A Woman of the Future

by David Ireland

  “How did he get to be boss of their family?” I asked father.

  “I guess that’s rooted in history,” my father said, smiling.

  “I guess he’s the man and away at work a lot and less visible than Mrs. Janicska so his authority seems greater,” he went on, treating me seriously.

  “Did he just get married and there he was: boss?” I said.

  “Some people when they pair up work out like that. Don’t forget that she looks after those four kids very well,” he added.

  “Michael says his father says she’s too sympathetic, and they’ve got to learn to do things for themselves,” I said, quoting Mike. I’d seen him trying to get his mother to show him how to cut the edges with the garden mower, and his father had come out and sent her inside and taken Mike by the ear and said, “Find out yourself.”

  “When I was a boy it was a case of, if you want sympathy, see Mum,” my father said. “Dad used to listen, but only a little. If he thought you were after sympathy he’d send you out to do some job for him. Mum was the one to fix up cuts and bruises. She’d never let me leave the house without my breakfast.” His eyes were remembering.

  I think he thought from my questions that I was missing the thing he couldn’t give me: brothers and sisters. Mother wouldn’t have any more kids, not even adopted. She had to be free to do her writing, and she had given time to me, a few years, and that was enough. She’d had to catch up that time, and that was sacrifice enough.

  It was Sunday, and father gave me all his time. He didn’t even look round for a new play to read so he could enjoy the pleasure of thinking what might have been or might still be.

  The way it turned out, he made sure I pursued the subject until I’d worked out this big family thing—the unfamiliar spectacle of a mother being an old-fashioned mum and the father an untamed male, instead of a reclusive mother and a housebroken father who did all the work.

  When Phillip Janicska came home with a black eye after school, and played around in the yard to keep out of range of Mum’s heavy sympathy and was seen by Dad—the moment he saw a slightly averted face he noticed something was wrong—Dad went up to him in his hearty way and began to teach him something about keeping his “right” up.

  “Keep it up, son. Keep it up.”

  “But my arm gets tired, Dad,” said Phillip.

  “Tired be buggared,” said Dad. “Keep it up. See?” And that was an explanation of how his own hand happened to sneak past Phillip’s guard and tap his chin. He kept his hands open, though.

  “Best you learn to fight, son.” But his mother had heard. I watched through a crack in the grey palings.

  “I don’t want him taught to fight! Fighting is rough and brutal and wrong!” And she came sailing out.

  “You have to protect yourself in this world.”

  “I want him to keep away from rough boys,” Mum said.

  Phillip could see me, so I went and sat on the patio and listened.

  “And try not to grizzle when you get hit,” added Dad.

  Mum didn’t hear that. She was off at a tangent.

  “And don’t forget tomorrow. You can’t go to football until you finish your music practice.”

  Dad let it lie there, and when things were quiet, said, “If you’re beaten, and get upset, try and get over it by yourself. You get better quicker that way.”

  Mum heard. “You come to your mother, Phillip. Mother knows best.”

  “Above all, don’t come crying to me, specially when I’m busy.” And he grabbed Phillip and playfully lifted him up, turned him like a catherine wheel and set him down vigorously on the grass. Mum said “EEE!”

  When Michael spoke to his parents about the latest thing the kids were sniffing to give themselves a kick, Mum said, “It should be banned!”

  Dad said, “No, son. I wouldn’t sniff that if I were you. Likely to make your reflexes slow, you’ll never get in the representative team then. Sure, others do these things, but you don’t have to be stupid.”

  Mum said, “If it was up to me I’d make a law about that.”

  Michael, who scored a major proportion of his football team’s points each week, was trying out an idea on his father before he put it into practice in the game. He wasn’t even going to tell the coach—or the other kids—until he found if it worked. He ran into the usual split in parental advice.

  Mum said, “But you can’t do that! That’s not football!”

  Dad said, “If he wants to do that and there’s no rule against it—let him! He didn’t make the rules. Let the referee blow the whistle if he doesn’t like it.”

  “You should conform to the traditions of the game, Michael.”

  “You play the whistle, son.”

  Phillip, two years younger, had climbed the box tree and was taking timber up in order to make a treehouse. We called it a “cubby.”

  Mum got on to him as soon as she looked up from the kitchen sink.

  “Phillip!” You could hear it miles. She dashed out and stood at the foot of the tree.

  “Why did you climb that tree and upset the bird’s nest?” There was a bird’s nest there, and he did upset it, but it was the only climbable tree.

  “That was thoughtless, very thoughtless. What if you were a bird? Put yourself in its place!” Phillip tried to, silent and frowning with concentration, wondering if he really had to come down out of the tree.

  Dad saw it. “Damn it, darling. He’s just trying to set up a cubby in the fork of a tree! If you’re always telling him not to do this and not to do that he’ll never do anything.”

  “That’s all right. I want him to be a good, kind boy. Doing things all the time can be a very thoughtless activity.” Mum eventually went away, and the cubby got started. I think she was resigned to the fact that it would be built. She was always fighting rearguard actions.

  Her next complaint was that Dad was on his back under the car while Phillip was up the tree trying to manhandle planks and manage hammer and nails, spilling them, going back down, climbing back up.

  “Aren’t you going to help him with the cubby in the tree?”

  “Leave him alone, darling. I’ll have a look at it later, and if it’s not safe I’ll tell him. He’s got to do things for himself.”

  The third Sunday in a row Mum was on some sort of high. She rode in to the attack again and again. It was the last of my tuition Sundays and taught me more about traditional families than I wanted to know.

  It started quietly. Mum said mildly to Dad as he was dismantling the pool pump, “Can’t you stay home a bit more during the week?” He went to meetings of this and that, and was always available to work late at the office.

  He’d pinched his finger and dropped a washer down into the body of the pump. It wasn’t the best time to grill him.

  “I’m busy all week earning money for you to spend. And when I stay home you want to go out shopping and spend more, or spend it at restaurants or shows. I’m chasing my tail.” He’d got her off the subject, he thought, but she picked him up on the money issue.

  “Well, I need more money. I need it—we need it—for extra lessons for Greg. He shows real promise on the piano, Miss Matthews says. We should get him now, while he’s keen.”

  Miss Matthews was the local teacher. Delrene wanted him sent to the music Conservatorium several times a week. Dad could see the end of sport for Greg coming, since artistic pursuits had nearly lost Michael and might lose Phillip. He knew they’d drop music when they were older, anyway. They were just ordinary kids.

  “I’m not giving you money for that. No way.”

  “But you must. We need it.”

  “No.” And that was that. She said nothing for a while, but later came out with a mug of coffee for him.

  “The lawn needs cutting,” she said reflectively. It was almost a reflex action, that remark.

  “There’s painting needs doing,” she added.

  “I’ll get round to it.” And that’s all she got out of him until so
me school friends of Greg’s got there with their horses and ponies. I looked over the fence when I got the first sniff of horse.

  Greg ran out, admiring. His best friend got off his horse and invited Greg to get on. They showed him the right side to mount.

  Dad got into the act, pleased. You can’t be saving money and working every angle to get ahead as an executive and still spend money on horses; he was pleased Greg was getting a chance to taste the pleasure of riding someone else’s toy.

  “Jump into the saddle, son,” he said to Greg. Mum loomed.

  “There’s a proper way to ride a horse. It’s not fair to the horse to have inexperienced people on his back.” It was a mare. “I think he should go to a riding school and learn about horses, where to ride them, who to go with, how to groom it. He should think about these things first and plan ahead now, and maybe we can get him—”

  Dad saw it coming and headed her off at the pass. “Just jump in the saddle, son. Once you’re there, stay there. That’s all there is to it.”

  Eventually all the kids left, tailing the uneasy but enchanted Greg clinging to the gentle mare, and the others on their ponies. They used the footpaths, the nature strips, the traffic was dangerous.

  Mum took the opportunity of their absence to sit down while Dad pottered, as she thought of it, and got into his ear. I didn’t feel a bit guilty, listening.

  “We should talk of their future, John.”

  “Sure we should. They’re doing OK at school, aren’t they?”

  “I’m worried that Michael might have attempted more than he can do.”

  “Good on him. He’s a good boy. That’s the sort of son to have.”

  “Be serious. Don’t you think he ought to take, say, photography and art instead of two foreign languages?”

  “Damn it, Del! I want him educated. If he doesn’t come into the business with me, at least he can go into law, or engineering, or medicine.”

  “I still think he may be attempting too much.”

  “That’s what makes a man a man.”

  “Don’t you think he should be given the choice?” She knew this was a good thing to say: Dad loved free choice, especially if his customers freely chose his goods.

  “Sure he should be given a choice. Where is he? I want to talk to him, man to man.”

  I didn’t need to listen anymore after that.

  But as we sat inside, having some of father’s yummy chocolate biscuits, father suddenly said, “What way do you think they vote?”

  I didn’t know, but “don’t know” wasn’t much of an answer for father, so I said, thinking of the stereotypes we’d been given at school, “Well, the chances are the woman is conservative and the man votes for the left.”

  “You’re not right,” he said gently. “From all they’ve said, he’s conservative and she’s labor. Work it out, and let me know how I know.”

  He’d been listening, too. I nearly said to him, “Isn’t it fascinating hearing how a real family goes on,” when I caught myself and stopped in time. I didn’t want him thinking I thought we weren’t a proper family.

  Is That All That’s Biting You?

  Next evening, after I’d been given a horrible load of homework and was having a bad time getting on with it, father looked up from his paper. He fixed me with a solemn gaze and said in what I can only call a profound voice: “There is now only one way for freedom to go, and that’s inside. Pulling your borders back, your defenses, your gun-emplacements of the mind, and withdrawing your forces inside your own mind, that’s the new freedom.” He put the paper down on the table, gently, not blaming the paper. “In spite of the labors and the dangers and martyrdoms of the past, it’s come to this again as it always does. But it’s a step on the way, a wave on the graph of change. It will happen again, and the appearance and the feel of freedom will happen again. And the dark nights of the mind and the body when knocks on doors will herald partings, these will recur. All of them. We will never be rid of them, nor rid of the recurrent change and the pattern of now more, now less freedom. And always we must put forth an effort to get as much as we can, to restore the balance against the days when we lose and lose and lose.

  “That is what is meant by the duty of being human.”

  What had happened?

  I waited. My eyes said: I’m listening.

  He gazed into the distance, his eyes alighting on the top of the piano, near the metronome. He picked up the paper.

  I was determined to wait. So was my homework. I lifted my pen. He put the paper down.

  “They won’t leave you alone, Al. Restrictions, restrictions.” He pointed at the paper. “Investment restrictions, health restrictions, parking restrictions—they want us all to become what statistics say we should be.”

  I pointed to the paper: Is that what’s biting you?

  “Yes,” he said in a grumpy voice, interpreting my sign. “They’ve closed off another street. It was my favorite short cut. Now I have to stick to the highway with the solid line of vehicles.”

  I could have kissed him. Such portentous affairs, such fuss! Instead, I said nothing and returned to my books. A man like my father deserved respect from his child—a man who fell deep into one love like a grave.

  No One Knew What He Had

  Peter Jessup kept apart from everyone, he didn’t play with the other boys, he didn’t go swimming and always stayed dressed. Even his family had never seen him undressed since he was nine.

  From his sister we learned that when he went into the bathroom or the lavatory he took all his clothes with him, stuffed up the keyholes, locked the door, and in his bedroom he puttied the unevenness of the windows and doors and got his father to put new, blurry glass in his window on the world. No one knew what he had. He locked everything up inside him.

  The Difference

  I noticed in other people’s houses that girls were expected by their mothers to be little ladies, as if nothing had happened, nothing had changed, as if time hadn’t passed for a century. Mothers, despite their pride in girls’ athletics and debating, wanted a girl to sit down immediately after training or a good game of chasings and be cool and elegant, not sprawling limbs in all directions comfortably. You could almost hear the impatience during a backyard karate practice, with legs and feet flying out and upwards, and short, vigorous movements being made that had no reference to cooking, sewing, and the nurture of infants. You could see their minds churning and fighting it, wanting and pressing their daughters into the mold they knew was safe and unalarming.

  The boys were let run wild. When they were brought home by the law or parents summoned to the supermarket, they’d shake their heads, give the boys a number of hits, and look proud. Boys will be boys, they said.

  I guess boys had freedom from birth, where girls were looked at, fussed over, talked at, and in general circumscribed by attention that clung like sticky lines in a web.

  Basically they wanted us to be passive, and look nice, like fruit on a shelf waiting for a buyer. Packaged goods. And the boys were allowed, encouraged, to be violent, and of our crowd I was the only one who’d been given a taste for it and the only one to know what an addiction it was.

  The difference was not their penis. Let me make that clear. In any sort of combat the penis and its backing group were a serious disadvantage. (Perhaps males had to develop muscles in order to protect it.)

  No. The difference was the freedom they were allowed.

  Everett Vaux

  Everett Vaux was eleven, too. In this, his last year of primary school, he was known throughout the metropolitan area as an athlete; he was near sub-adult times in every running event and still had to shift his feet about in class and the playground and still had permission to get up from his desk any time he liked on his own claim that he was starting to put out tendrils.

  He was a pretty boy, with a beautiful slim figure and streamlined limbs, but already the signs of his constant effort were showing, and those signs were round his eyes and beneath h
is ankles.

  Ankles, reader? Ankles?

  Yes. The lines on the top of his feet, where the flexing of his feet on their ankle-pivots happened most often, and under the inside of his arches, where the vertical lines are that look so like worry lines, were plentiful.

  His eyes showed most strain. All the children in school except the Lutherburrows had dark lines under their eyes, but the Lutherburrows went to bed just after sundown. Everett had fine lines at the sides and underneath his bottom lids, and if you got up close to him he looked, in that one part of his face, like an aging man. If you looked into his eyes, they were cheerful, merry even. But if you looked at the lines and took in the eyes with the peripheral part of your sight, he looked sad.

  And grey hair, at eleven. Sometimes I saw him sitting with his feet off the ground, his arms clasped round his knees, a long way from the other kids, looking up at the sky. As if he’d asked a question and was waiting for the answer.

  Or looking away from the planet to a better place, turning his mind toward that better place—trying to eat that distant heaven with his eyes.

  What Is Greatness?

  I think the thought that really drove me on, was that I wanted to be able to do anything they could do. Males. Their example was held up to me all the time, whatever I read; the records for this, that, and the other were held by them; women’s records were lesser imitations. Why shouldn’t it be the case that whatever they could do, I could do?

  Most of such activities were trivial, it’s true, and a sensible person wouldn’t have wasted the time thinking them up, let alone the effort of doing them. But trivial as they were, they had become erected into a body of activities established by custom and hallowed in the recording.

  After all, it is possible to look at most things and say: this is trivial. You could review a person’s whole life and say the same thing. In so many millions of lives nothing happens. They breathe, and occasionally move; eat, sleep, their blood circulates, they appear to observe objects around them, and suddenly they move no more, and as you watch, decay and disappear, blown away by gusts of wind that wouldn’t have moved them before.