“Your room has to suit your way of living, darling, not mine,” he said. “A child’s way of living is not the same as an adult’s. I want you to get from your home a personality full up to the brim with deep inner contentment.” That’s how he talked.
I think he thought that sort of contentment far and away the prime goal of his education of me, as if, having a person full of deep inner contentment, the other goals, concern for others, intellectual achievement, skills of all sorts would flow from it. How that was to happen, how anything much could spring from contentment I do not and did not understand, and later I thanked whatever gods there may be that I had something more powerful pushing me.
He went further. He was like an idealistic teacher, who had great faith in human potential, but in a special direction and one that could not be deduced from his magic contentment. It was that given the right environment people will naturally grow into zestful, positive, living human beings. And his recipe: freedom, love and self-regulation. In its way it was as much magic as thinking that hard work and right living will bring happiness.
Canned Laughter
Mother had a notation that enabled her to write with a sign the expression of a voice word, the lift of an eyebrow, an unusual variation from a person’s norm of manner, the feel of the air at the time, her own transitions from one feeling to another, a facial expression and so on. The notation consisted of dashes, stops and curly bits, and I think there were some bits of shorthand thrown in. She called them grammalogs and “my signs.”
It was as if a secretary or shorthand-writer had come to a place of business and begun like an automaton to take down everything. Without pay, for she was noncommercial.
She washed obsessively, and father often seemed unhappy at what he took to be guilt behind this washing. “Guilt is washing your underwear after one wearing and your hands before you touch anything,” he said anxiously if mother got up in the middle of dinner and went to wash. I thought she might simply like the feel of water on her skin.
He was convinced she had nothing to be guilty about. He told me so a lot.
Mother—original, inspired, peculiar mother—heard nothing; she listened to a prompter no one else could hear.
She had been, before she married my father, a Canned Laughter Adjuster. She was good at her job, the family said, and hovered over her laughter tapes during recording sessions—even live ones—like a sort of angel.
When the laughter level fell below required figures consistently during a live performance, her machine augmented the audience appreciation. I daresay the audience thought others in the auditorium, over there somewhere, were doing the extra laughing and chuckling, even the odd frantic whistle of manic enjoyment, despite all the evidence that their environment was managed.
She used the name Joy, then. Now it was Mara, from the same root as Mary. Bitter.
I heard mother say one day, “I love you so much when you seem to want me,” to my father, and I puzzled about it.
I hadn’t read about love—real love—only about Alice. And it was in the spirit of Alice that I took these words; they were a puzzle, and it was open to everyone to work it out if they could.
I would have thought, knowing my pets, that you loved something whatever it did, no matter what, and only pulled your love in a bit if the loved one did annoying things, and then only in words. You fed and cuddled them anyway. Hoping, I suppose, that their behavior would return to what was reasonable.
One night, after tea, I was doing a drawing of the backyard; I was going to take it to school to show the teacher. I was best in the class at drawing—my work was always shown around. I looked up once to say something, but I stopped: I saw father looking over at mother—bent over her notebooks—looking helplessly at her, and in each of his eyes there was a big unshed tear. I looked quickly back to my work in case he saw me see them fall down his cheeks.
I daresay it’s fair to say that each human unit sees herself as the center of the universe, and that center is a convention, like any other position; rather like the “position” of an electron.
Yes, each unit-human is like an empty spot, round which all else spins on long, fine threads.
Mother’s Praise
I guess mother’s calling me unique and cleverer than other kids and beautiful and brilliant, meant to me that however different from others I felt, I was perfectly right the way I was.
The constant admiration made me complacent. I wasn’t threatened by the difference of other people. I saw their failure, but it didn’t apply to me. I was what a girl ought to be.
Maybe every mother should tell her child she’s beautiful and clever and has great advantages over other kids. Then the kids can adjust as quickly and tidily as I did to the strangeness of others.
The necklace of praise she ornamented me with could easily become a noose if she made it too strong or spectacular.
I wonder if she did?
I guess I am a little frightened of her.
Not That She Refused To Work
Not that she refused to work, but my father treated the place as his house, and liked to keep an eye on the carpets, the state of the walls, the way the furniture was placed, the amount of light in the rooms. He could do electrical things and paint and cook. He was a competent wife.
When mother was reminded that something needed doing, one of the few simple things father thought she ought to do just to have a minimum interest in the home, she’d say “Of course, darling,” but an old, starving, one-legged arthritic Eskimo in the Arctic could have got to the workface far quicker.
Deep in her eyes was a vast room of papers, and tables to write on. Did mother come from another planet?
Social Justice
Pros never allow themselves to be heard in public discussing proles, but the private pro word for proles is the Id. I overheard this word at our place; it was spoken by one of father’s friends, a judge. It is pronounced with overtones of respect, as for a satanist of the psyche. But of course Id means Idiots, those who let themselves be organized and ordered and ruled, and do nothing. The doing nothing charge is particularly cruel, since by their place in society, which in turn is determined by their constitution and ability, they are not allowed or qualified to do anything, except what they find on the fringes of productive work. (Tribal pottery therapist, anger perception adviser, cemetery patrol team member, meteorite recovery programmer: that sort of thing.)
Judge Lorenz came to our place every few months and father always said something about him when he was gone.
“A judge is a person who when you say, you had measles thirty years ago asks How many? and prove it,” he once said after they’d been arguing and he thought his friend was too pernickety.
Some time later he said, “A judge is a fool like you but smart enough to be sitting up there in that big chair.” It was when the visits were getting fewer.
But when Judge Lorenz hadn’t been for a year he said of him bitterly, “A dumb animal can sit in a chair and look all the more grave and dignified for a sheepskin draped over its skull. But when it barks or brays you know it is judging some poor unfortunate.”
Another friend of father’s had been jailed for a long time by the judge for trying to conceal a change in a professional. He was a doctor, and tried to cover up with plastic surgery a phrase against society that appeared in raised letters on the poor pro’s forehead. It was “freedom without justice.”
The judge was one of those Servants of Society whose pride in themselves and their position was as bright and cold as Sirius seems.
In That Nest Sits the Nameless Bird
I was eight, and called into the backyard next door to watch a hen laying an egg. I was given the egg, took it home, broke it against the side of a pan, I watched it cook, I ate it—all in half an hour. My father meant well, I’m sure, and it didn’t do me any harm, but the looming thought behind this contrived sequence was what hung about in my mind. What was its significance? Father didn’t say. He wanted me
to get the connections, and I did, but I could just as well have pieced it all together from the breakfast table backward to the hen, some other time and months apart.
Why, then? What he gave me was this one-two-three performance, with an unexplained lesson; the abiding thing is the almost mechanical transformation of one thing into another. One minute the egg is part of the hen, next I am eating it, spread out and scrambled, yellow on a plate.
I can’t explain what such neat, step-by-step changes mean to me.
Boof Not Biff
When Jerusalem the cocky died, instead of a rabbit Daddy got me a large modern Labrador, suspicious and moody. He resented the presence of others on the planet, and even barked at us when we came home, as if we were strangers. His name was Trotsky, because he never moved faster than a walk. We tried to calm him down and cheer him up with Valium and whiskey, but he became addicted and needed more of each all the time. Finally we gave him both together.
He was assassinated one morning in a stupor by the car of a radical biologist who lived in Einstein Crescent, who apologized with a smile, said it was an accident, and presented me with a large mongrel, the sort of dog that’s full grown early—in parts. He had a big head, prominent hindquarters and a dip in the middle. He looked as if he’d been ridden mercilessly by an aggressive and hefty toddler.
Daddy didn’t ever know that the man laughed with his friends and told the story energetically and was applauded for getting rid of a useless mutt. The Dog was christened Boof, short for Boofhead, and we saw no reason to change it.
Boof could do nothing right.
One day I was swimming with other kids in one of the chain of bush pools, the sort which, when they’re deep, have cold spots. The cold got me, my legs cramped, I began to sink and the fronds of something underwater brushing my legs added to my alarm. I sank again while the other kids looked on, interested.
Boof didn’t look on. He sprang off our diving rock about a meter above the pool, swam toward me and grabbed a bit of shoulder strap in his teeth and tugged with his head enough to make sure I stayed on the surface. Then he set sail with me for the bank, where I found a footing. I sat on a rock and used both hands to straighten out my legs.
The other kids said: “What’s the matter with you?”
Boof shook himself thoroughly, standing right next to me. I didn’t have the heart to rouse on him.
When I got home I told the story. “I’m going to change his name to Biff,” I said. “Hey, Biff!”
Boof growled. I tried several times. “Biff.”
He growled at me, he showed his teeth.
“Boof?” I said. He wagged his tail, glad to have cleared that up.
After that it hurt every time I called him Boof, short for Boofhead.
Maybe Father Would Have Liked a Boy
Not that he ever let me know by the smallest thing that I wasn’t just what he ordered, but he did make me a slingshot. He said slingshot was American, and catapult or shanghai was the right word. He used a forking branch of the old pittosporum; I watched him trim down the bark and make it even with a sharp knife, then tie rubbers to it from the bladder of an old basketball, with a soft leather part to hold the stone.
He told me it was illegal and not to shoot it out in the street. After lots of shots at the fence, and a carton, and a target hanging from the lowest branch of the box tree, I needed a more interesting target. I spread some crumbs right up the backyard and waited inside the garage back door. A mynah hopped down and his mate stayed up on the clothes hoist. I went to fire. Then the eater flew up to the hoist and the other one landed. Just then a peewit swooped into the yard and I pulled back the rubbers and let it go. The marble—I’d run out of stones and used some marbles I’d won off the boys down the end of the street—hit the peewit in the chest. It must have been a fluke.
I ran out from the garage and over to where he lay on his back.
“Why have you killed me?” he said.
“You’re not dead. Get up.”
“I’m dead. You shouldn’t have done it. I’ve got a young family.”
He died.
I had a few more shots, mostly at the trunks of trees, but I lost interest. I put the catapult away, hanging it on a nail in the garage wall.
Composition: Rain
I was walking home in the rain and a sudden trickle of water went down my collar. It continued down my back, tickling me as it went. It went down my side, down my leg and into my rain boot. It started tickling my foot. I lifted my foot up, took my rain boot and sock off and dried it. When I got home, I told Mum and Dad. They laughed, too.
Others Exist
The deliberate creation of a universe is a chancy thing. To shape one’s own universe and then one’s place in it, in decision, action and suffering, is a labor that, if it did not come apparently automatically to us, would be more than we could—I nearly put “dare to do” but a better word is: accomplish. For many of the things we are doing when we grow ourselves and erect our world are done while we are dreaming, or asleep, or thinking of anything but what we are about. For if we thought of what we are about we would be building something else: we and our world are outside ourselves, and the building and growing operation is how we grow onto the world: excrescences, products, leaves of a tree, proliferations of a culture.
There is a good case for saying, then, that others are really there. Around us. And that they exist. We don’t wholly create them. Though they often think they created us, and therefore can take us out when they like; waste us, perhaps, like spoiled ingredients or leftovers.
Let’s get to the point. Everything I wanted, at eight years, they well may have wanted. All I thought of as mine by right, they might, too. All I reached after, they may have wanted.
What was I to do about this? Stop? Hesitate? Or point all my efforts to being first there.
Sometimes when I am trying to manipulate words into a position where they mean what I mean, the words become soft like putty; spreading, sticking, crumbling: like an idiot’s.
An Ascending Person
Mother wrote everything down. Everything that happened to her. She wrote down this dream.
In the middle of the night she was in a room high up in a high-rise building. At the first door was a band of young men and girls dressed in harlequin suits; sometimes laughing, sometimes shouting and threatening, they alternately joked and banged on the door and milled around outside. Mother knew if they got inside they would attack violently and perhaps kill.
Perhaps? She was sure they were after blood and corpses.
Where was father? She somehow got outside without letting them in, and joined the killers, trying to act as they did, and be one of them. After a while they got suspicious of her and began to look menacing.
Father was sometimes there—he would appear in the middle of a group—and again he would be gone, yet she felt he was around somewhere all the time, though she lost sight of him, and despite appearances, she was safe. Maybe she wouldn’t be killed.
This was her harlequin dream, she had the same dream at least once a week. When she was at the table for breakfast I could tell when she’d had the dream: there was a frown on her forehead, sketched in by a vertical line above the left side of her nose and a slanting line veering out above the right side.
“The harlequin dream, Mara?” I said cheekily.
“Please call me mother.”
“Yes, mother.” I had a mouth of cornflakes. “Yes mother. Smother. Smother.”
This annoyed her. She wrote down her annoyance, and the surrounding feelings, and how I looked and how father looked and her tone of voice and father’s tone of voice. (I assumed this was what she wrote.)
Father’s tone of voice? He hadn’t said a word.
That didn’t bother mother. She knew the tone of voice he was about to use.
My mother was beautiful to everyone she met. I don’t mean she had a beautiful face, nor a beautiful nature. Her face was real, and it radiated her closed-in, h
eedless, absorbed nature wherever she was, and people found that beautiful.
There was great power in the emotions inside her, I can tell you.
When I was older, her affection, her conviction all those years that I was something special, had worked on me so much that whenever I ascended to the top of a flight of steps—in the open, say, like at the Opera House or the Town Hall—I felt like a returned wanderer home clad in the glory of destruction, holy with the death I had trailed behind me, standing tall for all those I had put down. I was a hero, a wonder, the greatest girl in the world.
This feeling of being an ascending person, one who would necessarily climb higher than others and look down, was there even when I had to ascend the school steps at assembly in front of the whole school to be reprimanded.
I didn’t hear the headmaster, I was searching with my eyes among the ranks of kids for Sarah Sarau, who had reported me. She said I was tormenting her. All I did was say to her “Know what? You’re mad and I’m not” in the playground and when she said “What’s the time?” before we went in after lunch I said “Time all dogs were dead. Feeling sick?” Perfectly normal playground talk.
Tell tale tit
Tongue shall be split
Every dog in Church Hill
Shall have a little bit.
A Woman of the Future Page 10