Grace's Table

by Sally Piper

  Susan set the kettle back on the hob, then turned to face Grace. ‘Can I ask you something?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Why did you marry Dad?’

  It was a good question. Not Why did you marry Dad if he made you so unhappy? but rather a simple enquiry about the early spark between two people. Grace thought for a moment. She made her mind go back, past the disappointments and complications, to her earliest, easier impressions.

  ‘I guess because he made me laugh at first. As a young man he was very witty, very playful. Always ready with a joke.’

  Her early cooking days, before she’d fully honed the skills acquired from Mother, had offered him scope.

  ‘Bloody hell, doll. You’re meant to pluck a chicken before roasting it.’

  ‘I did, but not all the feathers would come out. I don’t think I had the water hot enough.’

  ‘Sit the next one in front of the radiator. She might take her coat off for you.’

  It was only later that he stopped laughing at her mistakes.

  ‘But at a deeper level, I was attracted to him because he was risky – dangerous even. I didn’t want to live as my mother had – afraid to do anything that wouldn’t meet with the town’s approval. In many ways he was the opposite of what people in Harvest would want me to marry. That had a lot of appeal.’

  ‘And love? Did you love him?’ Susan took up a spoon and started stirring the coffee grind in the boiling water.

  Grace thought back to the dance hall fight. That experience had taught her that love wasn’t just an emotion that started as a dull ache in the pit of the stomach and spread to the heart; it could also start as an expectation.

  ‘I thought I loved him. But what is love really but an alternative to living alone? You look at a potential mate and ask yourself Can I live with this person for the rest of my life? Is he the best match for me? When I was young, they were the sorts of questions I asked myself about love. What I didn’t think about was how much we all change in a lifetime. It was foolish to think that match wouldn’t alter as well. I’m not sure your father or I liked some of those changes.’

  ‘He still cared for you, you know? He told me as much – not long before he died.’

  Still? Even then? How was he so sure it wasn’t just familiarity he felt?

  Susan continued. ‘He said you were a sparky one, but that he’d always loved that about you. He also said he’d never considered himself good enough for you.’

  How was good enough measured? What defined it – words, actions, deeds? If those were the yardsticks then, Grace decided, neither she nor Des had been good enough.

  Susan stopped stirring, looked thoughtful. ‘I always considered him a man of his time,’ she said. ‘A bit arrogant. A bit chauvinistic. A man’s man with not a lot of insight into female emotions. But I also believed he was being the only man he knew how to be, so we could forgive him his faults.’ She gently tapped the spoon on the lip of the plunger before placing it in the sink.

  ‘Perhaps we were all being the only people we knew how to be,’ Grace said. ‘Perhaps we still are.’

  Susan put the plunger in position. ‘Sometimes I struggle to know who it is we really are,’ she said, and pushed slowly. ‘And then there are times I think I know exactly and I don’t like it.’

  *

  Kath turned an anxious face towards Grace as she entered the dining room. Maybe Peter had given them the heads-up when he’d carried the plates in. A little family tête-à-tête, he might have said, trivialising it, or perhaps he blew it out of all proportion with a Man-o-man, am I glad I got away from that one.

  ‘Here we are.’ Grace placed the tray on the table. ‘Your biscuits look delicious, Kath. I hope everybody’s got room for one.’

  Peter was in his seat, tea towel still over one shoulder. Richard had pushed his chair back from the table, long legs crossed, the top one swinging idly. Jane’s make-up had slipped a little further down her face, and her body down her chair.

  Susan came into the room and stood behind Richard. She put a hand on each of his shoulders. He reached up, gripped the fingers of one. Grace thought it a comforting gesture to see. Her daughter would always have a safe home in Richard. Susan took Nick’s seat, closer to Richard.

  ‘Now, who’s for coffee?’ Grace asked.

  ‘I’ll have a big one. With just a dash of milk, thanks, Grace.’

  ‘Coming right up, Jane.’

  ‘White and one, thanks, Mum,’ Peter said.

  ‘Anything other than coffee in the shop?’

  ‘We’ve made a pot of green tea for you, Richard,’ Susan said.

  ‘Don’t you just love the way these ladies have looked after us today?’ Richard announced.

  ‘We aim to please.’ Grace passed him his cup and pot.

  ‘The usual, thanks, Grace,’ Kath said.

  ‘Nothing for me,’ Susan said. ‘It’s too hot. I’ll stick with water.’

  ‘Why don’t you share my green tea? Full of antioxidants – help with those tiny crow’s feet you keep worrying about.’

  ‘Here we go again,’ Peter said, not unkindly.

  ‘In that case, pass the whole pot here. Surely it’s never too late?’ Kath said, and Grace felt everybody relax a little as they laughed.

  The children came back into the dining room Indian file.

  ‘The heat’s gone up as the breeze’s gone down,’ Nick said, sitting next to Susan.

  Jorja slid into Ada’s seat, beside Grace.

  ‘Great. Biscuits,’ Tom said. He and Jaxon took one each as they passed on the way back to their chairs.

  Settling beside Peter, Meg rested her head against her father’s shoulder and pulled the tea towel over her head like a veil.

  ‘Your tea towel isn’t very manly, Daddy,’ she said. A new word, Grace guessed.

  ‘Sometimes even manly people have to do girlie jobs. You’re all hot and sticky. Why don’t you lean up against your mum?’

  ‘But you’re squishier.’

  ‘Translation – fatter,’ Nick said.

  Peter balled up the tea towel and threw it at Nick, who ducked in time to miss it. Nick used the same gun-finger action Peter had used on him earlier.

  ‘What were you saying about reflexes?’

  Families were like sand dunes, Grace decided. They shifted shape and position with even the gentlest of forces. Even a tiny puff – a shrug – could bring about change, move a handful of thoughts to a new understanding, a new authority. A gale, like today’s, and whole dunes – lives and futures – were relocated, reimagined.

  So much resentment had percolated undetected in this family for so many years. Each of them had failed to recognise the other’s hurt, everyone had believed their suffering was more worthy. So what should they do about these feelings, now that they were out? Because it was clear that what had been said today couldn’t be unsaid, or forgotten.

  Abruptly, with the last of the coffee drunk, Peter slapped his hands on his thighs.

  ‘Well, we better hit the road.’

  ‘We probably should too, Susan. School day tomorrow. Can we drop you anywhere, Kath?’

  ‘No thanks, Richard. I thought I’d see if Grace had a spare bed I could cadge for the night.’

  ‘A big girl’s sleepover?’ Meg asked.

  Kath laughed. ‘Yes. We’ll sit up late eating chocolate in bed, reading the Seniors Supplement and giggling about the boys we fancy.’

  People filed out of the dining room and went in their different directions, gathering belongings.

  At the front door Grace waited for them.

  Susan came to her first. Grace wrapped her arms round her daughter and held her close and for longer than they’d normally embrace.

  ‘Thanks for your help today,’ she said.

  Susan didn’t compl
etely relax inside her arms, but neither did she pull away.

  ‘I love you,’ Grace said quietly, so only Susan heard. They were words that were always awkward between them. She held Susan at arm’s length and looked into her face. She could see that stern and determined child marked indelibly in the adult – in the frown lines that sat like thick commas between her eyebrows; the small muscles that pulsed either side of her jaw – her legacy from Des. Grace reached out, gently massaged the space between Susan’s brows with her thumb until it was smooth, then looped a strand of hair behind her ear, just as she’d have done when she was a child.

  ‘Will you come and see me for coffee next week?’

  Susan paused a moment, visualising her diary, or considering her desires, perhaps. Then her face softened. ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘Room for a small one?’ Jaxon said, and slipped into the space between mother and daughter.

  ‘Always,’ Grace said as Jaxon hugged her.

  He did the limbo out under their arms.

  Next came Tom. ‘And a bit bigger one?’ He squeezed between them and hugged Grace as well.

  By now Susan and Grace had clasped hands and created a bridge for each child to play the game, lowering their arms and capturing each as they came between them.

  ‘And a teeny-weeny one?’ Meg asked, taking her turn.

  ‘A gorgeous one?’ Jorja flicked her fringe back from her face and laughed as she hugged Grace.

  ‘A tall one?’ Nick dwarfed them both as he moved into the space.

  ‘Anybody else?’ Grace asked. By now the children were cheering and clapping the adults on.

  Jane teetered through next, her breath sour but her embrace warm.

  Then it was Richard’s turn. He ducked in and wrapped an arm round the waist of each of them; kissed Grace’s cheek first, then Susan’s.

  ‘Lovely meal, ladies. Thank you,’ he said, and moved through to join the others.

  Peter was the last to stand on the other side of the bridge. He looked reluctant, hoping it would collapse and he’d be let off the hook.

  ‘Come on, your turn,’ Grace said, and the chorus of those already on the other side repeated it.

  He moved into the space and Grace lowered her arms as she’d done with the others. Confined, he was forced to stay and hug her. He was wooden, a man not used to public displays of affection. Grace kept her arms lowered for longer than she had with the others, in the hope he’d soften. Only his voice did, as he said, ‘Happy birthday, Mum.’

  Grace thought of the grains of sand in a dune and how big changes could also start with small shifts. A gentle voice would have to do for now.

  At the end Grace and Kath stood side by side on the front patio and watched the departures. Outside was Sunday night quiet, light disappearing from the sky, snatched to the west as the sun dropped over the horizon. The streetlights came on, their glow orange and pale, not yet warmed up. The bags of waste on the sides of the road were grey silhouettes between each light pole – soon they would disappear from view altogether. A bottle tumbled free from a pile somewhere, likely upset by little more than a footfall.

  Nick drove away first, sounding a playful tune on his car horn. Peter followed. Jane, Tom and Meg stretched their arms through their open windows and waved wildly. Richard went last with Jorja and Jaxon waving just as keenly from the back. Susan’s face looked pale and small, just as Ada’s had, as she drove away.

  ‘There goes your future,’ Kath said, as they waved them off.

  And here stands their history, Grace thought.

  EPILOGUE

  Once Grace thought she’d seen Jesus in the barn. She’d spied him through a knot hole in the wood with a five-year-old’s eye. He was strung up high, arms wide, just as he hung on the timber cross behind Father Donnelly’s altar. But her Jesus was suspended from two large hooks.

  The barn had been gloomy, but beams of light from other holes and cracks in the timber walls shot lines across his upper body; his hips and legs were hidden by a wall of baled hay. At the time Grace thought it must be the light of his attending angels or the ethereal glow she’d seen surrounding him in pictures at church.

  Her eye had grown wide as she’d peered through that knot hole, taking in the scene of Jesus, bloodied and crucified in the barn.

  Fearful, she’d run home to Mother, where she blurted in a breathless, unthinking rush: ‘Jesus is hanging in the barn.’

  Mother had slapped Grace hard across the face.

  ‘Don’t you make fun of the Lord,’ she said, and sunk her fist into a mound of scone dough she was working.

  Red-cheeked and afraid to speak of her vision again, Grace slipped away to a quiet spot in the shade and drew the image with a stick in the dust.

  Sixty-five years later, this picture of Jesus had remained vivid to Grace. But she knew enough now to be able to laugh at the wild imaginings of a child. At the time though, even as Pa carried the buttery-coloured carcass of a lamb across his shoulder from the barn and placed it on the kitchen table for Mother to cleave into all manner of chops and roasts, Grace the child had failed to see what the adult eventually could.

  Grace remembered this long ago incident after her family had left that day. And it had made her wonder: if a child could get something so wildly wrong, why not an adult? How could anyone’s perceptions of an event ever be trusted?

  Such thoughts had made her ask Kath: ‘What was I like after Claire died?’

  After the family lunch the two friends had sat drinking wine into the evening.

  Kath, pushing and plumping a cushion at her back at the time, had paused, then resumed again, adjusting the cushion in small, considered increments, delaying her answer, or thinking about it, perhaps. She finally settled back.

  ‘Troubled. Distant. Frightening,’ she said.

  Grace stopped stroking the corded fabric of the sofa. ‘Why frightening?’

  Kath considered the question, elbow on the armrest, chin cupped in hand and one long finger tapping at her temple.

  ‘It was as though you walked a tightrope,’ she said, ‘balancing or teetering between madness and reason, calm and frenzy. Some days we had to watch you fall. That was frightening.’

  Grace pictured this crazy woman Kath described as a cinematic cliché – dishevelled hair, wild-eyed, manic hands doing and redoing tasks, then at other times inert, vacant. She felt frightened of her too. But the fear grew not from imagining this Hitchcock recreation but from not really being able to recall her at all.

  What she could recall, though, before everything became dipped in darkness, were those two small, terrified faces in the back of the Belmont that day, hands clutching the seat in front of them. Grace had no memory of what those faces looked like for a long time after that.

  ‘Maybe he did the right thing,’ she said, ‘getting rid of everything the way he did.’

  Kath shrugged. ‘The anger it provoked had a way of reawakening your spirit.’

  ‘But what a way to do it.’ Grace remembered how the incinerator smouldered for a full forty-eight hours. Cremations were quicker, surely.

  ‘Des didn’t – how shall I say it …’ Kath looked briefly to the ceiling for an answer, ‘show a lot of insight.’

  Grace would have said it was compassion he lacked, but she could see that the word insight was one Susan would use too. She went back to stroking the corduroy.

  ‘Nick says anger’s like a poison if you don’t let it go.’

  ‘Now that’s insightful, and he’s probably right.’

  For a moment the only sound between the two friends was the tick of the mantel clock. Grace was lost in her thoughts; Kath waited for her to find them. As the minute hand slid to a new block of time, Grace sighed deep and long.

  ‘And I thought I’d got us all through it okay. Nobody starved. Each of them got through school. Married. Had familie
s of their own.’ Grace marked off the list against the fingers on her left hand. ‘Job done. House in order. While all the time everything was a mess – still is a mess, as it turns out.’

  ‘You weren’t the only one responsible for keeping things in order.’

  ‘But rightly or wrongly, it’s sounding more and more like Des was the only one who did take any kind of responsibility. God knows what I was doing.’

  ‘Grief’s a personal thing, Grace. There’s no perfect or right way to do it.’

  ‘But I’m sure Susan thinks I acted like I did on purpose – trying to punish them for how Claire died.’

  ‘Were you?’

  Grace looked sharply at her friend. ‘No.’

  ‘So what are you afraid of?’

  That, Grace thought, was a good question.

  From the kitchen window Grace could just make out the length of her quarter-acre block in the almost dark. The remnants of the party were long gone. She’d just finished clearing up after another meal: a meal for two.

  She smiled remembering Peter’s suggestion that she lived on a large area of land. She had always considered it small. Yet she’d also considered the farm at Harvest small once. Grace remembered how she’d felt confined by those hills that surrounded it, just as she felt confined by the houses and units that were around her now. What a fool she’d been not to appreciate the space that stretched before her back then, all the way from the home paddock down to the river. Two hundred acres made a quarter of one look like a sweet wrapper on a sports field in comparison. Such a small square on which to build a life.

  She had a sudden urge to go back to Harvest. It had been almost twelve years since she had. She’d gone to watch Joe’s coffin lowered into the earth alongside their parents. Where Pa’s lungs had been weak from asthma, Joe’s had found another kind of weakness – a lesion Grace imagined as black as tar and probably caused by the same thing. At least they’d been laid to rest in the correct order: the child last.

  She’d like to visit their graves – they’d be in a state. She figured Pa and Joe wouldn’t mind that the dandelions and clover had been allowed to grow wild above their bones. Mother would prefer that hers be well-kept, the edges neatly trimmed and fresh flowers placed in a jam jar resting against the headstone, just once in a while, to show those in the town that someone still cared.