Stone Yard Devotional, page 6
This memory I have of Sister Marian is pure and sharp, but surely absurd. A nun complaining of her womb being endangered by a falling pencil case! Naturally the other source of our mirth was her ludicrous idea that anyone would ever want to have sex with her. And then she left, and we had to adjust our ideas about Sister Marian. Thinking of it now, I wonder how old she actually was.
This was a time of strange outbursts from teachers in that school. We were a badly behaved group of students, it is true. There was a Spanish teacher – a dazed sort of woman who had never learned to discipline a mob – who once broke down in the classroom when one of us whined that some instruction she’d given was not fair. She roared: ‘Life is never fair!’ We stared at her. ‘Children can die, at two years old!’ she wailed, and then she began to sob.
Mrs Teixeira did not have children, we knew; she was another old, plain, strange woman completely unsuited to her job. Is this why we were so cruel to her? The room fell silent, all of us riveted with embarrassment, as she wept. When she finally left the room, breathless with anguish, we broke into cackles, releasing our stifled hysteria. Nobody felt sorry for Mrs Teixeira; we felt only contempt. She really should find another line of work. Yet she was back the next week, as if nothing had happened. I wonder now if any of the other staff even knew of her outburst. Regardless, I doubt anyone helped her. She never became a better teacher, though she stayed for years and years.
Mr Hogan, the headmaster at St Ursula’s, was a quiet young man who mostly wore a scuffed brown leather jacket a size too big. He had a clipped ginger beard and an air of tragedy about him because his pretty wife had multiple sclerosis. At school he had an avuncular demeanour and smiled often, showing his neat white teeth. One day at the morning assembly, as we stood yawning and shivering in the weak winter sunlight, he spoke with reverence into the little microphone. ‘Girls and boys, I can give you one piece of advice in this life: don’t worry about anything; pray about everything.’
I thought that was the stupidest thing I had ever heard.
Now, when I drive to and from town, I pass the school on the hill and I remember all these people – the headmaster and his hopeless advice; Sister Marian and her injured womb; poor, hysterical Mrs Teixeira. I never had an ounce of respect for any of them. And here I am, recalling my adolescent cruelty, and feeling sorry.
~
I spend the afternoon in pleasant, rhythmic, mindless industry: scouring off labels, washing jars and lids, sweeping up mouse shit, washing down all the shelves, scrubbing away dust and other ominous stains and blobs in the pantry. Sterilising the jars on oven trays. Cooling them, filling them from the packets and bags of flour, lentils, couscous, spices, seeds and nuts and dried fruit. Writing new labels with felt pen on masking tape. After a few hours I stand back and admire my clean shelves, my shining rows and rows of filled jars.
It would be impossible to explain to anyone from my old life why or how this – whatever it is; servitude? – fills me with such peace.
A CLEANING FRENZY is in progress. Everybody at it, vacuuming and dusting and polishing the whole place, especially the good room, for the bones, which are coming this week – in three days, possibly four. Every week or so there’s an update, then a delay, then another expected arrival date is announced. There’s a scurrying, excitable feeling among the sisters that keeps leaking out from behind the masquerade of solemnity about the bones. I find myself humiliated, for all of us, by this spinsterish fussing and primping. Yet I am as bad as the rest: I too welcome the frisson of approaching change; I run a damp cloth over the good room windowsills, the mantelpiece, I make the vacuum roar, I scurry around like everyone else.
~
Since learning of the bones and Sister Jenny’s saintliness, I’ve been revisited by Maria Goretti, eleven years old when she was stabbed to death and became a saint. I was ten, in primary school, when Sister Aloysius told this to our class and I fell in love with Maria Goretti.
Maria was stabbed, we learned, because she refused to sin.
There were a lot of numbers in Sister Aloysius’s report. Fourteen times Maria was stabbed, with a ten-inch awl, by a man who seemed somehow related to her family, but not really. An awl, we learned, was a long, spiked tool for making holes in things.
On the day of the attack, Maria was sitting on the doorstep in the sunshine, mending the shirt of this not-quite-cousin, Alessandro. Maria was poor and she was Italian. I saw her long lustrous hair, her soft olive skin in the sunlight. I heard this Alessandro calling her inside the house.
Alessandro killed Maria Goretti, Sister Aloysius said, when she refused to commit a Mortal Sin. The refusal was important – but even more important, it seemed, was that as Maria died in hospital, she forgave her killer.
I may be imagining now the relish with which Sister Aloysius told us this story. I may be inventing the strange masochistic desire in her voice. But if I am, what then was going through her mind as she told us all of this? Why did she include such gratuitous details? And why did I become so enamoured of Maria? My first thought is that ten-year-old me loved Maria because she was ordinary. She didn’t commune with Jesus or see visions of the Virgin Mary. She just went about her business, a young girl, like us. But there was also a terrible glamour to her story, glimpsed between the lines of Sister Aloysius’s words. Maria was desired. A man wanted her. She resisted, ran around the room putting tables between them, but she was doomed. And then celebrated because of her bravery, her resistance. I suspect I ignored the part about forgiveness. It was the chasing and the violence, the drama, that compelled me.
Sister Aloysius had dry white skin and was extremely old. She had a hoarse, throaty voice like an old man’s, and a man’s big wide hands to slap you on the legs for … what? Talking. Laughing. Something you did wrong when you stood in assembly lines in the sun. The pink gravel of the playground was as dry and pale as Sister Aloysius’s old skin. The light was so bright it made your eyes water and we had no hats, nobody had hats then for school in an Australian summer, we just squinted. We had grey-and-white cotton school dresses with a fine blood-red thread through the seersucker checks, and little cloth belts with white plastic buckles that always slid crookedly. White Peter Pan collars. White socks, black shoes, bare brown legs for the slapping. All of this now, the innocence of our clothes, our bare children’s shins, somehow makes the teacher’s telling of Maria Goretti’s story worse.
I don’t think Sister Aloysius mentioned what I later learned: that Alessandro first tried to choke Maria before he stabbed her fourteen times. I don’t think she mentioned that Alessandro had tried to rape Maria Goretti twice before, but she hadn’t told anyone because she thought she would get into trouble. I don’t think Sister mentioned that Alessandro was twenty. I think she did make clear somehow – without saying it, of course – that because Alessandro did not get his way, St Maria Goretti died a virgin.
Alessandro went to jail. In prison he dreamed that Maria gave him lilies, but they burned in his hands. When he was released from jail twenty-seven years later, he visited Maria’s mother and she forgave him for killing her daughter, we were told, and they went to mass and took communion together the next day.
By this time Alessandro loved Maria Goretti. He called her my little saint.
He became a lay brother and was accepted into a monastery, working in its garden until he died peacefully, of natural causes, at the age of eighty-seven. That was in 1970, only a few years before Sister Aloysius told us the story of St Maria Goretti.
As I grew older I was confused as to why martyrdom was never just called ‘murder’. But it was at ten years old I first became confused about the nature of forgiveness, and of atonement, and the conditions under which they could each take place.
~
Living this life, I am convinced, makes a person dream more vividly. Last night: a family of kangaroos, haunch-deep in a quietly lapping tropical ocean, nuzzling at the edges of large floating piles of garbage, eating.
THE MICE HAVE been steadily growing in numbers. We are trapping five or six a day now, but we see even more of them in our peripheral vision, darting across the floor between pieces of furniture, whizzing along the skirting boards.
I have set two traps in the good room, with peanut butter, which we’re told is better than cheese.
In the kitchen now, if you set a trap and push it into the gap beside the fridge, it goes off within fifteen minutes. We take turns emptying the traps, releasing the bar (I learn this is called the ‘hammer’, for obvious grisly reasons) and flinging the limp little bodies either into the chook pen, or over the furthest back garden fence.
We have made ‘clean-up kits’ and stationed them along the halls and verandahs: buckets containing boxes of disposable latex gloves, spray bottles of disinfectant, wads of paper towel and rags.
As yet the traps in the good room remain unsnapped. They sit there, little grey plastic sentries on each side of the door, awaiting our visitor. The peanut butter hardening over the days.
~
I had a childhood friend whose father owned the Holden dealership in town. ‘Owned’ might be an overstatement; I think now that he must have been merely its manager, for his name appeared nowhere in connection with the place, and he seemed to enjoy none of the status attached to other car-dealer men in town. The large signs for other car yards were boldly patriarchal: VIC THOMPSON & SONS AUTOMOTIVE, which sold Fords, or RAY BEVERLEY TOYOTA.
My friend lived with her father in a tiny house behind the car showroom. The house – a sort of demountable cabin really – was an airless box with two tiny bedrooms, low white-tiled ceilings and small aluminium sliding windows of the kind normally only seen in bathrooms. I only noticed the windows particularly because my mother – who was not snobbish about much – had an aversion to aluminium windows that was never explained but which I thought was to do with people who were somehow uneducated, or poor. I did not tell her about the windows, nor that on the weekends my friend’s father would watch television in his underpants, while drinking beer from a glass tankard otherwise kept in the freezer. My own father drank cheap red wine from cardboard casks, and I had only ever seen his underpants and singlet as he made his way to or from the shower. Although I was afraid at the sight of my friend’s father’s fleshy thighs, his hairy belly exposed, he was not exactly threatening. It was more as if he didn’t notice whether his daughter was there or not. She was an exceedingly quiet child. He never spoke to her, or to me, when I was there.
Mostly she and I played in the showroom after closing time, sliding around the linoleum floors in our socks, and lying in the cars talking and laughing softly, with the seats reclined and the doors and boots all open, the cars smelling new and clean, glossy as insects, wings extended.
In the stuffy box house my friend kept pet mice in a birdcage lined with newspaper. They were small and white or light grey, with pointed faces and pink eyes. She would slide up the small birdcage door and bring her cupped hand down hard over one soft body and draw it out, squirming and then still. She held it so tight sometimes I thought it was dead. She asked me if I wanted to hold it but I never did. Then she would push her fist back through the door and release the creature, which writhed from her grip and scampered to the far side of the cage.
Soon the mice had babies – awful, long bald slugs – and then those babies quickly had more babies. Her house smelled of mice, and I have recognised even the faintest whiff of it immediately, anywhere, ever since.
When there were too many babies, which happened very quickly, my friend took the birdcage into the scrubby bare block across the road from the dealership and opened the cage door. We watched the mice spill out and scatter into the dry grass. In an instant they had gone. The birds and the cats would get them, her father said. Nobody seemed upset. What was the appeal of a mouse as a pet? My friend never let them run up her sleeve or sit inside her collar, like you saw happen on TV occasionally. Nor did the mice have names. She didn’t appear to like them much; she just kept them trapped in the cage, and then let them all go at once.
Next she had a single guinea pig, which I found almost as repellent as the mice. I hated to hold it, with its shivering delicate body and tiny claws when she plonked it into my lap, but at least it was allowed to live outside, in a metal cage. She would thrust handfuls of grass at the guinea pig, and then let the heavy lid of the cage fall shut.
Even after the mice had long disappeared from the house, the odour inside remained, and I have always associated that smell with the father in his underpants, the quiet daughter, the unmentioned misery of divorce.
DOLORES DRIVES ME mad with her constant sneezing and scratching. I order myself not to be annoyed: the girl can’t stop herself having hay fever! But her sneezing is so operatic. She can be heard from across the courtyard, through walls, on and on, and then she traipses around leaving crumpled tissue crumbs as she goes, her red eyes streaming. But it’s the full-body convulsions I can’t stand; the dramatic pause, the way she casts her pitiful gaze around at anyone in the room, before another round of swooping, high-performance noise, then the little moans as she scrubs at her face with tissues. The crackle of antihistamine blister packs follows her around.
Sometimes I think this place is sending me insane. I fill with disgust at my own pettiness, punish myself by being extra nice to Dolores in small ways. Picking up her damn puffy vest from the floor for the millionth time.
Really I just want to say to her, You’re so young. Go away from here, go home to your mother and your sisters. Go to their weddings, hold their babies. Live.
THERE WAS A girl at my high school whose mother used to hit her with the kettle’s electrical cord. I’m not sure how we knew this, because this girl was entirely friendless; an outcast. In whom could she possibly have confided?
The girl and her mother – there was no father – lived in a housing commission flat in the town, in an ugly red-brick block with vacant land on either side. There were no houses nearby; only, further along the road, a service station and the Lutheran church (who or what was a Lutheran? we never found out). No trees or shrubs softened the air around the block, there was no shelter from weather or inspection by passers-by. There was a cement driveway and a couple of faded-looking cars, but the girl’s mother did not have a car. She was the only mother we ever saw catch the school bus, and this was a degrading sight. Watching the girl’s mother climbing the bus stairs with her bags of groceries was like seeing someone naked. This same mother – an angry, frightening woman – was said to abandon her daughter at times, going away and leaving the girl to care for herself for weeks and weeks at a time.
I don’t remember the moment I learned about this girl’s outcast status. It had simply always been known that she was bad: a loud, unruly girl, repellent to all. I could never understand why she did not just try to shut up and fade into invisibility, for she was constantly punished by teachers and taunted by her classmates, but she seemed unable to submit. There was something threatening in the way she appeared not to notice the detentions and taunts and insults, and though we never spoke of it, I think it was this power that frightened all of us, and made her hateful.
Occasionally – not very often – I felt pity for her apparent inability to understand the basic rules of survival. She would walk up to a group of girls in the playground, for example, and ask a question or, worse, give an opinion: on a girl’s sneakers or schoolbag or jacket. Worst was when she gave compliments, for praise from this girl was an insult, and the recipient would be teased for months. I like your hair, Leanne, we’d mimic in our stupid, nasal voices, while Leanne cringed and begged us to stop.
This girl had sandy blonde hair that she wore in crooked plaits – we decided her hair was dirty, and her teeth, too, seemed grubby and misaligned. My own teeth were also crooked, and I had many other defects, but unlike the girl I’d learned to hide them as best I could or, failing that, at least had the grace to be ashamed of my big nose and my thin hair, my flat chest and hipless figure. I wore my uniform as unremarkably as possible – shapeless and with enough length to go unnoticed, but not foolishly baggy like poor Julie Gower, harmless but annoying, her uniform ballooning around her like a long pale green tent. Most of us, let’s face it, knew our place in the pecking order (even Julie Gower), and stayed there.
This girl, though, as well as being loud, wore her uniform tight and very short, and her breasts developed too early. Someone claimed to know that she had got her first period at age eleven, which was disgusting, a fact that spoke to her general vulgarity. On the girl the tight short tunic looked more like poverty than sex, but that was there too, animal and fierce.
Occasionally, watching the girl across the playground accosting some other girl (or boy – she was incapable of coy dissembling in the presence of boys, another mark against her), my group of friends would discuss what it would take for her to make herself attractive. This conversation was conducted as a form of charity; we felt good about ourselves at such moments. The girl had a good body, for starters – as if she didn’t know; we rolled our eyes – with long brown legs, a strong waist, finely muscled arms. Even her face, with her little snub nose and full lips, could be sort of okay if she tried. If she would only wash and brush her hair properly, grow out that fringe (was it possible her stupid mother even cut her hair?), change her nasal, grating voice and lower her volume. She did appear to shave her legs, which was something. But there was the problem of her acne, which she did nothing about. This was a delicate subject, as Eleanor, one of our group, was burdened by terrible red patches of severe acne on her face and chest. But Eleanor tortured herself with hours of attention to her pimples: countless applications of flesh-coloured Clearasil and horrible-smelling antibacterial washes, and she never, ever touched her skin with unclean hands. Whereas the girl – we could tell – picked and squeezed and allowed her skin to become infected. She never once looked clean. Which, it went without saying, was the greatest possible teenage-girl sin.
