by Liz Byrski
Your sudden and unexpected return catapulted me back to that unfulfilled period of growth. It seemed that the part of me that had been shut away now had to be lived out; it had a will of its own and had to run its course whatever the consequences. In those first weeks and months I was eighteen again. It was often difficult to hold myself in the present when the way we related to each other so often mirrored the past. In my head and my heart I wanted to be the person I had been in nineteen sixty-two and because I lived alone and still clung to my solitude I could safely be her as I wandered the house and garden, and conducted my life with you over the telephone and the internet. The shocks came when I ventured outside the safe cocoon of the house.
Catching sight of myself in a shop window or encountering an acquaintance in the street I would be suddenly jolted into the realisation that I was no longer a teenager, but a woman of fifty-five with a totally different life and responsibilities. When I arranged to meet friends, I had to remind myself which life I was really supposed to be living.
As I prepared to meet you in January I had worried over the changes you would see in me, and whether you would be able to reconcile Liz vintage nineteen sixty-two with the current model. Now I had to contend with integrating those two very different sides of myself. The mature feminist with strong views and an uncomfortable and often irascible social conscience, was faced with the resurgence of a conservative, submissive girl with no awareness of or interest in feminism or socialism. And the latter wanted to take over, to ditch the accumulated woman and assert the girl. The challenge was to reconcile the two, for there were forgotten aspects of that resurrected younger woman that I liked and wanted to preserve. As for the older woman—well perhaps it was time for some things to change. It was time to question the person I had become, to recognise that I could quite easily have become someone very different, and to find out where that knowledge would lead me.
It is complex and confusing and it is a continuing process as I reflect on more than just the romantic potential of the roads not taken.
I am like a gardener, sorting the weeds from the flowers, and I have the problem common to all gardeners. Sometimes it is not only the weeds that need to go, some flowers must be sacrificed in order to allow those that remain to flourish. It has always interested me that as one travels the plants one has come to know as weeds are favoured flowers in another place and vice versa. The classifications are subjective. The process of selection continues as the crisis of identity presents each new challenge.
***
‘I can get away again for a few weeks at the end of June,’ you say. ‘We can meet again in Frankfurt and then go on to England.’
‘We can go back to Northumberland Crescent.’
‘We might even be able to find Joan and Jock—wouldn’t they get a surprise.’
I picture meeting Joan and Jock again, telling them the story ridding myself of the bitterness. I savour the satisfactory prospect of showing them that in the end we are together, that our instincts and judgement have been vindicated.
‘And then…’
‘Then we can go together to San Francisco.’
‘Are you sure this is what you want?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘But your life in Australia, your friends, your mother, your house, your work, Basil? I’d understand if you want to wait until I can come to Australia.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I want you here in San Francisco with me. It’s what I’ve always wanted, but that’s entirely selfish and I have no right to ask it.’
‘Its what I want. My friends will understand. My mother—well I have to come to terms with that … Anyway my writing will travel, I can organise to do it anywhere.’
‘Except at home at the moment!’
‘Very funny—but these are exceptional circumstances. Theoretically at least, I can write wherever I am. I so want to be with you in San Francisco—for a while at least, then we can sort out what to do in the long term.’
‘I so much want you to be here Sweetheart. I so much wanted you here all the years.’
‘I’ll be doing what I should have done thirty-seven years ago.’
There is silence on the line and I know you relish the symbolism, the shape of it all, but that you are also measuring the impact of the changes you have created in my life.
‘This may not be as idyllic for you as you anticipate,’ I point out into the silence. I was on my best behaviour in Germany.’
‘So was I! You won’t believe how cranky I can be!’
‘I believe it!’
‘Brilliant!’ says Neil on the phone. ‘I’m really happy for you, I’m sure you’re doing the right thing.’
‘So what do you think about all this, Mark?’ I ask my elder son as we sit watching Sam and Jamie climbing onto a large stuffed donkey.
He laughs at the idea that I should even have to ask. I think it’s brilliant, Shelley and I both do.’
‘I think you’ll like him,’ I say tentatively.
‘I’m sure we will, and anyway Mum, it doesn’t matter if we don’t. It’s your life.’
‘It matters to me.’
‘Well it shouldn’t. It’s what you feel that’s important.’
I know he’s right—it shouldn’t matter but it does.
Sam falls off the donkey and scrambles to his feet while Jamie takes advantage of the situation to occupy the best position. They are almost two years old. I will be away for nine months and they will be very different when I see them again.
‘I so want you to like them all,’ I tell you later.
‘I’m sure I shall love your sons, and your daughter-in-law and your grandsons,’ you say. ‘And I promise to behave nicely, I’ll behave as befits the suitor of a grandmother.’
***
Early on a cool and sparkling May morning I drive along the banks of the Swan River to Perth to a women’s breakfast where I have been invited to speak about my recently released book. The room is vibrant with the colour and scent of women, it hums with their early morning energy, resonant with their greetings and their laughter. These functions are familiar but in the past I was a different person. For more than ten years I have had a presence as an outspoken feminist and social commentator, a writer, a broadcaster, an activist. Now I know that although I am still all those things I am also very different. This feels like a baptism of fire and I wonder how my new sense of myself will survive this event. We eat breakfast, I speak and answer questions and reassuringly it is as it has always been—that is until the formalities are over.
As the women get up from their tables to socialise and to leave for work or home many gravitate to where I sit catching up on the coffee I missed w4iile at the podium. They have read ‘Meet Me in Frankfurt’ and they have questions. How has it affected my life? What happens next? Aren’t I taking a huge risk racing off to California?
‘You’re the same age as me,’ says a well known and respected local lawyer. ‘You’ve got a high profile here. How can you risk all that you’ve built up? What if it doesn’t work out?’
‘I don’t think I’d have the courage,’ says a senior public servant. ‘You’ve been so successful here, but you’re prepared to throw it all away.’
‘Good for you,’ says a retired doctor. ‘But you do realise that this will all be ashes in a year or so.’
Others, more positive and optimistic, are fascinated by my decision to join you in California. Touched by the nature of the story they are surprised and somehow unsettled by my decision.
In a strange sort of reverse psychology their caution and reservations actually reinforce my own confidence in the decision. They were correct in thinking that to reshape my life in response to a man is totally at odds with the way I had long visualised my future. But I have been forced to reach inside myself to discover how much of what I have advocated has been truly a part of myself, how much is politics and ideology, and how much has been for my own protection.
F
eminism is not an orthodoxy. It is not written in canon law. Its essence has always been about the freedom of women to explore their own reality and for this to be valued, honoured and respected. Feminism was never about the denial of love, just about a different way to live it. None of us can predict how we will respond to the challenges and the invitations which present themselves in our lives.
Love is an affirmation of what we are, but its wonder lies in its powers of transformation. The irony is that love inevitably changes that which has inspired it. Some things are lost, much is gained and the process is not necessarily comfortable.
‘Some of the women were amazed and horrified,’ I say to Carolyn at lunch.
‘Hmmm!’ she says, tucking in to her soup. ‘You see the thing is that at eighteen we’re swept along by it all, we believe in romance at all costs. As older women, on the other hand, we may still believe in it, we may still want it, but we suspect it may come at a cost.’
I freeze, my spoon suspended between bowl and mouth.
‘What are you looking like that for? she asks briskly.
‘Do we?’ I ask, my throat feeling constricted.
‘Do we what?’
‘Do we suspect it may come at a cost?’
‘Well of course we do! As women in our fifties we know this. As writers, of course we understand this is the creative gift of uncertainty. Memoir is not about resolution or dramatic endings, that’s the nature of fiction. This is about the narrative itself. You know—the story continues but who knows how or where it takes us. Uncertainty is the knife edge. That’s what fascinates women about your story.’
‘Uncertainty?’
‘Of course. Eat your soup. It is the uncertainty that women want to explore in your story.’
‘Perhaps I’ll take the story and turn it into a novel instead.’
‘Boundaries!’ she warns firmly. ‘You always say how you detest it when writers blur the boundaries between fact and fiction.’
‘That was the journalist in me,’ I say, screwing up the napkin and tucking it under my bread plate. ‘This is different.’
She shakes her head. ‘No! At the very least you must be clear about the boundaries even if, in the end, you decide to cross them. But uncertainty is the key.’
‘I’m certain. Karl loves me, I’m certain I love him. We’ve loved each other all these years in absence. I am certain we are meant to be together.’
‘I know, I know,’ she says. ‘This is understood, it’s fact, it happened, the falling in love, the loss, the separation, the search and of course the coming back together. It has all the dimensions of the novel. The romance, the passion, the tension, a hero, a heroine, steadfast devotion—it’s a wonderful true life love story. But in a novel of course you would meet in Frankfurt and still be in love, or fall in love all over again—however you wish to interpret it.’
‘Well we did, that’s just what we did.’
‘But in the novel,’ she says, speaking more slowly to focus my attention. ‘In the novel that’s where it ends. You meet, you are in love, the past is not only vindicated, it is honoured, celebrated. Your instincts about each other were right, this was real love, thwarted, aborted and finally restored. You are reunited, all you have to do next is live happily ever after.’
‘Yes,’ I smile in relief. ‘Exactly!’
Carolyn has finished her soup and settles back comfortably in her chair.
‘That’s the novel The memoir is different. We don’t know how it will end. Life goes on and each day brings its own challenge. Who knows where it will end? Uncertainty you see. You’ve lost the fear that Karl is going to leave you this time as he did before, but you are still uncertain.’
I pause wondering how she knows this. What, in fact, she does know.
‘I have this morbid fear that he’ll die before we can meet again.’
Carolyn takes my hand across the table.
‘All the odds are that you’ll meet again in Frankfurt and live happily ever after in California to the envy of all your friends. But we are talking about the difference between fiction and memoir and this is it. In the novel you, the writer, can control what happens. The memoir is life, you can’t control it. Uncertainty. Life is uncertain.’
‘Perhaps it’s just that love is uncertain, creates its own uncertainties,’ I suggest.
Carolyn shakes her head. ‘No—well yes and no. Love is uncertain simply because it is part of life. Uncertainty is the nature of life itself. Certainty is an illusion.’
I disagree with her. Some things, I say, we can be certain of, we can plan for them, create certainty in our lives.
‘When I left here to go on holiday I had certainty,’ I say. ‘I had my life really well organised, under control, I knew what the future held.’
‘Really?’ she smiles infuriatingly.
‘Really! You know I did. I said so to you before I left.’
A chill breeze blows in from the sea and she pulls her wrap from the back of her chair and shrugs it around her shoulders.
‘I know you kept telling me that. I think it’s going to rain but let’s stay out here on the terrace. It was illusion of course.’
‘No,’ I protest. I had my life as I wanted it. I had control. I had certainty.’
‘Ah,’ she says. ‘Yes I remember. You had life as you wanted it. You were going to stay in Fremantle and write, and you were never going to have another relationship. Well one phone call changed all that didn’t it? Certainty is not something we can own. It’s an illusion occasionally on loan to us. Your lease was up the day you arrived in England and took the telephone call’
I shred a morsel of Turkish bread and squeeze the crumbs into pellets.
‘But I can have it again? Certainty.’
‘You may have the illusion again, sometime. But the challenge is to do away with the need for it. To dump the whole concept, to relish its absence and live in the tension. This, I suspect, is the perfect state of mind for writing.’
‘And for life?’
‘Aha! That’s the real challenge. Do you think we should try the bruschetta?’
***
The time grows shorter and the tasks to be completed before I leave Australia suddenly need to be done.
‘He’s beautiful,’ says Genevieve who has answered my advertisement for a home for Basil. She bends to stroke him and he gives her the full benefit of his most winning look. ‘What do you think Trevor?’
I think he’s gorgeous,’ says Trevor, taking Basil’s head in his hands and speaking quietly to him.
‘Well come inside and we can talk about it,’ I say. And they follow me into the house and sit down.
‘I’m afraid he doesn’t take too easily to men,’ I say to Trevor. ‘He’s more used to women.’
As the words leave my mouth Basil confounds me by immediately walking over to Trevor, resting his head on his knees and gazing adoringly into his eyes.
‘Mmm. Really?’ says Trevor, ‘he doesn’t seem to mind me too much.’
I have agonised for weeks, trying to find Basil a suitable home. Many people have come but somehow they were not quite right. These people are different. I think they will provide him with the right sort of home and we agree that I will take him to their house later that day. Basil has been my closest companion for just over two years. He has been the perfect dog, gentle, playful, loving and loyal, a good housedog. However can I cope with this? I collect up his bedding, his towels, his brush and lead, his bowls, his ball and his frisbee and pack them into the car.
At five o’clock I call him and for the last time he jumps happily onto the back seat and we drive out of the gate as the first roll of thunder crashes. The sky darkens rapidly and the rain begins. I drive the fifteen kilometres to Genevieve and Trevor’s house, and when we arrive the rain eases a little. Basil sniffs inquisitively around his new home. He runs through the large light rooms, and bounds out into the soaking wet garden where he comes face to face with their other collie. Soon the two a
re chasing each other around the rose bushes as the rain begins again.
‘Bye, Bas,’ I gulp, bending to hug him and he finds time to thump my face with his wet nose before racing off again.
I make my way home through torrential rain that brings the traffic to a standstill, and lightning that sketches its dramatic zigzags across the darkened sky. It is a terrible night of storms.
I cry on and off for four days, and when I tell you, you cry too. Basil on the other hand, is fine. He pines a bit the first night but manages to eat a hearty meal the following day and is exhausted by wild games with the other dog and with Genevieve and Trevor’s two teenage sons. He settles readily to his new life and I cherish the memory of the time that he was part of mine.
***
Into the last few weeks my fear of losing you continues to haunt me, and my neurosis reaches its zenith one night in late May. It is midnight in San Francisco, three in the afternoon in Fremantle and when you hung up the phone you were going to put the ear in the garage and then go straight to bed. You would call me again at six o’clock in the morning your time. It will be nine o’clock in the evening my time. But nine comes and goes and you don’t call I think you must have slept a little late and I refuse to let myself worry. Half-an-hour passes and I know that you have an early appointment. The phone is unanswered, it rings out. I dial again, and there is still no answer. Fear rises in my gut, my mouth is bitter with its taste, and the fear is clothed in irony. Of course it will happen now, now after all these weeks, just as I have the arrogance to believe that I will see you again, of course—of course, now I will lose you. Time after time the phone rings out and I know that this is it. This is what I have dreaded every day since we parted in Frankfurt. Have I conjured this up through my own obsession or was it always going to be this way?
Clutching your photograph and the t-shirt which I took from you in Germany I wander the house howling like a wounded animal.