It was The Story, and, exhausted with answering questions and lying to her daughter and splitting up possessions, Grace herself would sometimes revert to The Story. It was an easy shorthand, to fob people off. The wiser among her listeners would frown and say ‘But . . .’ as if realising there was a great chunk missing from The Story; for example, the thread that linked the job losses with the breakup, which was as frail as cobweb. Because couples endured such things, without ending marriages. But usually even the more astute of her listeners held back from asking too many questions. Because really, as everyone murmurs when filling in the sometimes vast gaps in relationship breakup stories, whoever knows what goes on in a marriage?
Grace would have agreed. Who the hell knew? She hadn’t known what was going on in her own marriage, apparently. Of all the things she had worried about — babies, money, mortgages, leaking taps — she had never worried about Tom leaving. Maybe that was the problem. A bit of worry might have done the trick, headed it off. Stopped it happening and being reduced to a story.
Her own private breakup tale went like this. On the day after the mutual job losses, many angry words were said, but things in Marriage Land were still not destined to go any particular way. And then Grace, staring at the blue sky, saw a tiny thread hanging from it, a blue thread, of course, because it was the sky, and, being a picky type, she gave it a little tug to see what would happen. What happened was that the sky around the thread unraveled like a woolly jumper, gradually leaving a ragged rip, through which she could see another world. It was a very different world, a frosty, dark world, with music that sounded more like a piano falling through the air than real music, threaded with the sound of, say, a drum kit falling off the back of a truck. There were people in it whom she knew, but with angry expressions, and a smell that made her stomach knot with fear. But she pulled Tom over to show him this world, sneeringly triumphant that she had discovered it, and, full of her own power, she used it to menace him. She threatened him with leaving, with an end to her marriage. She didn’t really mean it. But in doing so she pulled the thread again, and the hole in the sky grew bigger, and bigger, and suddenly Grace couldn’t work out how to stop her own dear, tender world from unravelling, and this continued quite quickly until the world as she knew it was gone. It sat at her feet for a while like a spaghetti pile of unpicked yarn, and she grabbed handfuls of it and tried to put it back in the sky, but it didn’t work, not at all. Then, then they were all totally in the cold, sad, new world; Lotte, too, poor little Lotte who had never wanted to be there. Grace had no idea how to get back into the beloved old world — and only now did she realise how beloved it had been — and with a sick feeling in her stomach, she realised that that place was gone forever.
The house seemed bigger without Tom, and noises were louder, and his absence was everywhere. Tom would not even tell her where he was living now. In the new world there were many things they did not tell each other, although, sometimes unfortunately, there were things they did. While she loved Tom and wanted him back, she was also not sure she would ever be able to forgive or forget some of the things he had said to her in recent weeks, as the world unraveled. In the new world, words were sharp and dangerous and history was always being re-written. You never really believed in me. You wanted so bloody much. You’re mercenary. Shallow. Selfish. You don’t know what it is to have a dream. You’re small-minded. All you can think about is yourself. What about that time six years ago, in that caravan park in that place with the ducks, when you . . . While she had wept and pleaded to talk with Tom in the early days, a few new-world conversations with him had cured her of that. Enough had been said. Texting was fine.
It was time to pick up Lotte from kindy. There were very few threads of continuity in the new world, but kindergarten was one of them. And, of course, Lotte was one. Grace was crouching like a one-woman army over Lotte, prepared to do battle for her child, but as yet the battlefield was empty. Tom saw Lotte every week, but seemed too busy with his new life to demand much time with his daughter. For Grace, unemployed for the first time in fifteen years, life revolved around kindy. She spent an hour dressing for pick-up or drop-off. She arrived twenty minutes early. She let Lotte play as long extra as she wanted. She thanked Miss Laura for any small task the teacher granted her; washing hand towels, sewing on name tags, covering books with clear plastic. Other than this, she shopped for one day’s food at a time. She wrote out figures on pieces of paper and reflected on her looming penury. She stared into space for long periods, like someone waiting to be struck by an idea, one which never arrived. For the first time in years, she did not know what came next.
Melody poured the saucepan of milk into the jar, Skip and Lotte watching as the milk rose up the sides. White steam swirled through the glass mouth, until Melody put the tin lid on and screwed it shut.
‘There.’
‘Can I have some?’ Lotte jumped.
‘By tomorrow morning it will be yoghurt. You can have some then. Now,’ Melody turned and pretended to consult her list, while actually checking Grace’s expression. The other woman had not moved to look at the yoghurt-making; she just stared vacantly out the window, into the bare black branches of a persimmon tree. The orange fruit hung like lanterns against a grey sky, and Grace seemed overwhelmed by them. She chewed her bottom lip and gazed out into the world.
Melody summoned some energy into her voice. ‘Let’s make laundry detergent!’
‘Yay!’ shouted Lotte.
Grace’s gaze shifted momentarily to her daughter, and she studied her for a long second, like an almost-dead mountain climber might have contemplated the Himalayas.
Melody had come with a list of things to make from scratch. She brought yoghurt-starter and Borax and rolled oats and seedlings. She had been frightened at the tone of Grace’s voice on the phone the night before. It was a dead voice, like the zombies had moved in. Grace was barely conscious with grief; couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, her voice a limp whisper. The money was draining away, she said; her redundancy vanishing into the mortgage repayments and takeaway food. She and Tom had no job between them now; there was only the single mother’s benefit, yet to arrive.
‘That’s what I’m living on,’ said Melody.
‘How?’ Grace had asked, without much interest.
‘I’ll show you,’ Melody had said. And here she was.
She found a big soup saucepan and filled it with soap flakes and water, and boiled it until the soap had all melted. She stirred in washing soda and Borax, and then carried it to the laundry and poured it into a big plastic bucket with a lid, and added cold water. In an hour it would cool to a slimy sludge and Skip and Lotte could take turns stirring it, squeezing it through their fingers. Grace reluctantly came to see.
‘Oh.’ Grace folded her arms and squeezed them against herself.
‘Ten litres of washing liquid, for less than a dollar,’ said Melody triumphantly.
‘Oh.’
Melody sighed. ‘Grace, you’ve got to get a grip. Tom might come back, or he might not, but in the meantime you’ve got to . . . survive. Be a mum. Keep a house going.
Grace’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I feel so useless. Thank you.’
‘Don’t thank me. Just help. Next we’re making muesli.’
Grace had a photo of herself on a top bunk bed, hunched over in thick brown glasses with lank brown hair. She had once scratched the surface of the picture, over her face, a deliberate vandalism. It was a photo of her first-year school camp and she was in a room with her three best girlfriends, who had decided for that week, as teenage girls can, that they hated her.
There was lots to hate. Her gappy teeth, her thick glasses, her quick answers to questions in class. Her mounting insecurity, her hunched shoulders. She couldn’t remember the details of the camp. Time had mercifully scratched away most of it, like her nails had done to her face in the photograph, but she could remember enough. It was at a place called, fittingly, Nhill, on the edge of the Little D
esert in northwest Victoria, and her memories of red sand, sharp black desert plants and flaming sunsets over endless horizons were tinged with aching loneliness and self-hatred. Maybe those girls hung around in a group of three and left her out, maybe they mocked her in front of the others. Maybe she ate alone. Maybe they spat on her, left a urine-soaked towel in her bed, maybe she spent a night in a tent with the teachers because of this, she simply couldn’t remember. But in that photo, sitting on her top bunk, she knew she was feeling the misery of not just being truly hated, but having to sleep in a room with the people who hated you.
Tom had loved this vandalised photo, even before she told him how sad she was in it. He loved it with a furious protectiveness, as if he was reaching one strong, muscular arm back through the years and putting it around those puny, thirteen-year-old-girl shoulders. She had imagined him striding through time to give them all a piece of his mind, and somehow removing the scratches from that photo until she was whole again.
Once, that was how much he had loved her.
Grace’s hand shook as she applied lipstick and tears ran down her face. Her lips were chapped and the colour left tiny crusts where it gathered on the flaky skin, in lines that went out from her mouth. She looked about sixty. Maybe now Tom could see what it was that those girls hadn’t liked. Like in that photo, she was once again truly alone.
But a jarring clatter of slamming drawers disrupted her coma of self-pity. She was not actually tragically alone at all. No, there was Melody, taking her biggest bowl and filling it with oats, seeds and bran, and drizzling honey over it all. Melody handed the bowl to Grace, with a wooden spoon.
‘Stir,’ she instructed.
Grace stirred dully, turning her thousand-mile stare deep into the oats. Melody watched as the other woman feebly pushed the wooden spoon against the oaty mountain range below her, honey glistening gold on the peaks. The effort seemed to weary Grace, to make her expel air in little puffs, as she lifted the spoon from its bog and stabbed it back into the mixture.
Melody had seen this before, had felt it herself, a spiritual giving up. Strange to see Grace in this tranquillized state, instead of her usual highly-strung anxiety. Melody gently took the bowl and spoon from her, stirred the mixture herself, and found a baking tray to spread the mixture out on. She opened the door of the warm oven, slipped in the tray and closed the door. Outside, Skip and Lotte did karate, a sort of chopping, kicking dance where they circled each other and yelled Hah! Yah! Lotte kicked Skip in the tummy, predictably, and he folded over, crying. Lotte crouched to observe him, and after a few minutes they resumed rolling and laughing in the grass.
Melody made Grace a cup of coffee, and peeled the tea towel off a bowl, revealing the bread dough she had left to rise earlier in the day. She floured the wooden table, Grace appearing not to notice, and she tipped out the ball of dough, dusty with flour, and began to knead. Dough bubbles sighed and popped, and the dough shriveled into itself. She stretched it, took a sharp knife and sliced it into three pieces. She rolled each piece into a mini loaf, and covered the three pale hills with a clean tea towel. Still no response from Grace.
Was this neurotic woman her problem? Grace had chosen to test her husband’s love for her, against his love for a dream. And what was a man without a dream, anyway — was he even worth having? Melody had spent the past five years in a world where everyone had dreams, and no one had money. Where ways of living — vegan, communal, freecycle, Montessori — were daily topics of fierce discussion and debate. The one point of agreement amongst the rainforest tribes of the north had been that chasing money was no way to live. All were refugees from that soul-destroying treadmill. And yet they were essentially non-believers, outsiders, and could believe in nothing for very long. People hated drugs, and then they started growing marijuana. Buddhists let go of meditation and dabbled in meat-eating, just like any dime-a-dozen lapsed Catholic, and then suddenly a baby was dead and the police were crawling all over paradise, sniffing at all the pot plants in the little school and pulling apart solar panels on ramshackle roofs. Where did they bury the baby? She wondered. What was happening up there? Had the druggies taken over? Had the co-op owners finally thrown them out? Who had gone to jail? All she had cared about in the end was getting Skip out of there before the Department started vetting all the families and breaking them up. She could not lose Skip. And anyway, it got so she could not sleep one more night in the valley that had been her home for so long; where the ghost wails of a baby drifted through the lantana and she woke shuddering from dreams where she almost saved the baby, where she ran to put a bottle into his whimpering mouth, only to find he was stone-cold and staring-eyed.
So here she was, back in Melbourne again. Her old life, idyllic though it had been, had finally not felt real, like a loaf of risen bread waiting to be punched down to reality. And now here she sat with a woman whose rubbish bin was full of McDonald’s packaging, who had a daughter with more life in her than a sunrise, a woman with the saddest eyes in the world.
The children clattered in, full of accusations and recriminations. ‘Skipper hit me!’ Lotte glanced at her own mother, but seemed to realise she was non compis and redirected her complaint towards Melody.
‘Is that true, Skip?’
‘She wouldn’t share the bike.’
‘Skipper, you never punch. What do you say?’
Skipper kicked a chair. ‘Sorree.’
Lotte flicked out a four-year-old hip. ‘Well that’s two times he’s done it.’
Melody sat before them. ‘Both of you know how to say sorry when you’ve done something wrong, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘But there’s another part of sorry, and that’s forgiving. It’s like a two-step dance: I’m sorry and then I forgive you.’
‘No.’
‘It’s very hard for some people to forgive. Even harder than saying sorry, sometimes. But you’re young, so you can get good at it. If you practise every day.’
They stared at her doubtfully.
‘So it goes like this. Skipper, you say “I’m sorry” to Lotte.’
‘Sorry, Lotte.’
‘And, Lotte, you tell Skipper you forgive him.’
‘I for-GIVE you.’ Lotte nodded patronisingly at Skip, her brown hair sliding forward, her little face suddenly lit with beneficent kindness.
‘Now hug,’ said Melody. They turned to each other and embraced stiffly at first, frozen still. Then Skipper squeezed Lotte around the waist and jumped, and they squealed and jumped like little frogs. She shooed them outside and closed the door. A tear rolled from Grace’s eye.
Grace watched Melody’s thin, strong hands knead the bread, and she wished someone would do the same thing to her heart and soul. She was thinking about the mini-crushes, as she called them, which had secretly plagued her life for the past year. Her sexual energy had sprayed forth like an ill-fitted hose. Was it some ancient reproductive urge that found her attracted to every second passing man? In the sunset of her fertility, was her body just ridding itself of lust anywhere, anyhow? There had been her old high-school friend Mona, who had come over with her academic husband Phil, and Grace had sat beside him at the dinner table and felt her body glowing with desire for this fairly ordinary man, had found herself almost speechless with the recurring fantasies that he would follow her out to the kitchen, close the door and fuck her senseless against the bench. Then there was the road service man, who came to start the car after the battery died. There was even Tom’s oldest friend, a man she knew to be a selfish commitment-phobe who would rather talk about himself than any other topic, and she had one day driven out of her way to his home, to return a jumper he had left behind. He had thanked her warily, no doubt wondering why she stood flushing and nervous at his front door, or why she had bothered at all when he dropped by every few days anyway. Nothing had come of these mini-lusts, and it was their nature to pass quickly through one man and onto the next. But with each one there was a moment where she vowed
that if he made a move she would do it, willing it to happen, fantasising furiously, utterly vulnerable to seduction but unable to be unloyal enough to Tom to initiate anything herself. Oh, there had been looks, and gestures. Men were blind to so many things, but not to a woman’s desire. There had been a thigh brushed against hers at a dinner, lingering too long; a stray lock of hair tenderly, inappropriately tucked behind her ear, a party where she and one man had talked too long, oblivious to anyone else, a footy game where another lent her his jacket and his masculine scent carried guilt and delight with every inhalation. Each crush was the work of a few weeks, each time she came dangerously close to exposing herself, to risking it all, and then the fever would subside and she would look coldly at the man and ask herself: Really? Him? Are you for real? Should you even be allowed out in public?
Still, she knew she wasn’t the only woman going through this. She only had to see the glances the kindy mums threw at Tom. The baby years were consuming, years when women felt they had no more sexuality than The Wiggles, had no more right to deviancy than the Pope, and then suddenly they lifted their heads from the drudgery and their sexual energy flooded back like a wave, and you had to take hold of your battered marriage and rebuild it quickly, before that fragile boat disintegrated. Other marriages had foundered, too. Her own husband she knew to be attractive, she still found him so, but there had been so much frustration below that lust. Why the bloody robot, why wouldn’t he just be normal, so she could be normal, too?
The Near Miss Page 10