by Liz Byrski
‘Yuk! Gross!’ Caro said with the sort of self-righteousness that implied her mother had not managed her pregnancies as efficiently as she herself was doing. Fran stared at her daughter, and wondered when Caro was going to stop behaving like a teenager and act her age.
‘Pregnancies don’t always go according to plan,’ she said, quietly turning back to the receipts.
‘Mine will,’ Caro said with irritating smugness. ‘Mine will be a textbook pregnancy and delivery, Mike’s convinced of that.’
Mike would certainly expect the pregnancy to go by the book, Fran thought, staring at a receipt for $45 from the local bookshop and wondering if she’d actually read whatever book it was she’d bought. Recently emerged from medical school, Mike was only a few months into an internship in emergency. Fran, who was very fond of Mike but irritated by his belief that the clinical trial was a metaphor for life itself, secretly thought that a few months in emergency, closely followed by fatherhood, might be just what he needed to help him come to terms with the unutterable chaos and unpredictability of human life.
‘How was your lunch the other day?’ Caro asked, getting up and wandering to the kitchen to put the kettle on. ‘The old girls’ reunion?’
Fran took off her glasses, abandoning the tax return. ‘Lovely, actually, just like old times. I’m thinking of organising another lunch, two weeks on Sunday. It’s Mother’s Day, so I’ll ask Bonnie and her mother, and Sylvia and Colin. Their daughter’s in England so she won’t be around for it. Then there’s you and Mike, obviously, and Granny Lila.’
Caro shook her head, unable to speak through a blueberry muffin. ‘Sorry, Mum,’ she mumbled thickly after a pause, ‘we won’t be here then. You won’t mind, will you? It’s Mike’s weekend off so we’re going for a luxury weekend getaway. It’s a surprise, somewhere gorgeous. He says I have to be made a fuss of now I’m going to be a mother.’ She scooped coffee into the plunger, tilting her head to one side. ‘After all, we’ve never really done Mother’s Day, have we!’
It was a statement not a question, which was fortunate. Had it required an answer Fran would have been hard pressed not to point out that not doing Mother’s Day had not been her choice, simply a default situation created largely by Caro herself.
‘Anyway,’ Caro said, handing her mother a mug of coffee, ‘David’ll be here, so at least you’ll have one of us around.’
‘David?’
‘Yes, he’ll be back Tuesday, won’t he?’
‘He hasn’t said anything to me,’ Fran said. ‘I haven’t heard from him for a few weeks now.’
Caro flushed and clapped her hand across her mouth. ‘Oh my god! I forgot to tell you.’ She put her cup down. ‘He phoned a couple of weeks ago. He’d rung here but you were out so he didn’t bother leaving a message, just rang me instead and asked me to tell you he’d be home on the third. He’s sick of Qatar so he’s coming home for a while. Then he’s got something up in Japan starting … oh, I can’t remember when. Shit, Mum, I’m really sorry. Being pregnant is supposed to make you forgetful, isn’t it? Well, there you are!’
Fran was torn between wanting to smack Caro, and delight at the prospect of seeing her son. ‘So where’s he staying?’
Caro looked surprised. ‘Here, of course.’
‘Here?’
‘Yes, with you, you are his mother. He said to let him know if it wasn’t okay, but I knew it would be, so I said not to worry, it would be fine, it’s just that, whoops, I forgot to tell you.’
Fran sat on the deck contemplating the fading light and wondering where she had failed. Was it her fault for leaving Tony? Caro was eleven at the time – maybe it was the divorce that had made her so self-centred, caused a sort of arrested development. Pregnancy might be a godsend; at last, perhaps, she would start to behave like someone of twenty-eight.
The job probably didn’t help. The record company where Caro worked seemed full of fifty-year-old men who all dressed and behaved like teenagers. Fran thought them pathetic, with their paunches bulging over tight jeans, four-letter words on their t-shirts, and their thinning grey hair tied back in straggly ponytails. They favoured motorbikes by day and white stretch limos by night, when they dressed either all in black, or in white suits with black shirts. It was rather sad, Fran thought, to see them attempting to cling so desperately and unsuccessfully to youth. Caro hardly stood a chance of growing up as long as she worked in that environment.
When Caro left, Fran phoned David. He was indeed due back in three days’ time and was mightily uncomfortable that this was the first she had heard of it.
‘I should’ve called again and spoken to you,’ he said. ‘After all, I know what she’s like. Sorry, Mum, is it okay if I stay with you for a while?’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘It’ll be lovely, but now that I know I’ll clear the stack of old files and stuff out of your room. I’ve been using it for storage.’
‘Great, thanks. I’m going up to Sydney for a job interview on the tenth so I might stay for the weekend and catch up with a few people.’
So much for having David around on Mother’s Day. Out there in Qatar he wouldn’t have any idea of the date, anyhow.
Fran felt her spirits drop. It hit her from time to time, this feeling of being entirely incidental in her children’s lives. It was, she supposed, just the way things were these days; the old rituals and celebrations meant nothing anymore. Mother’s Day was just a chance for Kmart to sell more fluffy slippers, and David Jones to have special offers on perfume, not to mention getting all those catalogues of white goods – who’d want a washing machine for Mother’s Day, anyway?
David had once brought home a jam jar of sand, dyed different colours and layered like a rainbow. It had stood for years on the kitchen windowsill, alongside the large tomato knitted in red wool, stuffed with old tights and topped with four strands of green wool that Caro had made. And she remembered a green felt pot holder embroidered with the words ‘Hot Pots’ in black wool that she herself had made for Lila. She’d given it to her the year of the picnic.
The picnic! They’d have been eleven that year or maybe twelve, she, Bonnie and Sylvia. Lila had organised it, Sylvia and her mother, Bonnie and hers, and Bonnie’s brother Simon, and a couple of other mothers and children, whose names she couldn’t remember now. They’d gone together on the bus to Sorrento, and spread their rugs and picnic baskets on the sand. It was autumn, of course, and quite chilly but they’d gone swimming while the mothers sat talking on the rugs. The three of them had stayed in the water long after the others, until they were blue with cold, and then run shivering up the beach to change back into their clothes under cover of their towels. Simon, who was a few years older, had made up a game that had them running around to get warm, and finally they’d collapsed exhausted on the grass alongside the mothers and drunk sweet tea with the distinctive stewed flavour acquired from standing for hours in a Thermos.
Fran thought about it now with nostalgia, the itch of salt on her skin as she dragged off her bathers, the ham sandwiches, lamingtons, lemonade, the dozy contentment of the ride home in the bus, the gentle murmur of the mothers’ voices. Perhaps they could do it again. Sylvia’s mother was dead, as was Simon, killed in his forties by a drunk driver, but Bonnie’s mother, and her own, were very much alive. Fran smiled to herself, and went to the phone to call Bonnie.
‘What a lovely idea,’ Irene said, taking off her glasses and putting down the paper. ‘I do remember that picnic, we had such a good time. Yes, tell Fran it’s a wonderful idea. I’d love to do it again.’
‘Are you sure it wouldn’t be too much for you, not too energetic and noisy?’ Bonnie asked, two little furrows forming between her eyebrows.
‘Oh, don’t be so ridiculous,’ Irene said irritably. ‘It’ll be lovely to see those girls again, and it’s years since I saw Lila. Why would it be noisy? Lila’s grandchildren are adults and I don’t have any.’ She could have bitten her tongue for saying it. It wasn’t as though she th
ought about it much these days, and she wouldn’t have hurt Bonnie for the world. She flushed. ‘Sorry, dear, I didn’t mean … I was just saying … stating a fact, you know children get noisy and then …’ but she realised she was just making it worse. ‘Bonnie, I – ’
‘It’s all right, Mum, I know what you meant,’ Bonnie said with a tight smile. ‘Well, it will be nice, won’t it? How clever of Fran to think of it. Her two will be away so there’ll be Lila and you, Fran and me, and she’s ringing Sylvia. I wonder if Colin will come. We haven’t had a look at him since their wedding.’
‘Well, no,’ said Colin, ‘obviously we can’t go. There’s the Mother’s Day service, and then at two o’clock the tea and the children’s art exhibition, so of course we can’t go. Nice of Ann to think of us, though.’
‘Fran.’
‘Huh?’
‘Her name is Fran,’ Sylvia said, ‘and I’m going. If you don’t want to come and you need the car I can get a lift with Fran and her mother.’
Colin looked up from the broccoli soup that Sylvia had just put in front of him. ‘It’s not about the car, it’s the service, and the tea.’
‘I shall skip the service. And I can make my contribution to the tea the day before. I just won’t be there to serve it.’ Colin would be wearing his sulky face and Sylvia decided not to look at it because it would instantly convert her annoyance into red-hot anger. ‘There are always heaps of volunteers for dishing out the tea, it won’t be a problem.’
‘It certainly will be a problem – what will people say? They’ll think there’s something wrong if you’re not there.’
‘Maybe there is.’
‘Maybe there is what?’
‘Maybe there is something wrong.’
‘Well, is there? What’s wrong?’
Sylvia put down her spoon. ‘Maybe I’m just totally pissed off with spending every Mother’s Day doing things for other people. Have you ever thought of that?’
‘But I thought you enjoyed it.’
‘Colin, be honest, you never even gave it a thought. So, this year I’m going to go out and do something I’d like to do for myself.’ It was fortunate, she thought, that the lonely porcelain shepherd was well out of reach.
*
‘Is it the weekend after next? So soon?’ Lila said. ‘I thought Christmas was just a couple of weeks ago, or haven’t we had Christmas yet? Anyway – yes, love, that’d be grand. Fancy Bonnie‘s mother being eighty.’
‘Yes, said Fran. ‘Time flies, doesn’t it? But you’re eighty-four, Mum.’
‘Am I really?’ Lila said in amazement. ‘I thought I was younger than that, but now you mention it, Fran, I think I do remember having an eightieth birthday. Well, that’ll be lovely. I must remember to tell them at the centre that I won’t be going to the lunch. They always do a very good lunch here on special days, but a picnic will be much nicer. I remember that day very well, you were sick in the bus on the way home.’
‘Was I?’ said Fran in surprise. ‘I don’t remember that.’
‘I do because you threw up all over my new skirt,’ her mother said. ‘Your memory must be going, Fran. I can remember it as clearly as if it was yesterday.’
Fran restrained herself from mentioning that her mother couldn’t remember yesterday and made an arrangement to pick her up at eleven. ‘I’ll call that morning to remind you,’ she said.
‘Oh, I won’t need reminding, Lila said. ‘Nothing wrong with my memory, Fran, it’s you who can’t remember being sick in the bus.’
Fran put down the phone thinking that what with Caro and her mother she had had enough reminders of vomiting to last her for a very long time. Memory was such a tease, some bits so vivid, others so elusive you weren’t sure if they were real or something you’d dreamed.
She wondered what it must be like for Lila to live with those bewildering gaps about really important and recent things while still having such vivid memories of the distant past. She swallowed the lump that rose in her throat – at least Lila would enjoy the picnic; old age had endowed her with the capacity simply to enjoy things that in the past would have been overlaid with complex and conflicting emotions and anxiety. Fran wondered if this would happen to her as she aged; whether, as she hit sixty or seventy, she too would find that sort of simplicity and let go of the anxieties that so exhausted her. It would, she thought, be easier to do with money in the bank.
Grabbing a pad and pencil from the benchtop, she went back to the deck and began to plan the best picnic food. She would kill two birds with one stone. Her column this week would be food for a Mother’s Day picnic.
FOUR
Sylvia locked the back door behind her and walked across to the church. She was wearing sunglasses and a cotton hat with the floppy brim turned down, hoping it would make it easier for her to avoid speaking to anyone she met on the way. It was ten o’clock and the church would, most likely, be empty. Colin had taken early communion and then gone to a meeting on the other side of the city; after that, he was going to a lecture. Some visiting theologian was speaking at the university about the challenge to ecumenism in the twenty-first century. He had seemed quite excited as he tucked into his toast.
‘He’s got some radical views, this man,’ he’d said. ‘Should be stimulating stuff. Can you manage without the car today?’
Sylvia watched his jaws moving rhythmically up and down, his hand lifting his coffee cup to his mouth at regular intervals, his eyes scanning the front page of the Age, back and forth, back and forth.
‘Yes. So you’ll be back late this afternoon?’
He nodded without looking up. ‘Early evening – sixish, I should think. By the way, Veronica is going to take over the tea and the art exhibition. She didn’t seem to mind, seemed quite pleased, in fact, so you don’t need to worry about it.’
‘That’s good, then,’ said Sylvia, who hadn’t been worrying. There were always enough willing hands to take on whatever she chose to unload and she liked Veronica Waters more than most. ‘You see, you didn’t need me after all.’
She knew it was a stupid remark. It wasn’t about need, it was about expectation, and it was those expectations over so many years that had brought her to this crisis. A crisis of which Colin, despite her various recent outbursts, still seemed blissfully unaware. Perhaps she should just tell him, try to make him understand how she felt, see if they could sort it out together, but Colin would never be able to understand. He would see her complaining about things that had been part of their marriage since day one. She remembered once, about ten years ago, telling him that the way he read his sermon in bed on Saturday nights, not silently and not aloud, but in that stagey whisper which was supposed not to disturb her, was driving her mad.
‘Good gracious, Syl,’ he’d said in absolute amazement. ‘I’ve been doing it every Saturday night for more than twenty years, and now suddenly it’s driving you mad?’
‘Not suddenly,’ she’d said. ‘It always has, it’s just that I’m telling you about it now.’
‘Well, then,’ he’d said good-naturedly, patting her hip through the quilt, ‘it can’t have been too bad if it took you all this time to mention it. I think you’re just feeling a bit off colour. Anyway, I’ve finished now, all ready for tomorrow.’ And he’d put out the light and slid down under the covers, and the next Saturday night, and every Saturday night since then, he’d gone on whispering his sermon.
Sylvia knew she had been her own worst enemy. For years she had gone on pretending that everything was all right, not mentioning trivial things like the sermon whisper for fear of seeming petty, thinking she could put up with it, until it had built into a mountain of resentment that she could no longer contain. ‘If you behave like a doormat they’ll wipe their feet on you,’ her mother had once told her, long before Colin appeared on the scene. It was a message illustrated by her parents’ relationship and by the way the nuns at the convent behaved when the priests turned up. Those wise, strong, intelligent women changed into fl
uttering, fawning ciphers, as though the priests were Jesus himself, and their reward was to be treated with disdain. It was an example that was hard to ignore. Sylvia had not been a doormat, and Colin certainly hadn’t walked on her, but she hadn’t carved out anything for herself and he had made the most of the situation.
Sylvia let herself in to the church, pausing just inside the door to absorb the atmosphere. She had always loved being in church, any church, when it was empty; the services and the rituals had never worked for her, but alone in the stillness she could feel herself connected to God. It wasn’t the God of the convent, or an angry, vengeful God, but a strong and comforting divine presence that had been with her most of her adult life and that now, in this time of greatest need, seemed strangely elusive. Selecting a pew halfway up the church, Sylvia sat down and closed her eyes, leaning her head on her hands. Lost in thought she didn’t hear the door open, so that when someone slid into the pew beside her and spoke her name, her heart thumped in shock.
‘I’m so sorry, Sylvia,’ Veronica Waters said. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you.’
‘Oh, Veronica, it’s all right. I just didn’t know there was anyone else in the church.’
Veronica smiled, putting a hand on her arm and then withdrawing it. ‘Look, I hope I’m not prying, it’s just that I saw you here and … well … you haven’t been looking too good lately, and then Colin said you wouldn’t be able to do the exhibition this year. I wondered … is there anything wrong?’
Sylvia paused. She wanted so much to talk to someone, and she trusted Veronica, but it was too close to home. She would be forcing Veronica to divide her loyalties, not just between herself and Colin, but with that blurry third party made up of God and the church, the boundaries of which were always so unclear.
‘Things aren’t too good at the moment,’ she said, breaking contact with Veronica’s steady gaze. ‘I suppose everyone goes through bad patches from time to time, but I guess we’ll get over it.’ She looked up and in Veronica’s eyes she saw something she couldn’t quite fathom. Sylvia flushed and looked away again.