My gorgeous girl Pina, there will never be anything you cannot share with me. I’ll be there to cry with you and maybe one day I can take out all that I have inside in my heart – perhaps give you this book so you can remember a man you hardly knew but who your mother loved and gave up for you and Leo. Maybe I can share with you what I’ve learned about love and desire, as you grow into a woman and face the joys and treacheries of that love and desire.
I lean my feverish forehead into the book, smelling faint whiffs of my mother’s perfumes. How do I share what’s happened to me today, Mum? I had sex with a guy. Or a guy had sex with me. No, not even that sounds right. What happened to me today, Mum? A guy did something like sex to me but it wasn’t beautiful the way you always said it could be.
Will I tell you tonight when you come home? Do I want to tell you? How will you feel? And why, why didn’t you tell me about Nathan? But I know the answer to that. I know because I know how I’m reacting now, how I reacted last night, how I think I hate you, how I wish I could hate you.
But there are other silences seeping out of her writing book. ‘My family began with disgrace’ Nonna had said to her.
I put down Mum’s writing book and look for photos of Nonna and Mum together. At times they’re smiling, at times trying to smile, but their bodies never fold comfortably together. I remember their arguments about me, the regular markers of the phases of my growing up: fights about climbing trees, going to school camps, going to sleepovers, wearing make-up, shaving my legs, baring my midriff, having boys over, and going out with boys to movies and underage dances. Nonna would ask in her shrill hysterical voice whether my mother wanted me to become a puttana and get a bad reputation so no decent Italian boy would marry me. And what was this going to do to her in her community, being known as the grandmother of a slut?
My mother would say I had the right to grow up strong and independent, to appreciate my sexuality and learn how to respect, not repress, myself. Then Nonna would point her finger at us. ‘You’ll see what will happen. I hope I am dead before I see what you’re doing to your daughter. How she will disgrace this family again! When Giuseppina comes home diseased, or pregnant, or raped, don’t come to me because I will spit at you for being a bad mother. A mother who has no shame, who should be teaching her daughter how to be a good Catholic woman, how to prepare for being a good wife. Who will have her? If I had a son, I’d kill him before allowing him to come and court your daughter after all the foolish things you’re filling her head with. And if Renato’s parents had been alive, they would’ve stopped him marrying you. Your husband is a good man, but a fool.’
What else was Nonna saying inside? What else did she know but would not speak into existence again? ‘Don’t hang on the clothesline what should remain in a closet,’ she’d said.
There’s a photo of my fourteenth birthday, a video sleep-over night I had at home with both guys and girls. Nonna walked in bright and early on the Sunday morning dressed in her black Sunday best to see if she could drag us to church – at least on a birthday. She found boys and girls like sardines in sleeping bags in the small lounge room. So she got stuck into my mother again. Nonno stood back; silent, listening, pained. Dad tried to keep my friends oblivious to the family dispute by plying them with French toast, Coco Pops and hot chocolate.
Finally, my mother could stand it no more. ‘So did being a good pious woman help you? Did it? Did it help Dad? What have you spent your life hiding, Ma? What about you, Dad? What kind of family have you been to your children – I mean all your children? Go on, let’s hear it out loud. And if you two can’t talk about your own stuff, don’t come around here parading your good Catholic marriage, your good Catholic family values, when I know what happened.’
While Nonna shrieked and ranted at my mother, Nonno’s face sunk down, down, his head shaking, and pleading churning out of his throat as he grabbed Nonna’s arm and pulled her away. ‘Stop this, stop it. You have done damage enough. So have I. Let them do it their own way now, since they think they know better. One day, their children will have different reasons to hate them, but hate them they will, like ours do us.’
That afternoon, after my friends had gone home, after keeping it together for those who were either Aussie and couldn’t understand the Italian, or were Italian and tuned it out as familiar family drama, my mum sat like a rag-doll near the photo albums, rummaged towards the bottom of the shelf, and sat crying over a black-and-white photo she’d hug to her heart. I saw it briefly, but suddenly Zi Elena and Zi Rocco were arriving with Stella to take Leo and me to the movies as a birthday surprise. Now I wonder how Dad managed to sneak a call to them.
I try to find that photo now. I rummage through the albums on the lowest shelf and pull out an old envelope with a German stamp dated 1950. It’s addressed to my nonno. There’s no letter in the envelope, no name on the back. But in it is a photo of a young man no older than about twenty, his hair greased back, an Elvis Presley kiss curl on his forehead. My nonno before the ravages of years of hard work in fields in Italy, and then a life of factories in Adelaide. My nonno with a smile like my mother’s, so vivid and loving in a way I’ve never seen him smile. With him is a young blonde woman, barely older than me but much more beautiful. A northern European, Brigitte Bardot type woman with a low-cut, tight-waisted, round-hipped chiffon dress. He has his arm around that little waist as they sit on what looks like a bench in a park. Such bliss in their animated faces.
Who was she? Where is she now? Did my nonno love her?
On the back of the photo in a swirly inked cursive is: ‘One day we will be together in Australia, mio amore.’
I put the photo back into the envelope, then put that back in the album at the bottom of the bookshelf.
No, I cannot tell my mother what’s happened with Scott; it’ll only be the fruition of Nonna’s threats. As much as I’m feeling confused, hurt and angry with my mother, I don’t want her to face this further proof that she has failed me.
Has she failed me? Can I really think it’s all her fault?
I continue reading.
Ren sat on the edge of the bed this morning, head bowed, hands together, as if mourning the death of a part of me, the part of my heart that had died after you left, Nathan. There’s nothing I can say except to thank him. My deep love for Ren is so important to me. Always has been. That’s why I couldn’t let it go when you arrived, Nathan, and unintentionally tore into the surface of my life and then plummeted deep into my heart. Yet you couldn’t shake the depth of love I have for Ren. What did you do instead? In a way I’d never read or heard of before, you took up residence alongside us, and my heart grew to accommodate you.
People say that falling in love with someone else should tear us apart, or show you what you were missing in your relationship. I know that happens a lot. I’ve seen it in others. But maybe that doesn’t happen all the time. It only made Ren’s and my love for each other stronger because it meant we’ve had to really talk and connect from our real selves, not from the ‘should be’ and ‘should do’ selves. I remember the early days of your devastation, Ren, when I told you I loved someone else. I remember my devastation at the thought of losing you. Somehow we stuck together and here we are today.
I loved you both differently and completely. I didn’t go looking for you, Nathan. I didn’t need an affair or a diversion from marital maternal duties, as loving Ren and my children never felt like duty. You arrived and with you came a new blood vessel pumping more oxygen into my heart.
Memories of a film festival and that animation short: the one of the clown on the tightrope. I remember thinking that was me, perched, wobbling, going forward into a foggy future. But I was prepared to keep going into a future that we three would have to precariously balance and carve out as we went. The love you both gave me was worth every time I almost toppled, every time someone’s comment almost pushed me over the edge, every balancing act I learned to do.
I remember that short film. Mum and Zi El
ena took Stella, Leo and me to see it. Mum said she’d already seen it but wanted to share it with us. I thought it was funny; this clown, with an exaggerated, red-painted smile and sad blue-rimmed eyes, struggling to stay upright on a tightrope. At the end, you don’t even know where he’s heading as he disappears into a fog. Yet all the while he’s only a few feet above a footpath where ordinary people walk and talk, pointing up to laugh at him.
Mum watched the film with an intensity that made her body still and upright, and so did Leo. When the lights came up in the theatre and we filed out, I was stirring them. I felt uncomfortable, as if a little of what it would be like to be that lonely clown on a precarious tightrope had radiated into me off the screen. I also felt like my mum and little brother had understood and shared something I was unable to see. I tried the facetious approach, hoping to lighten the heaviness around me. ‘That was so annoying. What was it all about? On a tightrope, trying to get somewhere, not knowing where. And all he had to do was jump off and walk on the ground like everybody else!’
‘Yeah! But it was good to see.’ Stella grinned agreeably. Leo looked at us, at Mum, and then looked down as we made our way out of the theatre onto the footpath.
Zi Elena laughed too and said, ‘It did look like an awful lot of effort and anxiety for nothing.’ She glanced at my mum. ‘But I guess some people want more than just walking on a footpath like everyone else, girls.’
Mum shrugged as she looked around at the busy street and noisy traffic, everything metallic glaring in the wintry sun. She wrapped her jacket more closely around her to block out the chill wind and walked forward. ‘Some people don’t have any choice. They can’t walk on the path like everybody else, and if they try, their spirit will be sucked into the cracks in the concrete.’ And we all looked at the cracks in the footpath as we walked away from the theatre.
‘Oh, right’, I sneered, ‘so instead they head into the fog where they’ll probably fall off anyway. As if.’ Stella laughed. Zi Elena took her hand as if to quieten her and smiled at me, but in a troubled way. She looked at Mum, waiting.
Mum kept looking straight ahead as we walked forward against the wind. ‘Or they may see only one step ahead, and step by step, they create a new path others will follow. Who knows, way up ahead, the fog may clear.’
‘And if they fall, at least they’ve tried.’ Leo’s whispered voice arrived as if from around a corner. He was in fact cowering on the other side of Mum. Mum beamed at him, her hand sweeping gently through his curly hair, which was getting wilder in the wind.
Leo the Lion-hearted my parents call him, the wonder child, the girly child, maybe the gay child? I reach again for a photo album. It’s one of Leo’s and there again are the exciting birthdays and school events. I’ve always felt as if the umbilical cord that connected Mum and Leo was never cut, just sort of dried a little and became invisible. They’ve both always been kinda different, kinda on the outer compared to Zi Elena, Stella and me. There’s a photo of Leo when he was about two, his curly black hair just past his shoulders, his smile and eyes wide and bright. Yes, he could have been a girl.
My brother had longish hair for most of his early years. He was afraid of getting his hair cut. He’d scream as Mum tried to get him to sit in the chair in front of the mirror. One time the hairdresser, a thirty-something Italian paesano – all slick gelled hair and sculpted sideburns, although the tufts of chest hair and back hair crawling up out of his shirt collar said more about him than he probably wanted anyone to know – tried at first to comfort and cajole him and then became too impatient.
‘Oh stop screaming like that. You’re a boy. Only girls squeal and carry on like that.’
I remember a freeze-frame moment. I held my breath. Even then I knew this wasn’t the kind of thing you said in my mother’s hearing, especially in front of her children, even more especially to her children! Even Leo stopped crying, looking at the hairdresser in a kind of confusion, as if wondering if he really thought that was going to work with him or our mother?
Mum just picked up Leo, held him close, and with her other hand, gripped one of my own. Her eyes stayed locked on the hairdresser as she calmly and coldly said, ‘That was totally uncalled for. That sexist rubbish is not what my children need to hear. But thank you for making me realise there is absolutely no reason why my son should have his hair cut.’ And she walked out with us.
We never went back. And Leo’s hair stayed long, often referred to as his lion’s mane, and had only infrequent trims from my mother, to stop him going blind from peering through his fringe. It stayed long despite frequent tauntings at school, which led to my regular whingeing to my mum about how embarrassing it was for me to have a little brother who looked like a little sister. But neither of them seemed to care.
I close the album. Yep, my mother’s always defied any rule that has no good reason to exist. There’s an anger, just under her smiley cheeky surface, against a world that scrutinises and reduces, and has to do away with anything considered ‘different’. Sometimes she’d put it to a test in hilarious ways. But now I understand what was going on behind those games. They were a prisoner’s attempts at rebellion and sabotage. I go back to her book, to her other outlet. And as I read, I realise she narrowly escaped a more permanent exit.
The dream I had last night: to get a knife and slash myself in two. To split myself into two people so you could have one me and Ren could have one me. I actually got up in the dark of night, wandered to the kitchen in half-sleep with a plan that seemed so logical, so relieving. I got a carving knife from a drawer. I made my way back to bed, lay down and held the knife to my lower abdomen. I then sliced upward through the air towards my head, then back down again. Then I pierced my heart and sliced it in two. Then I lay back and felt a sinking feeling, of blood draining away and my life seeping out.
This morning, I woke up and there was Pina next to my bed, horrified, pointing at a carving knife on my bedside table.
‘I must’ve sleepwalked,’ she’d said that morning. But there was such bewilderment and fear in her dark-circled eyes as she stared and stared at the knife.
Why didn’t I ask questions about it, I now think. Because I was eleven and sleepwalking was a scary thing I didn’t want to think about? Because Dad came in, saw what Mum and I were both staring at, and gently turned me towards the door, saying, ‘Your toast’s ready, Pina. Go have breakfast with Leo. I’ll drive you to school.’ He shut the bedroom door and didn’t come out until we banged on it, telling them we’d be late for school. He came out, red-eyed and pale-faced despite the Southern Italian tan, and shut the door behind him, whispering, ‘Mum’s having a sleep-in. She’s still tired.’
‘I know,’ I declared, ever the smart one. ‘She was sleepwalking and got a knife. Was she trying to fight off robbers, Dad? Was that her nightmare?’
What if I’d come in to what might have been – my mother leaving the world that had robbed her?
When will I be able to walk into a video shop and see no more films I saw with you?
French Twist, Splendor, Paint Your Wagon, December Bride, Ordinary Decent Criminal, Bandits – where Cate Blanchett refuses to choose between Bruce Willis and Billy Bob Thornton. Pearl Harbour – where at the end the guys say they’ll figure out how to love the same woman but the death of one conveniently resolves that dilemma. For days I scripted and filmed various endings in my daydreams. When will we see films about loving two people that aren’t just about sex, but stuff monogamous people do too, like raising kids, figuring out finances and jobs, handling sick days and tired days.
Yes, all those videos sitting on my shelf that I watched to try and see something like the way I love. I can no longer watch many films or soapies, nor listen to music, without my commentary; a jarring buzz concurrently playing inside me as the illicit affairs, the torn-between-two lovers, the evil adulterers and the emotional tortures of being unfaithful are screened in gory and salacious detail on the screen, blared on the radio, displayed on adve
rtising that also titillates with the possibilities of extra-marital desires. I survey and scan, looking for signs, seeing what else there is despite what I’m forced to see. I rescript scenes and endings in my mind, other possibilities, the possibilities you, Ren and I made realities.
I found a funky trendy movie with a groovy soundtrack, Splendor, and Pina actually watched it with me. But the conversation between us never ventured into what we needed to talk about.
I find Splendor on her shelf. I did love it, Mum, I did! But I didn’t know what it meant to you.
‘What do you think of her loving both these guys, Pinucella?’ she asked as casually as she passed her homemade popcorn.
‘Well, they’re both hotties.’
A little later. ‘Are you enjoying this movie?’
‘The soundtrack’s cool. Love the outfits. Wish I could go to clubs like that. I wish I was eighteen already. Will you let me go to clubs like that?’
‘Yes, of course, but hopefully without you needing to do drugs and drink so much like that. But what about the story?’
‘Oh yeah.’
Mum tried a gentle prod with the bowl of popcorn. ‘What does that mean, “oh yeah”?’
‘Mum, shush, can we just watch it?’
And again a little later. ‘What do you think? Should she marry the guy who’s offering the white wedding and wealth for her baby, but who wants to control her and who she doesn’t love? Or should she go back to the two guys she does love, who love her for who she is?’
Love You Two Page 7