Odyssey In A Teacup

by Paula Houseman

  Shit!

  Why was this night different from all other nights?

  Joe was cooking.

  I saw him standing at the barbecue talking to Reuben, with one hand wrapped around a bottle of beer (from the little bar fridge in the garage), the other one holding a meat-flipping spatula. I could forgive the beer (did he seriously not know beer has yeast in it? Reuben would have been too polite to point it out, or maybe he didn’t know, either), but I couldn’t forgive Myron for letting Joe cook. Myron saw me glaring at him and gave me a what-was-I-supposed-to-do? look. I walked over to Joe.

  ‘Why are you cooking? You know you always burn the meat!’

  ‘You’re meant to singe the meat. That’s what a barbecue is all about. And top chefs cook this way.’

  Flambé is not the same as burning the bloody meat, but you can’t argue with a know-all. And we didn’t. We just never let him cook. Ever. But Joe Blow was also a blowhard. There’s nothing Myron could have done to stop him showing off in front of Reuben, Iris, and Tammy tonight. And true to form, seven minutes later there was a thick pall of smoke as the meat spontaneously flambéed itself. Joe proudly served each one of us an almost incinerated steak and a couple of almost incinerated rissoles.

  Bon appétit.

  No one complained. Not even Iris. (‘She likes it well-done,’ whispered Reuben.) A table full of loudmouths, yet nobody opened theirs. Nobody talked. It wasn’t possible. They were like a herd of hoofed ruminants chewing the cud. And unless you’re Muriel the goat in Animal Farm, or Bambi, no way could you speak under those circumstances.

  Everyone chomped away at their leathery fare. Except for me. I finished eating the vegetables and salad, and then sat unmoving, staring at the cindery beef on my plate in the same manner as those bumya nights. Feeling Sylvia’s eyes on me, I turned to face her. She was transmitting.

  ‘EAT!’

  ‘Piss off!’

  She flinched. Yeah, baby! My ability to broadcast telepathically must have strengthened.

  Ralph had also finished his salad and vegies. He was staring at me, one cheek bulging with meat. I sensed the cogs in his brain turning, like a three-drummed poker machine spinning, then coming to rest.

  No jackpot, but in the end, a clear message.

  ‘Whoa! What’s that crawling up the wall?’

  He used the oldest trick in the book, yet they all turned to look. Not me, though. I saw both his cheeks puff; heard the phwoot; watched a chunky piece of semi-chewed meat fly out of his mouth; felt it lightly brush my ear; and listened for the slight rustling noise as it landed in the flowerbed behind me. It was a telling move from my goat-like cousin who ate everything. Even bumya!

  Nice going, but what about the other three-quarters of it and the two rissoles, genius?

  Ralph nodded like he’d heard me, then he pulled out, ooh say, the thirteenth oldest trick in the book. After sawing through the rest of the steak and putting another morsel in his mouth (for appearances’ sake), he surreptitiously spat it into his hand and threw it under the table for Mitzi. The dog wasn’t about to complain. She’d recently displayed neurotic behaviours and developed rampant skin problems, so the vet had her on a strict vegetarian diet (what rubbish! A bloody carnivore deprived of meat. The obvious cure was to get her away from my batshit crazy family).

  Mitzi, who’d been circling the table tonight, now dived under it and emerged with Ralph’s reject between her teeth. She wolfed it down, and then made a coughing, choking sound. Mitzi spat the meat out in disgust. She shook her head and gave me what I assumed was a filthy look (dogs are so like their owners). I could also swear she mouthed ‘I am so so disappointed.’

  I transmitted back, ‘Hey, don’t look at me. It’s not my fault.’

  But Mitzi’s reaction brought me to my senses. Who says humans are more intelligent than animals? Mitzi called it like she saw it. I looked at Ralph. I had to save him and I had to save myself. I put my fork and knife parallel across the plate, a bit like the way Sylvia lay across the bed but facing somewhere between the eleven and twelve o’clock position, as I’d been taught to indicate I’d finished eating. I pushed my plate away. Joe stopped eating and looked at me.

  ‘Is there a problem with your steak?’

  Again, a stony silence settled over the table. I could have lied like I used to, and told him I was full or I felt a bit off.

  ‘I don’t want it,’ I said. Then I looked pointedly at Sylvia. ‘Wouldn’t wanna end up fat.’

  It’s a good feeling to use one of the things she’d harassed me with when I was a teenager as the raw materials to shape a defence to suit my purposes. And I didn’t leave it there.

  ‘I’ll post it to Africa tomorrow.’ Eat that, mommy!

  Yep, this night was different from all other nights. In our house, every night had felt like it was the same. Sylvia consistently served up and forced us to swallow not only the food from her birthplace, but also its value systems, which she had ingested. Even though she’d migrated to Australia thirty years earlier, she was still a slave to the constraints of her old life in Egypt. By extension, I was too, but I wanted out! Standing up against Kishma a few years back was a good starting point, but standing my ground with Sylvia (and Joe) on this night showed me I had the cojones to take a big step out of captivity.

  I looked at Mitzi and transmitted ‘thank you’. And I threw her a bone—gave her the dog biscuit off the Seder plate.

  Things also changed for Ralph that night. He didn’t stay over, but when Albie tried to hit him after they got home, Ralph blocked the punch, slammed his father up against the wall and pinned him there.

  ‘If you ever raise your hand to me again, you’ll end up in hospital. And if you dare think about taking it out on my mother instead, nothing will save you.’

  After years of Albie’s abuse, Ralph had had enough. Albie never came near him again, nor could he look Ralph in the eye.

  I was exhilarated when Ralph called early the next morning to tell me what happened. And I understood what had kept him there. After we hung up, I gave some thought to his question from the night before—why was I still at home? Laziness? Temptation, maybe? Santa Joe made it easy for me. As long as I was under his roof, he paid my dental and medical bills. Or was I bound by some invisible shackle? I didn’t know, but I assumed I’d eventually get an answer if I kept asking myself why. I put it on the back-burner, though, because something happened a few weeks later that guaranteed I’d be moving out in the not too distant future.

  CHAPTER TWELVE:

  SHIP OF FOOLS

  Reuben took me out for dinner and proposed. I was surprised because we’d only been together for six months, but I said yes. I was ready to settle down. Reuben obviously loved me but apparently, my gutsiness on that Seder night was the clincher. His admiration now knew no bounds.

  My parents were overjoyed, particularly Sylvia. Reuben had her seal of approval—he could have been a gargoyle or an ugly cave-dwelling creature and it wouldn’t have mattered: he was Jewish and he had a university education. Never mind that he failed his first year and dropped out. He had been there on campus for a year. Good enough.

  Our engagement gave Sylvia a newfound sense of purpose. She had an engagement party and a wedding to arrange. She put her foot down—this was her baby: ‘I’m organising this!’ Joe had minimal input; he was only allowed to decorate the cheques (with his signature).

  Together with Greta and Rudy, Reuben’s parents, Sylvia and Joe hosted our engagement party on a Saturday night at The Boston Tavern. We occasionally went there for dinner and the atmosphere was always lively. It turned out to be a festive night of good food, music and dancing. As for the wedding, I just did not want to get married on a Sunday.

  ‘Dimanchophobia. That’s what your fear of Sundays is called,’ Ralph informed me.

  I felt better. If it had a name, it meant I wasn’t the only one wallowing in this fear. If it had a name that I could throw at Sylvia (names impressed her), then I had some
sort of justification to shore up my resolve.

  Jewish weddings are mostly held on Sundays, not Saturdays (Shabbat, which falls between sunset Friday and sunset Saturday), because work and travel aren’t permitted—God supposedly rests, man’s supposed to rest. But I’d learned that Sunday is the day of rest in most Western countries, for most Christians! If my family was okay with celebrating Christmas and Easter, why couldn’t I get married on a Saturday? I knew Sylvia wouldn’t have a bar of it, and no rabbi would officiate at a wedding on Shabbat. But I did some research and found out that Tuesday was also an especially auspicious day for a wedding. Apparently, in the account in Genesis 1:10,12 concerning this third day of creation, because the phrase ‘God saw that it was good’ appears twice, Tuesday is a doubly good day to get married (maybe God had OCPD as well).

  ‘I want to get married on a Tuesday,’ I announced to Sylvia. I told her about my findings and (stupidly) confided my fear of Sunday to her.

  ‘How ridiculous! Oeuf, pest!’

  Really? Shot down in flames by a woman who burned incense, hung eyeballs on cupboard doors, and pth-pth-pthed her way through life.

  ‘We’re paying for this wedding, you’re getting married on a Sunday, and it will be unforgettable—the talk of the town!’ But Sylvia was underestimating.

  One Saturday afternoon six weeks before the wedding, Sylvia, Joe and I were huddled around the dining room table discussing the minutiae. Although Sylvia allowed Joe no say, he asked her if Albie could propose the toast to the parents of the bride. Fuck. His stutter would turn a thirty-second sentence into forever. Sylvia could foresee this and had a suggestion.

  ‘We could always record his toast, and then he can mime it.’

  Sweet mother of Jesus! Scary images flashed through my mind—bad, voice-dubbed foreign films, a ventriloquist’s dummy, the audiocassette tape getting stuck and it stuttering ... ‘To SylviaSylviaSylviaSylvia ... ’

  Then there was Ralph. As one of the groomsmen, he would be on display (even more so because Sylvia was seating him right next to the podium at the end of the bridal table). Ralph liked being on show, but only when he chose to be. He was nervous about being that close to a spluttering, stammering Albie, even if only for a brief time. And when Ralph gets agitated, his peculiar little rituals2 (craziness to the power of two, which he generally performs in private) tend to escalate. So we were looking at lunacy6. It was a nightmare in the making—Albie stuttering, and Ralph next to him touching everything twice. A three-ring circus, for sure. All that was left was for Joe to have a bad case of post-nasal drip and a bad case of wind on the night.

  So ... just ‘the talk of the town’? The Sunday of what was becoming Sylvia’s wedding, and my personal cataclysm, was destined to become a social calamity!

  As mother hen mapped it out, yabbering on about the cars, the photographer, the cake, her dress and whatnot, I felt increasingly strung out. But I was saved by the doorbell. It was Ralph. His ears must have been burning—this man, who could inadvertently end up coming off as a class act in a freak show, was, at the same time, my champion.

  I made us all tea, then Ralph and I left Sylvia and Joe in the dining room and went out to the back porch.

  We sat astride the low brick wall at the end of the porch facing each other. I shook my head in dismay. ‘Oh Ralph, The End is Nigh.’

  He took a sip of his tea and looked at me. ‘And all this time you thought you weren’t a drama queen.’

  It lightened the moment, I felt better. I smiled at him, stirred my tea and drew a long sip.

  ‘You only tapped the spoon once.’

  ‘What?’ I peered at him over the top of my cup.

  ‘You only tapped once after stirring.’

  ‘I don’t need to tap it twice; that’s your thing.’ I started talking about the wedding arrangements, but Ralph interrupted.

  ‘I can’t focus. It bothers me that you’ve only tapped once.’

  ‘Jesus!’ Tap tap. ‘Happy?’

  Even with all his oddities, Ralph’s farcical take on things took the edge of them and calmed me down. We sat out there for half an hour joking around and just shooting the breeze when the doorbell rang again. There was some excited chattering and then Reuben burst out onto the porch waving a thick envelope at me.

  ‘I have a surprise for you!’

  ‘Ooh goody, I love surprises!’ I ripped open the envelope and pulled out two airline tickets for a return trip to Sydney.

  ‘I thought we agreed we were going to Surfers for our honeymoon.’

  ‘I know, but there’s more in the envelope.’ He looked so happy.

  I pulled out another two tickets and an itinerary, and gasped. I looked up at Reuben and shook my head.

  ‘I can’t do it.’

  ‘You can’t do what?’

  I couldn’t get the words out. Instead, Ralph, who had grabbed the tickets out of my hand and scanned them, did it for me.

  ‘She can’t go on this trip.’

  ‘What? You can’t go on a fabulous ten day P&O cruise to Noumea and Suva?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’ He looked so unhappy. I told him the story.

  I went on a cruise when I was eleven, and I swore it would be my last. Travel is supposed to be filled with the adventure of exploring new places and facing new experiences. My first overseas jaunt provided these, only not in the ways I’d imagined: new places included a chamber of torture, and new experiences included watching vomit travel five storeys. During the three weeks away, I actually envied Ralph, who couldn’t afford to go anywhere.

  Myron and I had been very excited about our upcoming Malaysian holiday, not least because it was during the school term. But even though we were getting out of school, we weren’t getting out of schoolwork. Our teachers had prepared three weeks’ worth of tasks to take with us. This didn’t dampen our enthusiasm, though. Getting our very first passports was exhilarating. And to add to the excitement, for the first leg of our journey, we were travelling to Perth on TAA’s inaugural flight of the Whispering T‑jet.

  Much fanfare accompanied this. The press were out in full force, each passenger received gifts from the airline and we were treated like royalty. It was also my inaugural vomit bag encounter (if only I’d known about the concept of vomit bags on our Sunday drives. And who knew that vomit could be so warm? I’d only ever thrown up in a potty, the toilet, or on the floor). It was not a great way to start the holiday, but it was quickly forgotten when we boarded our ship, MS Centaur, at Fremantle Harbour. From here, we were heading to Singapore and then onto Kuala Lumpur. Myron and I felt all grown up because we had our very own cabin. It didn’t matter that it was like a shoebox, with a double-bunk and one small cupboard. Most importantly, there was no connecting door to our parents’ adjoining cabin. Our cabins were on B Deck. The ships back then were not the multi-level liners of today; there were only three passenger decks, A through C (A Deck was for the filthy rich).

  Ten minutes after we were shown our cabins, Myron and I wanted to explore the ship. We couldn’t believe it had a pool. There were children’s facilities, a huge dining room, and this boat had its very own cinema!

  ‘It even has a library,’ said Sylvia.

  So? Who gives a shit?

  Just after we set sail, we found out that amongst the two hundred passengers on board was a WA football team. On the second day, I fell hopelessly in love with one of their players, a nineteen-year-old centre halfback called Reggie. A typical footballer, Reggie was solidly built, and he was so handsome. He had curly black hair, and long sooty lashes framed his light-blue eyes, which were often bloodshot (I thought he suffered from hayfever, like Joe). He was also appealing because he laughed a lot and sang very loudly. Obviously, I was too young to know about the effects of alcohol. But I was au courant with sex. It was the year before the cruise when I had my appendix out that Evelina, my hospital roommate, had not only set me straight about the names of our naughty bits, but also taught me the nuts and b
olts of sex.

  Evelina was twelve, but she looked much older. A tall girl with short brown, wiry hair, she had a husky voice and was quite well developed for her age. And she was streetwise. She had a better grasp of the birds and the bees than Sylvia did. And Evelina swore. Sylvia never swore. Ever. Not according to her (telling Joe that he thought his shit didn’t stink didn’t count, apparently). And although, on occasion, Sylvia called me a ‘bloody bitch’, this also wasn’t swearing (supposedly) because technically, neither ‘bloody’ nor ‘bitch’, in and of themselves, were swear words.

  As Evelina and I had sat propped up in our beds with our hospital-made milkshakes, she’d told me stuff that made my eyes bulge. Amongst other things, she taught me the fuck word. Well, she didn’t actually teach it to me. She just helped me understand what it meant. I’d already heard it numerous times at home, because Joe often uttered the standardised fuck and fucking. He also regularly expressed a variation of it.

  When I was nine years old, on one of the Sunday family get-togethers at our place, Ralph, Maxi, Vette and I were playing hopscotch in a secluded area of the backyard, between the garage and the neighbour’s fence. I’d meticulously drawn the squares in white chalk, and numbered them one through eight. In front of the first square, I’d carefully written ‘START’. And at the end, just above seven and eight, I’d written ‘FUCKET’. I decorated the grid with little flowers in soft pink and lemon-yellow chalk. Zelda found us and wanted to play as well, but we wouldn’t let her, so the bloody bitch (that wasn’t swearing, remember?) went and told on me. Sylvia came out, took one look, gasped, dragged me into the bathroom by my ear and, raging about my ‘filthy language’, washed my mouth out with soap. Why? The same way that she punctuated a lot of her sentences with ‘pest’, Joe punctuated a lot of his with ‘fucket’: ‘Yes, I will get it done, fucket!’ ‘Who ate that last piece of cake? Fucket!’ ‘Stop nagging me, fucket!’