by Helen Garner
For my work, on tram stops, in planes, I’m not afraid to question any stranger. But I never sat my mother down and pressed her about the past, her life before me, before our father.
One evening she and Dad and I came out of a restaurant. The street was empty of traffic for a mile in each direction. I stepped confidently off the kerb but she seized the tail of my jacket and pulled me back. ‘We’ll cross at the lights. I’m a very. Law-abiding. Person.’
My mother was good at sewing. When I was five or so she made me a pair of pyjamas on her Singer machine. I refused to wear them because they had frills on the bottom. She pleaded with me. She told me that if I wore the pyjamas, fairies would come and they would like me because of the frills. I did not care about the fairies. Even at that age I sensed the guilty power my refusal gave me.
It seemed to me, as a child, that our mother was hopeless at giving birthday parties. The cakes she made weren’t right. The decorations and games somehow missed the mark. Other kids’ mothers knew how to do a party right but Mum didn’t. Instead of her plain cupcakes with icing, I secretly thought, she should have made those cakes with whipped cream and little tilted wings on top that other girls’ mothers presented. It was a very strong sense I had, that there was something she did not get. All my adult life I despised myself for my disloyalty. It did not comfort me to learn that all children felt their mothers to be socially lacking in some crucial way. But one day when she was old and we were talking about motherhood, she said with a casual little laugh, ‘I was never any good at giving kids’ parties. I somehow never had the knack.’
She used to wear hats that pained me. Shy little round beige felt hats with narrow brims. Perhaps one was green. And she stood with her feet close together, in sensible shoes.
Oh, if only she would walk in here now.
She must have been only in her late thirties when she developed a gum disease and had to have all her teeth extracted. If she had gone to a Melbourne dentist, instead of remaining loyal to the doddery old fellow who treated our family in Geelong, a less drastic treatment might have been found. Not only did he pull out all her teeth, he whacked the false ones in over her bleeding gums. She came home and sat by the fire, hunched in her dressing-gown, eyes down, holding a hanky to her mouth. We did not know how to comfort her. We tiptoed around her, whispering, going about our business. Thirty years later, at home on my own one night, I saw on SBS a movie called Germany, Pale Mother in which a woman in wartime had all her teeth removed as a cure for her neurasthenia. I sat breathless on the couch while the dentist in his white coat yanked out her teeth and dropped them one by one with a clang into a metal dish.
My sax-playing sister, a professional, came over last winter with her ukulele and a Johnny Cash CD. She sings in the eighty-voice Melbourne Mass Gospel Choir, but is highly sceptical of all things religious. She wanted me to listen to ‘Wayfaring Stranger’. All I knew was that it is an old folk song of weariness, of sin; of the longing to cross over Jordan.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘It’s only got a couple of chords. We can learn it in five minutes.’
I got my uke down off the shelf. We tuned up. Yes, it was easy, the music part.
‘Listen to that harmonium-playing,’ she said. ‘It’s exemplary.’
But the lyrics.
I know dark clouds will gather round me,
I know my way is hard and steep.
But beauteous fields arise before me,
Where God’s redeemed their vigils keep.
I’m going there to see my mother.
She said she’d meet me when I come.
I’m just going over Jordan.
I’m just going over home.
I said nothing, just worked at getting the strum right. That night, after she’d left, I played along with Johnny Cash for a long time. I could hardly get the words out, but his voice, weary and cracked, gave the song a majesty that still welcomed the humble chords of a ukulele.
My mother was a natural athlete, neat, small and graceful. I was hopeless at sport of any kind. All I wanted to do was read and write. At fourteen I got my first typewriter, my grandmother’s reconditioned Smith Corona portable. Mum asked me to type out the results of the Point Lonsdale Golf Club ladies’ tournament, to be reported in the Geelong Advertiser. Perhaps she was trying to interest me in what she cared about, or was simply looking for something we could do together. At the time I took it at face value: my first typing job. We toiled together at the kitchen table after tea. She dictated, and I clattered away at my beautiful oil-scented machine, on the quarto paper of which we had bought a ream at Griffiths Bookstore. She did not lose her temper at my mistakes. I felt important and useful. We were pleased with each other when the job was done. Two mornings later we stood shoulder to shoulder, looking down proudly at the newspaper’s inky columns.
I must have been about twelve when the insight came to me that my mother’s entire life was divided into compartments. None of them was any longer than the number of hours between one meal and the next. She was on a short leash. I don’t recall thinking that this would be my fate, or resolving to avoid it. All I remember is the picture of her life, and the speechless desolation that filled me.
Mrs Thatcher has told one of her interviewers that she had nothing to say to her mother after she reached the age of fifteen. Such a sad, blunt confession it seems, and yet not a few of us could make it. The world moves on so fast, and we lose all chance of being the women our mothers were; we lose all understanding of what shaped them.
Hilary Mantel
The quietly mighty Japanese film director Yasujiro Ozu tells story after story of adult children breaking away from their parents. His characters rarely cry, or raise their voices. Their emotions are expressed in tiny signs and changes of position. A father looks down at his glass. A mother folds her hands, or draws a handkerchief from her sleeve. These subtle movements call up in me surges of excruciating sympathy for my parents, for the hurt, helpless, angry love they must have felt as they watched me smash my way out of their protection.
In Dad’s house I found a little photo of him and Mum in their twenties, sitting on the front step of their first house. Between them lay a long-eared black dog, a spaniel. Dad said his name was Ned. I did not remember our ever having had a pet. I asked if the dog had died before I was born. ‘Ah no. I had to get rid of him. Mum wouldn’t let him inside. Because of her brand-new mushroom-pink carpet.’ He laughed, and shrugged. ‘I put an ad in the paper. A lady came round and took him. She tied his lead to the carrier of her bike and pedalled away. I thought he might have looked back, but he never even turned his head.’
A crime novelist spoke at a conference about the unsuitability of his usual sardonic tone for the war story he was trying to write, ‘about young men with their stomachs torn open who cry all night for their mothers and then die’. An old man told me, after he had had open-heart surgery, that he and a ward full of other men his age woke in the dark from hideous nightmares, screaming for their mothers. I have never read or heard of a woman in extremis who called for her mother. It is not possible for me to imagine such a thing. Still, I did hear about a woman of my age who had died in a distant part of the country. Her parents did not go to her funeral. I asked my mother, ‘Would you go to my funeral, if I died far away?’ She uttered a sharp pant of disbelief. ‘If you died in the Arctic Circle I’d make m’ way there.’
On my pantry shelf stands a tall storage jar that I salvaged from Dad’s kitchen when we sold his house. It survived the successive demolitions of my mother’s households and, I suspect, of her mind. She has labelled it, in her large, clear hand: Sultanas. Then she has crossed out Sultanas and replaced it with Currants. Then she has crossed out Currants and restored Sultanas. The jar, when I found it, was empty.
Her ghost is in my body. I have her long narrow feet with low arches. I have her hollow bones, her hysterectomy, her fading eyebrows, her fine grey-brown hair that resists all attempts at drama. My movements are
hers when, on a summer morning, I close up the house against the coming scorcher, or in the evening whisk the dry clothes off the line in weightless armfuls that conceal my face.
In the intermission at Shane Warne: The Musical two smiling strangers approached me. The man introduced himself and his wife. Aside from our parents’ funerals, I had not seen him since we were children.
‘I knew you straightaway,’ he said, ‘from the other side of the room. You stand exactly like your mother.’
In my forties, when I lived in Chippendale, I used to walk to work across the big gardens of Sydney University. I walked fast, thinking my thoughts. One morning a young woman passed me, going the other way. She was wearing an op-shop blouse from the 1940s, striped, with shoulder pads and tiny pearl buttons. At the sight of it a bolt of ecstasy went through me, an atavistic bliss so powerful that its roots could only have been in early childhood. I wrote my mother a letter. Did she ever have a stripy blouse, rather floppy, when I was little?
A week later came a curly edged black-and-white photo. The date pencilled on the back was 1943. A woman in her early twenties stands in a bare backyard, squinting in an unposed way that raises her cheeks and bares her teeth. Her hair is permed and pinned in a victory roll. On her flexed left arm sits a wide-browed, unsmiling baby. The child’s right cheek and left hand lean against the stripes of the woman’s rayon blouse.
The war is not yet over. Her brother is alive. I am six months old. I am still an only child. She is carrying me in her arms. She is strong enough to bear my weight with ease. I trust her. She is my mother, and I am content to rest my head upon her breast.
2013
Before Whatever Else Happens
DIARY 3
A MAN came to install a shutter on my kitchen window. While he worked, Ambrose wandered in to tell me about a disappointing experience with his schoolmate Hazel, a very spirited little girl, who had come over yesterday to play. ‘I tried to kiss her on the trampoline, I tried to hug her, and I tried to dance with her. But she didn’t want to be kissed. She didn’t want to be hugged. And she didn’t want to be danced with.’ The shutter bloke downed tools and listened with full attention. ‘What grade are you in?’ ‘Grade two.’ The man had a good look at Ambrose, paused, and said quietly, ‘Wait a while. That’ll change.’
Out walking early I spotted a magpie’s head over the parapet of a garage. Wind ruffled a feather. I thought, ‘That maggie’s going to swoop me.’ Three seconds later the air stirred above me and a force slashed past my left ear. I let out a screech and waved both arms. Again it came at me, from behind: the hiss of plumage, the cool rush of air past my cheek.
Every day I work on the edit of my book. I slog away, shifting chunks of material and moving them back, eating my salad in a daze, wondering if the linking passages I’ve written are leading me up a garden path, or are sentimental, or violate some unarticulated moral and technical code I’ve signed up to and feel trapped in or obliged to. The sheer bloody labour of writing. No one but another writer understands it—the heaving about of great boulders into a stable arrangement so that you can bound up them and plant your little flag at the very top.
I keep noticing in the shelf beside my bed the copy of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, a reminder of the wakeful nights I had while I was working on my book. The emperor’s thoughts were not much use to me. The Book of Job was more comforting, or Thomas Wyatt: ‘I scarce may write, my paper is so wet.’
On the train a dark-haired young man in a dirty navy-blue boiler suit and work boots sat beside me. He was holding up a tiny book at eye level, chanting and singing in a very soft voice. It sounded like Arabic, though he didn’t seem to be turning the little pages backwards. He was entirely absorbed in his prayers, if that’s what they were. I wished I could murmur a psalm with that sort of oblivious devotion.
My friend and I came out of South Pacific and strode down into Parliament Station in the foolishly lighthearted mood that a musical can induce. A man came stumbling towards us along the tiled concourse, yelling and wailing—barefoot, barelegged, swollen-faced, holding up his pants with both hands, like Poor Tom in King Lear. Four tall young policemen were clustering inside the ticket barriers through which he must have been ejected. We swiped our cards and passed through, close to the cops. They were standing in a group, facing each other, half-smiling with a strange awkwardness. One of them, dark and thin and very young, looked shaken by the man’s helpless craziness, or perhaps by something he and his fellow officers had done before we got there.
To the NGV on St Kilda Road to see a show called ‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’. Dürers, manically detailed and phantasmagorical—tall spires thrusting towards a calm sky through foliage that crouched against a cliff; young lovers surprised by a Grim Reaper behind a tree; a knight clanking past a grave out of which clambered a skeleton. In the dim gallery the woodcuts were exquisite, but fanatical. When I emerged on to the street the world looked frightening and brutal. On the tram a deadbeat with a loud, grating voice praised a little girl’s beauty. ‘You’re gorgeous, you are! Children!’ he croaked to her shrinking mother. ‘They’re a joy, aren’t they!’ He barged off, cursing the driver, shoving through the crowd. I walked into the house and found the two boys bowed over the computer. I came up behind them on velvet feet, prepared to cut short some monstrous orgy of mayhem. They were intricately manipulating the long red tongue of a frog to catch flies on a lilypad.
The boys came to stay the night with me. After dinner I sat on the toilet lid and watched them in the bath: up to their armpits in pale greenish water, talking softly and playing with face washers, wrapping them round their legs in complex bandage shapes. Amby crouched on knees and elbows and I poured bucket after bucket of warm water over his back. Ted, the lofty philosopher, declined my offer, then crept closer and closer until his back and Amby’s were touching: ‘What about mine?’ Soon they were in bed and the house was orderly. The dog lay curled on his pallet outside the back door. A quarter moon blazed very high in an endless warm sky.
Werner Herzog’s documentary about American prisoners on death row—men found guilty of randomly gruesome crimes which, under the filmmaker’s unflinching scrutiny, are suddenly the least interesting things about them. Herzog’s Bavarian accent, his almost perfect colloquial American English. To interview his subjects he shoots them from crown of head to hips. After they finish talking he lets long silences fall, but keeps the camera on them, keeps and keeps it on them. Some can tolerate it. Others endure it. Others again lower their eyes, or turn aside. Some go to pieces and start to weep.
In Newcastle we had breakfast in a café right on the foreshore at Merewether beach. There was a mild offshore breeze. Great swells bulged and toppled; tiny figures cut across their faces and disappeared in boiling foam. One tousle-haired little teenage surfer called to his friend as they ran down the steps to the sand, ‘Hey, Zephyr!’ We laughed, thinking he must have hippie parents, but it was more likely short for Zephaniah. What the hell is this fashion for Old Testament boys’ names? Regret will come later, as with grandiloquent verbal tattoos.
At dinner we play a game of inventing movie ratings. PGF: Parental Guidance Forbidden. TMK: Too Much Kissing. POE: Plenty of Explosions. TSFK: Too Sad For Kids. Ted asks a riddle he says he’s just made up: ‘What do you call a graveyard that’s been cut exactly in half? A symmetry.’
Hand-lettered sign in public toilets, Ararat: ‘If you’re about to use these toilet facilities, we apologise in advance, we know they’re not the best.’
We drive down to Queenscliff to inspect my parents’ graves, which other family members have recently discovered to be looking neglected and unloved, their black lettering faded almost to vanishing point. We enter the bush cemetery expecting a desolate scene, but in fact, among the larger, squarer, darker graves, our parents’ pale, curved little vertical headstones, side by side, look modest and rather elegant. From behind they resemble the shoulders of a couple sitting in a theatre waitin
g for the show to start.
Toni Morrison on what her children needed from her as a single mother: ‘One, they needed me to be competent. Two, they wanted me to have a sense of humour. And three, they wanted me to be an adult.’
I reckon I scored all right on one and two. Three, not so much. Back then. But there she goes across the yard, my daughter. With her light firm step.
A teenager on the 57 tram offers his mate some advice about women.
‘Don’t give ’em too much attention! They take advantage! Just ’cause you root ’em they think you’re gonna go out with ’em!’
Ted shows me his school composition, a rewrite of Snow White from the point of view of the dwarves: ‘So you think we liked Snow White? You are completely WRONG.’
Recovering from pneumonia I spend an afternoon on the couch with Ambrose, watching Adventure Time. We laugh, I doze, I wake and doze and laugh again. A cold, dark day. Towards evening I glance out the window at the sodden yard.
H: ‘Oh! The wind blew!’
A: (in a cynical tone) ‘What’s so cool about wind blowing?’
H: ‘What’s so NOT cool about wind blowing, smartarse?’
Home, sobered by the documentary about the wild life and early death of Amy Winehouse, we sit down to dinner. Before we can reach for our forks my granddaughter says in a low voice, ‘Could we have a moment’s silence? For Amy?’ Later, while I wash the pans and serving dishes, she and her mother sit on the couch to sort and fold a huge mound of dry laundry. They watch ‘100 Top Hits from the ’90s’, murmuring together about the bands. Once or twice they laugh. Their swift, neat movements, their easy companionship.