Islands

by Peggy Frew

  When at long last Helen’s father had finished talking, he undid his hands and lifted his forearms from the table. Immediately, released, Helen and her mother got up and began to clear. While they did this, and while they packed any leftovers into the refrigerator—which was still new, and which Helen’s mother took care to open only when absolutely necessary and to close as quickly as possible so as to save electricity and the seal around its door from wear—and washed and dried the dishes and put them away, and gathered up the tablecloth and took it out into the yard to shake, and wiped the bench and table, and swept the floors, Helen’s father stayed in the dining room, leaning, hands in pockets, against the mantel. He wore an expression of removed interest, like that of an anthropologist observing an exotic tribe. When Helen came with the broom to sweep under and around the dining table he stuck out his foot and interrupted her sweeping, twitching his eyebrows and bending his thin lips in a roguish smirk. He never touched Helen, but if it was her mother with the broom he would reach out suddenly and scuttle his fingers up the side of her torso and into her armpit. Look out, he’d say, there’s a big white spider that lives in the chimney. Have you seen it? When this happened Helen’s mother shrugged him off and went on with her work, but she would also smile, just a little bit, and her lower lip seemed wetter and redder than usual.

  Helen, watching this, felt a distinct and pressing revulsion. Her father’s ‘white spider’, his quirking eyebrows—these were somehow connected with the sight of her mother in her nightdress, and the giggling sounds in the night. Helen would go back into the kitchen, where if she was lucky there was a potato in the refrigerator small enough not to be missed. She ate it so fast she got a burning feeling in her chest as it went down.

  The two worst things a person could do, in the time of Helen’s childhood, were to be wasteful, and to have tickets on one’s self. This was, Helen would later recognise, because of the Second World War, which lay like a thick layer of soot over the recent memories of her parents and every other adult she had anything to do with. It was because of the war that money was tight, and nothing was to be taken for granted, and comforts must be hard-earned and modest.

  In the house of Helen’s childhood, though, there was something more being acted upon than frugality and a general sense of caution. Helen’s parents, it would seem, subscribed to a fundamental belief that life was not to be enjoyed.

  But what about Helen’s father’s cordial? His mayonnaise, his generous helpings of butter? What about his post-dinner talks and the satisfaction with which he concluded them, removing his arms so Helen’s mother could take his plate? What about his foot poking out, his smirk, his ‘white spider’? And what about Helen’s mother’s little smile, her moist lip, her giggle in the night? Rationed, contained though it might be, enjoyment was allowed for in this household. Enjoyment was had. Just not by Helen.

  Sometimes the Dysons came to dinner, sometimes the Parkers. Neither couple had any children, and when they visited it was as if Helen’s parents didn’t have any either. Helen was fed early, in the kitchen, a boiled egg and one piece of toast, watching as her mother made a dessert, measuring sugar, melting butter, pouring boiling water around a pudding basin set in a baking tray, and then carefully sliding the tray into the oven. Helen’s mother’s cheeks were pink, her lip shone, a small frown appeared between her eyebrows. Helen didn’t like the white of the egg, but she ate it all, spooning up the flabby pieces, scraping the shell clean. Her toast would already be gone. At the bench, her mother ran her finger around a bowl in which delicious things had been mixed together—butter and sugar, or cream and sugar, or egg white and sugar. Helen’s mother licked her finger and made a little sound of pleasure. Helen watched. Then her mother took the bowl to the sink and washed it.

  Helen was sent up to bed before the guests arrived. Sometimes she went to the top of the stairs and listened, and heard her father’s voice droning. Much later, when she had left home, she would think that her father’s talking was probably the reason people didn’t come for dinner very often.

  She tried to say something about this to her mother once, when she was in her twenties, living in Melbourne, married to John. This was in 1974, before the children. Her mother came to stay for a night, because she had to see a specialist about a mole on her arm—she wouldn’t come to the city otherwise. She had not visited Helen while Helen was at boarding school, nor while Helen was in college, and until now she had not visited this rented flat either.

  In the time since Helen had last seen her, Helen’s mother had become smaller, and afraid-seeming. She sat on the edge of the lumpy green couch with her coat still on, the heels of her small black shoes catching on the threadbare rug. She didn’t want to try the wine John offered her—she didn’t usually drink wine, and wasn’t sure she’d like it. She regarded the chicken casserole Helen served with suspicion, and ate only a few mouthfuls.

  Over dinner John made some gentle and diplomatic enquiries regarding the mole and the specialist, which Helen’s mother answered with a minimum of detail. Helen’s mother did not ask Helen or John anything about themselves.

  Helen ate two large helpings of casserole and had to stop herself from licking her plate, a habit she had fallen into since living with John. She cleared the table, sweeping the leftovers wastefully into the bin and imagining she could feel her mother watching in horror. Then she poured out the last of the wine for John and herself and arranged a plate of cheese and biscuits.

  The three of them sat in silence for a while, and then John excused himself and began to wash the dishes. Helen waited for a reaction to this—she suspected that her mother had never seen a man wash dishes. Helen had a little speech ready, about gender roles and equity. But her mother didn’t even seem to notice; she just sat there with her hands in her lap. Her hair, which had faded rather than turned grey, was pinned back in the same old style, but there must have been less of it now because it was more a knot than a bun. Every so often she moved her lips as if about to say something, but no words came out. She seemed utterly lost, and Helen was gripped—perhaps out of empathy or perhaps out of a need to end her own discomfort at having to be in the same room as this ghost—by a big, warm, physical urge to have her returned to her own kitchen in the house behind the surgery. More than anything, Helen wanted to be able to magically transplant her, to lift her up with a huge, invisible hand and deliver her, and then to have the relief of seeing her there, restored to herself.

  Full of casserole and wine and cheese, and taking this eruption of sympathy for some kind of breakthrough, Helen sailed on into a poorly judged and unplanned attempt at forging a new connection. It was the seventies, after all. She reached across as if to take her mother’s hand, but found no hand there to take. Undeterred, she placed her palm flat on the tabletop.

  Remember, she said, gamely, the dinners? At home?

  Her mother blinked and bit her lip.

  Remember, said Helen, how we sat there, while he talked and talked? Like we were these—receptacles, for every single detail, for whatever might happen to drift through his mind?

  Helen’s mother’s head trembled, the way a very old person’s might.

  It was too late, but Helen tried a laugh, as if what she’d just said might be changed into a joke.

  Her mother drew in her lip and cast her eyes down and Helen, with a flattening, cold and lonely shame, saw—not for the first time, because it had been so much a part of her childhood as to in fact be her childhood, but in the broader light of an adult understanding—that her mother’s loyalty to her father was absolute. It had and would and must come before all else.

  On the desk in Helen’s father’s consulting room there were jellybeans in a jar, which were for children who had been brave. It’s not clear how Helen knew about this as she never went into the consulting room while her father was working, but somehow in her mind she had an image of her father opening the jar and holding it out over the desk for a child to reach in and help themselves.r />
  When she was about five years old Helen, climbing on the timber seesaw at school, slipped, and an inch-long splinter embedded itself in her leg, just above the anklebone, a dark mean spike that showed through the skin, only the very tip of its tail end poking out. She limped through the rest of the day with it hidden under her sock, and by bedtime the flesh around the splinter’s tail was hot and red, and had risen up like puff pastry around the fork holes in a pie.

  The next morning her mother noticed, and she was taken into the consulting room by her father, who lay her on the high examination table and mopped at the splinter with a cotton cloth soaked in a brownish-yellow liquid that stung like fire. Then he put one big hand right around the calf of her leg, and with his whole heavy forearm pushed down on her thigh and hip and the best part of her upper body while he used a scalpel to open the skin and then a pair of tweezers to dig and grasp and draw the splinter out. He was holding her that way to stop her from struggling, but Helen did not struggle. She lay with her head to the side, her eyes on the jellybean jar. As the disinfectant burned, as the scalpel cut, as the tweezers probed, she stared at the jar. Red, she thought, I want a red one. If not red, then white. If not white, then purple.

  When the splinter was out her father held it up for a moment, turning it this way and that and examining it. He looked pleased. Then he dropped it into the wastebasket, swabbed again at Helen’s skin with the mustardy disinfectant, and wrapped a bandage around her ankle. He glanced at his watch, lifted her down from the table, and set her on her feet in the doorway. Off you go, or you’ll be late for school, he said, and then he shut the door.

  Helen wasn’t quite through the threshold, so when the door closed completely she was pushed by it and had to take a couple of small, hobbling steps to regain her balance. The waiting room was empty. Helen turned around and looked at the big closed door, and then she looked at the place behind the desk, where her mother would soon come to sit, and then she looked at the two lines of chairs that would soon be filled with people waiting to see her father. Her ankle throbbed. She drew in a breath and let it out with a small, experimental whimper: Ow. Nothing changed. The clock on the wall went on with its smooth ticking. A tremor ran through Helen, low down, between her hips, and a fart fluffed out. She bent at the waist, took the gingham cotton of her school dress in handfuls and used the fabric to waft the smell, warm, bold and familiar, up and into her nostrils.

  After the splinter, every Sunday afternoon when her parents were both safely outside gardening and Helen was supposed to be resting in her room, she went downstairs and into the empty surgery and took one, just one, jellybean. Her heart hammered and her mouth ran with saliva. She returned the big glass stopper to the neck of the jar, and then she squatted and backed herself into the space beneath her father’s desk. She sat on her bottom with her knees pulled up. Breathing loudly through her nose, she sucked the bean into a tiny, translucent slip of gelatine, its chemical sweetness transferring to her spit, her tongue, the insides of her cheeks.

  At boarding school the food was soft and leached of colour—stews, mashed potato, soggy vegetables, gravy, puddings. The serves were not generous, but you could go back for seconds, and Helen did. There was white bread and margarine, salty and doughy, and you could have four slices if you wanted to. The girls were allowed to take a piece of fruit for later and Helen took an apple, but also hid a banana in the sleeve of her jumper. She ate it after lights-out, under the covers, the sweet lumps sliding down, the smell sulphurous and furtive.

  Dear Mum and Dad, I hope you are well, I am still not going very well in spelling but I am second top of the class in maths. On the week ends we are allowd to spend our pockit munny at the shop, they have choo choo bars that make your teeth black, or choclit frogs. You can have two servs of dinner. There is desert evry singul night, last night it was jelly, red or green.

  She wrote letters like this, and then she tore them up and rewrote them without all the food, which made them very short.

  Then, in third form, she realised that she was fat and changed to brown bread, no margarine, and only one helping of dinner. The fat went away. Helen saw herself: her legs were long, her face was pleasing, she didn’t have pimples, and her breasts were nice, not too small or too big. Her hair had thickened and was dark and shiny, and took well to the backcombed styles the girls did for dances, and for when they went to the shops on a Saturday afternoon in the hopes of seeing some of the boy boarders from the brother school in the same suburb.

  Boys noticed Helen. Boys approached her at the dances, and on Saturdays at the shops, where the advances were sideways and idiotic, but advances nonetheless. Helen was ready for them—it wasn’t hard, you just had to smile, and not say much—and she found that she liked what came next. Every glance and every stare, and later every kiss and every compliment, and every eager and fumbling touch, and then every heated brush of skin on skin, and every bit of softness and hardness and wetness, every taste of saltiness and sweetness—Helen opened up, and down they slipped, one after the other.

  She was not distracted from her studies though. She was bright, and she didn’t want just to be a wife, a prospect a lot of the other girls seemed happy with—looked forward to, even, talking after lights-out about engagement parties and how many babies they were going to have. The boys, the clandestine meetings, the whispers, the touching—these were Helen’s rewards, the secret treats she would give herself when her essays were finished, her French verbs learned, the diagrams in her physics book neatly ruled off.

  She sat her matric exams with a tender, exquisite feeling between her legs—she would do well, she knew, and then she would take her pleasure.

  After boarding school came university, and then John, and marriage, the early years, their first flat, where the ill-fated dinner with her mother took place. She would come to look back on this time—the years in the flat, and the trip they took to Europe—as the happiest of her life. Gloriously, untenably happy.

  They spent four months driving a campervan through Italy, France and Spain, unwashed and flat broke and thinking only of the next meal, the next campsite. Looking back, Helen does not remember reading, or meeting other travellers, or even visiting many tourist destinations. She remembers the food they ate, sausages cooked on the camp stove, bread and cheese, round purple grapes from a roadside stall, watery red wine drunk from enamel cups; she remembers the pallor of their tangled limbs in the light that came pink through the campervan’s curtained windows.

  Back at the flat, she more or less did as she wanted, stayed as long as she liked at work, cooked and ate and drank whatever took her fancy, and washed the dishes only when they ran out of clean ones. They spent whole weekends naked, eating nothing but toast and bacon and eggs, the bed full of crumbs, the newspapers sliding to the floor as they rolled and grappled and yelped and laughed.

  From the first day of boarding school there had been a sense of release—from her parents, from the dim and hushed and repetitious and disapproving house of her childhood—but there had still, at school and then later at college, been confinement too, some restraints and rules. It wasn’t until she was with John that she felt at last delivered into true freedom.

  It was Helen who wanted the baby. Her body wanted it, with a blunt, impatient hunger, and John, though he was happy to wait, to continue enjoying what they had, conceded readily enough.

  And so Helen was pregnant, and rushed through the pregnancy, working as hard as ever despite mild disapproval from older men at her office, and outright frowns from older women on trams—women who still wore hats when they went out in public. Take it easy, John said. Slow down. But Helen did not. All her appetites seemed to double—on a Saturday morning she would eat two plates of bacon and eggs and then pull John down into the bed with her, heaving herself onto him. Should we be doing this? said John, from the far side of her enormous belly. I mean, with the baby? But Helen did not answer, and did not stop. It seemed that Helen pregnant was not a woman with a
baby inside her, but simply a bigger, hungrier Helen.

  There was a baby, though, and she was born, eight pounds and dark and difficult. Day and night June wailed like a thing possessed, falling into only brief periods of sleep before waking to cry again. She cried while being rocked, while being pushed in the pram, while being sung to or patted or left alone in her cot. Helen’s world was suddenly reduced to the flat. She went out only to do the grocery shopping, as fast as she could, since June would cry through the whole excursion, prompting pitying looks and unsolicited advice from strangers. None of this was what Helen had expected—but then again she had not expected anything. She had not thought about what it would be like to have a baby—she’d only felt the burning desire to make one.

  Helen was forced to wait—for John to come home at the end of each day and take the baby, and also for the six-week mark, when June would be able to go to crèche. Waiting did not suit Helen. She spent that six weeks rearranging furniture, washing curtains, cleaning and sorting the kitchen cupboards, putting all the photos in albums, filling in the pages of June’s baby book. Much of this work she did to the sound of crying. Insistent, sturdy crying from the bassinette on the floor of the kitchen. Muffled, exhausted crying from behind the closed bedroom door. Quavering, kittenish, just-woken-up crying from the pram. Furious, lusty, clamorous, mournful—whatever tone June’s crying took, or seemed to take, the message was the same: I am here, her crying said. Tend to me. And Helen did—of course she did. And there were moments of sweetness: the smiles, the cooing, the closeness of feeding, June’s tiny lips working, her fingers curled, warm and milky, against Helen’s skin. But these were small islands in the sea of demands. And whenever the crying started there was something sharp in Helen that twisted away, that said, Not now. Not yet. Not me.