I hurry towards my bedroom to get dressed.
I’m at my wardrobe, then I turn around and he’s there. Quizzical, amused and annoyed flickers skirt around his eyes and mouth.
He’s closing my bedroom door and he’s laying me on my bed with those hot hard hands. I want to and don’t want to. I’m afraid and yet this is so normal, isn’t it, having one boyfriend who wants you so much and no one else, who’d go ballistic if you so much as flirted with another guy.
‘I love you, Pina. Do you want to?’ he’s whispering as he lifts my nightshirt so I have this scrunched up itchy cotton under my chin. He tries to pull off my underwear and it catches over my hips and bum, so awkward, so fat, so not like the sex scenes in films. I find myself listening to a phrase – the ‘I love you’ line – that I’d always dreamed of hearing from a guy. But now I find myself wondering why he’s saying it; why now and never so urgently before. And is this love? His lips pressing down on mine, his tongue darting in and out of my mouth, his hands racing over my body, his breath rasping like he’s doing a workout.
‘Do you want to do it now?’ he asks again, a little more urgently, nibbling into my throat so much that I worry a hickey will mark me there. Everything’s so confused, but isn’t this the one real thing that everyone’s doing? One boyfriend, one jealous kind of guy who persists and wants you, only you, so badly? Is this making love? Why aren’t I feeling something I would know as love, as pleasure? Why do his hands feel too fast, too rough for me to savour and learn what I want and how I want it? Is it because I’ve been numbed by what I’ve discovered about my mother?
Suddenly, it’s like I’ve found the anchor to steady me – and it’s anger. My mother’s ruining my first time. She’s made me so sick and insane I can’t feel what I’m supposed to feel when I’m finally doing it with a guy. My mother, who always warns me about boys when she’s the slut! Well, I’ll discover what it is she can’t get enough of. Maybe what Scott and I do will be love. If I could just relax and stop thinking about her, then I’ll know and I’ll be able to tell my mother what real love with one guy feels like. This will make me relax, this will make me forget. This will make the world normal again.
‘Yes, I do.’ But even as I lie there staring at the stars on my ceiling, and he begins to do what he does to me, quickly, roughly, grunting, undoing his belt and fly without taking his clothes off, I want to stop him. I even decide to whisper to him to stop but my mouth is muffled into his hard chest, and I don’t whisper anything. I move my hands from around his back to his chest, thinking to gently push him off. But he must think I’m feeling his pecs as he tightens them under my palms. Then his fingers clamp around my wrists as he pulls my arms over my head, and his hard muscular weight’s bearing down on me even heavier as he mumbles something rough and urgent into my throat.
The surge of anger that was sustaining me has abandoned me. I’m left so afraid that I go somewhere else, into the ceiling where the stars are crumbling off, cascading in slow motion all over us. My heart explodes with humiliation and fear as he pushes on top of me and into me. But I lie there silently.
He’s crushing my heart and my lungs, stretching my refusing vagina, and I’m struggling to breathe with him hurting me inside and heavy on top of me.
But I lie there silently.
Then my heart seems to stop beating as he gives out a deep growl with one last painful push.
A thought seeps into my mind as something wet and sticky dribbles feebly out of me. This isn’t love. This isn’t even pleasure.
He rolls off me onto his back, zips his fly, belts his jeans and adjusts his underpants.
My trembling fingers pull down my nightshirt.
We lie there for a few long minutes, both staring at the plastic stars. And suddenly we have nothing to say to each other. We make a kind of effort to smile at each other but it’s too wrong and so we stare at the ceiling again. He seems to be hiding his own doubts and anxiety behind a cold silence. But there’s his fidgeting right leg and tapping fingers.
So soon he’s sitting up without looking at me, straightening his t-shirt. Soon he’s heading out of my bedroom door after a frantic sweep through his long blond hair with an agitated hand, and an anxious glance at himself in my mirror. All the while, he’s mumbling something and bits drift in through my haze: ‘a job I gotta look into … car needs work … I’ll call ya soon.’
The front door slams, his car door slams, his engine rattles and his sound system blares. His wheels screech down the driveway, down the street, and then there is silence. Relieving, stinking, loud silence.
I’m left with a thudding ache in my heart and a throbbing ache between my thighs. I slowly stand up and down my thighs slithers pinky fluid. I blot away at it, somewhat relieved that my tears blur the smears on the white tissues. But the five-cent coin sized stains on my white bedsheet spread. Bloodied semen, that’s all there is; none of my juices in there, I’m sure, for I’d felt no pleasure, no orgasm, and I’m left alone to clean up the mess.
My hands are shaking as I straighten my nightshirt. They keep shaking as I put on a pad in clean undies, then wrap the tissues in a brown paper bag and shove it to the bottom of my bin. And they shake more as I pull the bedsheet off my mattress and crumple it into a pile on the floor. I don’t want to see my face in the mirror. I’m afraid I won’t find me in the reflection.
I open my bedroom door and my legs refuse to take me out into the corridor. I stand there swaying a little, nauseous, like I did earlier this morning. Or is it the house swaying around me, rearranging around me, so I have to navigate a new path?
I’ve been changed again; the house has been changed again. More skins shed, more masks melting away. I entered my room as someone already grieving, hoping to feel some sort of resuscitation through making love with my boyfriend. I lost that me as well, and I’ve come out as another being, even more lifeless. In one night and one morning, my house has become some kind of trap. Opening and closing familiar doors is like stepping into the unknown, where you’re morphed and lost forever.
I no longer want to stay in my room with its pungent smells of Scott’s sweat and cigarettes, of unsatisfying sex, of my humiliation and fear. I pass Leo’s room and realise he’s been in there all this time. What has he heard? What does he know? How I long to open that door, crawl into his bed with him and be hugged in his quiet gentleness. But I can’t. I’m going to have to pretend things are otherwise, tell him to keep his wimpy mouth shut or else.
I need to have a shower, so I make my way to the bathroom. I manage to pull my nightshirt up, then freeze at the sight of the reddened trembling skin of my inner thighs. The pad’s waiting to be taken off so I can see what else is coming out of me. I tug my nightshirt down again. I can’t bear to look at myself, touch myself, where he’s been.
I find myself outside my parents’ bedroom again, wanting to lie on their bed and feel some warmth and comfort, even as I taste the bitterness of somehow knowing that what happens in my parents’ bed between their bodies, mingled with their hearts and souls, is not what just happened between Scott and me on my bed.
What was it that happened in those few long minutes between Scott and me?
I lie my aching body down on my parents’ bed. The birds are still flying on the lace curtains. My cold clammy hands come up to cover my face. I’m sobbing, loudly, painfully, into those hands, salty from tears, shaking from fear and anger.
6
Going inside my mother and finding Gianna
I DON’T KNOW HOW MUCH time has passed when my sobs finally subside. All I know is that at some point I become aware that I’m staring at the ceiling through swollen, crusty eyes, and that I’m breathing through my mouth because my nose is completely blocked. In fact, I even get a creepy thought – what would happen if I clamp my mouth shut? How long would I survive? Everything about Scott and Mum would be erased if I stopped breathing …
I stop breathing …
My mouth suddenly gasps open, t
rying to breathe in deeply. I stand up and pick up my mother’s book from where I’d thrown it away in disgust. It’s still open to the Thursday Mum fought with Nathan and picked us up after school. The room spins.
Gripping the walls, I try to go back to my bed, but I’m afraid to traverse the treacherous landscape of my bedroom. So I fumble my way into the lounge room instead, where photo albums still lie scattered on the worn carpet from before Scott disrupted my search, and threw me further into the maze. I need to find my way out by rediscovering who Mum was to me before today.
I search for the album from the year I was eleven. I find myself in a school photo, smiling in that toothy, pre-braces, awkwardly staged kind of way. I’m wearing my green summer uniform, pony-tails with green ribbons in them, the first hint of a zit on what was going to become my crater chin. But I look happy and innocent. School photo day. That was the afternoon Mum was writing about …
Mum’s late, a little more than usual. It’s warm and school’s out for another day. I want her to hurry up so she can take my pony-tails out. Dad did them way too tightly this morning because it’s school photo day. I’m also hanging out to eat whatever she’s got for me this afternoon. I love that moment when Mum pulls up in her old purple Volkswagen. I love the afternoons when it’s my turn to sit at the front with her, Leo in the back. We take it in turns, throwing our bags in the boot, opening the passenger doors to disco music and two treats: the smile on Mum’s face and the fave food waiting on the passenger seats which we have to pick up in order not to sit on; usually an iceblock, a chocolate bar, a fruit drink.
This afternoon there’s neither of the two. She pulls up sharply at the kerb and barely looks at us as she leans over to open our door. Is she angry with me? It couldn’t be Leo. He never makes her angry. Come to think of it, I rarely make her angry but I do stuff that annoys her even when I’m not meaning to.
Has she forgotten or had no time to buy something for our after-school treat? That would be understandable, but rare, and she’d be apologising like crazy already.
But what about her face? Can you forget or be too busy to smile? I scan her face to see if the smile’s going to happen, hoping she doesn’t catch me out doing so.
She starts the car again and accelerates with a jerk, looking straight ahead. I stare at the half-face I can see. Her cheek is pale, the creases around her eyes are definitely not her usual smile-lines. Her eyeliner’s smudged, her hair’s messy – but not in the way Mum thinks is funky. And her mouth: no upturned corner, no white teeth peeping, no bright lipstick. It’s severe, narrow, with haphazard remnants of lipstick on lips that looked chewed. And she doesn’t keep trying to look at us as she usually does; her neck twisting as she forces herself to keep an eye on the traffic in between chatting so much Leo and I beg her to watch the road and stop talking. This is usually after at least one irate motorist has honked his horn or given her the finger in the prelude to road rage. To which Mum usually waves in her Doris Day way. Then we turn the radio up and we sing all the way home to something like the Spice Girls or Backstreet Boys.
‘Mum, you look angry. Are you angry with me?’ I ask.
The car slows down. She turns to me with a kind of shocked-back-into-the-present look. ‘No, not at all, Pinucella. Why? Do I look angry?’
‘Yes.’
A smile appears, trembling and tearful, but at least it’s a smile. ‘I guess I am angry but not at you two. I’m angry at things that have made me sad.’ She turns to the traffic, the smile still there, but her fingers are going blotchy red and white from gripping the steering wheel. ‘You know Nathan?’
We nod. Nathan’s a friend of Mum and Dad’s and a teacher; friendly, nice, a bit boring when he starts teaching me stuff we’ve already learned at school or haven’t learned and I really don’t want to know, but fun when he plays cool computer games with us, even if they are ‘educational’. He’s also sort of shy around us, especially when Leo tells him he wishes he was his teacher and I agree.
‘Nathan and I have had a big argument …’ Her voice drifts off and then slowly finds it way back. ‘… and I don’t think he’ll ever talk to me again. So I’m sad about that because I love Nathan … and because what happened has nothing to do with stuff being bad between us but because of what’s out there.’ I see the pointer-finger on her right hand lift from the steering wheel and point out through the windscreen.
Leo and I look to where that finger is pointing: to nothing in particular and to everything in general. All we see are car bumpers and traffic lights, shop windows and billboards, people on footpaths, people in cars, people in shop doorways. And we wonder how all that has made Nathan stop talking to Mum.
‘So, I’ll be sad for a while and angry for maybe always. I hope you two understand because that’s what happens when you lose someone special in your life and it’s unfair, and you didn’t want to lose that person.’ She turns to us again and tries to smile even as her eyes are full of tears. ‘But I’ll try to make sure I don’t take it out on you two. You let me know if I do because I love you two and I don’t want you to be sad or angry with me one day over what’s happened with Nathan.’
What we didn’t know then, and what I realise now, as I sit with the photo album open at the smiley, clear-skinned eleven-year-old that I was then, is that part of why Nathan and Mum had split was to protect Leo and me, to stop us being sad and angry with her one day.
But I’m sitting here feeling just that: angry and sad. Except not only with her, but as the ache throbs dully through my body like a regular reminder of what’s happened today, I realise I am also angry and sad with myself.
I can’t go to those thoughts again. It’s too soon. My stomach heaves and the panic sizzles. So I go through some of the really ancient photo albums and immerse myself in my childhood as presented so simply and happily in them. They’re full of images of Mum and me. There’s my disco queen mother in tight leggings, topless and breastfeeding me. Her fringe is teased and sprayed so that it sticks up in that early 1990s fashion disaster they called ‘style’. Her hair falls over her naked shoulders, stroking the slight hair on my head. My baby lips are tight around her nipple, my baby eyes stare up at her blissfully, soulfully, while she smiles deliriously happily down at me.
There’s Mum on a swing in a park, toddler me on her lap, our bare legs and bare feet glistening in the sun as they point to the sky.
There are birthday parties with cakes and candles, dress-ups and face-painters, clowns and magicians, pony-rides and zoo parties. She’s always there, sometimes entwined with Dad, both of them with raptured smiles.
In a more recent album, the two of us lie on a blanket in the backyard under a full moon, a warm glowing circle of candles marking a ring of light around us. It was a special ritual she’d organised when I got my period at thirteen, to talk to me about being a woman and the awesome bodies women have. At the time I was both thrilled and embarrassed. It was magical in the stillness of a balmy spring Adelaide night, as she placed almond and peach blossoms in my hair. So mystical and warm that the cramps in my belly and the strange squishy feel between my legs was absorbed out of me by the moonlight, the candlelight, and by her love.
This memory has eased me a little, and I pick up Mum’s writing book again. I lean against the bookshelf and read.
My mum sensed something on Saturday when Elena and I went over to help her make the tomato sauce. We were washing up the pots and pans when she suddenly turned to me and hugged me to that scrawny body of hers. This is so unlike my mother. She said, ‘Thank you for making me happy. I know I haven’t always been the best mother. I made being a teenager hard for you two girls. I know there are things now that you may be going through and you’ll never share with me. Maybe that’s for the best. Don’t hang on the clothesline what should remain in a closet. If you speak them, they exist. Then things have to be said back. Then things have to be done.
‘Trust me, I know these things. So thank you. Thank you, for letting me hold my h
ead high. My family began with disgrace. I have worked hard to pull us out. Even when we sank into quicksand some years ago, I kept this family’s heads above ground and pulled us out.’
I looked at Elena, who smiled sweetly and forgivingly at Mum, then at me. She and I both knew Mum’s words were for me, for Elena has always found a way of fitting in, feeling at ease with the world, forgiving and smiling her way through, knowing things about her siblings but loving us quietly through it all. But too much has happened between Mum and me, the growing up years when it was all about moulding me into a good compliant and marriageable Italian girl so I was in the running for a good catch; practised to perfection in the kitchen and the laundry, ignorant and passive in the bedroom. Somehow my twin sister was able to manage it all quietly and persistently, and ended up doing ‘the right things’, finding her rock and her freedom with Rocco.
Even now, whatever Mum knew, or whatever pain she was sensing me feeling but not talking about as we cleaned the kitchen, Mum’s main concern was still keeping face, the props of honour for her family, making una bella figura. This apology was still not about my feelings, but about me keeping her happy, keeping up a smooth pretence among all the rellies and paesani that somehow her family had got it right. My silence was payback for her sacrifice over something we’d grown up knowing only as ‘The Family Disgrace’.
Dad was out in the backyard keeping the fire going under the forty gallon drum in which the brown beer bottles full of sauce and sprigs of basil were boiling. I could see him through the kitchen screen door: hands in overall pockets, a slightly bowed and thinning man watching the fire, now and again feeding it a branch of a fruit tree he’s been keeping from the pruning just for this occasion. My Dad, staring into the fire, always so silent. Always thinking of things far away, even when I was growing up.
I said inside where I say these things, ‘I’m making you happy at the expense of my happiness, Ma. Because you thought you were making us happy at the expense of your happiness. Did you feel one thing and do exactly another because of “The Family Disgrace” – for the sake of your children, for the sake of your family’s respect and reputation in the community? Did you really love Dad, always and only Dad? Do you love him now? Why can’t you and I, mother and daughter, sit down and talk about these things, cry and laugh about these things?’
Love You Two Page 6