by Alex Miller
Dear J,
Tonight the city is cold. Winter has dug in with sharp claws. I should be sleeping, because you are, but I can’t. My thoughts emerge in the space between your breaths. It is not as predictable as I had imagined, your breath. Sometimes I cannot hear it at all and I need to lower my head deep into your cot and nudge you gently so you stir. I get nervous too easily, because I don’t quite trust myself with you yet.
Every three hours or so, when you begin to suckle the air and grab for me, my breasts sting. They are burning for you, to give you what you need to live and grow and love. We are in complete darkness. I place the back of your tiny, malleable body onto the pillow of uneven stitches and lower my breast to your mouth. My veins: an electric fissure system, electric blue for you. All of me flowing into you. Lightly fingering my breasts, you find what you’re searching for in the darkness, encouraging all of me in your tight, trusting, needing mouth. You make sporadic noises, sloppy against the background of your father’s recurrent breath. You begin to fall asleep and I want to hold you forever. Occasionally there is a tug tug from your mouth and a chug chug from your throat and I am all mother. All woman. Our bodies in dialogue. My uterus clenches, contracting to the pace of your suckling. Tug tug, chug chug, your rhythm determining the migration of my body, snapping back into itself.
Because I have already said too much, I will tell you more. But not now, not just yet.
Love, Mama.
Suddenly, violently, she switches on her eyes and stands up quickly to snap herself out of it—into it. She shoots out a sharp breath of stale bedroom air, purging herself of boredom, before dressing in her thin slip, leaving her wet hair to cool her back as she begins work around the apartment, the pillow stranded, diagonal on the bed.
Moving from one room to the next, she tidies and sorts, sorts and tidies, her mind darting from one thought to another. A million instants flicker and then are gone. She places the stuffed laundry hamper on the balcony outside the back door. The chicken head has gone but there is no sign of Stray. Her two eldest children have pulled up their own beds.
Anna places her palm, flat to the wall, imagining the migration of heat through its matter. The double brick walls absorbing the energy from outside, then releasing it slowly. A precise chemistry of diffusion. The inside walls have been painted in rich greens and blues. Anna had chosen the colours herself and had insisted on them. And she remembers:
Walking into the living room after her son had taken a thick red marker to the walls, drawing his brilliant six-figured man, complete with penis and hair. Oh, the proud look on her son’s face, pointing to his man! The lone figure was so simple and complete, with his long penis, messy hair and zigzagged smile. Without saying a word, she took the brown marker from the packet and with her quick hand, drew a frame around her son’s work. He smiled and clapped and then they had sat down together to eat their finger sandwiches of avocado and ham and drink their warm malted milk, before getting ready for their afternoon stroll.
When her husband came home that evening he was in his usual mood, happy but tired. But, when he saw figure he grew furious, taking it as a sign that their lives had spun out of control. Their precious walls, inked with chaos, were nothing to him but a giant slip from discipline.
That night, crying the outside-in, breasts squealing with letdown, Anna took a washcloth and detergent to the walls. Slowly the picture began to lose form, absorbing itself back into her body. Down the hall she could hear her husband tinkering with his night ritual: glasses placed in their case, watch laid to rest in the top drawer of his dressing table, the alarm clock digitally set for the morning ahead. He would soon begin his descent into sleep while she continued to labour away at the wall. Once finished she walked to the kitchen sink and pulled up the heavy bucket and flushed away the murky remainder of her day.
Anna vacuums quickly but with care and takes a damp cloth to the architraves, picture rails and mantles. It is not something she feels she should have to do three times a week, but her husband’s allergies are getting worse and he now complains of not being able to smell. If he wants to avoid weekly injections at the local doctor then the place has to be kept ‘dust-free’. She wonders, as the cloth glides cleanly over the architrave, what life means without a sense of smell—the most potent sense. She continues to dust quickly, her various thoughts caught up in the cycle of her domestic work, connections seized and then lost within the distance of an instant.
Once she is finished that task, dust resettles clinging to the damp surfaces, dust replaces dust replaces dust. She sits on the afghan rug. She remembers when they told her she had to ‘get out’ more. That socialisation would be good for her, ‘a balance’, they called it. One particular event always lodges in her stomach, the event which made her give up on they foreverafter. It rises up, indigestion to memory. Sitting on the middle of the rug she pulls her knees up to her chest and rocks. She hates herself in this memory. Perhaps, if she pulls herself up tight enough then she can crush this festering memory once and for all. Pressing her eye sockets into the caps of her knees until her eyes scream white and then red, orange and then black.
But she is there. She is getting ready to go out. She hadn’t seen her friends for years and she was still the only one with children. There was nothing she could do to cover up the dark circles that haunt sleep-deprived eyes so she went with it. Using the eyeliner, dark as hell. Thick, black almond circles. Her pupils, a shot of blue. She liked it. There’s only one dress she wanted to wear. She had thought about it all that week—fantasising about slipping back into it. About slipping back. As she pulled it over her head she was surprised how tight the bodice was, she had grown breasts in her twenties. And they were swollen and full and sore and trapped in blue polyester.
It was like stepping outside of one life and into another. She noticed everything as though she had returned to a house she once lived in. The smell, the texture, the nostalgia—melancholy that filled her mouth and her cunt with a twinging, a pinching. This could be her first day of school. This could be her last, with awkward goodbyes she’d rather bypass.
When it was time to leave the apartment, she lay on the bed instead and pulled the covers up, the full circle skirt crumpling under the weight of the doona. What she really needed was a night to herself, curled into herself, no cries from babies to loosen and unravel the knot that she would tie herself in, to nest alone, till morning.
But she got up, smoothed out the full circle, gently repositioned the bodice
(like so)
and walked out the door, without saying goodbye to anyone.
***
It was an awful night. She had forgotten how to drink, she had forgotten how to talk, she had forgotten how to rein in the loose cannon of autonomy. She had nothing to contribute and spent the night overcompensating. Filling every silence, laughing too loudly. The dress and eyes made her look like she was attending a costume party, except she was the only one in costume. You cannot drag an old dress out of the past without it looking like you have dragged an old dress out of the past. No one wore polyester anymore.
***
When she arrived home that night she was a blue polyester mess. She walked in the door, staggered and stumbled down the hallway, past her bedroom where Jessica was curled in with H and Rueben tightly gripped the plastic breasts in his sleep, his cot beside their bed. She pushed open the bathroom door, like any drunk does, and flung herself onto the toilet bowl and threw up. She threw up the margaritas, the tiny organic olives, the sustainable garlic prawns, the laughter that was a little bit too loud, the awkward moments, the stupid dress.
Collapsed over the toilet bowl, she spent the rest of the night. To distract herself from the spinning she created a puppet show with her left hand on the wall. If her fingers worked quick and obeyed, a couple of big sharp dogs could devour a little pussycat. On the fourth attempt, and lending her right hand to the theatre, she was even able to give the pussycat puppet a dress just like her own.
When the spinning was too enormous and lopsided, she stopped. The coolness of the porcelain comforted her and she had dragged in a towel to wipe her mouth and later it made for a pillow as she rested her head on the lid and her focus disappeared into a point.
***
In retrospect she could piece together no linear equation to the night. It represented itself as arbitrary flashes, a collection of stills that made her recoil with sickness. Next morning she picked herself up, pulled off her dress, noticing the symmetrical dried milk patches on the bodice as she stuffed it into the small rubbish bin she used for floss, panty-liners, and tampons.
She climbed into the bath and turned on the shower so it acted like a waterfall over her body. She washed the vomit out of her hair and cleansed herself of the night as best she could. She used German Chamomile on her eyes to wipe away the black hell. She worked her flat palms against her breasts, painfully releasing the milk that had created deposits the size of large pebbles in her ducts. When they were smooth and relieved she asked H to help her out of the bath and towel her dry like a mother does a child, before she surrendered herself to sleep till late into the night. All the while the dress remained, a perfect half circle spewing out of the small bin.
In the kitchen she tidies a little before making the couscous and bean salad. She takes the cooked chicken out of the oven and stabs it to check that the juices run clear. It is abandoned on the stovetop, a tea towel draped over it. She works like a professional in the kitchen, cleaning as she goes, following the stringent set of rules and regulations she inherited from her mother. A washcloth draped over the taps, the fact that she insists on keeping a larder and the presence of a few dozen wooden chopping boards, each married to their own particular food group. There is a history to these details that can be trusted.
On the stove, the couscous fulfills the possibility of its extension. She takes the butter from the fridge and cuts off a generous corner. She places the triangle of fat in the pot and watches it giving in to chemistry, before forking it through the beads of wheat. She then works it with her fingers—it makes better couscous and there is something satisfying, delightful even, about the texture and the fact that her hands have crafted the meal her family will consume.
Lunch consists of a baguette and a thick slice of cheese, which she eats quickly, standing on the back landing, leaning against the weathered rails of the outside staircase. Anna loves to eat frugally, feeling a certain hollowness—a disciplined gap between herself and satisfaction. When she is finished she looks out over the backyard vegetable patch that is shared by all the apartments in the block, but maintained mostly by her. There she grows herbs, lettuce, and tomatoes and in the cooler months she grows spinach and potatoes. It’s enough for her; fresh herbs and warm tomatoes snatched from the bush in midsummer, squished in the fold of a thick slice of bread.
She dusts her hands and carries the heavy hamper down the three flights of stairs to the laundry in the basement. Her senses shift as she brushes past the potent heads of jasmine, generous in their midsummer abundance.
Carrying the large hamper down the basement stairs requires awkward sidesteps. The laundry is characterised by the smell of underground, damp creeping up the uneven concrete walls, tamed by the hot air of the four dryers that are almost always on, spinning their loads round and round—cycles within cycles. Falling into the hypnotic rhythm of the machines, Anna loses time.
It had not always been necessary to cart the washing down the back stairs. There had been a laundry shoot from each of the apartments to the basement. A dark, breathless corridor connecting each apartment to a substratum tunnel. But they have since been boarded up after the unspeakable acts of a mother in a pale green dress, locked in a prism of psychosis. It was after hours of listening to the baby’s scream. Screaming Screaming Screaming. Hour after hour after hour—the mother’s body absorbed the abject scream, till it became her—her blood, her bones, her flesh. Absorbing screamafterscreamafterscream until she herself was scream. Hysteria. Her insides resembling a churning, slithering snake pit—held tight within the immaculate form of her pale green dress. In a moment of rupture, she bundled the baby up, hands shaking, mind flaming red, and shot it down the internal shoot. The swaddled baby thumped awkwardly down the zigzagged course. The dull echo of softness, almost unnoticeable, rebounding and then absorbing into the various surfaces of the apartment block. Locking itself into the memory of bricks and mortar, plaster and glass. Within a matter of seconds, another load thumped more softly down the corridor. Then the silence was absolute. The mother’s uterus contracted in horror, her breasts squealing—leaking, as she scrambled down the stairs. She tore through apartment 6’s laundry, only to reach the motionless, silent face of her baby—still and perfectly swaddled, held. Looking more peaceful than she could have imagined. Suffocated by the stagnant complexity of dirty clothes.
Anna was childless all those years ago and she had wanted to move, feeling the horrid ordeal was seeping into her apartment and contaminating the goodness that she was nurturing into her new life with her husband. He had both refused to speak about it and refused to move. And then, with the birth of Jessica, Anna felt an overwhelming sadness—generous, rounded sadness—for the mother in the pale green dress. There were times she herself rode the thin line of sanity. Of protest and anxiety. The hand that stroked gently with love, wanted to sometimes slap with hate. Nipples that softened with a desire to nurture could retract in the same moment with resentment. The mind—that delicate cocktail—diffused through the cells of the skin and ran the veins that lay underneath. We are but arms and legs, mouth and cunt, she had whispered to Jessica, rocking her bassinet to the rhythm of the night.
Anna cuts her stare and begins to fill the top loader. She pulls out a towel that she retrieved earlier from under Rueben’s bed. As it unravels, she is smacked in the face by the pungent odour of cum. She shakes her head and giggles, placing her damp underwear on top, the fragile cotton slowly collapses onto the heavy terry towelling.
With the washing machine now full, she reaches up to the wooden shelf for the box of powdered detergent. A plume of chemical dust interrupts her breath as she scatters the powder unevenly over the dirty laundry. She puts the cycle on full twist and shuts the door, hearing the hollowness of the machine despite it being full. She rushes back up the stairs, taking them two at a time, feeling her body pulsate from the heat and the climb. All the while one hand slides up the rail and the other drags the hamper, the way her daughter drags her schoolbag.
The sky is blue and gentle clouds skim across its surface. Its colour and patterns give no indication of the intense heat. It is mid-afternoon and Thursday, the dinner is prepared and the washing caught in its necessary cycle. Anna walks to the kitchen and takes her apron off the hook from behind the door. She puts her arms into each of the shoulder straps and fastens the tie neatly around her waist.
She needs to focus now, because that dangerous part of her day is fast approaching. That hour of anxiety is reaching her earlier than usual. Her palms are sweating and she cannot hold them flat without tremor. Usually it takes hold at the hottest part of the day, but today, the heat is so rich and constant that her body is confused. She stands up at the window and pulls the lace curtains and heavy drapes to the side, the radiant heat mocks the double-glazing. She pumps the lever on the bottle of window cleaner, generously spraying the glass. It bubbles into individual deposits on the smooth surface before merging together and dripping, each droplet running its unpredictable course down the smooth, impenetrable surface. Anna catches the drips with a grab of newspaper before they hit the frame. She polishes quickly, concentrating on what she is doing with tunnel vision, as though she can rub away the world with each stroke. Polishing through the streaks. The newspaper smudges her hands and pills fall to the floor but she continues to labour, held in the parenthesis of a trance, her forehead creased with determination and her arms stiffening at the joint.
Finishing one window she quickly mo
ves on to the next. Without pause or delay. The thickness of the glass means that she can lean entirely into her work. Once she is satisfied, she vacuums once again to clean up the newspaper shavings that litter the base of the windowsill.
She walks back into the kitchen and tidies up, meticulously and quickly, vanishing the evidence of her work. She hangs her apron behind the door and places the empty hamper back in its position in the bathroom. Everything is stationed in its usual place. She pulls off her black slip in front of the large Victorian mirror. Her breasts gently filling the small white-laced cups of her bra, her untamed pubic beard, nestled between protruding hip bones. The years dig away at her body and in time she will grow into a gaunt woman, just like her own mother had. In the right light it is now possible to spot tufts of witch’s hair throughout her blondness. She loves her body though—of protruding bones, reaching out through her almost translucent moon skin. From her drawer she takes out some thin cotton underwear and steps into them, pulling them up in a nonchalant fashion. She opens up her cupboard and pulls another freshly ironed shirtdress off its hanger. The busy paisley print of the expensive liberty cotton is restless and complicated.
Moving back through the apartment to the living room she tries to look out of the freshly cleaned windows, but her reflection, in her neatly ironed paisley shirtdress, stares back at her. The windows are so clean that she can no longer look out without reflecting back in. The apartment has become an impenetrable surface. Breath slips into the shallow valley of anxiety. The outside lost to the image of her reflection. Or perhaps the outside no longer exists. She has no way of telling. She stands back and sits on the polished boards in the middle of the room. The noises that have filled the background of the day have disappeared. The deep colours of the walls seem brighter, even ridiculous. Her apartment could belong to the set of a cheesy sitcom. And this is her life! She feels the proximity of the walls, the ceiling (despite its height) and her translucent, ghostlike reflection in the absurdly polished windows. A woman, in her freshly ironed shirtdress, alone with her reflection. One surface, empty against another.