Love You Two

by Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli

  I turn away and walk towards the one room I try to avoid these days, and yet had spent so much of my childhood in: my parents’ bedroom, with its oak bed and lacy cream curtains patterned with flying birds. I used to love that bed. On weekends I’d romp on it, watching the birds on the lace flying with the breeze, while my parents tried to steal some more sleep. Sometimes I’d find them locked in an embrace or kissing. Sometimes I’d notice scuffles under the covers and I’d jump on them, pull them apart and laugh as they tried to cling to each other. Some nights I’d race there in the dangerous dark of lost doorknobs and moving walls. I’d arrive bruised from physical knocks and nightmares, and so I’d snuggle between them, in their furry warmth and cushiony love, in their sleepy breaths and soapy skin smells. Mum’s damp showered hair would cool my feverish cheeks and Dad’s hairy limbs would crush me so blissfully.

  It was fun. They were in love. I felt safe.

  I walk into that room now. Its smells of sleep and aftershave and perfume mingle to make that special smell of my parents. They never make the bed. I’m the only person in my family who actually makes the bed each morning and I tidy my room too, but not this morning. My parents have so often walked past my room, stopped in awe at its tidiness, then cringed and stared at me as if I’m insane. I’ve always declared that among all the kids I know, my home would have to be the only place where the kid tells the parents to tidy their room.

  And yet, the unmade bed with the crumpled white cotton sheets, the permanent dents where their bodies have lain for years in the ageing mattress, and the hollows in the pillows where their heads nestle, seem so safe and loving, so much like ‘home’.

  I walk in and sit on the bed. Fighting my own embarrassment, I lie down on my mother’s side, pulling the sheet up to my chin. I can almost feel my skin being brushed by the stains of her mascara and lipstick that mark the edge of the sheet and her pillow because she’s so sloppy about removing her make-up at night.

  What does she feel and think about in this bed with this man? Is there another bed waiting somewhere else? Does it have the same mascara and lipstick stains, the same dent where her body lies? Does her cushion there smell the same as this one here?

  These thoughts are agonising. I roll over to my dad’s side and sink further into his deeper dent. I look over to his bedside table and there’s one of my mum’s poetry attempts framed for him. I remember her reading it out loud to him on one of their many anniversaries a few years back. Dad’s eyes filled with tears and beamed with love: pained and proud and full. She got teary, her mouth trembled and smiled. Leo gave one of his rarely seen grins and I squirmed with delicious embarrassment.

  I pick up the poem now and read it. I want to slam it against the wall even as I hold it close and feel its soft quilted frame mould against my fingers.

  To Renato – the way I love YOU

  I love the earth,

  I love the sky,

  Fascinated by their changing colours,

  Grateful for their eternal constancy.

  I love the sky and the earth,

  The way they meet at the horizon,

  Holding the whole world in me

  In a loving embrace.

  Loving the sky

  Does not mean I love the earth less.

  Each evokes a different part of me

  And brings me different lessons.

  My love for you, Renato, will never diminish.

  I roll back into the middle of the bed. ‘Your mum knows how to love,’ Dad said to me only a couple of months ago. I’d come back from spending a day with Mum at the aged care home where she nurses. I was only there because of this lame weekly community service scheme we had to do for school. Part of making us good Catholics, I guess. I’d hated it, or wanted to hate it, because it scared me with the threat of what was to come for my own parents and for me. So I came home whingeing and whining to Dad about the smells of old people’s piss and farts, their clammy fingers gripping my arm, their faded eyes that looked at me but called me other names from lives lived long before ending up in this detention centre for the dying.

  Well, my loser-lovey parents got so upset that I had such a shallow view of Mum’s work and of the elderly. That’s when Dad told me, ‘Your mum knows how to love.’ After I’d smirked and sneered and performed the ruthless adolescent, I went to my room and thought about my mum, and grudgingly, secretly, admitted to myself that yeah, my mum was a good nurse who genuinely loved the people she looked after. I’d watched her lifting wrinkled bodies as if they were delicate ornaments, cleaning gnarled fingers and bony wrists as if gently polishing glass, feeding toothless mouths as if they were the mouths of babies, wiping saggy bums, shrivelled penises and unevenly thatched pubic areas as if they were babies’ creamy-skinned bottoms.

  ‘Each face is a canvas of crushed silk, Pina,’ she’d said as she combed wispy strands of soft grey hair on an old woman’s temples. ‘Crammed with life experiences. They teach me, Pinuccia.’

  ‘But they just sit staring into space all day,’ I’d muttered, trying to pick up some wet towels by using the walking stick of a staring old man sitting up in bed.

  ‘They could be running their very own home movies inside their heads and hearts. I hope I have a heart full of home movies to keep me warm when my skin grows cold.’ Mum had smiled and gently brushed the old man’s cheek with her hand.

  ‘Your mum knows how to love.’ That’s what Dad told me.

  But now I remember someone else had told me that. At an Italian community club’s Easter picnic with my parents’ friends and rellies, my aunty’s family and friends, and the nonni. My mum had invited a couple of homeless youths hanging out in the bush to come and have some lasagna and prosciutto panini. The rest of us looked on warily, except Mum’s fan club – Zi Elena and Zi Rocco, Stella, Leo and my dad – who glowed with adulation. My nonna had muttered to her in dismay. But as my mother remained smilingly defiant, Nonna made the rounds apologising for her daughter to the scrutinising paesani tut-tutting around her.

  Nathan was there, sitting cross-legged on a blanket with some of Mum’s friends, talking childhood development with them and explaining photosynthesis and metamorphosis to their children. ‘Your mum knows how to love,’ he’d said to me, gently beaming and following her movements as she sat the youths down with paper plates threatening to overturn under the weight of the lasagna. I’d glanced momentarily at his clear blue eyes and small pale face. I remember thinking, just for the briefest of moments, how he was so different from my swarthy Italian father, yet saying the same thing about my mother.

  I reach towards Mum’s bedside table for a tissue to blow my nose and wipe my eyes. I find the tissue box on top of what feels like a small book. I pull both towards me. It’s a writing book with a Victorian-era woman in purple satin on the cover. She’s sitting on an iron lace garden bench, looking down pensively at her embossed writing book, quill poised.

  I’ve seen this book here the rare times I’ve wandered in. But I’ve never thought much about it, apart from dismissively figuring it was where my mum practised her feeble poetry.

  I open it. On the inside cover is a neat handwritten note in silver pen surrounded by a hand-drawn heart in gold:

  Cara sorella Gianna,

  Write it out,

  Tuo fratello Donato.

  Trust that uncle of mine to indulge her ambitions. Zio Donato, or Zi Don as we call him, was just as lovey-dovey as Mum, but at least his life was organised, successful, normal like Zi Elena’s. He lived in Melbourne, he was a lawyer, he had a girlfriend – one girlfriend – who was an architect. They were planning to marry and have babies.

  We hardly saw him except surrounded by all the rellies and answering five hundred questions at once on Easter Sundays and Christmas Days when he made his pilgrimage to Adelaide to do right by the famiglia. But Nonna kept us filled in as she phoned him every week, religiously, on Sunday evenings: the latest successes, the latest everyday trivia. Sometimes she’d declare it wit
h triumph, sometimes she’d announce it with relief. She was always reminding us, and any rellie or paesani hanging around, that he was still with his girlfriend, still planning to get married. I’d often giggle at how this info about Zi Don was so important to the ‘Little Italy’ gossip grapevine. The only two hitches according to Nonna: his girlfriend was Vietnamese and she was not a Catholic. But Nonna was putting in her weekly nags to Zi Don to do something about the latter. Hey, compared to what I now know her daughter was up to, Zi Don was the epitome of the perfect offspring.

  Opposite Zi Don’s note, on the first page of the writing book, Mum has written in bright, blood-red texta surrounded by a hand-drawn rainbow-coloured heart: Going Inside. I flick through the pages. It’s like a diary but it isn’t. There are no dates, just sections of writing, sections of her life and thoughts in different pens, obviously written at different times.

  I flick back to the first page and begin to read. Her words make me realise things I’ve either forgotten, or never knew. It’s like filling in missing pieces of a jigsaw. But it’s also like the jigsaw pieces you already had in place now, somehow, go missing.

  I live so much of my life inside me now. I guess I have for such a long time, since I first fell in love with Nathan and our love put me, Nathan and Ren outside the world.

  But it’s more so now that he’s gone after seven years together. The life I had with him has now gone inside me, like hidden cave-wall murals that will always be there for me to view privately. This way, the outside can have a semblance of continuing unchanged, uneroded – so that the love I have for Ren can continue as it always has, for he deserves no less. So that I can continue to be the mother I am to my darling children, Pina and Leo, for they deserve no less too.

  My darling Pina knew something was wrong that Thursday when I picked her and Leo up from school. She asked me why I looked ‘angry’, and was I angry with her? No, I told her, and managed to find a smile to soothe her frown. Then I thought how she didn’t say ‘sad’, she said ‘angry’. I am angry that in order to live the exterior life, I’m going to have to take the life I had with you, Nathan, into me and somehow come to terms with a world that has caused so much agony for me and so many others like me who love differently.

  I sit up on the bed as a clammy chill scratches down my cheeks. I remember that day.

  I get up and leave the bedroom, making my way to the lounge where Mum has a whole ceiling-to-floor bookshelf of photo albums. I seem to know exactly which albums to go through to find what I want. There’s photo after photo of Nathan in groups of friends, with Mum, with me at various ages. Years of him in and out of my life and in and out of Mum and Dad’s life, posing for the cameras as their friend. I’ve seen these photos before, some of them several times, but I’ve never really seen what they were photos of.

  I’m struggling but I keep turning pages, steadying myself in the house’s silence. But soon there’s the rattle of a car pulling up outside. It grates its way into my dizziness.

  It’s a familiar sound, with all the usual announcements that he’s arrived: the revs, the screeches, and then as the car door opens, the blaring music.

  I want to ignore these sounds from outside, pretend I’m not here. I feel like I’ve disappeared into a world that these photos reveal and conceal, depending on what you’re looking for. I was just never interested enough in the seemingly boring lives of my parents to ask some basic questions, to piece together clues left carelessly around me in my own home.

  I make it to the window and there he is, looking as arrogantly hot as ever in a black muscle t-shirt, his ripped jeans sitting precariously low on his narrow hips.

  And here I am still in a nightshirt: no make-up and no shower, hair unwashed and teeth not brushed, my zits multiplying and my fat spreading like jelly even as I stand there panicking. He’s never seen me like this. I never wanted him to see me like this. I’ve always worried about the day he’d realise how repulsive I really am.

  I begin to creep back to my bedroom when I notice Leo also coming out of the car. He’s holding an ice-pack under his right eye and walking with a limp.

  I run to the door and they’re already there.

  Scott’s leery ‘surprise, surprise’ smile fades a little as he scans my face and body. I try to ignore the pinpricks of those laser beam eyes. ‘What happened to Leo?’

  ‘I was playing soccer and …’ but Leo’s about to cry. He mumbles something as he grips an arm around his chest, still holding the ice-pack to his face with the other hand. He edges past me to the bathroom, shutting the door behind him.

  I turn to Scott, who for a fleeting second looks worried. ‘He’s such a wuss, hey?’ he says as he strolls forward past me, into the house. He smells sexy, despite the cigarette and petrol fumes. It’s a heady boy smell, and he looks awesome in a rough way. Meanwhile, I’m a mess, both inside and out.

  ‘So you’re not expecting a secret lover, not in that get-up.’ He shrugs a snarky look back at me over his broad shoulder. I begin to follow him. ‘Didn’t expect to find you looking trashed out.’

  ‘I’m not trashed out. I just woke up late. How did you …?’

  ‘I dropped my brother off, and the kids got into a … a soccer game. I stayed to watch, and then Leo got hit, um … hit by the ball. So I thought I’d drop him off, seeing as I was heading this way anyway.’

  ‘Scott –’

  ‘I’m sure we can convince little Leo to stay in his room or go for a walk –’

  ‘No.’

  He turns to me and his fingers begin to work their magic along my spine. But my stomach’s tensing up. ‘We could take it from the top, head into the shower together, clean you up, do you up, put something nice on you so I can take it off again.’ He thrusts his hips forward and his crotch is against my stomach, which seems to bloat out further to greet him.

  Here comes the question I’ve been trying to avoid: why does he make me feel so ugly? Are you supposed to feel so unsexy with a boyfriend?

  I try to pull back and suck my stomach in. His fingers have found the grooves on my back between my ribs. They hook in. ‘Scott, I have to make sure Leo’s all right. Is he staying home all day? What did his teachers say?’

  ‘Don’t worry about all that. It’s better if he stays here. They’ll only expect him to do brain-damaging work all day.’

  ‘How hurt is he?’ I hear Leo shuffle from the bathroom to his bedroom and shut the door.

  ‘Oh, it was just the rough handling kind of stuff that guys do.’ His arms tighten around me, pulling me in so that my breasts crush against him. Part of me just wants to melt into him, into the sheer normality of it all, while another part is afraid of the tightness of those arms, the rigidity of that chest and abdomen. Sex is way out of the question today, even more so than usual.

  ‘Look Scott, I’ll make us some breakfast and then can you please go? I’m not feeling well.’

  ‘Sure, breakfast. Let’s play house.’

  ‘I’ll see if Leo needs anything, if I should phone Mum –’ How automatically she’s there in my psyche ready to repair whatever damage Leo and I have created. ‘– or someone.’ I can’t talk to Mum now, and I don’t want her to know Scott’s here.

  ‘I’ll go ask, you just get the food going.’ He’s heading to Leo’s room before I can stop him. I turn towards the kitchen. I’m in a daze. I don’t know what to do, where to start, as if toasting bread and making coffee is something not done in this new world in this old house. I hear Scott’s muffled voice now and again but nothing from Leo. Then Scott’s coming back into the kitchen and I hurry to get some bread into the toaster.

  ‘He wants to stay in his room all day and chill out. Says he told his teacher he was coming home. And he doesn’t want you to worry your mum.’ He massages my shoulders as I watch the reddening glow of heat in the toaster, feeling the skin on my shoulders burning, a heat of desire and fear. ‘That’s cool with us, hey?’

  I don’t answer. I’m trying to work out what
to say. But he turns me, cups one strong hand in the small of my back and the other under my chin so I’m looking up at him as he leans down. His cigarette breath is dry and warm on my face as his lips smile and sneer, smile and sneer. I want to be devoured by those lips and I want to escape that devouring mouth. ‘It’s cool, hey?’ and his crotch presses into me.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, but I don’t know if it is. Is this blend of fear and excitement normal?

  So we do breakfast of coffee and toast garnished with some kissing, his fingers finding parts of me to fondle through my nightshirt. It does make me feel a little more relaxed, the coffee and toast make me less light-headed. I find I can shut out my mother by feeling desired by Scott. We share some jokes about Leo and soccer not being a good mix.

  Then he pulls me onto his lap. His thighs and crotch are hard against me. I’m so relieved he still finds me sexy, the blobby zitty me, that I let his hand crawl under my nightshirt. He squeezes my breast the way he squeezes his biceps.

  I’m trying to work out how it feels and whether I like it, but he’s working the fingers of his other hand up my thighs, parting them with his own thigh underneath me until I feel as if I’m about to fall. But he holds me rigid, tightly, as his fingers work their way under the elastic of my underpants.

  I suddenly feel like I’m splintering. Fear like ice dropped into boiling desire. This doesn’t feel right. His touch doesn’t feel right.

  But maybe this is what doing it feels like and I just have to get used to it. Maybe if we slow down so I can get used to these feelings, to his touch, so it feels normal and known. But I don’t know how to tell him, or what to tell him. I’m actually afraid to stop him. Not just because he might dump me. But afraid of what he could do. ‘I need to go to the toilet.’

  His fingers loosen. He lets me go with an irritated groan.