‘Mum, it’s a film. Stop analysing. Just watch it.’
‘But what do you think?’
‘It’s not real, Mum. I think nothing.’
She cried with smiles at the end when the three of them, plus cute Hollywood twin babies, had a happily-ever-after ending. ‘What did you think of her decision?’ Mum tried one more time, blinking tears away, grinning.
‘It’s a good ending. Glad she went back to them.’
She was almost delirious with relief. ‘Well, it’s just the beginning. I’d love to see a sequel of their lives together. Wouldn’t you, Pina? What it’s like to love two men and do so in a good relationship and raise healthy children who love their family even if others say it’s wrong?’
‘As if. You can’t love two people at the same time.’ At that point I got up and grabbed one last handful of popcorn. ‘Gotta go, Ma, catching up with Ro and Lisa.’
She hadn’t responded. That moment – what if she’d called me back? What if she had just said, ‘But maybe a few people can. I can and I do.’ What if I had just once stepped out of my ‘I’m a cool chick and not too interested in my Mum’s eccentricities’ script and actually asked her questions about what it meant to her?
Would I have wanted to know then, when even now, supposedly wiser with age, I don’t want to know? ‘Get real,’ I love saying to my parents when I think they’re tripping about something. Well, this is real, and I don’t want to get it. I don’t get it. The whole world I’ve known hasn’t ever got real with this kind of crap before. I go back in to another part of her book.
I read that the word homosexuality wasn’t even invented until just over a hundred years ago. But men had loved men, and women had loved women way before then. ‘The love that dare not speak its name,’ Oscar Wilde once called it. Slowly, with a lot of pain and hard work, that love has come to be spoken and with it gay people are more accepted and there are even gay marriages and gay families! To think gay people were once put into mental institutions and prisons – and still are in some places in this world. To think they were given electric shock therapy to ‘cure’ them.
I read there’s a word for when people love more than one person at a time, but it’s hardly been heard yet: polyamory. It’s the love that dare not speak its name now, I guess, though it’s always been around. I’ve read about so many lives lived this way in the past and today. It’s part of many religions and cultures, yes, it’s even in the Bible. Some refugees are coming to Australia with families like this, and they’re not legally recognised. Only one can become the legal wife. And what happens if you’re the child of a second wife? Of course, some of it is oppressive, sexist and forced on people, especially on women. But sometimes it’s out of sheer love and devotion. One day when I’m dead it’ll just be one of the many ways people can love and be in relationships. It’ll be as well known as the word homosexuality.
Mum loves reading. Despite busy shiftwork, two kids, a husband – and now I know there were two husbands to do the emotional work with – she always had books on her bedside table, and books in her overnight bag. Did she have her own little reading spaces at Nathan’s house?
I get up again, moving through the terrain of my home, remapping it with my mother’s words. I walk into the study, taking Mum’s writing book with me. My legs are steadier. The dull ache has subsided. I’m immersed in getting to know the landscape of my mother’s world, Gianna’s world, as it was lived in this house.
The study is a little room crammed with books, papers, a computer and printer. Most of the papers are Dad’s bank work and Leo’s and my school stuff. I’d always wanted my own study stuff in my room but the house and its rooms are small. So we shared this one big room, or spread our schoolwork between our bedrooms, kitchen table and study.
Mum uses the study the least, preferring to carry her books out into the sun or onto a warm sofa in the lounge, or lie reading in bed. Leo and I would often join her there, where we read together, or chatted about schoolwork. Leo still does it. Dad would come in too with hot chocolates, bowls of fruit, and squeeze onto the bed with his newspapers and banking spreadsheets. I’ve never really bothered to talk to Mum about what she reads or why she reads it. It’s like your parents’ lives are so dull, they’re just entities hovering transparently around your own busy and totally absorbing life.
Mum never asks for solitude although I know she likes it when she gets it. She’s happy to share, happy to have a corner; happy to be in her own large world inside her head while inside a book, even if her physical world is reduced to a sliver of bed and a corner of the study. You can talk, play music, squabble and fidget around her, and she’ll stay engrossed in whatever she’s reading. She’s also able to switch into you if you need her, and then switch back and forward effortlessly.
Now, for the first time, I linger over my mum’s shelf, her books and videos. I read the titles. It’s all there, openly, if I’d ever bothered. Nestled among them is my old school copy of yet another book she’d loved and I’d struggled with.
‘It’s so boring, Mum,’ I’d said to her as I contemplated another tedious English assignment on another tedious assigned English text. ‘All this wanky stuff about this nerd that Anne goes on and on about. Any little thing he did or she felt led to pages and pages of navel-gazing we now have to study. Why didn’t they just have a good bonk in their little world behind the wardrobe!’
Mum had looked at me for a while, with that pre-lecture stare of hers. ‘Pina, how can you be so dismissive of Anne Frank’s thoughts and fears and desires? Try to picture a time when a girl even thinking about what you can now so openly call “a bonk”, and so openly talk to your mother about, was taboo and liable to have you persecuted not only in the puritanical wider world but also within the trapped little world of your family. People are full of hate and violence towards you and your family because of your religion at a time when all you want to do is explore this exquisite feeling of love and sexual desire. And there’s no space to talk about these truths. There is just you and your diary.’
She’d touched Anne Frank’s face on my schoolbook cover. I’d actually taken a brief moment to notice that my mum and Anne Frank had the same black hair, same dark eyes, same depth and delight to their smiles. ‘I grew up kind of like that too, Pina. Zi Elena and I couldn’t talk to your nonna about anything like this. It was supposed to be so simple to be a good Italian girl. “Fa la brava, be a good girl, eh?” is all I heard and that was meant to tell us everything we needed to know. But as we got older and we were suddenly declared ready by Nonna to be put on the marriage market, other bits were added: “No sex till you’re married” and “Once you let a man touch you, you’re ruined. You need to stay innocent and let your husband teach you.” Then, as my wedding to your dad approached, none too soon for Nonna, who must’ve been straining under the stress of keeping two obviously amorous young people at arms’ length from each other: “Remember, from your first night, it is your duty to please your husband. Do what he needs. Men have sexual lusts you need to satisfy or else they look for it elsewhere or become violent and take it out on you and the children.”’
I’d been shocked and spluttered. ‘Jesus, how medieval! What century did Nonna think you were in?’
Mum had shrugged at that point, sighing. A wry smile trembled on her mouth as her finger traced the outline of Anne Frank’s smile. ‘My virginity was my biggest asset to fetch me a good husband, a good Italian boy. I was lucky it was your father, a beautiful, loving young man who also struggled with all those silly rules about young Italian studs meant to sow their wild oats before settling down. Your dad and I learned together before we got married, despite the guilt, secrecy and shame that we were doing something so wrong. I didn’t even tell my closest girlfriends or my sister that I was no longer a virgin. My pleasure was his pleasure, and his pleasure was mine.’ Mum’s eyes had misted over at her memory and for a while, I had the feeling she’d drifted away and forgotten I was there.
But I was there; I backed out of the study yelling, ‘Too much information!’
I never listened. I thought I knew it all about love, about sex. I thought I would know what to do. I thought I would be in control. No fear, no shame, no pressure. What happened today, Mum?
Anne Frank died and never did it. She left a diary behind about what she wanted to do, and all the questions no one ever answered for her. I did it and I feel as if I’ve died. And there are questions I never asked because it’s all so apparently said and all so supposedly known from every TV show, every film, magazine, video clip, porn site. Despite all this talk and knowing, I still got it wrong.
And you, Mum? You keep a writing book with all your questions. You’re doing it more than you’re supposed to – more than I want to think about because it makes me want to vomit – and you didn’t talk to me about this man who took you away from your family for a couple of nights every couple of weeks and who knows how many days. So how much truthful talking have you done?
I wipe my eyes and go back to her book.
On a balmy autumn night, the sky lit by needlepoints of starry suns and orange moon, faint scents of eucalyptus and steamy earth wafting down from the foothills, traffic noise wafting up from the main roads, I sit outside on the back verandah, and am transported to your apartment at Henley Beach, the sound of surf breaking over the sand, the slightly fishy salty sea smell. You and I on opposite sides of Adelaide, me on the edge of Little Italy, near the foothills, you an Aussie surrounded by Little Athens by the sea. But if you’re outside on your balcony now staring out to sea, we’ll be sharing the same moon and stars.
I can see the kitchen table where you did your marking and I read, and where we shared dinner and videos with people who knew who we really were, and who Ren and I were, and loved us anyway. Yes, they even kept our secrets, protected and supported us against others, including their own families and other friends.
From your apartment, I’d head off to pick up my beautiful children after school and take them to some of the after-school activities I so loved watching.
I’ll never walk into your apartment again. Sometimes, when the fear of being watched overwhelmed us, and all we wanted to do was be able to hold hands without feeling the stabs, real or imagined, from the eyes of spying rellies, we’d hibernate in your apartment. Reminded me always of my early days of going out with Ren, parking in a street a few blocks away from my house, sure not to be positioned under a streetlight, and always on the lookout for a rellie’s car driving by.
So I’ve left a big part of me in your apartment. Are your rooms haunted by the me that was left behind just as my heart-room echoes with the emptiness of your departure?
It’s almost a month since we spoke. A month of torture and turmoil. A month of slowly starting to wean myself off you.
If I email you, will you see me? That’s all, just see me so I can say something stupid but so real like, ‘I’m sorry. I will always love you. I hope you find a full-time partner, get married and have children, and enjoy easy happiness.’
I sit at my computer and again read over old emails where you called me ‘beautiful’, and then the nightmare silence. A whole month without words between us, without your name appearing on my screen or your voice and words on my mobile. Oh, how I’ve looked every day, any spare few minutes, to see if just maybe you’ll be there.
I switch on the computer, connect to the email system, and explore. I find a folder with Nathan’s name and an endless list of emails, regular connections except for that month she talks about in her book. I begin to read. The early days of meeting Nathan through mutual friends at a party and the hesitant revelations of something growing between them but neither wanting to ‘debase’ their feelings, each other and Dad by having a ‘humdrum affair’. Emails about Dad’s pain, her pain, Nathan’s pain. Then gradually, the emails tell of negotiations, trust, setting boundaries, ways of sustaining their love, and then later they become full of the everyday stuff that relationships are based on. Small talk, plans and schedules, dates and jokes, the endearments of love, the occasional arguments and misunderstandings, and the constant hints that it’s all very hard and supposedly very wrong, and yet it’s honest and negotiated and there’s too much love, joy and trust between the three of them to give it away. Until the month when it looks like they have given it all away before the emails tentatively and then passionately start up again, initiated by my mother.
And always, I read her lovey-dovey thoughts and remarks about Dad, and about Leo and me. Gushing mummy comments on things we’ve done and said that I’ve long since forgotten.
She really loves me.
She’s in rapture over my ‘butterflying’ from childhood to puberty, with my ‘energy and exuberance’. Then later, her worries that I think I’m ugly, that I’m walking around with my shoulders slumped to hide my breasts.
She’s relieved that I’m not ‘boy-crazy’. Then she frets that I think boys don’t find me attractive. Then she worries when I start going out with Scott.
She really loves me.
That’s too hard to think about now. I go back to her book to find out what happened to begin and end that month of silence between them.
Memories of those terrible last few hours together …
Easter Sunday night after I’ve done my doveres, I get away from my parents as soon as I can. I come and see you. But you’re distant. You want to be included in my family after so many years of being part of my family.
Torn, I’m always torn. Shredding you, slicing me, and slicing the lives of those who love me, for I cannot let them know what you are to me.
You walked away shaking your head. ‘No more. I can’t handle this any more.’
I grieve silently. Another silence heavy on me. Should I be relieved that now you’re gone I can be honest again? Now I can live without another life hovering like a fog around the edges, pumping its own life-blood through me. And yet, what I live now is the bigger dishonesty. A fog threatens to smother the very inside of me rather than the external edges. The blood bursts from your blocked chamber in my heart and spills into every facet of my life.
So I decide to email you after a month of silence and fog and spills. I steel myself, ready for nothing, ready for rejection. How do I write an email that tells you I just want a chance to say hi, to say I’m sorry, and ask if we can maybe write a future together as friends? So I try to sound friendly but cool, no pressure. I’d like to return your leather jacket and I’d like some of my things still in your apartment.
The arrow hovers over ‘send’. I feel like I’m going to break apart and before I break down, I click the mouse. The message is on its way to you. Will you ever open it? Will you trash it after skimming through it with a sneer?
I get out of my chair and get on with things, helping Ren cook dinner, helping Leo with his homework, ironing Pina’s jeans, cleaning the toilet while Ren does the washing – and every now and again, throughout the evening, with cups of tea and during TV commercial breaks, I check the Inbox.
Nothing.
I feel sweaty and chilly all at once, all evening.
Until I come back from the clothesline where I collected some dry towels and Ren’s standing at the door of the study beckoning me forward. The clothes basket still under my arm, I go towards him. He hugs me and looks towards the computer. I go in and drop the basket. There is your name. No subject title.
I’m shaking. My heart’s aching. I prepare myself for the worst.
Your message is short. I cannot squeeze any emotion or intent from it, but you have agreed to see me for ‘a short while’. What does that mean – five seconds for a quick exchange of goods? Five minutes? An hour? But it’s something, whatever it is.
I email back, agreeing to your time and place – our usual Greek café, Henley Beach Square, dusk. Now I have to wait a few more days. But wait I will, with no hopes. I expect nothing now and feel better that way. I’m prepared, my feelings numbed.
On the da
y I’m to see you again, I try to be bright, lucid, cool. But all I want to do is run to you. As I shop, work, pick the children up from school, I somehow stay in control. But every now and again through a chink in the veneer of armour, I remember I’ll be seeing you that evening, and that thought pounds me.
As the day settles into dusk, our favourite time of the day, my head aches. My eyes sting with tears I haven’t cried and will not allow myself to cry. I try to sleep for an hour while the children are playing outside, but every ten minutes I awake with anxiety and check the time. Ren calls from interstate, wishing he hadn’t been called away for work so suddenly, wishing he could be home to help me through this, but wishing me well, saying he knows it’ll be okay. Finally, at 5.45 pm, there is no more time. My mother will be coming to take care of the children.
I tidy my hair, redo my face, straighten my clothes. I find myself wondering if you’ll think I’ve aged. Will you notice the wrinkles, the bleary teary-eyed look, the shaking hands?
Almost time to leave and I’m wondering where Mum is when I get a call that she’s been trying to get out of bed but has come down with a flu and I’ll have to stay home. Anyway, why do I have to go out so much, she adds? Why don’t I just stay home and cook the children a decent meal?
But I can’t stay home tonight. And I can’t call my sister. She knows, she cares, she’s always liked you, but she and Rocco want to stay out of it because she doesn’t understand it, and doesn’t want to get involved in something that she thinks will eventually destroy everyone. I’ll have to take Pina and Leo with me. I rush out the back door, calling them in from their games, telling them to get ready; we’re going to the beach.
At Henley Beach, the children and I cross the street to the Square. I can see you sitting there outside the café, framed by inky blue sea, dusky blue sky and darkening green lawn. I keep myself numb and cheery. I want to make it easy for you and for me to take whatever steps are going to be taken.
Love You Two Page 8