently when her older sister came round, looking wretched. Between our sisters, a rough joke would’ve been made—Come on, pick up your lip before you trip over it! But the younger one had a good look and said, “Ah—what’s the matter?” The older one shed a few tears and said: “Life’s too difficult. I’m trying to work, and there’s the baby, and I have to do a course if I want to keep my job—it’s too much for me.” And the younger one said, “Oh, come here”—and sat her sister on her lap. Can you imagine any of us doing that? Then they ran a bath and got in it together. I heard them laughing and shrieking. I felt terribly envious. Maybe you others had that sort of closeness. I never did. When I had a hysterectomy, I was abandoned. See? You hardly even remember it. One came down and minded the boys for a couple of days, but the rest of the time I was on my own, with a new baby and two toddlers, too weak to get out of bed. It was…desolate. I learnt not to look for help from the family.’
‘Yes, that’s shameful,’ says One, ‘but do you realise how perfect your marriage seemed, from the outside? You looked as if you had everything sewn up. You didn’t ask for help. There’s an art in asking.’
‘I know how,’ says Three, ‘but I wouldn’t.’
‘Why?’
‘I was afraid of indifference.’
‘Would there be indifference, if you showed weakness?’
‘It’s not weakness,’ says Three. ‘It’s need. It’s better not to show need, if you’re not going to get your needs met. I’ve learnt that. I worked out where people were going to care enough, and I went there.’
‘It is rather uneven,’ says One. ‘I tried to tell Four my troubles once—we were driving downtown in a car. I talked for five minutes, and she cut across me and said, “Oh, shut up—you sound exactly like Mum.” But whenever anything goes wrong in her life, the first thing she does is pick up the phone and dial my number.’
Four is the witty one. But as a child she was a tremendous howler. At the slightest rebuff she would throw back her head and roar; tears would squirt out of her eyes and bounce down her fat cheeks. One, Two and Three used to hold up sixpence at breakfast time, saying ‘You can have this tonight—but every time you cry, we’re going to dock you a penny.’ By teatime Four would be once more heavily in debt.
‘If we cried when we were little,’ says Two, ‘Mum used to say, “Stop it, you great cake.” ’ ‘I don’t remember that,’ says Five.
‘Of course you don’t,’ says Two. ‘You weren’t born yet.’
‘Three,’ says Two, ‘was the painful little sister we used to run away from. Once she tried to bribe us. She said, “I’ll give you threepence if you let me come with you.” But we took no notice and kept running.’
‘I remember that,’ says Three. ‘I can remember the feeling of the wire of the gate under the soles of my feet, as I hung over it and watched you two disappearing up the road. At least, I think I remember it. Maybe it’s only because the story’s been told so many times.’
‘Maybe,’ says One, ‘it never happened at all.’
Endearments
Because endearments were never used in our family (Plymouth Brethren two generations back on our mother’s side; grim-jawe
d Mallee stoicism on our father’s), it has taken us all our lives to learn to say dear, darling, sweetheart, without irony.
‘At school,’ says One, ‘when I was a boarder, I was sick with envy of girls who got letters from their parents that started with the word Dearest.’
A few years ago, Four sent One a telegram: ‘Dearest Darling, happy birthday, from your Darling.’ The telegram was read, marked, learnt and inwardly digested, then thrown into the rubbish bin. That night a strong wind blew, and overturned the bin into the running gutter. Next morning an angry young man knocked on One’s front door. He thrust the crushed and sodden telegram in her face: ‘Is this how you treat a man’s heartfelt declaration of love? Shame on you!’ ‘It’s not a man!’ cried One. ‘It’s my sister.’ He stared at her strangely, and stamped out the gate.
If one of us uses an endearment on the phone to a child, a friend, a lover, while a sister is in the room, she glances nervously behind her to make sure she is not being mimicked. None of us would dream, however, of mocking someone for doing this. In fact, we would (I believe) like to pet and treasure each other, to pour out floods of sweet words. But we are all engaged in the same struggle against inherited embarrassment, against a terrible Australian dryness. We maul and stroke each other’s children: it’s the closest we can get. And our children submit to their aunts’ possessive handling with patient smiles.
Class
From the middle of the middle class there are paths leading in both directions. A family can rise or fall in class over twenty years, so that its eldest child is brought up at one level, and its youngest at quite another.
‘I used to escape from the bedlam,’ says Two, ‘by going to my friend’s place over the back lane. Her father listened to opera, and her mother always did beautiful ikebana flower arrangements that I loved—she was so creative. They had posh accents. The parents didn’t just have single beds, like our parents did—they had separate rooms. I liked their accoutrements: engraved silver, crystal, a back sitting room. They had two spaniels called Kismet and Ophelia. They were what I aspired to be: Geelong Grammar posh people. We were down market. I wished our parents said dahnce and cahstle. Three always disapproved of my lifestyle, later on. Once I said to her, “I’d like to have a marblised wood dining table. I suppose they must be really expensive”—and she came back at me: “Even poor people have dining tables, you know!”—almost as if she thought my whole life was devoted to…acquisition. It probably is! I wouldn’t deny it! I don’t care about that now, but I used to.’
‘Once I went with Two to a department store,’ says Three, ‘to buy our kids some pyjamas. I headed straight for the bargain bin, and she made a beeline for the quality shelf. When we met at the cash register, her stuff cost six times as much as mine. After I came back from Papua New Guinea I couldn’t believe the way people in Australia spent money. Two Papuans from the mission where I worked came and visited Mum and Dad. Later they wrote to me, “What a lot you gave up, to come to us. Your family lives in a huge house, with many comfortable chairs and two cars.” I wrote back, “Yes, but in that house I have not learnt what I need to know.” ’ ‘One’s friends,’ says Two, ‘were band-y, interesting, creative people. That got her into trouble with Dad. Whereas I had boring, stable, middle-class friends, which was approved of.’
‘I remember asking and asking,’ says Four, ‘what the working class was. I mean—where was it? As soon as I got the chance I headed down market. I was desperate not to be middle class. Even my friends at school were rough as bags. I was smart but I was always in trouble.’
‘Two was deeply offended, I think,’ says Five, ‘when I didn’t marry X. She wanted me to marry an American and go and live on Long Island or in Hawaii. That was her fantasy for me. Frangipanis over breakfast for the rest of my life.’
‘When Five was having her baby,’ says One, ‘I suffered for a while from ferocious jealousy. It was mostly displaced on to material things—on to shopping. Mum took her out to Daimaru for a swanky lunch at Paul Bocuse and then bought her a whole lot of fabulous baby clothes. When I heard about it I practically had to stay home in a darkened room for a couple of days. And Five’s not even married.’
Afterbirth
With four sisters, there’s one for most moods. Two is brilliant at cooking and gardening. Four is the adventurous one, to go out shopping and dancing with: at a certain point, whenever she and One went out together they witnessed a car crash. Five loves to talk about books and writing, and to compare the nibs of pens. In Three’s company, the slightest incident becomes redolent with psychological and spiritual meaning.
Once, Three and One spent a day at One’s shack in the bush. The purpose of the outing was to ‘sort out some things’, to have ‘a conversation that was several years overdue’. Reproaches flew both ways. They sat sadly at the wooden table, looking at their hands. Then Three said, ‘Want me to wash your face with a warm washer?’ One recognised the childhood phrase. She presented her face, chin up, eyes squeezed shut, and Three rubbed and wiped, firmly; One could hear her quietly laughing. A little while later, One put some Oil of Ulan on Three’s face. These things seemed very symbolic, as did everything else they did up there that day: tearing out the old ivy roots, sawing dead limbs off the shrubbery, making soup for the meal. Then, as they drove away towards the road home, One saw a cow in a paddock with a long red strand hanging out of her mouth. One yelled out, Three stopped the car. The cow had just finished licking the membrane off a new-born calf, which was struggling to its feet. They saw its blunt little head, its coat so matt and clean. The cow set about eating the afterbirth: the thing was clearly a membranous sac; the cow kept licking and chewing at the sloppy mound of it on the grass, dutifully gulping it down. One and Three imagined it already cold, slimy, strandy—it seemed a nauseous duty, and an image of the maternal labours they had been bitterly talking about. Neither of them remarked on this connection, but they sat there in the car, holding the dog by the collar, and watched intently for a long time. Then Three said, ‘Oh look. All the other cows are coming over to inspect. To celebrate.’
Music
‘Once,’ says Three, ‘I was combing Dad’s hair with the comb dipped in Listerine and telling him that I wanted to learn the piano. One said, on her way past, “Be a jazz pianist.” And Dad said to her, “Don’t tell her what to do.” ’
‘So you were the one who made them get a piano,’ says One. ‘How’d you do it? When I said I wanted to learn the violin they just laughed and made squawking noises.’
‘Oh, I pestered and pestered,’ says Three. ‘And then I set up a stall in the street out the front, to raise the money to buy one. I think I shamed them into it.’
Back in the seventies, when there was such a thing as the three-dollar gig, Four and One used to go out dancing, with all their friends, several nights a week. It would never have occurred to One to imagine herself on stage; but Four watched carefully, then borrowed a saxophone from a man she knew and taught herself a few riffs. Next thing One knew, her sister was up there in a sparkly jacket, playing ‘Suffragette City’ with a women’s band called Flying Tackle.
When Two’s daughter decides to leave her medical course and study singing, Two invites Three and One over, one evening, to be a practice audience for the daughter’s conservatoriurn audition pieces. Three and One jump in the car and rush over there, wearing clean, ironed clothes. They set up the living room like a little stage, and plump themselves on to the sofa in a line, hands folded, chins up, eyes bright. The daughter steps out to sing, sees them eagerly sitting there, and bursts out laughing. She leaves the room, and returns more composed. In the pause before she sings the first note, Two hisses to her sisters, ‘Need a tissue?’
‘One came home from university for a visit,’ says Three, ‘and brought me a Vivaldi record. It was so exciting—I’d never heard anything like it before.’
Four is the kind of person to whom it matters how a backing vocal changes, in the bridge of the song, f
rom ‘shoop shoo wop bop’ to ‘bop shoo wop bop’. When she got of the plane at JFK she took a cab straight to Danceteria.
Three can sight-read. Three always remembers the words. Three goes to the trouble of making tapes and passing them round the family. Three must have been the only nurse at the Royal Children’s in the 1960s who knew Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder.
‘In New York,’ says Five, ‘I heard some black people singing and playing in the street. I wanted to bawl. I said to the person standing next to me, “Are they from a religion? Show me where to join—I want to sign up.” ’
At school we were taught to sing in parts. Thus there were years during which, we would spontaneously drop into harmony, while washing dishes or on tedious car trips, or very softly in our beds at night when sleep was reluctant to come.