“That’s so sad,” I said, and Laura shrugged.
“It was. Is.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, leaning in to hug her.
“What about your family? It sounds like a bit of a disaster.”
“When my father died, everything fell apart. My mother and brother are close, but I’ve never been close to either of them.”
“What’s wrong with your mother?”
“Nothing. She just doesn’t like me much. After the accident, she made no contact with me other than a birthday card she sent in the mail.”
“That is very strange. Most un-mother-like.”
“You’ll meet her at some point and you can make up your own mind.”
I explained that my parents had met at the University of Sydney when my mother was doing her bachelor of arts. My father had lectured my mother in geology and, according to my mother, was highly desired by his female students. He was a handsome man: tall, with thick, dark, wavy hair and gray-blue eyes. When he kept his mouth closed he looked like a film star—but his stained teeth gave away his working-class roots. His many admirers, including my mother, had attended private girls’ schools on Sydney’s north shore. They’d enrolled in university, my mother told me once, for the sole purpose of finding a husband. My mother, a short brunette with excellent teeth, waited patiently until she graduated, when my father decided sufficient time had lapsed for him to ask her out.
My father’s childhood had been unfathomably sad. His mother died from scarlet fever when he was three, and my grandfather made the curious decision to tell his boys their mother had abandoned them. Both boys had adored their mother and she them. My father and his brother learned the truth fifteen years later when my grandfather remarried. My grandfather seemed to blame my grandmother for dying, for leaving him to bring up two boys alone.
My grandfather’s lie ignited a rage in my father that burned bright until his last few years of life. He never blamed his father, who had done the best he could under difficult circumstances. His rage landed on my brother and me. But my father had more integrity about him than anyone else I have known. I always knew where I stood with him, and I never doubted his love or support—even in his worst tempers.
My mother’s father, Lionel, a journalist for a rural newspaper with a fondness for women other than his wife, divorced my grandmother when my mother entered high school. Once divorced, my grandparents never saw each other again.
Lorna, my grandmother, a beautiful woman with high cheekbones and long, shapely legs, lost her hearing after developing an infection in her twenties. My grandmother was gentle, loving, and kind—the polar opposite of my mother—and I adored her. She took me to the local cinema and bought me choc top ice creams. We did the kind of things normal people did, things I never did with my parents. Not once did our family go to a movie or a restaurant. We were short on money, but my father also had a strong desire to avoid unnecessary human contact.
My grandfather remarried a younger woman who had made a lot of money on the stock market and used to tell me, as an eight-year-old, to sit with my legs closed. They bought an apartment in an expensive suburb of Sydney with a view overlooking the harbor. They had their own drinks cabinet, complete with crystal decanters for gin, vodka, scotch, brandy, and port, each bottle labeled with a tortoiseshell tag slung around its neck. When we visited my grandfather, he always pretended I was more grown-up than I was and made me a nice drink: orange juice, bitters, and ice served to me in a proper glass with a plastic twirly stick. He was the only adult who ever trusted me with crystal. He was the only adult I knew who owned crystal. I held the glass tightly with both hands. In his spare room, my grandfather kept scrapbooks full of postcards of girls in bikinis. My stepgrandmother laughed about it. Each year they holidayed together in Hawaii, and he stocked up on more postcards that he filed away in his scrapbooks.
My mother sided with her father, and my grandmother grew old in a dark one-bedroom flat with carpet the color of the ocean. Each time we visited her we would find her hunched over a race guide, an old yellow Bic in her hand, wincing from the static between her tiny transistor radio and her hearing aid. She was a sensible gambler. A couple of times a week she walked up to the local betting shop on the Pacific Highway and placed her bets. She never betted much, and she did her research. Mostly she seemed to win. Her apartment was three blocks away from our house, which had once been her marital home. My grandfather sold it to my parents for a fraction of its worth after my brother was born. I was eleven when Lorna died from lung cancer, though she had never smoked. On the day she died, my mother came down to my bedroom where I lay spread across my bed sobbing and said, “You may not understand this, Sarah, but all I feel is relief. I am finally free.”
My mother and her brother don’t speak. Her father and her brother were estranged. A similar division formed in my family after my father’s death, with my mother and brother on one side, me on the other. Conflict is in our genes.
My father maintained almost no contact at all with his brother and stepbrother. “We don’t have much in common,” he said, when asked why we never saw my uncles. “They’re nice enough, but there’s no need to see them, is there?” Had the decision been left to him we would have seen no one at all—no family, no friends, no neighbors. We were an odd family.
Some months after Laura moved in, we drove across town to my mother’s apartment. Laura had been pressing me to meet my mother. To make up her own mind. My mother invited us in and made some tea. She sat on the sofa, looked earnestly at Laura, and said, “Well, you know Sarah is manic-depressive.”
“What?” I asked. It was news to me.
“It’s my opinion,” she added.
“I’m not manic-depressive! Where did that come from? I had a head injury! I’m depressed!”
“I just thought Laura should know, that’s all.”
“She’s not manic-depressive,” Laura said.
“Alright,” my mother said, shrugging. “It’s just my opinion.”
“You bitch!” I shouted, my rage flooding back in an instant. “You were saving that one up, weren’t you?”
My mother looked at Laura as if to say, See? You’re dating a foul-mouthed psychopath. Enjoy!
I grabbed Laura’s hand and headed for the door.
“I’m not manic-depressive!” I said to Laura as soon as the door clicked shut behind us. “And if I were, why wouldn’t she have tried to get help? We have barely spoken since the accident! She never talked to the doctor, never tried to find out what was wrong, never did anything to help!”
Laura pulled me toward her and kissed me on the ear. “You were right about your mother. I’m so sorry.”
As we drove home, I realized that a seismic shift had happened in my relationship with my mother. She held an incendiary device and could toss it in my direction and wait for me to explode. From that moment on, my mother began telling her closest friends that she was scared of me. That I had a vile temper, that I lost it without warning, that she feared for her physical safety. She never told anyone about my father’s frequent rampages through our house, smashing things and beating up my brother and me. I had never hit anyone, never smashed anything. But I did shout. Had she told them about my brain injury? I’ll never know.
At home, Laura was disrupting the dynamics with my preferred family. George was surprised to learn that, while meeting his criteria of being under thirty with a symmetrical face, Laura didn’t spend her time showering him with affection. She didn’t get down on her knees, rub his tummy, and tell him he was a good boy. She didn’t even tickle the tufts of baby hair behind his ears. She smiled at him, and sometimes nodded. That was the extent of it. Bess would approach Laura time and again wagging her tail, and seemed to bounce back when Laura nodded at her in response or ignored her altogether.
“I like dogs,” Laura said a week after she moved in, “but they belong outside.” I glanced at her and looked across the room at George, whose nostrils had flared in d
isbelief.
“I can’t keep the dogs outside,” I said. “They are inside dogs. Rescue dogs. I am compensating for someone else’s neglect and cruelty. I am trying to make up for what went before.”
“It’s not cruel to keep a dog outside.”
“You were brought up in the country with farm dogs. These are city dogs! And we live in a terrace house with a tiny backyard. And I won’t,” I said. This was something about which I wasn’t prepared to compromise. I loved Laura, but the dogs had seen me through the most hellish time of my life, and they needed me more than she did.
The world, as I saw it at that time in my life, was divided into dog people and nondog people. Laura was a nondog person and a people person. I was a dog person and a nonpeople person. I had been a dog person all my life, but the nonpeople thing was new. After my accident, I decided that people (based exclusively upon my experience with my mother) were a colossal disappointment. George and Bess, on the other hand, had showed their devotion to me each and every day. It is true that they didn’t have much choice, but I had experienced firsthand the ability of my dogs to calm me, to love me, and to motivate me to keep living. No one understood and supported the head-injured me better than George and Bess.
Laura was not as attuned to the positive effects of dog ownership. Stare into the eyes of a dog, and you may experience what researchers have called an “oxytocin-gaze positive loop,” in which oxytocin levels are raised in both you and your dog.13 You need to have known the love of a dog to understand the joys of dog ownership, and Laura, sadly, had not.
I did my best to explain that humans form opinions of each other based on their expectations and judgments. Dogs love us without conditions or judgments. Laura looked at me, cast her eyes upward, and exhaled, so I sang her a few bars from “Dogs Are the Best People” by the Fauves.
“Enough,” she said, smacking my leg.
I sang the refrain again.
“Stop!” she said, placing her hand over my mouth.
My dogs and Laura were the two things that were helping my return to a normal life, and I needed them to learn to live with one another. I attempted to address Laura’s concerns about the dogs’ sleeping arrangements by buying two dog futons and placing them on the floor on either side of our bed. I explained to George that there was no longer room for him in the bed. He shot me a look of contempt, snorted, and wandered to the fireplace where he proceeded to lift his leg in protest.
“No,” Laura shouted, as she saw the arc of yellow pee splashing against the fireplace, but once a dog starts to pee, it’s hard to stop him.
“Don’t worry,” I said, racing out to the back shed to retrieve a mop and bucket.
“It’s disgusting!” she said as I began to mop up the mess.
“There are a lot more disgusting things than a dog peeing inside the house.”
“Like?”
“Come on! He’s adjusting to having you here, that’s all. We’ve been alone for years. Give him time.”
Bess was even worse. Ever since Laura moved in, Bess had developed terrible separation anxiety. My days at work were shorter than Laura’s, which gave me time to race home and clean up whatever surprise Bess had left us. Most days she would jump onto the kitchen counter and spray diarrhea over everything within reach: the toaster, the juicer, the blender, whatever we had left to dry in the dish rack. I started leaving the office earlier and earlier each day, allowing myself time to scrub the kitchen clean before Laura returned from work.
After a month of coming home each day to discover the same thing, I took Bess to the vet surgery two doors from our home.
“Separation anxiety,” the vet said. “You could buy her a crate and lock her in it while you’re out.”
“I can’t crate a twelve-year-old dog for nine hours each day,” I said. “Do you have any other ideas?”
“You could try Bach Rescue Remedy.”
I bought a box of the stuff—a tincture that claimed to calm a whole host of unpleasant emotions—and took it home. The next morning before I went to work, I placed two drops on Bess’s tongue. That afternoon I discovered she had managed to spray diarrhea not just over the kitchen counter but also as far away as the fridge. I put on a pair of plastic gloves, reached under the sink for another bottle of Dettol, and began to clean. No worse than a sick kid, I told myself. A highly disturbed, sick kid.
My mother—as fearful of me as she claimed to be—kept up contact with me after she had met Laura. She was the type of woman who loved gay men but struggled to understand lesbians. I dated a plastic surgeon after my father died, and my mother adored him. Months after we broke up, I traveled to Lesbos. When I got home, I visited my mother and gave her a pottery dish I had bought for her in Athens.
There was a joke in our family when I was growing up that my mother liked to regift every present I ever gave her. Tea towels, scarves, and mugs I had carefully chosen were kept in their wrapping and given away at birthdays and Christmas. At Christmas, when I was seventeen, my mother gave an aunt a vase that was identical to the one I had given her months earlier. I waited until my aunt was out of earshot and told my mother. Ever the quick thinker, my mother insisted, “I liked the one you gave me so much that I bought another just like it for Mary!” In the car on the drive home, my mother said, “I’m sorry, Sarah, I had no idea that vase came from you.” My father looked at me in the rearview mirror and raised his eyebrows.
After my trip to Lesbos, I felt compelled to tell my mother I was gay.
“I hope you like the dish. I got it in a shop in Athens, on my way to Lesbos. By the way, I’m gay.” I have always favored the “ripping off the Band-Aid” approach when delivering bad news.
“You’re what?”
“Gay,” I said.
“What?”
“I’m gay.”
“But what about Mike?”
“Mike and I broke up months ago.”
“I thought you’d come to your senses and begged him to take you back!”
“No, I didn’t do that.”
She steadied herself on the side of the kitchen bench and looked at me. “It took you a long time to work it out, didn’t it? You’re thirty!”
“I like men!”
“Well, you’re bisexual, then.”
“No, Mum. I can love men without wanting to sleep with them. I’m just trying to tell you that I’m gay.”
“Oh, well, alright. It’s a bit of a shock, I must say.”
With that backdrop, it surprised me somewhat that my mother embraced Laura. Months after Laura and I had stormed out of her living room, my mother asked me a question when we were alone.
“Just tell me, how is it possible to have sex without a penis?”
I felt my face flush.
She pounced on my silence. “You know your father would not have been happy to know you were gay.”
“I believe you’re wrong,” I said. “And it’s disgraceful to attribute sentiments to my dead father. I wonder what he would have thought about you abandoning me after my accident. Have you ever thought about that?”
She got up from the sofa, opened the refrigerator door, sighed loudly enough for me to hear from the living room, and tightened the lid on the Vegemite jar.
After our conversation, I became yet more wary of my mother. But she was family and I wanted our relationship to be civil.
Laura became our intermediary. People liked Laura. I, as my mother told me whenever she got the chance, polarized people. They either liked me or hated me. Certainly, after the accident, I felt that was true. My mother exhibited no signs whatsoever of liking me.
The only things my mother and I seemed capable of talking about without fighting were my dogs. I told her about Bess’s separation anxiety. She had heard of a vet in Chatswood who specialized in animal psychology. I was desperate, so I booked a time for the vet to meet with Bess, and my mother came along. The vet suggested that I start leaving Bess alone in stretches of fifteen minutes and gradually build up
to an hour to get her used to the idea that I would return.
I took a sick day the next Friday and left the house in blocks of fifteen minutes at a time. Each time I returned, I was pleased to find no mess at all. After two hours, I left for a full hour and went to a café opposite my house. Bess was not stupid, I realized, when, at three o’clock—after I’d spent the day leaving the house and returning to it, drunk eight cups of coffee, and eaten a cheese and tomato sandwich and three chocolate brownies—I looked across the road to my house and saw her standing on the back of an armchair with her head poking through the curtain watching me. I left the café and walked to the park overlooking the Harbor Bridge and sat there for an hour. Back home, Bess was fine. No harm done. I clipped on the dogs’ leads and took them for a walk.
During the weekend, Laura and I left the house for breakfast, for a movie, then later for dinner. When we returned, Bess was fine. Come Monday when I needed to return to work, though, she was back to her old habits. Perhaps she had picked up on the fact that I hated my job. The Bach Rescue Remedy I had continued giving her for more than a week had no effect at all. I dreaded the day when Laura arrived home early and entered the kitchen.
That day came a few months later. I was late, running as many yellow lights as I could, desperate to get home first, when I got a call on my mobile.
Laura was hysterical. “The kitchen!”
“What’s wrong with it?” I asked innocently.
“You’ll see! You’re cleaning it up!”
“Really? Okay. I’m on my way.”
I got home to find the dogs locked out in the back garden and an ashen-faced Laura perched on the edge of the sofa. I walked past her into the kitchen. Bess had outdone herself. She had managed to cover the walls, the counter, the sink, the fridge, and the floor with diarrhea.
“Jesus! What happened?” I asked no one in particular. I opened the back door and Bess jumped up on me, frantically. “It’s okay,” I said, trying to calm her down. “I’ll clean it up. You stay out here.”
“You need to get a new toaster,” is all Laura said. “And a dish rack and a kettle.”
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