by Pat Rosier
All nature seems at work, Coleridge wrote.
“You'll be getting mud on your good work clothes,” says her mother.
“It's okay, these are the practically retired work clothes. Like me.” She didn't mean to say “like me,” not to her mother. There’s a huge empty space in front of her and she doesn’t want to think of the rest of Coleridge’s poem, doesn’t want to be
the sole unbusy thing,
for whom the banks of amaranths
bloom not.
After dinner her mother gets out a folder of papers. “I want to show you something,” she says.
“Don't be bothering her with that, Shirley,” says her father.
“You just mind your business, Keith, and go off and watch your sport.” Ann knows he hopes she will watch the Ranfurly Cup match with him, so she says, “I'll just have a look at this, Dad, and come and see the second half.” She has a lifetime’s practice at sharing herself between her parents.
Her mother empties the folder onto the dining table.
“Since my brother John died,” she says, “I got to thinking about family, and doing some family research. You know, there's so much on the internet, genealogy sites by the hundred.” Ann is looking at the pages in front of her, many of them empty forms. She looks up at her mother, a question on her face.
“I was keen at first, but when a Wilson marries a Williams, and neither family goes in for reusing first names,” Shirley says, “it's pretty hopeless trying to track down your ancestors. Anyway, I don’t think it’s my kind of thing. People can be so earnest and obsessive about finding their forebears, it's rather put me off.” She gathers up the papers. “What I have done, though, is made contact with our few living relatives overseas.”
“You and Dad could go on a trip, visit them all.” Ann is immediately excited at the idea of it, her parents on a big overseas trip … she could stay in their house …
“No, dear, Keith and I never got the habit of overseas travel. And he likes his routines, it's all I can do to get him to have a summer holiday. But I've emailed my little sister in New York, your Dad’s cousin in Washington and,” she pauses for a moment, “Rob’s boy in London. All three of them. Just today.”
“You emailed Evelyn? I thought you two weren’t speaking.”
“Not so much not speaking, dear, it’s just that we haven’t been in touch, not for … well, far too long. And all she did when John died was send those fancy flowers, not even a proper card. But—we are the only siblings left and it’s silly not to know about each other.”
Ann remembers her mother dismissing her sister, twenty years younger, as “too good for us no doubt” when she sent extravagant flowers instead of coming back for either of their parents’ funerals. Shirley and Evelyn had hardly known each other as children, Shirley had left the family home for Auckland and nursing training before Evelyn was born. Rob, Shirley’s twin, was at university in Dunedin. Rob was killed in a car accident, in 1979. Twelve-year-old Ann and her father had worried about Shirley together until, gradually, she came back to herself.
*
Ann won’t have a farewell from the university. She leaves her office as it is, taking only her jar of nuts and raisins. All the books and papers she wants have gone home with her a few at a time over the weeks and IT put her computer files on a couple of memory sticks, then cleared out the hard drive. All the student results she’s responsible for are on the university’s mainframe.
As she leaves the building she feels the air closing behind her, silently filling the space in the department that she has occupied for more than ten years. It’s three o'clock in the afternoon, she isn’t waiting around for the embarrassed stayers to drop by and say their farewells. Gonesville, that’s her, and in a few days she will, literally, leave everything behind her, at least for a while. It had been her mother’s idea.
Chapter 3
Evelyn Wilson, 47, and her four friends, meet on Mondays at a tapas bar near Chelsea Market. Evelyn arrived from New Zealand a long time ago, and after a few false starts found work as a freelance science editor. These days she thinks of herself as a New Yorker.
Jerry, 43, gay, from Minnesota, is a hairdresser. “Every stereotype of your gay man,” he says of himself.
Monica, 52, has married twice and matched that with divorces. She’s an administrator at New York Public Libraries.
April, 39, high-school teacher, identifies as bisexual, though she has so far had sex only with men. She was named April-Mae by her parents but won’t answer to that.
Jonathan, 50, is married, sort of, to his childhood sweetheart, Jessica, who he describes as “too busy being a lawyer to have kids, or a husband really,” He works in a bank, insists he is not “a banker”.
On most Mondays there are four or five of them at the bar by seven. This night there are only Evelyn, Monica and Jonathon at their usual table, with a bottle of Australian wine and two tapas plates: a spinach dip and Croquettas De Jamon Cerrano.
Evelyn: I’ve had an email from big sister Shirley asking if I’ll be around to host—her word—her daughter, in November.
Monica: Who in heaven’s name would come to New York in November?
Evelyn: My niece Ann, apparently.
Monica: And “host.” What’s that?
Evelyn: Have her stay with me at my place.
Monica: You’re kidding!
Evelyn: No kidding. It’s a New Zealand thing; when family come to town they stay with you.
Monica: Not in New York, they don’t. Not unless you’re loaded and live in a penthouse.
Evelyn: I don’t think Shirley would know that. I expect she’ll suggest leaving a key under the doormat.
Jonathan: We don’t have a penthouse and Jessica’s parents come and stay.
Monica: (Talking over Johathan.) Sheesh! Shall we get another plate? How about the patatas bravas? No, too much carb with the croquettes. Asparagus with shrimp?
Jonathan: Get the patatas as well.
Monica: When my brother and sister-in-law came I booked them in to a place in the next block that did breakfasts, so I wouldn’t see them until lunch. It didn’t work, they were at mine by ten.
Evelyn: There’s only one of Ann and she can have the fold-out bed. I’m not going into how things are done—or not—in New York with my sister.
The two plates arrive and Monica arranges the steaming asparagus and curling shrimps into three equal portions on the plate and the patatas into two, pushing the latter towards Jonathan and Evelyn and away from herself.
Jonathan (to Evelyn): I didn’t know you had a sister.
Monica: Yes you do, or you would if you took notice. Evelyn and the older sibling and running away from, what was it Evelyn, your “bible-banging presbyterian family.”
Evelyn: That was my parents, the siblings escaped before I was born.
Jonathan to Monica; What was that about taking notice?
Evelyn: What am I going to do with this niece?
Monica: (Stretching across the table for a forkful of patatas.) Make her get up so you can start work and send her out for the day.
Jonathon: I’ll help, especially if she’s hot. How old is she, anyway?
Evelyn: Umm, about six years younger than me.
Jonathan: Sharp! Just the right age, is she hot then?
Monica: What’s with “sharp”?
Jonathan: “Cool” isn’t cool any more.
Evelyn: How would I know if she’s hot, I haven’t seen her since she was, I dunno, five or something. Anyway, reading between my sister’s lines, I think she might be gay.
Jonathan: Bummer! Offer of help withdrawn.
Monica: Jeez, Jonnie, you’re so selfless. How’s Jessica?
Jonathan: Out lawyering. I get to control the remote.
Jonathan’s marriage is one of their regular topics, along with the pounds Monica has lost or gained, New York’s transport system, April’s incompetent boss, and recently, President Obama.
Later, at hom
e, Evelyn re-reads her sister’s email, trying to imagine Shirley at 67. She sees her mother in a print dress, with neat, permed hair and a cardigan she knitted herself; she should ask Shirley for a recent photo.
Lying in bed, she lets her mind drift, remembering herself as a lonely only child, her two brothers and sister distant grownups, off in their own lives. She remembers her mother writing letters to them on Sundays, one of the few things you were allowed to do on “God’s day”, other than go to church and pray and read the bible. People in the houses around them did other things on Sundays, like playing or mowing the lawn, which her father did on a Saturday. Even on Saturdays it was quiet and uneventful at their house. Evelyn loved school.
Being good all the time, when she wasn’t sure what was good and what wasn’t, because god could see everything, took a lot of effort. When she realised other kids at school didn’t worry about god watching them, the need to be careful when she was away from home gradually faded. Her parents were old, like other children’s grandparents. When her father became “a nelder” in the church her parents got even more serious and home even less interesting. She taught herself to not-listen while seeming to pay attention and learnt things by rote for Sunday School. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. This is the first and the great commandment; and the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” Mathew 22, verses 37 - 40. Jesus, she even remembers chapter and verse.
Another memory. She is six and she asks her mother if she can go to Moana’s two houses down the street, they’re having a party for her big brother’s twenty-first and did they have a party for John’s twenty-first because she can’t remember one and he’s her big brother and Moana said it would be fun with sausages and bread as well as a hangi and there’ll be singing later. Moana had said to Evelyn when they were walking home after school that she should ask her mother if she could come and her mother and father could come too if they wanted because Moana’s father had said they’d better invite the whole bloody street so there wouldn’t be complaints about the noise.
“You weren’t born when your older brother turned twenty-one,” says her mother and looks worried and Evelyn knows she won’t be allowed to go to the party no matter how much she wants to and then notices her father in the doorway.
“I want to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’,” she says to her father and he raises his hand, and she cringes, and hears an intake of breath from her mother, and the world stops for a moment.
“The devil is at his work” he says in his most awful voice, and turns away. “Depraved heathens.” He says “depraved” often and something stops her asking what it means, though she does know about heathens, who don’t believe in God and Jesus Christ. She wants to go to the party even more and knows it’s hopeless. As she walks away she hears her father shouting to her mother and practises not-listening.
Now that her father is so important in the church he uses that awful voice more often. When he’s not angry he tells her to say her prayers, and pats her on the head and calls her child if she asks questions, and answers them with verses from the bible. “Honour thy father and thy mother.”
The rest of that afternoon and night is a blur, with noise from Moana’s house of people talking and laughing and music and from her father getting angrier and angrier and her mother trying to soothe him and him ringing up people and the police coming to their house and saying things to her father that make him even angrier and eventually she goes to sleep feeling sad because it sounds as though there is a lot of fun going on at Moana’s house and she knows her parents will never let her play with Moana again.
The Abba wars confirm Evelyn’s suspicion that she’s a heathen. She’s in the resistance, operating underground. Girls at school sing the songs and practise the dance moves and she learns them, without at first knowing what Abba look like. When she sees the magazines with Abba pictures and stories that other girls have, she willingly takes up her father’s directive that she should learn some self-reliance by delivering papers after school. She is in love with Abba, the whole group, and their fantabulous clothes. All the money from the papers has to go into her bank account, the one they started for her at primary school, except for—she can’t remember how much—that her mother thought she spent on sweets and soft drinks.
Big Brother John, or maybe Robbie, sent her a transistor radio for her 13th birthday. It had headphones. For one dreadful moment she thinks her father might take it off her. All the best radio stations play Abba, and a whole lot of other music, but Abba is her true passion. Her mother finds one of the magazines under her mattress and makes her kneel down and pray about it. Evelyn pretends to be contrite and keeps the magazines in her school bag, giving each one away as she buys another. Really, she wants to keep them all, have a collection to look back on but there aren’t any hiding places in their house. The radio sits all innocent-looking on her chest-of-drawers during the day, carefully tuned to the classical music station her mother sometimes listens to.
The worst day is when she is walking home from school with some other girls and forgets to look out and her father sees them, singing and dancing Abba songs. When she gets in the house he’s waiting for her and before she realises he’s hit the side of her face with his open hand. She cries out, from shock, and at the ringing noise in her ear. Then her mother is there, hustling her into her room. Later she hears noises, groaning noises coming from her parents’ room and when she asks her mother if her father was hurt, her mother says he was very, very sorry he had hit her, he had promised, if she had another child, he would never raise his hand to it and up to now he hasn’t, not until today. Then her mother stops talking and puts a hand over her mouth as if to stuff the words back in and Evelyn feels awful. But unrepentant. She can still remember the word unrepentant coming into her head, and knowing that meant she wasn’t sorry about Abba, or dancing in the street with her friends.
Later, she doesn’t remember how much later, maybe a few days, she is in her room and the door is open, her mother makes her to leave it open while she does her homework, and she hears her parents talking and something in their voices makes her creep to the door and listen.
Her father is saying that he wouldn’t hit Evelyn again, he promises, he truly repents, he asks her forgiveness, as well as God’s for breaking his promise to never chastise her in the way he had the older ones. Her mother’s voice is too low, Evelyn can’t hear her words. Then her father again, “How have we sinned against you, O Lord, to have brought into your world four children. Four! And not a speck of grace among them.”
Chapter 4
Shirley opts to say goodbye at home. Ann and her father drive to the lawyer’s office where they sign the papers that authorise him to sell her share of the house, and then to the airport. The last thing Ann sees before she heads into aeroplane-world is her father, waving the brown folder from the lawyer’s.
When she finally lands in New York, Ann’s has been in transit for over thirty hours. The bus from J.F.Kennedy airport into Manhattan takes an age, more stop than go in an endless stream of traffic. Ann’s first views of the city register only dilapidated buildings and rusty cars in the fading light.
At the bus station she spots a card with ANN WILLIAMS on it waving over the heads of the crowd. Ann is so relieved and grateful that she doesn’t have to manage a taxi in her disoriented state, she almost cries as she burbles her thanks to Evelyn. Texting from the airport had been inspired. Thank you, mother dear, for such thorough information.
“You look terrible.” Evelyn is blunt. Ann is surprised at how worn she looks, she’s always thought of her aunt as young. “You think she’d have made one trip back over the years, the money she makes in New York,” her mother had said. She’d also said, “It was years before I could admit, even to myself, that I was embarrassed at my mother having a late baby. Not that anyone would take any notice of a new baby at forty-four these
days.”
As a young child, Ann had wished her grandparents and Aunt Evelyn, who could have been more like a cousin, lived nearer; Whangarei was thought by Shirley and Keith to be too far to go for holidays. As an adult, Ann realised her mother, her easy-going, amenable mother, didn’t get on with her own parents, grimly ultra-conservative Calvinistic Presbyterians.
“I just don’t get people who prefer their God to their children,” her father had said once.
Evelyn is brisk too, clipped and business-like with the taxi driver, handling the fare with an aplomb Ann wants. Her hair must be dyed, no natural hair was ever that black on a woman of nearly fifty. With clothes in a dark, murky colour, not brown or blue or green, but some mixture of these, highish heels, a swishing skirt and an elegant shoulder bag, she looks just like Ann’s idea of a New Yorker.
"You must be shattered from all that traveling.” Evelyn says as she unlocks the street door. “I've finished work, so you can go to bed if you want.” That doesn't make sense, but Ann is beyond sense. “Shirley thinks I'm much flasher than I am,” she adds once they are in the flat. “I don't care what you say to her about my life. Ruin her idea of embarrassingly younger sister made good if you want.” Now is not the time to try and deal with any of that. Evelyn offers her a sleeping pill. With her mind set to say no thanks, Ann hears herself accept. Evelyn asks if she'd like to go with herself and her gay theatre-buddy to an off-Broadway play the following night.
“Yes! Anything!”
Giving in to jet lag is not an option, as Ann has to stay out all day while Evelyn works at home. The fold-out bed is in the living room that is also Evelyn's office and what there is of a dining room. The kitchen is a cubbyhole off one corner, Evelyn's own bedroom’s not much more than a double-bed-sized box, and the shower and toilet (“bathroom” Ann would have to get used to) are a plumbed cupboard. Both televisions are attached to the wall, one in the main room, another in Evelyn’s bedroom.
New York—Manhattan, that is—is intense. Tall, fast-moving, crowded, loud. Around Times Square huge, frenetic, brightly-lit advertising shouts at Ann’s eyes, covering the whole side of buildings, screaming for attention, largely ignored by the dwarfed people hurrying around below.