Love You Two

by Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli

  ‘I don’t understand. He didn’t beat her up, he didn’t drink, he didn’t gamble,’ she reminds us again today, shaking her head in the bewilderment and confusion that has woven her a face of meshed wrinkles and sagging skin way before her time. ‘He put food on the table, he was a good father. Ma Dio, what more did she want?’

  Zi Caterina’s husband, Zio Luigi, did his awful best to keep the couple together. He disowned his daughter and threatened to knife her if she ever put foot in his house again – he even turned up at her doorstep in a drunken rage. Today he adds his usual explanation for all men’s woes in the world. ‘Women want too much these days. They don’t know their place. And the stupid laws in this country protect them. In my father’s day, a woman would’ve been found drowned in a well if she dared to dishonour her father like that.’

  His wife nods slowly, proud that she was such a good woman she escaped that fate. So after that diatribe, where do you begin to talk about emotional intimacy, sexual satisfaction or that some relationships have a use-by date as lovers and evolve into a friendship that is way more likely to last forever. Indeed, many of Nonna’s friends’ relationships rotted away like flowers left unwatered on tombstones.

  But at least they had relationships, a symbol of success! Not like these university-bred daughters, these women who have amazing careers, travel the world and have heaps of friends, but no husband, no baby! That’s how they see Franca. She drops off her mum, Zi Carmela, and being brought up a good respectful girl, she comes in to be subjected to the same malicious interrogation and advice disguised as sympathy and sweet intentions for a desperate spinster. I hate seeing her go through this. I admire the broad smile that stays fixed as she responds to shaking heads and sad hands wringing each other over her. But now I also wonder what her real world’s like, what keeps her smiling through this charade.

  Zi Carmela, Franca’s mother, a five-foot barrel of wrinkled animation, twists her neck to peer up to Zi Don and across to Wei Lee. She’d be making the same evaluation as so many others today: an Asian woman is better than no woman at all. Which reminds her of her daughter looming over her like excess baggage she can’t shed unless she deposits it somewhere appropriate, like in the house of a man. The fact that Franca has her own inner city, double-storey terrace house is more cause for mortification.

  ‘See?’ she says to Franca, her neck twisting up to her while a flabby arm waves towards Zi Don and Wei Lee. ‘And you? No husband, no children? What life you have, huh?’

  Franca keeps smiling broadly. ‘I did what you told me to do, Ma, followed your rules on how to catch a husband. You just didn’t do your job right.’ She then moves towards Mum and me. As Zi Carmela seeks commiseration from the other rellies, who of course smugly provide it, Franca mutters to my mother and Zi Elena, ‘Actually, I’m in the process of organising to have a baby with a gay friend.’ She glances across to her mother and the smile wavers. ‘Of course, it’ll mean having to commit Mum to an asylum with incurable Figura Disorder.’

  Zi Elena hugs her while Mum laughs, ‘You go for it, Frankie. Enough is enough.’

  Zi Caterina, my nonna and the others are still making quite a show of consoling Zi Carmela, with that sweet and sour mix of kindness, malice and superiority:

  ‘Her day will come, Carmela.’

  ‘A Dio, what can you do? If that’s not her destiny …’

  ‘Yes, if God, for whatever reason we cannot dare to want to know, has chosen to keep her alone all her life, what can you do?’

  ‘She was always such a good girl, not like some we will not name. I don’t understand why her fortuna hasn’t come along.’

  ‘Just think how desperate she must be, let’s not make her feel worse.’

  At a previous gathering, I’d heard Franca give my mum her theory of why her so-called fortuna hasn’t come along.

  ‘I was too good, Gianna. I stayed home, kept my mother’s house shiny with Mr Sheen, waiting for that shiny knight to come roaring in with a Ferrari and be dazzled by the gleam of clean sinks and toilets, get sexually high on the smell of furniture polish, and declare undying love for me, or at least while I could keep his house and kids in the same condition. But you know what? Those shiny knights were all out chasing the bad girls I wasn’t allowed to go out with.’

  So the afternoon wears on while my mother, father, Zi Don, Wei Lee and I listen to as much as we can take before wanting to say something, but finding ourselves gagged by Nonna’s don’t-you-dare stares. We find any excuse to go outside, to clean something in the kitchen, to disappear into the toilet. Anything not to be in the room where lives are being dissected on the dining table. We feel so relieved that Zi Elena’s loving patience, Zi Rocco’s rollicking humour, and Stella’s modest handling of the praise lavished on her are providing a buffer-zone for us.

  In the midst of this, Nonna bustles with panettone and espresso, tut-tutting in sympathy, agreeing with every recrimination against wild children and grandchildren, but refusing to talk about her own family. Maybe divorce is now so normal in its horror that it can be shared with an understandable and honourable hysteria. But having a bisexual son, and a non-divorcing two-man daughter, is way too much, particularly when some of these older peers might still be able to wipe away a few cerebral cobwebs and recall her own husband’s shame with ‘la Germanesa’.

  So Nonna keeps her family’s facade of redemption intact. She looks as if she’s about to faint when Zi Don, after catching Zi Elena’s eyes pleading for some time-out from saintliness, mutters to her, ‘Go get yourself some fresh air, Elenuccia,’ and proceeds to clear the table.

  ‘Please, please, the women will do this. My son has picked up bad habits in Melbourne, hey? Waya Lee wouldn’t want you to do the dishes, would you, Waya Lee?’ But before Wei Lee has a chance to reply, Nonna’s ushered her into the kitchen saying loudly enough for the guests in the dining room to hear, ‘Aren’t you wonderful wanting to clean up. Here’s the dishwashing liquid and the cloths, Waya Lee.’

  Zi Don dutifully returns to his seat, the returned good son, to be on display while those present convey some words of wisdom about his role. He smiles to the point where he can stretch his mouth no further and is about to say something precarious in that legal voice of his, when Nonna grabs his arm, urging him to rise.

  ‘Donato, go outside with the men. What you do here with the women?’ He gets up and leaves, because if he doesn’t, the force in his mother’s pushes will have him and his chair splayed over the floor.

  I head back into the kitchen and pick up a tea towel. Mum’s washing the latest round of coffee cups and cake plates while Wei Lee’s preparing the next round. Zi Elena comes back in, her pleasant face restored, and chats cheerily with Wei Lee while helping her.

  Through the kitchen window I see that Zi Don’s joined Dad, Leo, Nonno and the male rellies while Zi Rocco pours more of Nonno’s lethal homemade wine. The after-dinner leisure of Italian males while women scurry, tidy and reorganise the kitchen. It’s so unlike the reality in my home, or Zi Elena’s or Zi Don’s, but the old rules operate here.

  Zi Elena and Wei Lee head off to the lounge balancing trays stacked with slices of tiramisu and liqueur glasses of Strega. Mum looks out at the men from Nonna’s kitchen window now and again. I glance at her. She catches my eye and manages a forlorn smile.

  ‘Thank you for what you said before. It meant more than I will ever be able to say.’ She lowers her brimming eyes to the sudsy water in the sink. A steel roasting dish slips out of her hands and the water splashes over her dress. ‘But you won’t need to deal with it in future. I don’t think I’ll ever see him again.’ Her reddening hands begin to frantically scrub the dish with steel wool. Now and again she wipes at an eye with her arm.

  Wei Lee returns with half-empty trays and places a gentle hand on Mum’s shoulder. I stand next to her at the sink, not knowing what to say, but hoping she knows that my standing there is saying lots. Yes, it would be great to have a normal family in the future
, with Nat left behind in the messy past, but there’s something so sad about what’s been lost.

  Somehow the day draws to a close. We clean up the rounds of cups, plates and glasses. The rellies gradually leave, taking their woes and woeful faces with them, complaining of fat bellies aching with too much food, heads spinning from too much wine and liqueur, and caffeine jitters bound to keep them awake all night. Nonna takes their complaints as compliments.

  Nonno escapes again by falling asleep in the lounge room, waxy-faced, slumped lifeless into a sofa. Is it his way of going into other worlds beyond the wardrobe, where he meets up with his son, sees again the woman he loved, while the woman he was forced to love, who was forced to love him, keeps his wardrobe house in order?

  We bid Nonna goodbye but she barely acknowledges us. We hesitate, wondering if we should say something. Is there a way of picking up the heart-rending conversation that was underway before the rellies arrived, and steering it to a gentle resolution?

  But Nonna doesn’t descend back into sobs and hysteria. She puts on the demeanour of the hard-done-by martyr: distant, dignified, carrying the weight of everyone else’s sins on her shoulders. She has work to do. She’s put on a clean apron, rolled her sleeves up, removed the gold bracelet and necklet. The shiny black shoes have been replaced with her house-slippers. We’ve tried to leave her place so tidy she can just go to sleep after such an unnerving day, but even as we say goodbye, there’s a mop in one hand, a bucket of sudsy water in the other, a face set with martyred weariness and resigned anger. There are specks of dirt on bench tops, streaks of shoes and spots from heels on the floor, pots and pans rattling in cupboards because they haven’t been put away correctly, a toilet to clean after so many foreign bodies have been in it, two fridges full of leftovers to arrange. Nonna will find the dirt, the spill, the smell. She will scrub it, polish it, wipe away any smear or bacteria.

  As I sit in my parents’ car, I picture her after we’ve gone and she’s made the house immaculate again. She’ll take a long hot bath. Maybe there she’ll cry. Maybe she won’t. Maybe she’ll actually be proud of her strength against such evil. She’ll head off to bed as tomorrow is another day of chores and doveres. There are rellies and paesani to visit, those unable to make it to her place for her Christmas gathering. Maybe she feels she has something in common with these people who’ve experienced similar – even if misguided – struggles. Or maybe if she doesn’t front up, who knows if they’ll turn up to her son’s wedding next year. Of course there will be a wedding. She’ll start scheming and scheduling now as it might take a while to convince her son and that girl.

  She’ll visit the woman who took to bed after her husband hanged himself in the shed. His dreams disintegrated with his daughter’s divorce and her living in sin with a man half her age; with his son’s daring to arrive for a family wedding with his male partner. She’ll visit the old paesano in the nursing home, the one who doesn’t understand why the children he used to beat into obedience won’t care for him in his old age. She’ll visit the couple who somehow negotiated the strange ways in this new land and seemed to come through the other side without once becoming gossip fodder.

  I’m thinking all this as I sit in the back of my parents’ car, feeling closer to Leo, feeling like I know more about the two greying but youthful individuals in front of me than I ever would’ve thought possible. I keep thinking of how Nonna’s youthful vision and Nonno’s youthful voice have been lost. Constantly rearranging their interior landscapes to conform to the pressure of the outside world. Zi Don had talked about people cutting off their heels to fit Cinderella’s shoes. Maybe that’s what made Nonna ugly, slicing away at herself and Nonno in order to squeeze into society’s ill-fitting shoes. One thing I know as I watch the backs of my parents’ heads is that Nonna’s passed that on, the skill of self-sacrifice, self-flagellation, of tearing out your insides in order to fit. That’s one thing Nonna taught really well.

  We’d shut the front door to Nonna’s house behind us, feeling like we were abandoning them, but also feeling relief. What could we do with those two old people? Where could we begin to unravel the tangles there, the knots that have been ironed, polished, waxed, scrubbed into the very house itself over decades? Would death be the only going home they’d know now?

  Outside Nonna’s front door, Zi Elena had said, ‘We’re off to spend some time with Rock’s family,’ as Zi Rocco planted a kiss into her hair. Then she’d hugged everyone, her face tired but relieved, her eyes loving us totally.

  Mum had nodded, looking at the shut door. Zi Elena touched her arm. ‘It’s okay, Gianna. I’ll look in tomorrow morning and see how they are. I’ll call you if anything’s up. You guys go and chill now.’ She gave one last hug to Zi Don. ‘Hey you, I’ll call to arrange you and Wei Lee to come over before you leave tomorrow.’ And then she hugged Stella to her. I watched as Stella snuggled into Zi Elena while she spoke to me. ‘Welcome back, bella. You’ll be fine.’ She glanced at my mum. ‘We all will.’

  Christmas Day at Nonna’s was over for another year. But we knew that by the time it came round again, it would be very different.

  24

  At home on the borders

  I’M A STRANGER COMING HOME, the house feeling new yet oddly familiar as I follow Mum, Dad and Leo into it.

  The door to my bedroom is shut. I’m contemplating whether I’m ready to walk in when I hear Zi Don’s car pull up. He and Wei Lee will be staying over as there’s no way Nonna would allow them to sleep over at her place unless she can lock them into separate rooms.

  I drop my backpack and sports bag outside my door, still wondering if I should at least look in, get that first-time-back anxiety over with.

  Leo walks by, smiles at me, and goes into his own room. I follow and knock on his door. This is one of the few times I’ve actually gone in to his room, and the first time I haven’t announced my entry with some put-down about his Pokemon posters, or collection of Digimon figures on his shelf, or why his teddy bears are still snuggling on his bed.

  Leo smiles at me again. He used to smile at me like that a long time ago, but I began to return a grimace or snigger. He stopped smiling at me. Then he stopped looking at me. Now I smile back. ‘Hey, I just want to say I’m sorry for the stuff I let happen to you at school. It won’t be like that next year.’

  ‘It’s all good. I’m not gonna let it happen either. I’m giving up soccer. I’m really better at drama and art anyway. And I’m gonna report any bullying as soon as it happens. And I’m gonna hang out with guys who are my real friends, in the library where we read and play on the computers. I always liked that.’ He looks so strong, my little brother, Leo the Lion-hearted.

  ‘That’s so cool.’

  ‘But I’ll be busy with drama rehearsals. Mr Dopher called. He wants me to audition for the main part in the school production next year. Cool, hey?’ His excitement wavers a little and he looks seriously at me. ‘I gotta say sorry too. I heard what was happening that day – you know, you and Scott, in your room – but I was so angry with you, and my body was killing me, I just didn’t do anything.’

  ‘So we’re square. But never again for me too with any shithead guy.’

  We both wander outside to where we can hear the adults chatting. It’s like we all need to be together, like this, for the first time. They’re sitting on the back verandah overlooking our small overgrown garden, comforted and cushioned by the balminess of the night. We all raise a toast to Zi Don and Wei Lee, and begin to heal after such a day of rips and bleedings.

  This is a Christmas gathering, Narnian really, in my own boring backyard.

  In the soft light, I can just make out a spider web hanging between verandah posts. Life’s a web, not a grid, with silver threads shining if placed under a light, but invisible unless you look for them.

  Mum gets up to slice a watermelon and then sits on the verandah next to me. I would love her usual arm around me even as I flinch slightly at the thought. Is it still too s
oon? Will there always be a tension between us even as we know we love and need each other?

  Of course, her short flimsy frock rides up. But it doesn’t bother me so much now. I see those familiar stretchmarks on her thighs. I know she also has them on her tummy and hips. My mother’s not perfect. My mother’s never tried to be. I had come to hate her, by thinking she was pedestal-perfect. Then I’d hated her when I found out how human she really was.

  I reach out my forefinger and trace the line of one of the stretchmarks on Mum’s thigh. She looks down to my finger and then back up to me, smiling, teary, and does a proud kind of nod. Mum’s often told me those stretchmarks are symbols she’s proud of. They appeared when she was pregnant with me, and then stretched further with Leo. ‘Just like my heart stretched to make room to love you two, my skin and body stretched to carry you. They’re special symbols for me.’ Of course, I’d sneer and think it just another of my mother’s loony loser spins on things. While everyone’s mum and their daughters were reaching for creams, exercises and surgery to remove stretchmarks, my mum just revelled in them. Now I realise my mother’s capacity to love stretches way beyond what I could’ve imagined.

  Mum places a hand over mine on her stretch-marked thigh. ‘Pina, we told Leo after you left. I’m so sorry I never said anything. I guess you know why, now you know it all from my book.’

  Everyone’s silent around us, waiting. Leo’s looking at me, kind of worried, since he knows how narky his sister can get, but his eyes are also telling me he won’t let me get like that any more. I nod and shrug. ‘When did you know you could do this? Love like this?’

  Gianna, my mum, sighs. ‘The signs had always been there but I hadn’t known how to read them. Why had I never been able to have just one best friend at school but always had at least three?’ She laughs, but there’s weariness there. She looks across at Dad with that starry, dewy, in-love gaze of hers. ‘When I fell in love with that hunk there, I’d fallen in love with two men, one who’d become my husband and your father, and one who I’d never see again. It was so typical that they both asked me out for the first time on the same day, just minutes apart. I only chose your dad because he’d asked first, but it could easily have been the other guy … and much later when Nathan came in to my life, I realised it could easily have been both.