by Liz Byrski
‘The holidays must have been a nightmare,’ Simone says. ‘I liked boarding school but I also loved going home, though admittedly that was mainly thanks to the Marshalls.’
‘Yes, the holidays were deadly,’ Adele says. ‘I spent most of the time at home, with Mrs Richards, studying stuff that Dad wanted me to learn, about business practices, economics, the stock market, accounting, all of which was incredibly tedious. Occasionally I was sent to stay with my mother’s sister, Alice, who lived in Perth. She had a slightly older daughter, Marian, whose house we’re staying in now. Those were good times.’
‘I’m not surprised you’ve suffered from anxiety, and found it hard to . . . well, to be confident about who you are,’ Judy says.
‘Well, you get the picture now. Like your father, Simone, his love was conditional on compliance, good behaviour, top results. And like you I was usually able to deliver. Finally, I escaped to university.’
‘And I bet you came top of everything,’ Judy says.
‘Pretty much; but it never compensated for not being a boy!’ She says it lightly but that endless struggle to be good enough, to make up for being what and who she was, still remains. Why? she wonders? He’s been dead for years, and it’s me, just me, who’s keeping this alive, kicking it along all the time. She hesitates, shakes her head, stares down blindly at the table.
‘Are you okay, Adele?’ Simone asks, putting a hand on her arm.
Adele looks up, tries to smile. ‘Yes, fine, sorry, lost track for a moment,’ she says. ‘Anyway, to cut a long story short, I finished uni and got a job in a bank. Mrs Richards had gone by then. I was still living with Dad and still very much under his thumb, but he was out a lot, and so was I, so we got on all right, probably because I rarely stood up to him, and on the occasions I did I soon backed down. I managed to have a bit of a life of my own, boyfriends, and quite a bit of casual sex, which, some time later, meant that I ended up pregnant. When I told Dad I was pregnant he was quite pragmatic, and I’ve wondered since if at some time he’d got someone pregnant. Anyway, I’d expected him to go berserk and in fact he was reasonable. But he knew people high up in the bank and didn’t want them to find out his single daughter was pregnant. So he packed me off to stay with Aunty Alice, and I had Jenna there, and stayed on in Perth for several years, got a job there in the same bank. Eventually I moved back to Adelaide largely because Dad developed early onset dementia. Then I was invited to set up the bureau. Jenna and Jean-Claude had met by then, they lived with me for a while but when they got married they went to Canada, to Quebec, which is his home. So, there it is. I thought it might help you to understand why I am as I am.’
A waiter arrives with huge bowl of fries, deposits them on the table and disappears, only to return immediately with an equally large bowl of chicken nuggets, cutlery and pile of plates.
‘Enjoy your meal, girls,’ he says with a big grin. ‘All on a diet, are we?’
Ros looks up at him and Adele sees anger flood her face. ‘Just sod off, you fatuous, sexist twit,’ Ros says.
The waiter freezes. ‘Sorry,’ he says, flushing. And he turns away and heads rapidly back to the kitchen.
‘That was a bit rough, Ros,’ Judy says. ‘He was only joking.’
‘He was,’ Ros says, ‘but we’re not girls, we’re probably the age of his grandmother, so it’s actually demeaning, and I really resent jokes that rely on ridiculous stereotypes of how women look or should look and what we eat.’ She turns her fierce gaze to the food. ‘Let’s get stuck in to this.’
They are all really hungry now and the fries are to die for. Across the room a dozen or so women of a similar age to them are celebrating a birthday. There’s a lot of noisy laughter, and they sing ‘Happy Birthday’ three times without stopping for breath.
‘Let’s get back to the book, shall we?’ Simone says eventually, tossing her crumpled serviette onto her empty plate. ‘Do you want to tell us something about it now, Adele?’
Adele nods. She reminds them that the main character, Reta, is a forty-four year old writer with a loving husband and three beautiful daughters, and that the book begins with Reta saying, ‘It happens that I am going through a period of great unhappiness and loss just now.’ One of her daughters, Norah, disappeared recently and turned up sitting on a street corner in Toronto with a begging bowl and a sign around her neck simply saying Goodness.
‘So,’ she says, ‘I started reading this as a family story but as it moved along I began to feel it was telling me so much more, and this continued all the way through. I loved it, but I felt I was always missing something. I still do, and I am not sure what it was I missed.’
Ros nods. ‘Yes, it’s haunting and in its own gentle way it doesn’t let you go. It’s intimate and utterly believable and I felt it was like something I had as a child: a packet of flat coloured pieces of paper that you drop into a glass of water and they open and swell into beautiful, colourful paper flowers.’
Adele clasps her hands together. ‘Exactly, Ros, but I felt I was just not getting the flowers to open.’
‘Reta spoke, I listened and didn’t want her to stop,’ Simone says. ‘By the end I felt she had cast a spell on me. I emerged from the book feeling calm and serene . . .’
‘That’s not the book, Simone,’ Judy says. ‘You’re always like that.’
‘Not really, but I try to be.’
Adele takes a breath to speak, but Judy continues before Adele can begin.
‘It is like a spell, she . . . well, the author, through the character of Reta . . . made me feel that this was a very simple story, but I slowly realised that I was reading something much more complex but I couldn’t actually join all the dots. So I’m with you on this, Adele.’
Adele looks around. ‘I’m relieved that you felt that too, because so much is packed into these simple, elegant sentences. It is not overtly literary, because it feels as though a friend is telling you something, because she talks about small things that are so familiar, things that slip below the radar but leave us feeling crushed, or impotent, all so small it seems petty but adding up to something so much more significant. Is that how you felt?’
‘Absolutely,’ Simone says.
Judy nods in agreement.
Adele is enjoying this now, enjoying the way they are engaging with it and with her. ‘Reta starts recognising the ways that she is powerless through this awful experience of her daughter disappearing and cutting herself off from the family. It’s every mother’s nightmare, and it makes Reta examine her comfortable and predictable life. I mean, it’s almost a picture-perfect family: the mother intelligent, thoughtful, writing books, poetry, short stories, translating the work of an eminent feminist writer, the father a kindly doctor. He’s a bit obsessed with his study of trilobites but I don’t think we can hold that against him. Although he does seem to be one of those nice men who is absent while being physically present. The sisters are dutiful and loving, and then Norah disappears without warning, and when they eventually find her she won’t talk to them, won’t engage at all with any member of the family. I thought that this was so inexplicable that it almost amounted to violence.’
‘Yes, well the thing about Reta,’ Simone says, ‘is that her happy and predictable life is thrown up in the air. She’s a very reasonable woman and that reasonableness is also fundamental to her writing. What she writes is mild, like Reta and like her life, not in any way contentious or challenging, she never rocks any boats. And it’s interesting that while she’s so reasonable, the woman whose work she’s translating, Danielle, is a tough and challenging French feminist and quite unreasonable.’
‘Could I just stop you there?’ Ros asks. ‘Adele, do you think it would be a good idea if we each read out the sentences we wrote? It might help to clarify things because I think you may actually have got it, but maybe you just can’t name it.’
Adele looks puzzled. �
�Really? Okay, sure, let’s go with the sentences. Who wants to go first?’
‘I will,’ Judy says, pulling a folded piece of paper from her bag. She puts on her glasses. ‘Here’s what I wrote. “This is a lovely story of a really nice woman called Reta, with a beautiful family, and they are all shaken to bits because one of the daughters has left home and is doing something truly weird, and Reta feels helpless and powerless and she writes letters of complaint to important people but never sends them.”’ Judy stops reading, looks up. ‘Oh dear, very long sentence with no punctuation. And I forgot, I was going to add a second sentence if that’s allowed, which was going to be about how Reta is puzzled by the way her happiness has been totally disrupted. But you already knew that, didn’t you?’ She laughs.
‘We did,’ Ros says, smiling, ‘but you’ve got it all there to focus us.’
‘Okay,’ Adele says, ‘here’s mine. “This is the story of Reta, who feels powerless in every aspect of her life, despite loving that life, and she only really recognises this when her daughter leaves home to pursue a life on the street, which Reta can’t understand.”’
Ros nods, and looks at Simone.
‘I suspect that you and I are the same on this, Ros,’ Simone says. ‘You go first.’
‘Okay.’ Ros rummages in her pocket, smooths out a piece of paper and begins to read. ‘”When Reta’s beloved daughter, Norah, takes dramatic action because she feels powerless in the face of widespread injustice and inequality, Reta realises that Norah’s political position mirrors her own more personal sense of disenfranchisement in her everyday life, and she starts to recognise that her ambivalence has led her to collude in her own powerlessness.”’ Ros stops and looks around. ‘Simone?’ she says, raising her eyebrows.
‘Spot on,’ Simone says, ‘only I couldn’t have put it so succinctly.’
‘Hang on,’ Adele says. ‘Could you read that again please, Ros.’
Ros reads it again and sees that Adele still has the stunned mullet look.
‘Look,’ she says, ‘you could say that through Norah’s public political action, Reta finally sees that she has lived her life doing all the things that are expected of what we might traditionally call a good woman or a good wife and mother. She’s lived with and accepted it, been irritated and maybe sometimes angry or resentful, but she has never done anything to change it. Her only form of protest is in the letters she writes, but she doesn’t post them. She resents it but she doesn’t rock any boats. Reta’s daughter, on the other hand, is overwhelmed by inequality and justice on vast scale. She takes it very personally and her response is to reject the comfort zone of privilege and to live from hand to mouth on the street corner, to draw attention to what matters to her. She’s channelling her concern, her distress, maybe her rage into a form of public protest. So – Nora makes the personal political by making it public, whereas Reta never really acts or does anything remotely contentious.’
The pub is noisy but there is complete silence at the table. Adele stares at Ros, her head spinning. ‘And the woman at the end,’ she says, ‘the immigrant woman who sets fire to herself, she’s doing the same thing?’
‘Exactly,’ Ros says, ‘she takes control of her life in a horrific way because she has no alternative.’
‘Crikey,’ Judy says, ‘I really will have to read it again now, in a different way, just as I will Truth and Beauty.’
‘Can I ask you something, Adele?’ Ros says. ‘Are you seeing what I’m seeing about what happened this afternoon?’
Adele nods slowly. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I think so. My own confrontation with the political and the personal. It feels . . . powerful.’
‘It was powerful, and important,’ Ros says. ‘You took control in a remarkable way. You were truly awesome, and as you know I consider that word to be appallingly overused and misused but in this case it feels right.’
Adele is trying hard to get to grips with all this and retreats again from the conversation, examining once more what happened and how she feels. Eventually she gets to her feet.
‘Ready for another round?’ she asks. When they all nod, she walks to the bar with the empty glasses and stands there, watching the musicians in the small jazz band that has been playing on and off since they arrived, and who have now started to pack up.
Back at the table they talk more about the book, and Ros suggests that they are all part of some sort of transitional generation of women who were aware of the rise of feminism in the late sixties and early seventies but let it pass them by.
‘I hooked into it quite late in the seventies,’ she says, ‘but I know heaps of women who simply thought it wasn’t for them. They thought it was too aggressive, or meant they shouldn’t have relationships with men, or it would destroy their families. Some thought they just didn’t need it and only comparatively recently discovered what it could really mean.’
‘That’s me!’ Judy cuts in. ‘You know what finally did it for me? It was that misogyny speech when Julia Gillard took Tony Abbott apart. I sat there listening to that and something really powerful seemed to be whizzing around inside me and I thought – oh yeah! This is what it’s about, and I couldn’t believe I’d only just caught on.’
Ros nudges Adele. ‘Look over there,’ she says, ‘this might be a bit of a laugh.’
Two of the women from the birthday group are setting something up on the karaoke machine and as the others turn their chairs to see what’s happening the first notes of ‘Mamma Mia’ float out and the group at the big table whoop in delight. Soon the room is swaying to the music of ABBA, and the two women – probably, Adele thinks, around her age or a little older – are belting out the lyrics.
What have I been doing all this time? she thinks. How can I have got into my sixties without ever feeling what I felt this afternoon, what I feel now? A great surge of frustrated energy seems trapped inside her and she wishes some of that lovely noisy group of women would get up and dance so she could join them. You don’t have to wait for them, something tells her, you can just get up and dance, but she’s still locked in her chair. The women finish to shrieks of laughter and wild applause and then begin again, this time with ‘Dancing Queen’. Swinging their hips, waving their arms, twisting and turning; Adele feels the wildness infecting her. These women are not worrying about how they look, or what anyone might think of them, they are simply having a wonderful time.
She feels as though she is about to burst out of her skin.
*
Ros is enjoying the karaoke, she loves the uninhibited way the two women are singing and dancing and the others are urging them on. She wishes now that she hadn’t made that unkind retort to the waiter. His remark was fatuous and sexist, but he probably didn’t know that, and she didn’t have to do it and embarrass him and the others in the process. As James would have pointed out had he been there, the young guy wouldn’t really understand what he’d done wrong and there’s not much point in complaining or picking up on things like that unless you explain why. The waiter was simply trying to be matey. But Ros is still partially caught up in the incident in the pharmacy. Adele’s handling of it really was a triumph, but she is disappointed in herself for not stepping up to support her. It’s not so long ago that she would have done that without thinking twice, but today she’d come face to face with the fear of her own vulnerability. When she was younger she had thrown herself into the fray of feminist and anti-nuclear demonstrations, struggled with police and been arrested on marches for Indigenous land rights, and on industrial relations issues and, most recently, against the government’s treatment of refugees. But today her own physical condition had held her back; she feared being hit or pushed and falling down, perhaps getting injured in some way that would further reduce her independence or mobility. I was pathetic, she tells James, and you’d have been ashamed of me. And she can almost hear him saying, You don’t have to front up for everything, Ros. But for Ro
s this has struck at the core of who she believes herself to be.
The singers have had enough now; they laugh, do some exaggerated curtsies and head back to their table. Judy and Simone are deep in conversation now about Julia Gillard, and Adele seems restless. Ros imagines that Adele will have a sleepless night in which she will circle the events of the day and what they mean for her. She turns to speak to her, touching her arm, but Adele pats her hand absent-mindedly, gets to her feet and walks away.
Is she going to cry, or throw up in the toilet? I’ll check on her in a minute, Ros thinks, and she turns to join the Julia Gillard conversation.
‘She did have a very hard time,’ Simone is saying, ‘and the Gillard government managed to pass a lot of important legislation. I don’t think she ever got sufficient credit for that.’
‘It’s an awful job, politics, I reckon,’ Judy says, ‘and the top job would be the worst.’
Ros opens her mouth to speak but a loud electronic beep followed by a blast of something else from the karaoke machine makes the three of them look up.
‘Oh my god!’ Judy says. ‘It’s Adele!’
Ros blinks, wondering if she’s seeing things, but it is indeed Adele up on the stage, clutching a microphone with one hand and stabbing at various buttons with the other. Suddenly, triumphantly, she hits another button with a flourish and stamps her feet to the first bars of a very familiar anthem.
‘Strewth,’ Ros says. ‘It’s “I Am Woman”. Adele thinks she’s Helen Reddy!’