Some of My Friends Have Tails

by Sara Henderson

  Prinie was a hero for life in my eyes. We told him that night how wonderful he was, and as a special treat he was allowed to sit on the sofa. He had an expression of ‘I know, I know’ on his face; Prinie took guarding his family seriously.

  In the summer Charlie wanted to have a party for the people in Washington he had been working with; they were coming to ‘the Shore’ for the weekend. He also thought it a good idea to include local friends that he hadn’t had a chance to catch up with, being so busy in Washington.

  I pointed out that I could not entertain forty people in such a little house. So after much discussion Charlie decided I could manage if the party was outside on the lawn in the late afternoon, and after cocktails, a crab salad buffet dinner.

  His nephew was trapping crabs to make money for his university fees, so we could get a lot of crabs for a reasonable amount of money. Charlie went ahead and invited everyone to the party, despite my protests. These days I would call in a caterer, but for some reason, in those days, I always seemed to have to prove myself. The other deciding factor in doing the work myself was that we never had any money to spare.

  We had been living quietly for a year, so this was the big coming-out party, a chance for many people to meet Charlie’s Australian wife. Americans in the 1960s didn’t know much about Australia except they thought all Australians played world-grade tennis and could swim like fish. The few Australians that I met in the States said they had a hard time explaining that every Australian didn’t play tennis like Rosewall and Hoad, or swim like a fish. Americans just could not accept that there were Australians who actually didn’t play tennis and some who couldn’t swim. The other popular notion was that Australia was somewhere in the middle of Europe.

  The day of the party arrived. I had really worked hard and was quite nervous. The crabs were to be delivered that day; I had cooked and prepared everything else. So except for the last-minute finishing touches we were ready. It was a lovely day with no sign of clouds, so people could be outside. I borrowed some outside chairs and tables from Mrs Henderson and hired the rest, along with extra trestle tables.

  I was very pleased with myself. I was ready at ten o’clock in the morning; I had the space and plates ready in the fridges for the crabs to arrive. I was sitting having a cup of tea, still congratulating myself, when Charlie’s nephew drove up and eventually staggered into the kitchen with a plastic garbage bin which he dumped in the middle of the kitchen.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked as he disappeared out the door.

  ‘Hang on,’ came the reply over his shoulder.

  He returned with a second bin identical to the first and dropped it next to the first one. ‘Crabs!’ he said in a puffed reply.

  ‘Crabs?’

  ‘Yes, your crabs!’

  He whipped off the lids and a mass of squirming, floundering, squeaking crabs greeted me.

  ‘They’re alive!’

  ‘Yep. How else could they be?’

  ‘How about cooked and ready to eat?’

  It was then I was told that everyone on ‘the Shore’ definitely cooked their own crabs. There was jealous competition over recipes and everyone, I was informed, would be judging mine tonight. He jammed the lid back on, told me to be careful to keep it on, then left a dazed me sitting in the kitchen with two garbage bins full of squirming crabs. I called Mrs Henderson and told her my problem; she told me I could borrow her crab steamer. She went on to say there would also be one in the kitchen somewhere. No home on ‘the Shore’ was without a crab steamer, I was to learn later; it was standard equipment. After I was told what to look for, I found two in the storage cupboard in the basement. I drove over to Lloyds Landing, had a quick lesson in steaming crabs properly, then raced back to the house, now desperately out of time. Of course, cunning Charlie was arriving with some of the guests coming down from Washington, so I had the children and Prinie as assistants. The woman who helped me during the week didn’t work on Saturdays, it was against her religion. I raced back to the house with the instructions, put all the steamers on with water and all the flavourings to make the crabs real ‘Shore’ crabs, and clutching the recipe which I was reverently told had been in the family for over one hundred years, I started.

  The water was boiling, steam was whistling out everywhere it could; it was time to move. Prinie was watching the bins, pricking up his ears and turning his head on the side, intrigued by the funny sounds he could hear. Each boiler could hold about five crabs on the steaming shelf. One look at the bins and I knew I was going to be cooking for quite a while. I gingerly lifted the lid off the bin and with difficulty managed to get five crabs out, one at a difficult time, with long-handled tongs, putting them in a bowl ready to tip the lot into the steamer together. I was feeling uneasy about having to do this but I had no choice, and I reasoned with myself that they would die anyhow if I left them in the bins. I took off the steamer lid, poured them in quickly, and slammed the lid back. No-one had told me about the locking device for the steamer lid. I turned to the plastic bin to fish out the next five, and the five crabs in the steamer catapulted out of the steamer, sending the lid flying. They were hopping all over the stove, understandably, I suppose; if I was sat on a shelf in a boiling hot steamer, I would jump like hell, too. That was what the locking device did, it prevented the crabs jumping out, but the locking device was still in the cupboard.

  I dropped the basin of crabs I was holding and they started crawling around the floor while I tried to catch the escapees on the stove, now also dropping on the floor. I put them back in the pot, only to have them leap out again, so I had to hold the lid down until they died. By now I was crying, feeling for all the world like an executioner, realising I would have to keep doing this for the rest of the afternoon.

  Prinie was fascinated with the crabs and before I could stop him, he sniffed one heading his way. It latched onto his nose, then all hell broke loose. I let go of the lid to go to his rescue; again the now-half-dead crabs staggered over the edge of the steamer, collapsing on the floor, making terrible noises. The children were sitting on the table crying because I was crying, and Prince was howling, jumping up in the air to avoid the nippers, barking and attacking, all at once. I was trying to calm him when another crab latched onto his foot; he recoiled backwards. He was shaking his foot furiously and backed right into the bin of crabs that I had left the lid off. The bin went flying, crabs spilled from the bin and spread slowly out, in an expanding mass, all over the floor.

  We now had a floor covered with very active crabs, unlike the poor old ones in death throes falling over the side of the stove. Crabs were now biting me, so both Prince and I were yowling and hopping around. We couldn’t put a foot or paw anywhere where it didn’t get bitten.

  The table was closest, so I helped Prince onto the table with the girls; I stood on a chair. I finally got the crab off Prince’s foot, he had dislodged a second one off his nose, thank heavens. After we calmed down I sat on the table and cried some more. The crabs were walking out the door, into the dining and living rooms, all over the ground floor in fact.

  I knew I couldn’t sit all day, so I made a path through the crabs with the tongs and raced upstairs to put on thick long pants and heavy boots. With the pants tucked tightly in the boots, I armed myself with dustpan and brush and started scooping up the crabs, crying all the time.

  In the middle of this, Charlie called. He had driven down with some of the guests early. He was bringing them, he informed me, over for a few quiet drinks. In a very few colourful words I told him if he turned up with guests before six o’clock I would throw a garbage bin of live crabs over them. I went on to tell him to get home to help me with the mess or all his guests would be eating live crabs. All I heard was, ‘But darling’, before I slammed the receiver down to return to scooping up crabs.

  The coward never turned up, but took his guests to Lloyds Landing, to sit on the porch with his mother, and sip tea and chat until it was time to come to cocktails and dinner. I s
pent the rest of the day crying and putting crabs to death.

  By six o’clock I was exhausted, but we, the children and I, had managed to cook most of the crabs, or at least all we could find. So we still had half a bin of uncooked crabs, and I had no idea of what was roaming the rooms of the ground floor.

  But I was running out of time, so I decided if the guests wanted more crabs they could cook their own. I went upstairs to quickly shower and change. Charlie arrived with three carloads of guests, staying in the middle of the guests so I couldn’t get him alone to kick him in the shins. I really didn’t care by that time if the night was a success or not, I was so upset I just went through the motions of a hostess. The night, as it turned out, was a howling success and was the talk of ‘the Shore’ and Washington for weeks. People started cooking their own crabs when all the cooked ones were eaten, and a very serious cooking competition was in full swing in the kitchen, with judges in force. I served Australian pavlova for dessert, which was consumed at an alarming rate and raved about for the rest of the night; they had never heard of pavlova. But by far the highlight of the evening was when one of the escapee crabs came out from under the lounge and nipped one woman’s foot.

  By now the cooking gourmets had cooked all the crabs in the last bin, but there still were willing cooks to demonstrate their secret recipe, so when they heard crabs were loose wandering around the ground floor, there was a crab hunt. They all had a wonderful time finding the stray crabs. When they found one the cooking was a very serious process and judges received just a morsel each. They all left in the early hours of the morning, saying it was the best dinner they had ever been to, all swapping crab seasoning recipes, all wanting the Aussie dessert recipe.

  Charlie complimented me on a job well done; I didn’t speak to him for days. When he suggested another crab party a month or so later I gave him such a look, he mumbled, ‘Perhaps not.’

  I told him the only place I would even look at a crab again was in a restaurant where it was served to me on a platter, ready to eat.

  6

  * * *

  LEAVING PRINIE AND DIFFICULT

  The 1960s in America were wild and swinging years: skinny-dipping, wife-swapping, progressive dinner parties. Charlie engaged in the first two without me, though I suppose number two would have to be called wife-borrowing, but the third just involved eating each different course at a different house, so I was allowed to participate. By the end of the night you had covered a lot of the countryside and eaten a lot of food.

  My downfall, on my first progressive dinner party, was that I mixed a lot of drinks. By the fourth house I was very pleased with myself and felt on top of the world; I thought to myself, Now I can understand why people drink a lot; if being drunk feels better than this it would be a very pleasant state.

  I was far from drunk; I could still walk a straight line and wasn’t slurring my words, as many of my co-travellers were. I was also hostess at the last stop, for midnight supper, so I kept this thought foremost in my mind.

  Most of the guests (some had collapsed along the way at various houses) arrived and welcomed the coffee, but after a while they lapsed back to hard liquor. Eventually, in the early hours of the morning, the last few left and I was faced with the mess. Charlie had gone to bed the moment we arrived home so I had entertained a house full of guests while he snored upstairs.

  I put the food in the fridge, left the rest for the morning and climbed the stairs. I didn’t feel tired, in fact I was wide awake, feeling on top of the world. I took a hot shower, walked to the bed feeling very pleased with myself, laid my head on the pillow, then let out a scream as all hell broke loose. The room swirled, the walls pounded down on me one at a time; when I closed my eyes it was worse, I could still see the walls falling on me, but I was also tumbling in a sickening circle, while swirling. Bile surged up my throat but I couldn’t lift myself up, couldn’t speak. One arm hit Charlie repeatedly to help me, but he snored on. I rolled out of bed and crashed to the floor flat on my face. I managed to swallow the vomit that was in the back of my throat and let out a scream followed by a dying moan. Charlie finally rallied; when he saw my condition he roared with laughter.

  I crawled to the bathroom slowly, not daring to move my head, so I could not look at Charlie as I hurled a torrent of abuse. My painful progress across the room continued, eyes glued to the image of the toilet through the open door, as I still continued to send a barrage of insults to Charlie. I spent the rest of the night throwing up, my chin hooked over the rim of the toilet seat, hour after hour after hour.

  I finally stopped dry-retching, crawled into the bath to lie under the hot shower for the next hour, then crawled to bed without drying. I do not remember anything until late afternoon, when I forced one eye open to the repeated requests from my worried children asking me to please say something. Just the opening of one eye started it all again, only this time I could run to the toilet to start dry-retching again. It was well into the next day before I felt like anything resembling a normal human being, and strong enough to tell Charlie what I thought of his actions. He told me it was my fault I got drunk and I had to suffer the consequences. The fact that I didn’t know about mixing drinks didn’t make him sympathetic, he just kept laughing, saying it was my fault. My only reply was, ‘Don’t get sick, Charlie, and expect me to look after you.’ That sobered him; he offered to cook dinner, which sent me rushing to the bathroom again with his laughter ringing in my ears. Charlie really suffered the next time he was confined to bed with a cold!

  I was thirty-two when I got drunk for the first time in my life, and I can still remember vividly every heave … the only thing worse than being drunk is delivering a baby. At least at the end of that experience you have something to show for all the pain. Not so with drinking; why any person inflicts that kind of punishment on themselves, willingly, is beyond my comprehension. It was another twenty years before I felt sad enough to descend into that complete oblivion again, in 1986 when Charlie was desperately ill in hospital.

  America for me was an alien land. They were so far ahead of Australia in the 1960s it was unbelievable. Freeways, four lanes each way, when we only had roads. You were booked if you went under forty miles per hour on a freeway; in Australia you got booked if you went over thirty-five miles an hour. The first time I drove on the New Jersey Turnpike, five lanes each way, I got booked for going too slow in the truck lane. The advice was, ‘Geet up to fifty, ma’am, or geet orph!’

  Having only known the corner store and the local shops in the main street, I got lost in supermarkets, sometimes for half a day, after wandering down endless rows of products. America had instant tea way back in the ’60s: there was an entire aisle of instant tea and I didn’t even think they drank tea! I started walking, fascinated that there could be so many different ways to present tea. I never did find a packet of just plain tea-leaves. But I did find instant tea, plain with artificial sweetener, with artificial milk and artificial sweetener, with real sugar and real milk, with artificial lemon flavouring only, with artificial lemon flavouring and artificial sweetener, or with both real lemon and real sugar; then they started crossing, one artificial this, one real that, then the other way around. So it went all the way down the aisle. Shelves as high as you could reach and stretching a whole city block, offering you endless choices, endless brands.

  I think to be raised in such an environment of unlimited selection from an early age would be inclined to make a person stressed out just deciding what tea to drink. It expanded the importance of everyday, trivial, routine decisions, making a simple task into a massive, time-consuming problem. Supermarkets had a terrible effect on me. I became disoriented and irate at being forced to plough through hundreds of product variations, and endless brands, for a simple packet of natural tea-leaves. I constantly had to repeat to myself what I wanted to buy, otherwise by the time I finally found the right aisle, I had forgotten what I wanted. When I finally finished the shopping, I could never manage to find
the door I came in by.

  Once in Washington I drove into a car park, and after going in circles floor after floor for an interminable time, I found a parking space, then went shopping. The plan was to meet Charlie, a few hours later, on the corner near his office. When I got into the lift at the car park ready to leave, and saw the expanse of buttons, I knew I was in trouble. I knew the car was parked somewhere in the top twelve floors because I had done a lot of circles before I parked. So I started midway and went from floor to floor. It took many hours to find the car. But I learned that lesson well. I now also understand why there are colours for each floor, and a number painted in each parking square. From then on I always wrote down the floor and square number.

  Well, let’s face it, in the 1960s most parking lots in Australia were outside and on the ground and about the size of a few tennis courts; you could stand and take in the whole parking lot without moving your head. I had had no experience whatsoever in tackling a fifteen-storey car park.

  But I didn’t fare too well with ‘on the ground’ parking lots in America either. I would have started to develop an inferiority complex at this stage, only Charlie was there right alongside of me, also confused. We just weren’t prepared for the size of the parking lot outside the stadium in New York when Army was playing Navy. Not long after arriving in America we had travelled to New York to meet Charlie’s Navy friends and see the game of the year.

  Late as usual, we parked, locked the car and hurried towards the nearest entrance, which told us we couldn’t enter unless our ticket numbers were between this number and that; if our tickers were higher, go left; if lower, go right. We started briskly in the right direction, as instructed, and twenty minutes later we arrived breathless at the correct gate. This was a big stadium.