The Miracle of Love

by Ondine Sherman

  She closed the front door and began unpacking her black briefcase, carefully placing manila folders in ordered piles on the entrance table. It was 6 pm and she was home from work as a lecturer at Sydney University.The week before she had officially received her doctorate in French Literature. Seven years of work. Her smile had been as big as the sun.

  ‘What did you learn today at school?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Ondine.’ Her curly black hair, now bent over an enormous handbag, shook slightly in disapproval. ‘Do you have homework?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Well, get started. Always best to do your homework straight after school. Then it’s finished and you can relax. My father taught me that.’ She sighed heavily again. ‘Take off your school uniform and hang it up. Remember what I said about snacks in your uniform? And brush your hair.’

  She pulled a large black brush from the bag, her silver bracelets jangling.

  ‘Here,’ she said, handing it over.

  ‘But Mum . . .’

  ‘No buts. I will not have my daughter walking around with knotted messy hair.’

  ‘I’m at home, not walking around.’

  ‘Don’t whine, Ondine. Nevertheless, one needs to look after one’s hair. And one’s skin,’ she said, peering at my freckles for signs of multiplication. She was an early believer in skin care, convinced the sun was our enemy. Not a fan of the outdoors in general, in fact.

  My grandmother appeared behind me. She wiped her large wet hands on her apron and, looking at her daughter-in-law, took a deep breath.

  ‘What a day. The plumber called and you wouldn’t believe that the pipes—’ ‘Hi, Minnie. How are you?’ Mum said resolutely. ‘Just give me a few minutes and I’ll be ready to talk.’

  My mum ran upstairs, small feet in elegant black flats, her thin legs hidden beneath a voluptuous skirt.

  If in my fantasy life my mum was mother bunny in The Tale of Peter Rabbit, with a sky-blue dress and clean white apron, in real life she was Mr Rush, the purple triangular man from the Mr Men series: a blur of movement, words in quick succession, long skirts whooshing, curls flying, hands forever moving objects from one place to the other.

  What was Mum running from? I was aware she had bad stories: her mother and brother, both dead before I was born. I knew nothing else. ‘Brick by brick,’ she told me solemnly, ‘I built a wall.’ I didn’t imagine mudbricks. These were made of much tougher stuff. ‘To keep out the past,’ she said. ‘It’s important to look forward, Ondine, not back. I would never have been a good mother to you and Emile had I done otherwise.’

  But children soak up their parents’ secrets like sponges and hers filled our house: her fears about depression, madness and death became ours. Any negative emotions were quickly sorted, solved and filed; or rather, colour-coded, alphabetised and locked in a vault.We were to never open that vault, as insanity lay behind the steel door. Sadness was an enemy and my childhood tears never dampened my mother’s shoulder. In fact, childhood tears didn’t flow at all. Although my family considered me oversensitive, a label Emile used for many years, crying was not part of the profile. Rather, I sulked. Bottled up my emotions and kept the cork on so tight I barely knew what lay inside. No one in my family talked about their emotional life. It was the opposite of Woody Allen—stiff upper lips all round.

  Mum expressed her love for me in a myriad of more practical ways, overseeing, organising and delegating every aspect of my daily life so that I had every conceivable opportunity to reach my potential. I learned ballet, piano, tennis and the flute. Mum also noted my interests and ensured they were fostered. Seeing that I loved to draw, she arranged after-school art classes for me. Realising my two favourite subjects, Art and French, conflicted on the school schedule, she argued with the principal until the programming clash was rectified. Mum had high standards for my schoolwork and showed by example with an iron-strong work ethic. She had no patience for laziness or boredom and expected Emile and me to strive, like her, to be the best we could be, morally and intellectually.

  I didn’t express my emotions to my father either but we had a silent bond that I cherished. Often, despite his frequent travelling and long working hours, we would take rambling walks together, slowly making our way from home to the enormous urban oasis of Centennial Park and the grove of oak and pine trees on top of the small hill. I would take my wicker basket, just like the one in the Beatrix Potter books, and fill it with treasures: splendid passionfruit flowers, complex, fragile and otherworldly; acorns, soft, humble, whole and full of promise; pine cones, each one unique in its size, shape and flaws; and small, smooth pitch-black seeds taken from the pods of a local weed. They were my favourite.

  I also enjoyed my time with Gran. She was a practical, solid, no-nonsense woman. While Emile busied himself with endless games—handball, ping-pong, juggling, tennis and darts with his friends—I helped Gran grow mung beans in glass jars on the kitchen counter, carefully pouring out old water into the sink before refilling each jar from the tap. One of her old stockings was strapped over the top of the jar with an elastic band, cleverly preventing the sprouting beans from falling out. She had avocado pips perched on top of recycled jars on the kitchen windowsill, held in place with a toothpick, so only the brown bottom was submerged. Slowly roots would peep through and I would watch them descend into the glass until they were strong enough, when Gran would ask me to help plant them in our garden. She taught me to prune the lavender bushes, carefully snipping off the dead buds at their base, or where the branch forked. We would also cut fresh ones to dry in the sun, then sew little sachets, filling them with the fragrant, sun-dried purple flowers and tying them with a ribbon. Our underwear smelled of lavender.

  Gran had a mischievous sense of humour, which I adored. For me, it spelled intimacy and camaraderie. When I went into the kitchen she’d flick me with her wet hands from the sink, scrunch up her face into a funny kind of wink, chase me with soapy gloves or kiss me roughly, stating with assurance ‘a face only a grandmother could love’. She found this last statement endlessly funny and I didn’t mind.

  Gran took great pleasure in cooking and baking. Her birthday cakes were spectacular; that year she had made me a garden cake with green rolling hills sporting small delicate flowers made of icing. Seven candles were placed on the hilltops. Just like the English countryside of my storybooks. But soups were her big love: the freezer was packed with Tupperware filled with luminous colours—green for pea and orange for pumpkin and intense, fluorescent purple for beetroot. We were lucky to have her cook for us and we knew it. My mother didn’t know how to turn on the oven and boiling an egg confounded her.

  On one particular night, Gran, Dad, Mum, Emile and I sat around the dinner table. After green pea soup I looked curiously into the casserole dish as Gran scooped the meat onto Emile’s plate. The stuff looked weird.

  ‘Gran, what is this?’ I asked across the wooden table.

  Her green eyes narrowed at my challenge.

  Usually we weren’t supposed to talk about food at the dinner table. My grandmother wanted constant reassurance that we liked what she made—‘Not too bland? Really? Is the soup too thick? Carrots a little soft, no? You sure? Have some more.’—so it became my mother’s rule: no kitchen talk around the table. Mum had grown up with the same, her intellectual father insisting on discussions on philosophy and politics, not home economics.

  ‘Tongue,’ Gran answered.

  Suddenly the word and the meaning came together.

  ‘Tongue? As in somebody’s tongue? In their mouth?’ I asked, sticking out my tongue to make sure there was no misunderstanding. Surely no one would eat someone else’s tongue. Surely my kind Gran wouldn’t cook someone’s tongue. That sounded more like the witch from ‘Hansel and Gretel’.

  ‘Yes, dear, tongue. An ox . . . a cow’s tongue,’ she patiently replied.

  Light bulbs flashed. The connection between storybook animals and
the food on our plates fell into place. Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail ran away with fright.

  ‘No, thank you,’ I said.

  At the end of the meal I walked into the kitchen.

  ‘Granny, I don’t want to eat animals. I love them.’ My parents and Gran agreed they would support my decision. I didn’t appreciate how remarkable that was at the time. Gran would make special vegetarian meals for me and gradually meat would feature less in our family diet.

  Once my dietary life changed, socialising became more anxiety-ridden. I became a subject of great curiosity among everyone we knew. It was 1981 and the term ‘vegetarianism’, if known to some, was rarely used.

  ‘Humans are meant to eat meat,’ friends of my parents stated, seemingly concerned about my health. ‘I’ll be okay . . .’ I reassured them before my parents stepped in, Mum reiterating her pride that I was staying true to what I believed.

  ‘How do you know carrots don’t feel pain too?’ my brother’s ten-year-old friends smirked.

  ‘Animals eat other animals; we are part of the food chain,’ everyone agreed. That was the harder argument to debate. But I tried. Explained and discussed each time. And soon I learned better how to stand up for myself, for my ideas. But it was exhausting and I started to dread mealtimes with company.

  I still had the desire for meat. At school, meat pies were the hardest sacrifice. While previously I had looked forward to lunchtime pies from the canteen, now I gazed longingly as my first-grade classmates, in between wiggling their wobbly teeth, squished tomato sauce onto the pastry and gobbled up their pies, lumpy black liquid oozing temptingly down the sides of their mouths before being licked off. Luckily I was stubborn. I had decided that I would be vegetarian and nothing, not even meat pies, would stop me.

  TWO

  I was ten and it was a Saturday morning when Dad and I walked down a wealthy upmarket street in Double Bay and stumbled upon something unexpected. Animal Liberation had put up a table stall with flyers.

  ‘Would you like to sign the petition against battery cages?’ the elderly woman asked. I liked her scruffy hair and lack of make-up. She wore a blue T-shirt with curly white writing: Love animals don’t eat them. Finally! A kindred spirit. I hadn’t met another vegetarian before. Mum would have had a field day with her: she hated jeans and T-shirts, and would certainly have attacked the woman with a hairbrush had she been there.

  ‘Ondine’s been a vegetarian since she was seven,’ Dad said proudly. The woman smiled. She showed me a picture of hens crammed in a cage, their bony raw skin showing through clumps of feathers.

  ‘Can I join?’ I asked Dad, although I was sure he would let me. Somehow he always intuited when things were important to me.

  ‘Sure,’ he said.

  When a large envelope with my name on it arrived in the post, my parents and Emile were overseas. It was school holidays and Mum and Emile had accompanied Dad on an important six-day business trip to Tahiti. I had begged not to go. My dad had been travelling nonstop and Mum was working long hours and was always stressed. She was Head of Languages at Ascham School, with a demanding principal. With the beginnings of financial success, our family had started travelling every school holidays as well. It was too much. I just wanted quiet. Mung beans and lavender.

  Gran had decided to stay home. Her garden club had a big event, not to be missed.

  ‘Please let me stay with Gran,’ I had pleaded.

  ‘You’re crazy!’ Emile had said, rolling his eyes. ‘You’ll miss out on all the fun.’

  But my parents had relented and let me stay behind.

  I lay on the floor of my bedroom with my new package from Animal Liberation, Gran downstairs making dinner. I flicked through pages of deformed animals, broken limbs, cages, concrete and wire. I read an account from an informant in a slaughterhouse chronicling the cruelty of the workers, who had been sadistically beating and abusing the animals before slaughter.

  If sadness was dangerous, an emotion to be vaulted, then anger was my only outlet. My freckled cheeks burned with rage. I put my head on the carpet and lay there silently. I wanted to scream but didn’t. I would store up the anger and use it later for revenge, I thought. Maybe I’d become an outlaw. Bronnie walked into my room and sniffed my face.

  ‘Bronnie!’ I sat up, suddenly imagining her stuck in a dirty cage, never sniffing another tree. I scratched her tummy for a minute before lying back down, hands under my head. ‘How can everyone know this is going on and not do anything?’ I asked my dog. ‘I promise you Bronnie, I will try and stop this,’ I said resolutely.

  In response, Bronnie leaped onto my bed, turned in three clockwise circles and settled down to doze.

  The magazine came with a poster. I took down the one of the cute kitten in a basket from my wall and put up the new one. It showed a large white fridge with blood dripping from the freezer drawer, and the words: The chicken in your freezer has more room now than it did when it was alive.

  My letter to the magazine Outcry was soon published. I have read all your magazines and never knew that people could do such rotten things to animals, I wrote. If I was older I would really give those people a hard time. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  My dad became worried about me; not only was I now oversensitive and grumpy but I had also refused to go on holidays to Tahiti. Clearly something was wrong but I wouldn’t, couldn’t, tell him. One Sunday we took Bronnie for a long walk in the park.

  There wasn’t much need to talk. Our silence had always felt comfortable and I was happy just to be by his side scouting for cherished black-seed pods. But on this day we came to a large empty field.

  ‘Tell me how you are,’ he asked.

  ‘Good, I’m fine . . .’ I said quietly.

  ‘No, really, Ondine, tell me how you’re feeling.You can’t be just good.’

  ‘I am Dad, I’m fine!’ I lied.

  I had moved schools and wasn’t happy. Older boys were bullying me on the school bus. I was having a hard time fitting in and hadn’t made friends. My short boyish hair was a disaster. Freckles had overtaken my nose, despite latherings of sunscreen from my mother, and I was being teased about them.

  ‘You bottle up your emotions, it’s not healthy,’ Dad said.

  Funny coming from him. He had never talked about his feelings. Ever.

  ‘If you can’t talk about them,’ he continued, ‘just try and let them out. Scream,’ he said. ‘Just shout as loud as you can.’

  I whimpered with embarrassment, ‘I can’t, Dad.’

  ‘Try,’ he said gently. ‘Just try.’

  ‘I just can’t, Dad, I’m sorry.’ I didn’t want to let him down. But I had no idea how to scream. I don’t think I’d ever done it before.

  Everyone seemed to agree—Mum, Dad, Emile and Gran—that I needed help with my shyness.To build my self-confidence Dad started me on a diet of Dale Carnegie and his bestselling book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, which Dad swore had changed his life. He would often read the book to me in the evenings, adding his own life lessons.

  When I turned twelve and my brother fifteen, Mum left Ascham and became involved in the Irving Sculpture Gallery, established and run by Celia Winter-Irving, an artist well-known in the community. Mum had always had a passion for art and was looking forward to a change from the high demands of the school. Only several months after Mum started working there part-time, however, Celia visited one of her sculptors in Zimbabwe, fell in love with the country and never returned. Mum decided to take over the gallery and, with Celia’s blessing, make it her own.

  Mum began to wear only asymmetrical black Issey Miyake and other Japanese designers paired with large, often spiky, silver jewellery. Dad’s financial success had gone off the Richter scale by now. Emile and I moved from public to private schools and the family moved into a big new house in an exclusive Sydney suburb. I was happy to leave my old school, which I still hadn’t learned to like, and had already made a real friend, Sharonne, at my new one. My gra
ndmother moved into her own apartment, right on Bondi Beach, pronouncing that now was the time for her to enjoy her own activities. She was in her seventies and had lived with us for eleven years, and now Emile and I were teens and needed her less. Although I saw her often, still going to her place for glasses of fresh-cut vegetables, I missed her. A housekeeper met us after school every day. She didn’t make purple soup.

  ‘Dad’s gone to pick up the money bags again,’ I said to Emile one morning before school. I imagined a James Bond-style switcheroo of shiny black briefcases at a crowded airport. Dad certainly fitted the part: handmade silk shirts under tailored suits, his unconventionally long hair framing a handsome square face.

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Ondine,’ Emile said, rolling his eyes. ‘There are no money bags.’ He grabbed the Nutri-Grain box from my hand, his voice brimming with superiority: ‘You probably still don’t understand what a share is. Do you?’ Mr Smart-Arse.

  In fact, my father had tried to explain what a share was, several times. What I did know was that when he wasn’t working long hours at the office, he disappeared for weeks overseas on roadshows, three cities a day, returning sick with the flu, a smile on his face and a great deal of extra money in the bank. A couple of years before, he and Laurence had launched a new fund, Growthlink, which had been doing very well, but it was the start of the First Australia Funds in 1985, the first ever listing of Australian investment companies on the US stock market, that took them to the next level. Dad bought a Porsche. He also became a vegetarian, a silent nod of approval for me.

  With Dad’s star still on the rise, we bought a hobby farm a couple of hours out of Sydney and our travels continued. Mum knew to enjoy money while it was around. Our finances were tied to the stock markets, and she had learned from her father, Eric, who had eventually lost it all, that you never knew how long it would last. My parents were also generous and on many trips invited friends, mine or Emile’s, or shouted relatives to come along. We went skiing in Canada, perused modern art in New York, learned scuba diving in Tahiti—Dad lying about my age so I wouldn’t miss out—and visited Celia Winter-Irving in her new home, a village of stone sculptors in a remote part of Zimbabwe. I had made good friends at school with a girl named Alicia, and Mum convinced her parents to allow her to come travelling with us. Although we still weren’t confidantes, Mum was always looking out for me. She knew how important girlfriends were at this fragile age, and how much nicer it would be for me to have a friend by my side. Alicia travelled with us for a month, building the foundation of a friendship that would last for many years. I soaked it all up; I had started to love travel, realising how it could open windows to new worlds, ones I had only read about in books.