The Best Australian Stories 2016

by Charlotte Wood

  When I slept at last it was to dream of a body discovered, a century after a shipwreck, frozen in Antarctic ice, and then of a bubble rising with unbearable slowness through a tar-like substance – a bubble that had been rising for millennia – at last reaching the surface, releasing its ancient, rotten air.

  *

  The mourners are filing by, grasping our hands as they pass. Condolences. With twenty minutes still to go before the priest arrives most of them are seated, in silence, thinking, waiting. A very pious man in a back row – Katia has pointed him out as the bishop’s informer – takes out his beads and begins to say the rosary, and suddenly, as if a wave has swept over the room, the whole congregation of elderly women, elderly men, has joined him. Breaking from dry throats, scarcely more than a rasping at first, wind through dry grass, the prayer builds, pushing its way through voices almost too tired to stand, finding its passages, a bass drone slowly filling the space as water fills a jug, groaning up through the stones, an ancient poetry underneath, within, of grief and bewilderment, incomprehension, overlaid by the old rituals and recipes of containment, this chanting of the rosary, people burying their own dead again, any funeral a reawakening, reburying, re-grieving, mothers, fathers, daughters, brothers, friends, wives, husbands, again, in slow showers of earth, insubstantial, heavy as this shadow, out of the afternoon sunlight, her death mask almost beautiful in its rest, after the torment, waxen, pearl-grey, the fright and confusion become dignity, music moving through us in a kind of praise, making us instruments, wind, clay vessels, a kind of brooding bird, almost dove.

  Frida Boyelski’s Shiva

  Abigail Ulman

  Frida Boyelski had always wanted a daughter. Then she had a daughter and that daughter grew up into a young woman who said she was actually a young man.

  ‘You mean to tell me, you’re gay?’ Frida asked.

  ‘No,’ Ruthie said. ‘I’m telling you I’m trans. Did you read the book I gave you?’

  ‘When do I have time to read books?’ Frida asked. ‘I have a gay daughter to deal with now.’

  ‘Just read it. It’ll help you understand.’ Ruthie was standing next to the kitchen door, a backpack strap slung over her shoulder.

  ‘Where are you off to?’

  ‘Leah’s place. I’m gonna stay there for a bit, just while it’s school holidays.’

  ‘Does Leah know about this?’

  ‘Yeah. She’s been really supportive.’

  ‘What about Jack? Does he know? How does he feel about his girlfriend – feeling this way?’

  ‘He knows. He’s known for ages. He’s happy for me.’

  ‘Is he doing this trans thing now, too?’

  ‘It’s not something I’m doing. It’s something I am.’

  ‘Is Jack that thing, too?’

  ‘No. Jack’s cis.’

  ‘What—?’

  ‘Mum,’ Ruthie cut in. ‘I have to go.’

  ‘Please don’t go yet.’ Frida had the strange feeling that if she let Ruthie leave now, she might not be exactly the same person when she came back. She followed her daughter out to the garage and watched her get on her bike. ‘Why do you want to be someone you’re not? What’s wrong with who you are?’

  ‘This is who I am,’ Ruthie said, her feet already on both pedals. ‘Just please read the book.’

  Frida Boyelski didn’t want to read the book. She knew that when she started reading the book, Ruthie would be a girl – her little girl – and by the time she’d read through the whole thing, turning the pages through chapters like ‘The Politics of Renaming’ and ‘Mastectomy and What It Means’, her daughter would have slowly and irrevocably turned into a person she didn’t know, had never known; certainly she would no longer be the person Frida had given birth to sixteen years ago.

  Frida hadn’t immigrated to Australia and learnt English at the age of twenty-six so she could read a book like that. She had moved here so she could meet a man, have a daughter, and give that daughter the opportunities she herself never had. Frida left the book where it sat on the coffee table, and she called in sick to the nursing home for the first time in the twelve years she’d been working there.

  ‘Are you okay?’ asked Zelda at the front desk.

  ‘My daughter’s – leaving,’ Frida said. ‘She’s gone. Things will never be the same.’

  ‘It’s Margaret’s birthday,’ Zelda said. ‘She left a piece of pear strudel in your pigeonhole. What should I do with it?’

  ‘You can eat it,’ Frida told her.

  ‘No, no, I’m gluten free this whole month,’ Zelda said. ‘I’ll leave it in the fridge for you. It’s from Chaim’s Bakery. They put so much glaze on it, it’ll probably outlive us all.’

  Frida hung up and made another phone call, this time to the Jewish Observer. ‘Hello,’ she told the girl who answered, ‘I’d like to put a message in the Bereavements section. Can you help?’

  When that week’s edition of the Jewish Observer landed on doorsteps all over Frida’s neighbourhood, it contained Frida’s message. This is to announce that Ruthie Boyelski, daughter of Frida Boyelski, will soon no longer be a girl. Frida will be sitting shiva for her daughter at her home address for the next week. Visitors welcome.

  Frida Boyelski remembered watching her father sit shiva decades ago, when his own father had died. She covered all the mirrors in the house with bedsheets as he had done, because vanity was supposed to be eschewed in periods of mourning. Frida knew you were supposed to create a small tear in a piece of clothing to communicate your suffering. She cut a gash into the collar of her work shirt. Her father had spent the seven days of shiva sitting on a low chair. Frida considered trying to bend her achy knees onto a cushion and sit there, cross-legged, the way Ruthie sat when she and Leah did yoga in her bedroom sometimes. But then she remembered Ruthie’s old playset, with its tiny chair and matching play-table, on which countless teddy bear tea parties had been enacted when Ruthie was a child.

  Frida found the furniture under a tarp in the garage. Ruthie’s old dollhouse was there, too, its tiny windows laced over with spiderwebs, and there was Ruthie’s old bike, with its pale pink frame and the hot pink streamers sprouting from the handlebars. Frida pictured Ruthie’s seven-year-old face scrunched up at the sight of the bike on her birthday morning. ‘I told you,’ she’d cried to Frida, ‘I want a BMX racer.’ Frida had other memories, too – a frown over a fairy princess birthday cake, screaming fights about pinafores purchased for Passover, and a thirteen-year-old Ruthie perched on a stool in front of the bathroom mirror, scissors in one hand, a loose lock of hair in the other. Frida took the small chair, pulled the tarp back over the other objects, and went inside.

  On the first day of Frida Boyelski’s shiva, the rabbi came. He gave Frida a butter cake that his wife had baked, and he read a prayer from a small book. Then he asked Frida how she was feeling.

  ‘I’ve been better, Rabbi,’ Frida said. ‘I always wanted a daughter. And then I got one.’

  ‘The time you spent with your daughter isn’t gone,’ the rabbi said. ‘You’ll have that forever.’

  ‘But it was too short, Rabbi,’ Frida said. ‘I thought I would have a daughter till I died. I thought she would get pregnant, and give me grandchildren.’

  ‘Life isn’t what we expect it to be,’ the rabbi said, half a piece of his wife’s butter cake in his mouth. ‘But it’s a blessing in all its forms, nonetheless. Most bereaved parents have lost their children to illness or an accident. At least your child is still with us.’

  ‘Do you have children, Rabbi?’ Frida asked him.

  The rabbi looked surprised by the question. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I have three daughters and two sons.’

  ‘Uh huh,’ Frida said. ‘Enjoy your children, Rabbi. And thanks for coming.’

  The rabbi started to say something else, but Frida fixed him with what Ruthie liked to call her Don’t-even stare, so he wiped his mouth, muttered the customary wish for Frida to live a long life, and saw himsel
f out, a crumpled paper napkin in his hand.

  On the second day of Frida Boyelski’s shiva, Cousin Shulie came to see her. ‘Ooh,’ Shulie said, ‘where did you get that side table? Are those new pants? Do you want to see photos of my Danielle? She’s captain of the trampolining team and she played one of the leads in the school’s production of “Beauty and The Beauty”. They decided the beast character was too negative for the kids. Last year poor Robbie Simons was traumatised because they cast him as a Nazi in The Sound of Music.’

  Cousin Shulie perched on the edge of the coffee table, which, given the size of her behind and the rickety legs of the table, seemed to Frida an ill-considered seating choice. Before Frida could say so, though, Shulie started to weep.

  ‘Why are you crying?’ Frida asked her. ‘You still have your daughter.’

  ‘I’m crying because it’s my fault,’ Cousin Shulie said. ‘We’ve always been competitive, the two of us, since we were little. And I was jealous of you and Ruthie. You were so close. She looked up to you. My Danielle has been rolling her eyes at me since the moment she first opened them. I was so envious, I used to wish horrible things on you. I wished you unhappy, I wished you to lose everything you have, I wished Ruthie to leave you. And now it’s happening. It’s my fault. All my fault!’

  ‘Shulie.’ Frida rolled her eyes. ‘Get up, go home. It’s not your fault.’

  ‘I prayed to God,’ Shulie said. ‘More than once.’

  ‘You think God can bear listening to you and your screeching?’ Frida asked. ‘God blocks your voice out just like the rest of us do. Go home to your family. Take some butter cake for Danielle.’

  On the third day of Frida Boyelski’s shiva, Danielle came. She sat in Ruthie’s favourite armchair and bowed her head. ‘It’s my fault,’ she murmured, so quietly Frida could only just hear her. ‘When we were kids, Ruthie and I spent every weekend out in my cubby house. We’d play “Mothers and Fathers” and I always insisted that I get to be the mother. I’m a year older and I bullied her into it. Ruthie had no choice.’

  ‘That’s not why this happened,’ Frida said. ‘I don’t know much, but that much I know.’

  Danielle squinted at her through the jagged ends of her fringe. ‘Every weekend, Auntie,’ she said. ‘For years on end, I made her play the boy.’

  ‘Have you ever known Ruthie to do anything she didn’t want to do?’ Frida asked. ‘She probably wanted to play the boy. That’s why she let you be the girl. Maybe she was secretly getting her way all along.’

  On the fourth day of Frida Boyelski’s shiva, the women from work came: Margaret, Shanie, Johanna and Zelda. They brought crackers, smoked salmon, tzatziki and capers, and told Frida all the gossip she’d been missing at the nursing home while they ate the crackers, smoked salmon, tzatziki and capers.

  Johanna stayed on after the others left. She was originally from South Africa and had spent her twenties living in Bordeaux, and this made her famously open-minded amongst the staff at work.

  ‘What’s the big deal?’ she asked, lighting a menthol cigarette. ‘Boy, girl, il est tout de même.’

  ‘What would you do if your daughter told you she was no longer a girl?’ asked Frida.

  ‘I don’t have a daughter.’ Johanna blew a small smoke ring through another, larger smoke ring. That was true. Johanna famously had a chihuahua called Giuseppe that she loved dearly, and a husband called Olivier who she was crazy about, après tout ce temps.

  ‘What if Olivier came home suddenly and said he was a woman?’ Frida asked her.

  ‘Honestly?’ said Johanna, tapping ash onto the edge of one of Frida’s good plates. ‘I’d be shocked. And uncomfortable and angry and miserable. But I think eventually I’d see it as just the next big adventure of my life.’

  ‘It’s the next big adventure of my life.’ Frida tried that out on her ex-husband when he came to see her on the fifth day of shiva. But she was avoiding eye contact as she said it, and she knew Ivan didn’t buy it for a second. He was sitting on the couch, cracking his knuckles and staring at the artwork on the wall as though he’d never seen it before, as though he hadn’t helped pick it out himself.

  ‘This is your fault, you know?’ he told Frida. ‘You should have started seeing other people after the divorce. Instead, Ruthie was forced to become the man of the house.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Frida said. ‘You went away and had your new wife and your new kids, and you didn’t visit. How could she feel like Daddy’s special little girl if Daddy wasn’t around?’

  ‘Maybe it’s because you let her stay up late on school nights watching Grey’s Anatomy when she was too young for it,’ Ivan said. ‘Kids need structure.’

  ‘Maybe it’s that time you smacked her bottom when she swore at you,’ Frida spat back. ‘You’re the one who taught her to swear in the first place. What did you expect?’

  ‘I’m not the one who let her eat all that fast food. You know that stuff is full of hormones.’

  The argument went on and on, circling back through all the parental wrongdoings that had occurred during Ruthie’s short but apparently eventful life, until finally they returned to the very moment of Ruthie’s conception.

  ‘It’s because we did it sideways,’ Frida said. ‘What kind of man insists on doing it sideways on his honeymoon?’

  ‘It’s because you insisted on listening to that terrible music every time we made love.’

  ‘Bing Crosby,’ Frida said, ‘is a genius.’

  ‘Bing Crosby, Bing Crosby.’ Ivan waved his hands in the air. ‘Why didn’t you marry Bing Crosby if he’s such a genius?’

  ‘I wish I had,’ Frida said. ‘Bing Crosby wouldn’t want to do it sideways on his honeymoon.’

  ‘I had to do it sideways!’ Ivan leaned forward and shouted. ‘What other way could we do it without making a racket or rolling right off that tiny bed they gave us?’

  Frida Boyelski fell silent. She stared over at Ivan Boyelski, and he stared right back. The daylight was waning behind the living room curtains, and they sat together, both of them thinking back to their honeymoon: the narrow bed, the moon spying on them through the skylight, the last few moments that their new family had been two instead of three. ‘We were so young,’ Frida said.

  ‘Yes,’ Ivan said, ‘and now it’s Ruthie’s time to be young.’

  ‘Go home to your family, Ivanchik,’ Frida told him, ‘and take some butter cake for the children.’

  On the sixth day, it rained, and no one visited Frida. She sat on the low chair all morning, but the cold was making her fingers stiff, and her achy knees ached even more than usual. She got up and turned on the heater. She made herself a cup of tea and chewed down the last piece of butter cake. She went around the house, turning lights on and turning them off again, feeling like she was looking for something or like there was something she was supposed to do, even though this was her shiva week, and she had nothing else planned.

  She ended up at Ruthie’s bedroom door. She pushed it open and stood there, looking at the unmade bed and the posters taped to the wall, saying Occupy Glenhuntly! 4pm Sunday and This is What a Feminist Looks Like. Rain trickled down the window and rain shadows trickled down the walls, making it seem like the whole world was crying tears onto Ruthie’s little-girl desk, the little-girl bed, and the little-girl wallpaper covered in flowers that Frida had picked out years ago, because it had seemed like a good idea at the time – like immigrating, like getting married, like staying in this house for years after all of that was over.

  On the seventh and final day of Frida Boyelski’s shiva, a boy came to visit. He was a teen boy, with short, feathery hair, and holes in his ears where earrings used to be; he was wearing jeans and a baggy blue jumper and he had a backpack slung over his shoulder. He came and sat cross-legged in front of Frida on the living room floor. If he noticed the book sitting unopened and unread on the coffee table, he didn’t mention it.

  ‘Hello,’ Frida said.

  ‘Hello,’ said the boy. />
  ‘What’s your name?’ Frida asked him.

  ‘Rafael,’ the boy said. ‘Rafael Boyelski.’

  ‘Can I call you Ruthie?’ Frida asked the boy.

  ‘No,’ the boy said.

  ‘Are you still going to call me Mum?’ Frida asked him.

  ‘Yes,’ the boy said. ‘Unless you want to be called something else?’

  ‘No,’ Frida said. ‘Mum is good.’

  ‘Okay,’ the boy said, ‘Mum.’

  ‘Can I still brush your hair sometimes?’ Frida asked him.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Will we still go shopping together?’

  ‘Maybe. But I’m not wearing a dress ever again.’

  ‘Even on Passover?’

  ‘Especially on Passover.’

  ‘And, if you don’t mind my asking, do you still have all your – parts?’

  ‘Yes,’ the boy said. ‘For now. But soon I want to start taking testosterone.’

  ‘And, if you don’t mind my asking, will you tell me when you do that? I won’t try to stop you. I’d just like to know.’

  ‘Okay,’ the boy said, ‘I will.’

  Frida Boyelski had always wanted a daughter. Then she had a daughter and that daughter turned out to be a son. And now it was six o’clock and her son was standing up and saying he was hungry, and when Frida suggested that they make dinner and eat together, he yawned and stretched and said, ‘Okay, sounds good.’

  Frida marvelled at the sight of him, Rafael – his skinny legs and sturdy posture, the easy way he exposed his lower belly as he stretched his body upwards, the grace with which he leaned over and reached his hand towards her. His fingers were slender and strong, and he gripped Frida’s arm and held on tight as she struggled, and then managed, to rise to her feet.