Escape

by Anna Fienberg

  I sat down suddenly on the brown sofa. My knees felt loose.

  Guido frowned. 'And also you must teach our daughter Italian.'

  'But I don't know Italian, well, only the very little I've learnt in translating for you.'

  'You know the basic verbs, the names for things. You can look it up in the dictionary, what you don know. Clara is very young, she will not need more complicated language until later. And it would'elp your translation of my poems.'

  Chapter 15

  When I left Clara at day care, she cried.

  'She'll be fine,' said Rosemary, Sheridan and Martha, the girls who had to mop up the floods made by children and their mothers. 'Don't worry, they all do it at first.'

  I looked around and saw no other child was crying.

  'Will she cry forever?' asked one little blond girl at the end of the second week.

  'Is because you keep her too close to you,' Guido said when I told him about the crying. 'Always you are there at her side, is not 'ealthy. You will see, this day care will be good and make 'er more independent.'

  Clara stopped crying around the middle of the third week. When I left her on the Wednesday she just stared at me blankly, her green eyes wide. From the back of the room Rosemary waved me away, making a silent go! with her mouth. I hesitated, watching Clara's eyes, waiting for them to fill slowly like the sink in the laundry with the dripping tap. They didn't. She just drew herself up, taking a big breath, and gave me a half-smile. Then she turned and ran over to the girl who'd said, 'Will she cry forever?'

  'See,' said Clara, 'I've stopped!'

  The next morning was the same. Lovely Sheridan said she was participating well in the games. And didn't she know a lot about insects? And bacteria? In two days she'd trained the children to cover their mouths with their hands when they coughed.

  'You see?' said Guido. 'I told you so. You don 'ave to worry no more.'

  It was true. Clara seemed quite chatty when she came home, even if she was more tired. When I tried to teach her the word for tired in Italian, stanco, she put her hands over her ears and shouted, 'Na na na na!' She slept better. I was the problem now.

  When I came home in the mornings after dropping her, my arms seemed to lengthen at my sides, hanging loose and empty. I was hollow, as if all my insides had been scooped out. I missed my daughter terribly. Do your work, said the voice. Bulletproof vests would never have been invented if women just sat around on their bums, crying all day. I tried to read about the tiny bones of the hand, the metacarpals, but saw Clara's little dimpled knuckles instead.

  'Isn't it fabulous having those hours to yourself?' cried Lena on the first Friday that we could all meet. 'Don't you feel free?'

  'Sometimes,' said Rita, 'I spend the first half-hour trying to decide which treat I'll have first – it's so precious, that time to yourself, you want to use it well!'

  'You're so lucky, you lot,' Doreen sighed, 'being able to stay at home and have the house to yourself. I'm always rushing to work after the drop-off . I'd give anything to just wander around, shave my legs, I don't know, read a book in the bath . . .'

  We didn't meet as often now, what with Doreen working full-time and Lena's new editing job at her publisher's office. We didn't talk any more about babies and survival, hysteria and chaos. They had all moved on; they were talking as women, as grown people, about jobs and politics and education. I was still stuck, gorilla-like, walking on my knuckles, unevolved and hooting with pain.

  My own work wasn't going well. After The Human Body, I had been commissioned to write a new series, 'Natural Disasters'. The first book was to be Floods. At the beginning of each book, when I sat down to the blank page, a drowning feeling came over me. Often I went back to look at books I had already written, published now with snappy covers, and tell myself, see, you've done it before, why can't you do it again? But the neat printed pages with the words in their typed suits looked foreign, not familiar. I couldn't remember how I'd constructed those sentences.

  Of course I knew I wrote them, the printed words said so on the cover: Rachel Leopardi. It was more that I didn't seem to have access to her, to that Rachel who had broken through the wall and found the facts to tell a story. I just couldn't find her. Once the book was finished she was gone forever, swept away downriver like a log in one of my floods.

  After a few weeks I had a routine. I'd drop Clara off and go into my bedroom and kneel by the bed. I put my face into the sheets where there was still the smell of her, from when she'd woken next to me.

  'Don't you feel free now?' Lena had said. No, I felt like a prisoner in a cell. I was trapped by freedom. So much freedom, hours and hours of blank page, more than I had been used to for years, and everyone agreed that I should feel great, but there was just the emptiness, and the misery.

  One Friday morning I found an empty spider's nest clinging to a fold in my bedroom curtain. It was papery thin, shaped like a shower cap. There were hundreds of tiny holes like pin pricks, through which the baby spiders must have escaped. I lay the nest in my palm. I thought I would keep it for Clara to see, and explain how the tiny babies had lived inside it. But when I touched it with my finger, so gently, it fell away to dust, leaving just a white stain on my hand.

  'Why don you take a lesson from your daughter?' Guido said. 'She does not cry any more.' He made an effort, drawing himself together like Clara when she had to do something difficult. He touched my face. Smiled. 'Come here, we have some time before I have to leave.' And he put my hand on his crotch.

  A sob burst from my throat. Under the rough material of his pants, I felt his semi-hardness turn soft in my fingers. Guido looked down at me, disgusted. My hand dropped to my side.

  'I have to go out,' he said. 'Don worry, I will have breakfast on the way.'

  When he was home, I tried to keep my crying for the bathroom. The running tap and then the shower drowned the noise. As the warm water ran down my face I could surrender to the heaving in my chest, and it was almost ecstasy. When he went out, I didn't have to waste water.

  Crying in the bathroom was a habit from childhood. It was the only place where I could lock the door and run the water, and none of my father's homeless boys could barge in.

  If Guido caught me crying he would go very still, glance at me quickly, then away. If he was standing near he would shift his weight from one foot to the other and sigh, tapping his fingers together, as if he were waiting in a queue. I didn't know what was happening inside, in his secret self – perhaps he was counting all the greasy fingerprints on the kitchen wall, or the cobwebs around the light fittings. He just seemed to be waiting, still as stone, until the crying passed.

  Our long stretches of silence pooled into a lake, flooding occasionally, and we were marooned on our opposite banks, waving half-heartedly at each other until the tide went down.

  'I'm sorry,' I said at night, when he came into my room. I was sorry about the lake and my muteness and my stupid inability to cross over and the endless tears. But I couldn't say all that. And he'd kiss me, or squeeze my breast, but somehow, the lake was still there and I didn't feel forgiven by his touch any more, at all.

  Soon after we were married, Guido had decided that we should do a monthly shop together at the Italian quarter across town. He hadn't approved of the white pasta that I'd brought home from the local shops, or the parmesan in plastic. 'Is disgusting,' he said, 'how can we live like this?' He'd looked quite anxious, twisting his hands together into a knot. I would have done anything, then, to smooth the tangle of his fingers. Guido said we should buy big quantities of food at a time, to last as rations – it made sense to stock up, because it was a long tedious drive to the Italian quarter.

  We always went early in the morning to beat the traffic. We bought four hundred grams of gorgonzola, half a kilo of parmigiano, fifteen packets of the good yellow durum wheat pasta. I had to ask my parents for another loan to buy a new fridge, to accommodate the monthly shopping. Since my mother had already given us her money fro
m Great Aunt Leah, I felt quite sick about my request. But the gorgonzola, Guido told me, was too good to waste. The food from the Italian market was all delicious, and for weeks after the shopping we would have little assagi, tastes of different cheese and sausage after dinner, as if we were at a real trattoria.

  But after Clara was born and the war began, I could hardly swallow.

  At the market, Guido encouraged me to order the groceries in Italian now, as practice. He would stand back and point, prompting me, making rapid selections in my ear. 'Get the provolone, no, it looks ancient, choose the fontina instead.'

  Often I'd stumble to a halt in the middle of a sentence, my tongue huge in my mouth. I heard my accent, hard and nasal, my shameful vocabulary. I saw the condescending smiles around me, the twitch of Guido's raised eyebrow. The cheese moistened and blurred behind the glass. With each second I seemed to expand like Alice, too big and clumsy to scuttle down any hole.

  When the salesperson chose a piece of parmesan Guido didn't like – 'Too much rind for twenty dollars!' – or cut the mortadella too thickly, he'd ask them to do it again. 'Cretino,' he'd mutter.

  I'd smile blankly ahead as if I hadn't heard, cringing damply inside my blouse. When the man finally gave us all our packages, re-cut, rewrapped, I whispered to Guido to say thank you.

  'No, I will not,' he said as he strode out the door.

  When we were outside I ventured to remonstrate. It was excruciating, I told him, so embarrassing. Why was it so hard for him to be civil? Guido looked at my sweaty lip and curled his own. 'Rachel, cara, you do not understand. When you have only lived in one place all your life, you cannot judge because your vision is limited. Is cultural, this thing – we in Europe do like this. The man is there to serve, you are there to order. He is there to take your money. You are there to get the most for it. For what else you go in the shop? To become the best friend?'

  'No, but we are all human beings! We all deserve respect. Surely you can adapt your customs? Be friendly?'

  'Uffa!' Guido rolled his eyes. 'The customs in this place? Everywhere there are the superlatives. You go in the post office and they say "'Ave a wonderful day!" – they don even know you, maybe your brother just died. You order three stamps – "Fantastic!" they say when you give them the lousy dollar. Is false, this custom, so superficial all this exclaiming. What do the people have left to say in private?'

  While we waited at the counter, I sometimes thought about the cafe we used to visit before we were married. Once, after the shopping was finished, I suggested that we should take Clara there to sit down and have a little something, just as a treat, remembering the dreamy smell of espresso, the luxury of being brought what we'd ordered, and how the cannoli had melted in our mouths. Guido snorted in disbelief. 'You spend good money to sit in a cafe with a bad picture of Mount Etna on the wall? You eat stale cakes when we have just bought the monthly shopping? Are you pazza?'

  He was quite right, I knew it. Even so I thought wistfully of the past, of the time before the introduction of food rations and the monthly shopping and the implacable feudal system.

  As we trudged to our car, illegally parked – 'All these stupid rules, in Roma is not like this!' – my heart would drop. Guido would lift up the boot and we'd pile in all the packages: the cheese, the small soccer field of pasta, the little bottles of caperi, the large jars of anchovies and olives, the mortadella, salame, prosciutto, melanzane sott'olio. Then we'd stand in the heat while Guido tore off chunks of Italian bread and slices of mortadella and munched, ravenous, in silence. Fumes from the heavy traffic rumbling alongside mixed with the smell of food.

  There is nothing to look forward to, I thought one Saturday. Not even one benign moment. I looked at the grey asphalt of Parramatta Road shuddering and flashing in the mirage of heat. It went on until the metal horizon filled with cars filled with shopping that would have to be unpacked and put away and cooked and eaten and argued over. It was all duty and shopping and ironing and feeding and even when I did all that, what was expected of me, every minute of every day, it still wasn't right. I couldn't make anything right.

  Clara had lingered in the pasticceria, hoping for a sweet from the nice man serving. When Guido had finished eating I began to pick up the remains of bread and the cheese and mortadella. I imagined crashing the boot down on my fingers. I heard the crack of bone, saw the gush of blood. It would be sweet, almost. Would serve you right, said the voice. The pain would sing.

  'Porca miseria, what 'ave you done?'

  I hadn't crushed my fingers. I'd thrown the crusts of bread and slabs of ricotta cheese and slices of mortadella and loose black olives marinated in rosemary and lemon right back into the boot. I hadn't wrapped them in their neat packages. I'd just tossed them in handfuls, a gluggy mishmash of colours flying from my fingers.

  We both stared into the boot, at the mess of torn bread and cheese and oily meat smeared across the other neat little parcels of food wrapped in white greaseproof paper. If only you could freeze moments and rewind them, pretend that they hadn't happened at all. 'Is incredibile, Rachel, what you 'ave done. This car will stink,' Guido was still yelling. 'How could you do this? You are a mad woman! I 'ave married la pazza!' He turned to me with the same look I'd seen him give salesmen in shoe shops, people on buses, dog turds on the footpath.

  'You English, all quiet and polite, oh yes,' heaved Guido, 'with your please and thank you but underneath you are savages! You are not a civilised person, Rachel, you act like the maniac! An idiot child! There, you use this handkerchief and wipe up this mess. Cristo dio, che disgusto!'

  We stood staring at the boot the way you'd stare at a car accident, with Guido pointing and shouting, until Clara ran out of the shop, having been given a Baci chocolate by the shopman. 'Don't shout, Daddy, please. Ooh, Mummy, what a mess, who did that?'

  Clara's look of fear as she peered into the car, and back at my face, made me want to die.

  'Mummy, Mummy?' Clara tugged at my sleeve. 'What's wrong? Are you sick?'

  I buckled Clara into the back seat. I tried to smile at her but my face had set like stone. I imagined going home and unpacking the groceries, filing them into compartments in the fridge and pantry. Then I would iron Guido's thirteen shirts while he lay on the sofa and watched the soccer. After I'd cooked the dinner we would go to our rooms and even if we lay in my queen-size bed we would roll each to the far side and breathe quietly like two mute animals from different species. I knew that, even if I wanted to, I couldn't die now. I knew it with the same certainty I knew the sun would rise tomorrow. Once you became a parent, you weren't allowed to escape; you had to be alive for as long as you were needed, and then some. You were the enduring part; the painted background across which your child could safely run, the ground under their feet. You could never abandon your child, your own true love. It was a terrible thing not to have a choice any more, but it was a wonderful thing to see, when you rearranged your mouth into normal lines, how quickly that little face brightened and smiled back, as if nothing in the world had happened. It was a reprieve. Another chance.

  After that Saturday, I decided it would be best if I did the shopping alone. Frequently, when I hauled in three or four big cardboard boxes, Guido would be dissatisfied with my purchases. 'Look at this cheese, what is it, stracchino?'

  'But you asked me to buy it—'

  'Sì, but you must examine it first – if it is not properly stagionato, you know, cured, is without taste. Cara, when I go to the shop I look carefully at all the things first, then decide. Is an art, the shopping. You do it too quickly, like a job, not with amore.'

  He was right. I'd just wanted to get it over with. I hated the creeping traffic, the anxiety of choosing, the waiting behind broad backs of loud-voiced women who knew what they wanted, the two or three trips to the car with arm-aching boxes.

  'You should ask the boy from the shop to take them,' Guido said, 'that is what 'e is there for.'

  I hated it. But I should have taken more care
. I should have thought how my husband's face might light up at my selections, how those assagi could make our evenings more pleasant. A proper woman, an Italian maybe, would know how to do this. She was probably born knowing how to satisfy a man. When he called me amore like that, stroking the little vowel on the end of his tongue, I still felt a stab of longing. But it was a distant sort of yearning, like admiring a marvellous present that a friend might have received. You could look, but it would never be yours to hold. My inability to make my husband happy loomed as my greatest failure, as big as Mount Etna, his satisfaction something as unattainable as serving a perfect dish of gnocchi.

  But I think Guido was happy the day he came home and announced that his book of poems had been accepted by Galaxy Publishing. He strode up the hall and slapped down the letter of acceptance on the big oak desk as if it were a declaration of war, or an ultimatum. 'You see, I am a poet!' He gave a shout of victory. 'Read it!' And he went into the kitchen to pour himself a glass of wine. He slammed the fridge door so hard I heard the little yoghurt tubs tumbling off the top shelf into the vegetable crisper below.

  'Congratulations!' I called into the kitchen, reading the letter. But I felt frightened somehow by his entry into the house; he was sharp as a flung arrow. He seemed more angry than pleased, as if he'd wrung this triumph from the world despite towering forces of opposition, such as his wife. He seemed to be on the attack rather than expansive with good news. But maybe that was just me.

  'Isn't it wonderful?' I called.

  'Yes, it is wonderful, it is fantastic, this is the right occasion to use superlatives, no? Let's go out for dinner or better still, why we do not invite some of my students for dinner, to celebrate?'

  'What, tonight? It's already six o'clock – I haven't got anything ready.'