The Grass is Greener
by Dominique de Forest
Text copyright © 2012 Dominique de Forest
All Rights Reserved
I remember saying to her, as her lips pressed against mine and her breath was warm on my face:
“I wondered when this moment would come.”
She didn’t answer. We both seemed to know, somehow, that it would happen. I only spoke because it seemed to me that some sort of acknowledgement in words was required. But the words were unnecessary. The way she had looked at me, and I at her, her light step, barely a movement at all, in my direction. The trembling in my arms and legs, and the tightening of the muscles in my stomach, the goose-bumps beginning to prickle over my shoulders and along the back of my neck… that had said it all. I had stupidly wanted to fill the moment with words, and so I had spoken. Superfluous as usual. The kiss seemed to last a long time, but it was probably only a matter of seconds. It was warm and wet. Her breath, mingling with her perfume, had a peculiar scent, a bit like fresh eucalypts in a field. My arms were around her waist and my hands were pushing under her top, at the back, excited by the warm flesh beneath the materiel. Her breasts, firm and round, but not by any means large, were pressing against my chest as we kissed. When it was finished she leaned back against the doorway, resting one arm on the architrave, and smiled. Her eyes, a soft brown colour, contrasted by her long and straight black hair. She wore just the lightest cosmetic blush, her skin natural and white, freckled over the bridge of her thin nose. She was not a classic beauty, and I knew that some of my friends (my golfing mates!) would have wondered what I saw in her. She was looking at me pensively now, as though she were considering what to say, churning the words over in her mind. I continued to admire her from a close distance. She was taller than me, her legs were long and shapely, and her waist was small, the hips curved. That was what had attracted me so powerfully, I think. Her hips. It wasn’t quite the classic “hour glass” figure, and she was not what other women would have called thin or slender. But she was well rounded, and seductively curved.
“So… What happens next?” she asked suddenly.
I didn’t answer, because I didn’t know. I was still rehearsing in my mind those thrilling few seconds it had taken for her to move her mouth towards mine, and I was still thinking about how it had happened, and still exhilarated by the sequence of events that had just transpired. She drove a blood red Falcon, with silver mag wheels, and twin exhaust at the back. She drove it fast, and she usually emerged from the car wearing wrap around dark sunglasses and a broad smile, her white teeth flashing behind lipstick that matched the paintwork. I had watched her arrive from inside the house. The engine died slowly, grumbling in protest – this was a car that belonged on the open road. The door swung open. And she emerged, one black boot first, then the other. She wore blue jeans that hugged her shape, and a black singlet top. You could see the white bra straps beneath it. Her hair was especially raven and it seemed to shimmer in the pale sunlight. She walked towards where I stood in the now open doorway. I stepped aside, allowing her to enter the house, mumbling a greeting as I reached for the book on The Stones she had come to collect. That was in response to my text.
“Hi Tara. Finished that book u wanted to borrow. Pick it up any time u like.”
I had pressed send on that less than an hour ago.
“Thanks, I’ve got a few days off Uni now so I’ll start on it right away,” she said breezily.
“Not a problem, have it as long as you want.”
There was a short silence.
“Got the car washed,”’ she said eventually, for no particular reason at all. Instinctively I looked beyond her, over her shoulder, out of the open doorway in which we stood, facing each other, to where her car was, outside on the roadside. I noticed that the bonnet was still wet. Water was dripping onto the road underneath the vehicle.
“I must get a car like yours one day,” I said dreamily. “Might make me feel young again.”
“It does feel nice to open it up on the freeway, with the windows down,” she replied, ending the sentence with the brief flourish of laughter that I was used to now. She often did it. “And it’s sort of cool too, when you rock up to Uni and get out, and all the young guys stand around, admiring.”
“The car?”
I said it instinctively. It was the sort of characteristic, spur of the moment, witticism for which I was well known. Another time it might have been laughed off. It might have been enjoyed, savoured even, briefly, over red wine at a dinner party, as so many such witticisms had been in the past, and probably would be in the future, each becoming increasingly more lewd and suggestive as the wine soaked in and the night wore on. But not this one! The words seemed to hang there in the space between us. I felt it again, powerfully. I had felt it first in the coffee shop as we sat opposite each other, for the very first time. We were not meant to be alone then, and perhaps we should not have been. Her husband was meant to be with us, but had pulled out at the last minute with some work commitment. And we had made the journey together, alone. The purpose of the trip was to meet with someone who might be able to help us prepare a magazine and have it published locally - “for locals, by locals” had been the tentative selling point - but it had turned out to be a fruitless drive. On the way back we called into a roadside café in the next town and ordered coffee. It was my idea. I asked if she minded. I hadn’t had breakfast, and I was starving, and still tired. I wasn’t at my best in the morning. I needed coffee. All of that was quite true. Up until that moment she was just the person accompanying me to this meeting, as many others had in the past, to many other such meetings. It was not until we sat opposite each other in the café and the waitress brought over the plates of scrambled egg and steaming cups of coffee, and I looked up into her chestnut eyes, that I experienced it for the first time. Something happened. Something seemed to pass between us. It was almost tangible. Neither of us spoke a word, for a very long time. Half way through the coffee I started talking about the weather, but I was thinking of something else. Her. That same real, tangible, tantalizing, still unspoken sensation, reemerged as I spoke those two words “the car?” and as she answered, seductively, purposefully:
“What else would they be admiring?”
I hadn't even said it. She knew exactly what I meant and what I wanted to say. She looked at me. Her eyes were especially light, a lighter brown than I had thought previously. I think she took a very small step towards where I was standing, I’m not sure, and I wouldn’t want to insist it was her who made the first move, so to speak. However it happened, in one fleeting movement I had kicked the door shut with my foot, and her lips were warm on mine, and I was inhaling her minty breath. And then she was standing in front of me, like an inquisitive schoolgirl, asking – “So… What happens next?” It occurred to me then, at that moment, that how I answered that question might potentially change the course of my life. For some reason - I didn't understand it then, I think I do now – my mind raced back in time, and almost thirty years flashed by, instantaneously…
In 1984 a red phone box stood outside the railway station, directly opposite the city bound platform, across a narrow street, underneath a street light. At night the light glowed a mustardy yellow that shimmered on the bitumen. But during the day the road was busy with passing traffic and with school children coming and going. There was a barren expanse of green turf with a withered evergreen and a rusting set of swings that the council called, seemingly without embarrassment, a park. In the middle of this so-called park was a dome like structure built of treated pine and roofed with corrugated iron that housed two bench seats, each long enough to accommodate four people. In the morning, and early evenin
g, these were occupied by city workers, mostly suits, waiting to be picked up by their spouses, who came and went in a fleet of sedans. But at night, deep into the night, the seats and the shelter, and the whole park, belonged to us. It was here that I fell in love with Bron – Bronwyn O’Meara to be precise. She was a schoolgirl then. I had just left school. I had not exactly graduated, I had more been “counseled” by the Vice Principal to consider opportunities for employment rather than continuing to drag down the school’s final year averages. I’d taken his advice, dreamt of being a writer, gone on the dole for a while, and then found a job in the storeroom at a local factory that paid enough for a bottle of whiskey most weekends, when we would head to the deserted beach with a group who spent most Friday and Saturday nights sitting about in the sand, drinking around an open fire. That night we had come from the beach and were making our way home, past the railway station and the phone box. I remembered it as though it were yesterday. It was almost thirty years ago! Dan – a few years later he would be best man at my wedding – had gone into the phone box, and commenced a loud, and a long, dialogue with an imaginary girlfriend which became increasingly obscene, his frenzied speech ringing out in the midnight air. We were in the shelter, across the road from him, laughing, and shouting at him to stop. As I lit a cigarette – I remember that so well – they came into view. Four of them. Girls! Bron among them, her face illuminated in the flash of my lighter, then in the shadows, then lit up again as I took the first drag. Her friend spoke.
“What are you losers doing?”
“Just hanging out,” one of our group answered.
I knew Bron – no, that’s not quite right – I had seen Bron! She went to a girls school, a Catholic school, near what was now my old school. She was a year, maybe two, younger than me. I had seen her at the railway station, in her school uniform, bag over one shoulder, waiting for the train, and I had thought to myself “she’s cute.” Now she stood in front of me. At midnight. In a public park.
“Got a smoke?” she asked.
“Sure.”
I handed it to her and she lit it.
“What's yer name?” she asked.
“Brian,” I told her. “You're Bronwyn. Nice to meet you.”
“How do you know me?”
A hint of anger. Surprise. Annoyance. All mixed up in one. That was Bron! The “Irish temperament” I supposed.
“Seen it on yer schoolbag,” I said triumphantly, casually, trying very hard to appear and to sound “cool.”
“So you’ve been watching me?”
“Yep.”
“Pervert.”
I didn’t deny it. Bron was young and slender then. Her hair was straight and blonde. Exactly the same as it has been ever since. Her eyes were green. I don't know what attracted me to her, or even why I had noticed her, walking across the platform towards her train, or laughing with her friends around the waiting room at the station, or setting off for the bus stop when the train got in. There was nothing especially attractive about her. Indeed, some might have called her “plain.” An average girl, of average height, with blonde hair and green eyes. A pleasant face, but not one destined for the front cover of Vogue. For a reason I could not define or describe, not even to her, I had noticed her. And I liked her. At the age of eighteen, that was close to the biggest compliment I could pay a girl!
“Where are you girls going?” I asked.
“Home,” she said.
“I’ll walk you.”
“Okay.”
And that was how it had started.
“For fuck sake Brian!”
It was Bron.
What now I thought? I didn’t say it.
“I work all fucking day. I come home and have to pick up your clothes off the bedroom floor. Then stack the dishwasher. Then take the rubbish out. And that's all before I can even think about cooking something for dinner.”
She appeared in the doorway. The blonde hair was just the same. Shoulder length. Straight. Settling over the ears. Sometimes, if she moved quickly, it covered the side of her face. I liked that, the way she looked at me, through the eye I could see, the other obscured by her hair.
“I don't suppose you got something out for dinner?”
She filled the doorway, hands on hips. She was not the slender little thing she had been when we had met all those years ago. She still had the Irish temperament!
“I’ve been working on the…”
She stormed back into the kitchen before I could finish the sentence. I recalled then, too late, how she had called out to me as I showered, before she had left for work that day, saying – “Make sure you get something out for dinner honey, maybe the chicken fillets. Bye. Love you.”
There were no “love you's” now. I’d forgotten all about it of course, as I got into the heart of a piece I was reworking for a new audience, and the revamped headline just wouldn't come. As the words on the screen drowned out everything else around me I had pushed the imperative to get the chicken fillets out of the freezer far from the surface of my mind.
“Oh, and another thing! Mum will be up on the weekend. Maybe you can remember that. Maybe you can even talk to her this time.”
She was back in the doorway now, glaring at me. I nodded helplessly. Really, this was too much. I had not meant to be rude last time, but the frequent visits of my mother-in-law were not the social occasions I anticipated most keenly, and there had been a nine hole tournament at the course last time she had come up for dinner! I was in with a chance right up until the eighth (an extremely rare occurrence! I was usually out by the third!). We had unpacked the game over a few beers afterwards, more than a few to be honest, and I'd got home in a taxi, near midnight, just a little worse for the wear, leaving the car at the club. Well, let's be honest, I was toasted! And there were Bron, and mum, in the lounge room, watching some late night move, eating cheese and biscuits, and drinking my wine.
“Hello,” I'd said, cheerfully, trying to appear normal, sober. “Think I’ll get to bed if you don't mind.”
I couldn’t, to this day, describe the look on Bron's face. It defied any verb in my vocabulary. And I could hear in my mind her mother muttering under her breath, as she liked to do, something like – “hasn't changed” – or words to that effect.
I closed my laptop and walked to the kitchen. She was peeling potatoes at the sink.
“I’ll be the perfect son-in-law this weekend. Promise.”
She didn't answer.
“Want a glass of wine?” I asked, as I took a beer from the fridge for myself.
“I’ve got one.” It was said, not angrily, but curtly.
I drank my beer in silence.
“When is she coming up?” I asked eventually.
“Saturday.”
Shit! I thought.
“I will be out a bit Saturday,” I confessed, cautiously.
“Game of golf?” she asked in a hostile tone.
“No.”
“Whatever Brian.”
“Not golf,” I protested, my voice light and playful. “I’ve gotta take the new design in for approval for the local rag we’re working on. I set up the interview so I sort of have to go.”
“Will you be back for dinner?”
“Yes.”
“I need the car to take Jimmy to football.”
“It's okay. Your friend Tara is driving. She did the artwork, so I’m hitching a ride with her.”
She didn’t answer this. Tara was not really “her friend.” We knew them, Tara and her husband Mark, mainly through the fledgling professional association I had formed with a small group interested in producing a local magazine. I was the only journalist on the team – in the town! Tara was one of the many “new young mothers” in town, around my age, doing a crash course as a mature age student in graphic art and design. Her work was good, her ideas were fresh and new, and after a few phone calls and a little bit of pleading, I had got us both an interview with a friendly editor who owed me one and was willing to c
onsider backing the project. I hadn’t done that out of any sense of attraction to her. It hadn't happened yet. I had always sought to assist locals, since we had moved to this place, to what had been a little satellite town back then on the outskirts of the city. We had moved there to escape, and for Bron to have the baby. It was now fast becoming a suburb, but the sense of community was still strong, especially for any project or cause that contained the word “local” in the sentence extolling its merits.
“It’s okay,” I assured her. “We’ll only be gone the morning.”
I reached for Bron’s hair. I loved her hair. It was straight, impossibly straight, and soft to touch. Always had been. I moved a little closer and kissed the back of her neck. Very lightly. The exposed flesh prickled at my touch. She put the peeler down in the sink.
“I’m busy Brian,” she said stiffly. “If I don't get the potatoes on we'll be eating at midnight.” She emphasized the I.
It was the following morning, on the way back from the interview with my editor friend, that I came to be seated opposite Tara over coffee and scrambled eggs in a nondescript roadside café. And it was there that I felt it for the first time. I knew what it was. It was sudden, and inexplicable. It was unwanted, and uninvited. I felt like exactly like the unshaven adolescent with the lumberjack coat and the long hair, that I was back then in 1984, smoking a cigarette as I stood before Bron at midnight in that deserted park, all those years ago.
I didn't feel guilty about not speaking to her mother. Or not being there when she visited. Her parents had never liked me, and even after the reconciliation, and the grandchildren, her mother continued in her dislike. It was still potent, even though Bron and I had a made a good life for ourselves, and for our three children – her grandchildren – and even though I had ceased to oppose her coming here, years ago. It was Bron’s mother after all! As I grew older, and as my own daughter passed the age at which I had first met Bron, I’d realised how young and how naïve we had been then. Too young! The relationship had flared that summer, over bonfires on the beach, whiskey, the occasional cigarette filled with more than tobacco, and with Duran Duran and Bon Jovi playing in the background. When she went back to school, for her final year, her mind wasn’t on her books. Whereas she had been an A grade student, right up until then, she was thinking now only of the weekend, of the next party, and of getting into the upstairs venue in our local pub, where it was so easy – a dozen girls with the same paper driving license (no photo then), the same date of birth, and the same name, would all present themselves to the bouncers on the door in ten minute intervals, and if they looked pleasant enough and reasonably sober, they were all waved through. Her parents tried everything to stop us! From sending her away over term breaks, grounding her, speaking to teachers, confronting me, locking the doors and the windows. They even had their priest come over for dinner, to stay on and talk to her! But it was too late. They had hoped that it would burn itself out, quickly – our relationship. But we knew the fire was already well and truly lit, and that it was insatiable. When she got pregnant, towards the end of the year, we left. It wasn’t shame, or not knowing what we would do, or that we were both so young, with Bron barely eighteen. It was that Bron couldn't face them, and couldn't tell them. Melinda Jade, now a young woman herself, would be almost four before her maternal grandparents saw her. I regretted some of that. I regretted the vehemence with which I had stopped her contacting her parents – now that I was a parent myself! Some of that history was still there, thick and tangible, in the air between us, whenever her mother called, an occurrence that had become much more frequent after her father had died. I’d made an effort that night. I thought a pretty reasonable one. Her mother had even smiled at some of my anecdotes, and flicked through one of the journals, taking one home with her, expressing an intention to read my article later. Mother had been gone a good two hours before we turned in, me stripping off and lying on the mattress, reaching out to adjust the bedside lamp so I could see the book folded open in front of me. Bron entered the room with a sigh. She even managed a smile as she closed the door gently behind her, and described how Mel had called from University, agonizing over the exams that loomed on the cusp of the semester break, and wondering if we could put something extra in her account to help with the stress.
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