I might run into an old friend. Maybe we briefly attended Girl Guides together, as teenagers in western Sydney. We grew close quickly—each with our perceived isolation and peculiar perspectives on life. Her family moved away a couple of years later, and we lost contact. She might ask after Carlie because she’d been a Brownie with her younger sister.
‘Carlie died,’ I say.
‘What?’
‘She died. In a car accident. Lisa too. They were together.’
The heat is thick against our skin. It begins to rain and this comes as a relief, releasing us from the humidity’s tension.
‘You didn’t know? I thought everyone knew. It’s all over Facebook.’
‘I don’t use Facebook.’
The rain comes down heavier, but we stand there, not moving, despite there being a shelter fifty metres away.
‘Are your parents still together?’
This question still startles me. ‘Yes, of course.’
The questions go back and forth, each one underwritten by the shock on her face. It was a long time ago that we knew each other. It takes a while, and we are soaked through by then, but we eventually part ways, promising to catch up.
People often ask if my parents are still together. At first, I was perplexed by the question. But over time, I’ve heard my mother express the same surprise. Perhaps what people are really asking is: How did your parents not turn on each other? Was there no morning, as their knives cracked the tops of their boiled eggs, when they asked:
‘Why didn’t you come with me?’
‘Why didn’t you take a different route?’
‘Why didn’t you share the driving?’
‘Why didn’t you stop me from going?’
‘Why did you let half the family stay, and half the family go?’
I don’t know what my parents talk about when I’m not there, but I never see them ask each other these questions.
I’m having a lazy Saturday morning. I sleep in, get up, go back to bed to finish reading Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life, a series of personal essays circling the death of his wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh. I am living on a PhD scholarship. My doctorate is in Creative Writing and I have gravitated naturally towards writing about grief. Half the course is creative, for which I have begun to write this book; half is theoretical, which is where Levels of Life comes in. During the week I rise early. I make coffee, grab a banana, go straight to my desk. If I am in writing mode, I do two hours of work. If I am editing, I do four. In the afternoons, I read for two hours. I do this five days a week, with some exercise during breaks. Sometimes I run through the bushland paths parallel to the ocean. Other times, I play a podcast and walk around the harbour, where the fishing boats dock. If it is summer, I might swim laps or do a yoga class on the grass by the beach. During this time, I devour grief memoir: Patti Smith’s Just Kids, Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Sonali Deraniyagala’s Wave, C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, Cory Taylor’s Dying: A Memoir, Drusilla Modjeska’s Second Half First. In this way, I am teaching myself how to write, but also how to grieve.
While still in bed, I send my father a Facebook message saying I left a copy of the last essay in Barnes’s Levels of Life—‘The Loss of Depth’—at their place and suggesting he read it. He’s been down lately. We all went to dinner last night and he didn’t say a single word the whole time. Just ate his Lebanese lady fingers and sat there looking like he wanted to cry.
My parents met when they were in their early twenties. Sometimes, my mother refers to herself as a cradle-snatcher; my father is a year younger than her. Dad was raised on a dairy farm in south-west Sydney. Mum moved to the big city at twenty-one after being raised in tiny Wollar, 48 kilometres north-east of Mudgee in regional New South Wales. Growing up, she once told me, they’d climb the surrounding mountains for fun, and get a new dress once a year, and they didn’t get a black-and-white TV until she was in high school. Her father raised horses, delivered mail and baked bread.
‘You remind me of him,’ she always tells me, referring to his love of horses and bread, no doubt, but also the way he’d disappear when people came to visit, how he’d buy four pairs of the same shoes in different colours when he found ones he liked, how he sometimes used alcohol as an emotional crutch. I don’t remember him: he died before I turned two.
Her mum was a hard-working mother of four who ran the family shop. Later, when the shop closed down, she cleaned the local school. Like her daughter, she was the one who kept everything together.
My parents met through Dad’s brother’s girlfriend and later wife, Maria. Aunty Ree knew my mother from work and she and Terry took my yet-to-be parents out one night. The four of them became inseparable. For a short time they even lived together, these two brothers from a milk farm in Douglas Park and the women who would later become their wives. My mother told me that on their first date a group of them were meant to go see a band, but my father forgot to pick her up. It sounds just like him.
The first time he kissed her, she cried.
They lived together in Bankstown for seven years before they got married. No one seemed to mind. Mum’s mother loved Dad—according to the running joke in the family, it was because he was Catholic and didn’t drink.
The proposal was true to their style: Dad went missing for a while with no explanation. My mother was furious. When he eventually returned, he took her to a jewellery shop in Bankstown Square, where the saleslady pulled out a ring and put it on the counter.
My mother cried.
(The ring was too big, my mother tells me. She had to wait a week for it to be re-sized before she could wear it.)
They were married at the church in Mudgee on my mother’s birthday. Dad said this would be useful, so he only had to remember one date.
When my mother fell pregnant with me, she picked out my name before she knew my sex. She said she didn’t care whether I was a boy or a girl, I was going to be called Chloe and I was going to wear dresses.
‘A couple of years later we had our beautiful Carlie, who was the easiest baby ever,’ my mother tells me. ‘Then a few years later along came our special girl Lisa, who was a bit of a surprise but a good one. We have been through so much but thirty-one years later he is still the best thing that happened to me. A very caring, beautiful man.’
My father drinks an entire bottle of sixty-nine-cent Aldi soft drink every night. Sometimes he eats a whole packet of musk sticks, or liquorice allsorts, or Allen’s bananas. I cannot say anything because I drink half a bottle of red wine each evening while I make dinner or read in the bath, and hope it will help me forget so I can sleep.
(My relationship with sleep has improved; I no longer lie awake for three hours each night but still I dread the thoughts that come when it is time to sleep. It is then, in the quiet of night, that I become most aware of my aloneness.)
But often, I want to ask: What was the man who pulled you from the car meant to do, Dad? Let you die?
My mother has an idea in her head of how a person should be, and tries to push me in that direction. We watch a film together. It features a young woman who kisses one boy, then another a few days later. Mum makes a derogatory comment about the girl and I defend her.
‘Well, you wouldn’t do that, would you?’ is her response.
One Friday evening, we are going out with family friends and she doesn’t like what I’m wearing: ‘You look so nice when you dress up and put make-up on.’
When I say I want to spend three months exploring the Northern Territory: ‘But don’t you want to settle down in a full-time job and get married?’
We bicker like this constantly, gently throwing barbs, each trying to make the other see what we want her to be. It’s not meant to be cruel. Often, we laugh too.
We are trying to make sense of each other.
I have been feeling a little better, my emotions having stopped feeling like a rollercoaster ride.
I spend three nights at Mum and Dad’s, and Mum and I only have one fight.
‘Are you friends again yet?’ Dad asks the morning after, as he and I are on our way to see the therapist.
‘Yes, of course. Why?’
‘Because you were so angry at each other. You came to me in tears.’
‘Oh yeah, but we’re friends again now.’
When my mother and I fight, our anger rarely lasts overnight. When we fought the night before, I had an urge to run to a lover, or go out drinking. Instead, I made myself take Princess for a walk.
I was surprised by how much the walk dissipated my anger. Is that what normal people do? Instead of turning to drink and cigarettes and sex? Take their dog for a slow walk through a suburban park, and feel better for it?
I tell my therapist what is happening. ‘I swing between extremes.’
‘If each side was a ten on the extreme scale, what if you tried only going to five? Or even three? And checking in to see how that felt before going any further?’ my therapist asks.
And so when I return to Wollongong I do just that. When I feel a bout of cabin fever coming on, instead of messaging friends to go out, and getting high and then drained on conversation, I take myself out to dinner. Go for a walk along Wollongong Harbour and come home by eight in the evening, craving more reading time. I’m learning how to hold a healthy adult life together.
The next day, when tossing up between an afternoon cider and swimming ten laps at the Continental Pool, I choose the latter. While there, a middle-aged man says hello in a Polish accent as he smiles at me, and I think of Kris’s mother and that night on her kitchen floor and how the carbonara recipe she taught me is still my go-to dish when cooking for friends.
‘Too beautiful a day to not be in the water!’ he says.
I couldn’t agree more.
In the morning, I wake at five and do an hour and a half of yoga before sitting down to write. The summer rain patters on my tin roof, and I look up at the whitewashed sky, thankful to be where I am. In the afternoon, the rain stops and I go to my writers group. In the evening, a friend picks me up and we walk along Towradgi Beach, the sandy wind whipping our bare calves.
My mother begins telling me that she and Dad are moving to Mudgee.
‘Really?’ I ask, because when she says this her cheeks get those lines that suggest she’s trying to keep a straight face.
‘Really,’ she says. ‘What will you do without us?’
It feels like she is actually asking: why don’t you need me as much as I need you?
Later, I text my mother: What was that actually about, when you started telling me you and Dad were moving to Mudgee?
Just being silly, she replies.
I insert a laughing emoticon, and then type: Of course, I know. But you were hurting about something.
Who knows. Maybe because I thought up there I would be around my family more.
Sometimes, I am well for weeks at a time: my head is clear, it is easy to smile, I feel less tension than usual around other people. I spent years working out how to get to this place, and often it comes down to routine: rising with first light, two hours of writing each morning, two hours of reading, exercise four or five days a week. Speaking honestly and openly with close friends. Going to see a film alone. Speaking with my therapist as often as I can afford. Reading books and having conversations to understand my behaviour and other people’s: pulling the covers off my shame. But there are things that ripple through these safety nets that I find difficult. Sometimes, I go out drinking and don’t come home until two or three in the morning. For two days after, my body is tense—from alcohol, yes, but also from the stress of not remembering everything I did and said, or remembering too well something I wish I could take back. Sometimes there is a new lover in my bed (or at least my head), and I find it difficult to keep my mind clear and my nerves straight. When this happens, my body returns to the state of the years that immediately followed the accident: I cannot sit still, cannot wait patiently for things to unfold. I need certainty, and I need it now. And in this haze I cling to lovers, then drive them away. Everything moves in extremes. My moods swing, my drinking increases, I smoke too much. Always, always: sitting still is the hardest thing to do. These short-lived love affairs or nights on the town can take days to recover from. These emotions are like drugs, and my body has severe comedowns. Healing is not linear.
My father pissed me off recently.
This is rare. Inwardly, I am so protective that I won’t allow myself to think badly of him. Outwardly, I walk on eggshells, afraid he will become more depressed, or will like me even less if I hurt his feelings.
It’s been a rough couple of days—swinging between my ex-boyfriend and a new lover, drinking too much, spending the day on the verge of crying, dancing at Rad Bar until midnight, sneaking into the Continental Pool with a girlfriend and cider at two in the morning—and I’ve decided to go home for a few days. Compared with my early twenties, my rough days are less frequent and far less intense. But I have been trying to let go of my ex-boyfriend and it is difficult. I crave solitude, and yet am terrified of ending up old and alone. My parents are aging, my sisters are dead, and I don’t want children. As I keep trying to separate from my ex, these thoughts are a constant buzz in my mind. I struggle to let go of lovers; the pain of separation—even from someone I no longer want to be with—is one of the most psychologically painful experiences I know of. It comes close to physically unbearable and the emotions it brings up feel more intense than the night my sisters died, perhaps because I don’t have the shock to safeguard my body.
I arrive at my parents’ place at 3.30 pm. I walk through the quiet Liverpool streets and nearby parklands, Princess beside me, a few young men playing cricket in the nets, groups of women—some in short shorts, others in hijabs—doing an exercise class. I feel happy, calm, unrushed. Princess is twelve years old and starting to have fits, her back leg curling up like an angry cat’s tail, her walk slower than a year ago. I worry that she too will die. I push this out of my mind.
When I return to Mum and Dad’s after my walk, I check my emails and social media. There is a Facebook notification saying my mother has tagged me in a post. Happy 23rd birthday, Lisa, her post says.
I forgot. I came home to escape, and yet here it still is, in a different form.
Mum is working until seven, and I breathe a sigh of relief as I remember. Perhaps this means we are not doing the cemetery thing this year. Usually, if it is a birthday, or anniversary, or Easter, we go out at around four in the afternoon. Maybe set up a camping table, or a picnic, blow out candles on a cake once everyone arrives. I am hopeful Mum’s late return means we aren’t going this year.
I text my father, at work: What time will you be home?
Six, he writes back.
Want to walk to that pizza place around the corner for dinner?
On the nights she is working late, Mum doesn’t eat at home. She grazes throughout the day, eating mangoes and slices of salami from the fruit shop and deli she’s worked at since Dad’s bankruptcy.
Dad calls me. ‘If you want to meet me at Bonnyrigg, I’ll get off the bus there and we can go for dinner at the pizza place near there?’ It’s Mum and Dad’s favourite pizza place.
This prompts a wave of panic to ripple through my body. He wants me to pick him up. I thought I had finished driving for the day. Reducing my driving over the years was not initially a conscious decision, but something I moved towards each year without realising. I began organising my week around minimising the number of days I had to drive. I did my grocery shopping on the day I drove into town to meet friends. I saved my run for the day we had book club, so I didn’t need a car to get there. Now, I live right in town and hardly drive at all. When I return home t
o western Sydney for a few days, I rarely go out. I stay cocooned in the house, the thought of driving enough of a barrier to keep me housebound. Sometimes, when people mention new places and ask if I’ve been there I joke, ‘If I can’t walk there, I don’t go there.’ I laugh along with them, but mostly I am not kidding.
When I know ahead of time that I need to drive, it is easier to make peace with it: I have a couple of days to mentally prepare; it doesn’t come as a shock. But meeting Dad at Bonnyrigg is a change of plans. Walking to the pizza place I suggested would have meant he’d catch the bus home, like normal, and then he and I would walk the five hundred metres to the restaurant. His suggestion means he would get off the bus earlier, and I would drive twenty minutes to pick him up, then drive the few minutes to the other pizza place, and then, after eating, drive twenty minutes back home. I will spend the evening stressed, unable to rest my mind: I cannot relax knowing I still need to drive.
‘Sure,’ I say. ‘I’ll see you there in half an hour.’ I don’t know how to say otherwise without feeling selfish.
‘Don’t forget Mum’s home at seven. Then we’ll go to the cemetery. See you soon.’ He hangs up.
Anger rises within me. It starts in my chest as my breathing becomes constricted and heart rate quickens, then moves into my throat. The glands in my neck swell and the muscles tighten. There is a dry, burning sensation. I try to push it away. I clean my teeth, pull my fringe down to make it sit straight. Put shoes on. The anger climbs up through my chest, and I crave a cigarette. I haven’t bought a packet in a couple of days; I’m trying to quit again.
(Why couldn’t I say: I can’t do this today. I can’t drive and I can’t go to the cemetery?)
In the car, I keep the radio switched off. I am trying to remain calm. But the anger and anxiety climb higher in my throat. This is not what I imagined, or planned. When I arrived at Mum and Dad’s this afternoon I let myself relax. Turning onto Cowpasture Road, I begin to cry.
The Girls Page 8