What Was Left, page 4
When Peter was a baby, Nora says, she just had to shut the door and let him scream himself to sleep—it was what the baby nurses told them to do in those days. His sister, eighteen months older, was the same.
‘The GP told me to give them a few drops of sedative in their baby bottles, to help them sleep. So I did. Everyone did in those days.’
‘You’re so lucky to have disposables now. All those soggy, soiled squares of cloth. We were always washing them, soaking them, hanging them out. Folding them up again. It was endless.’
‘Did you know the dad wasn’t expected to lift a finger then? There were a few that did, mind you, but Peter’s father wasn’t one of them. Can’t remember him changing a single nappy, or getting up once in the night. The more a baby cried in that witching hour, around five or six o’clock, the more likely he was to find an excuse to go to the pub. He’d be off to get milk, he’d tell me—I’d be cooking his tea—and he’d be back two hours later, three sheets to the wind.’
She imagines sheets on a Hill’s Hoist. They spin with a gust of wind. Nappies hang, still soiled, above a dead lawn. Young Nora at a gas stove, burnt chops, salted with tears. Like a made-for-TV movie.
She trips over a tree root, rights herself, and peeks in behind the muslin that shades the pram. Lola is asleep.
‘Thank God,’ she whispers, looking up at Nora. ‘She’s asleep.’
They sit on the footpath outside a cafe and wait for their coffees. Rachel rocks the pram with her foot. Back and forth, back and forth. Both of them wait for the other one to say something. A currawong in a tree across the road calls. When she first moved here, Rachel loved the sound, but now it is just lonely. Unbearable, really.
The clatter of cups and saucers and spoons; sugars in a bowl. Warm sweet foam on her lip. Nora asks if she’s looking forward to her mum’s visit. Rachel takes a long sip, scalds her tongue, nods her head. Her mouth hurts and the chair is too hard—she shifts to perch on one side of her bum. Bum, she thinks and smiles, in spite of herself. It was always butt, or ass, or tush or rear-end. Now it is bottom (emphasis on the t’s and the m), arse (emphasis on the r) or bum (long m). She has changed her vocabulary, but she can switch back, like a chameleon. Nora thinks she smiles at the prospect of her mother.
‘You must miss your family terribly,’ Nora says. Her eyes well up a bit. ‘I hope I can help you more than I have been. You know you can always ask me for anything.’
‘Thanks,’ Rachel murmurs. She looks at the undissolved crystals of sugar in the bottom of her cup. She wishes it was full again.
‘Look at the time! My appointment’s in fifteen minutes. The other side of town!’ Nora bustles together her bag, phone, scarf and wallet. She passes Rachel a five-dollar note. Blinks rapidly.
‘For the coffee, darling.’ Peeks in at Lola, still asleep, in the pram. ‘So precious. Reminds me of Peter. Spitting image.’
And she’s gone. Rachel sighs at the empty street. It’s not even lunchtime. The day stretches before her, unbearably empty. She ought to feel solidarity with the mothers of Nora’s generation. Grateful for having disposable nappies and clothes dryers and a husband who at least tries. Pleased at her beautiful child. She ought to feel suffused with maternal love. Her foot still rocks the pram. Back and forth, back and forth. All it would take is more force on the forth. A car to come at the right time. A nudge of the toe to edge it towards the dip in the footpath. All it would take. All it would break. All it would take.
Instead she pays, gathers, leaves. The currawong is silent now. There are a few noisy mynahs perched on telephone wires and an ibis clutches the edge of a street bin, a wrapper from a chocolate bar in its long curved beak. An old woman drags her shopping trolley, hunched over the footpath, trudging up the street. Rachel passes her, a wide berth with the pram.
‘God bless,’ the woman cries as she walks past, head down. ‘God bless little babies.’
Rachel looks back and fixes her face into a smile. The old woman has more creases than smooth skin. Her eyes are heavily lidded, slightly mad.
She pushes on, up the hill, through the park, over the fallen purple jacaranda blossoms. They are wet under her feet, and quickly turn brown and slippery. Muck. They were so pretty up in the tree. Behind the muslin there is a cry. It starts muffled and gains momentum, turning into a scream.
Lola is angry. Lola is hungry. Lola spits the dummy that Rachel offers up, and screams louder. A man in a suit gives her a look. A shut-up-your-baby kind of look.
‘Oh Lola, can’t we make it home first?’
Lola scrunches her face and her fists. The skin around her lips is white. Rachel lifts her, pats her on the bum and sits on a damp bench. Offers the breast, which for the first time today Lola takes. She is ravenous. She lets loose a noisy, liquid-sounding poo in her nappy.
‘Oh Lola,’ she says, and grits her teeth to the hard slats of the bench, the painful pull of Lola’s mouth. She blinks away the watery world. Above, the currawong starts up again. That eerie, weary, echoing song.
Lola doesn’t look up, just works her jaw, her mouth, one hand rested on Rachel’s chest. Her fingers are as wide as they will spread, as if to say, you—all of this—everything—mine.
Chapter 4
The Wednesday of mothers’ group Rachel always thinks: I don’t have to do this. Nobody is making me go. But if she didn’t, it would be worse. This is her chance to see other mothers, other babies, and to open up the tiny bubble that she and Lola inhabit for an hour or two. The early childhood nurse has left them to their own devices but her judgemental eye lingers. None of the mothers are totally honest, each of them afraid that what she is doing is wrong.
These are the things that are safe to discuss:
How little sleep you are getting. How much your baby wakes.
How much he or she eats.
The colour, consistency and/or frequency of his or her poo.
The cute, smart, sweet or amazing things your baby has done.
Ditto for your partner.
The annoying qualities of your partner.
The annoying qualities of your mother-in-law.
These are the things you could discuss if you were feeling brave:
That you gave your baby some formula.
That you miss your job.
Sex with your partner (whether or not you have had it since your baby was born).
These are the things you would never discuss:
That you hate this.
That you don’t know if you love your baby.
That you think about letting go of the pram. On a steep hill. On a busy street.
That you have hidden all of the sharp knives.
That your body is no longer your own.
That you don’t want to be touched—ever—by anyone.
And so Rachel manages to hide her misery. She just talks less than the other women, listens more. They meet in cafes or, if the weather is nice, in parks, often by the water’s edge, spreading out rugs, bringing toys for the babies, watching them roll and kick together in the sun. They take turns with food. Some mothers bake elaborate tea cakes—an affront in itself—others just stop at Coles, or Bakers Delight, or the French patisserie up the road. In her mind, Rachel rates the get-togethers: one being the worst; ten being the best. The ones and twos are when Lola is the only one crying. When Jade and Isaac don’t show up. When someone has baked a lemon polenta cake (‘just an old family recipe’). When a mum talks about how she never thought it would be this easy, or good, and that she wouldn’t give it up for the world.
There has never been a ten but the better gatherings, the fives and sixes, are when someone (not her) breaks down. When another mum’s week has been hard and her baby hasn’t slept and her husband hasn’t understood. And there are tears, and tissues, and assurances that ‘it will get better’, ‘it will get easier’.
Rachel would never do this. She couldn’t bear a public audience for her pain. But it calms her, watching other women break down. She likes to imagine being that open with her emotions, being able to talk about things. She likes to imagine what it must feel like to be consoled by a group. To be accepted.
Later that evening, if Lola is asleep, if Peter is home and they have a few minutes to talk before he turns on the TV or she goes to bed, she’ll tell him about this other mother. The one who is, as she’ll put it, ‘having a hard time’.
Peter will put his arm around her shoulder and Rachel will try not to recoil. ‘See sweetheart, lots of people have a tough time. It’s not easy. It’s great you’ve made friends with these other mums.’
And immediately she will feel like an impostor, again, for making Peter think these women are her friends. Really the only one she talks to, besides ‘hello’ and ‘how’s your bub?’ is Jade.
Jade has nervous energy, dark circles under her eyes, and skin as pale as porcelain. Her baby, Isaac, lies solemnly on his rug, staring at the leaves on the trees and the way they shimmer with light and gentle wind. Rachel likes Jade immensely, but she’s not even sure why, and it makes her anxious too, this liking. What if she tries to befriend her further and is rejected? What if she asks Jade and Isaac over for lunch one day and they say no?
Rachel doesn’t think she could bear it, and so she just hovers, noncommittal, speaking to Jade at the meetings, sometimes walking part of the way home with her. Listening to Jade talk about her sister and how close her family is and wondering how it must feel to be knit in by family—muffled by their presence, always. Protected.
One Wednesday Jade turns to her on their walk home and says, ‘Are you feeling okay?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re just so quiet, and sometimes you look… sad. I’m not sure. I didn’t know you before this, and so I don’t know if this is just how you are, but I wanted to make sure. That you’re okay.’
Rachel bites the insides of her cheeks. She wants and fears this in equal measure. Lola and Isaac are asleep in their prams, and she is afraid to stand still, even though they have stopped, so she rocks the pram, back and forth.
‘I just know that one of my sisters was depressed, after her baby, and so I thought—I don’t know, I’m probably just being paranoid, but I wondered if…’ Jade shakes her head and looks away. ‘Sorry, I just had to ask.’
‘No, it’s okay.’ Rachel says. ‘I do feel sad sometimes, and it’s harder than I thought, but it’s not a big deal. I think lots of people feel that way.’
‘Are you sure? My sister said she felt like she was suffocating.’
Suffocating is a good word, Rachel thinks, for this tightness in her chest. But she shakes her head. ‘It’s just getting used to a different reality,’ she says.
‘Will you do me a favour though?’ Jade asks.
‘What’s that?’
‘Go see the GP if you feel bad. Not the early childhood nurse—just the thought of that woman makes me depressed. At the GP they have a little questionnaire they give you—do you know what I’m talking about?’
Rachel shakes her head.
‘It’s called the Edinburgh Scale. It’s not scary, I promise.’
‘Okay. Thanks, Jade.’
‘No worries.’
They say goodbye. This is where they part; Jade heads one way and Rachel the other. As she walks beneath the giant figs in the park at the end of their street she wonders what it would be like to tell a doctor how she has been. She would sit in an office, on a chair, with Lola in her arms (who would be looking after her otherwise?) She would tell a doctor that she has failed. As a mother, she has failed. Here is the proof, in her arms, blinking earnestly.
But she can’t picture this doctor without seeing her own mother’s face. Her mother in a white coat, a black stethoscope coiling down her torso. Her mother saying ‘stop being so dramatic’ and ‘I don’t have time for this.’ Her mother shaking her head. ‘I managed on my own most of the time, while finishing med school in my spare time. I have patients with real problems here in the waiting room. Get a grip.’
Get a grip. It’s a hard thing to get when the world is slipping out from under you. She is grateful to Jade for noticing, but she won’t speak to anyone. She can’t—speaking of it will only make it more real.
As a girl, after Gunther left, Rachel discovered the beauty of lies. They started off so small. ‘Did you wash your hands?’ her mother would ask when Rachel returned to the dinner table from the bathroom.
‘Yes,’ she said once when she hadn’t, her heart thumping with the boldness of it.
‘Good,’ her mum said, and spooned up another mouthful of peas. It was so easy she could have laughed. From there they grew. She didn’t have to do things that displeased her; she could lie.
She didn’t brush her teeth for months: she just ran the water in the bathroom and wet her toothbrush. Instead of a shower she would turn the taps on and sit on the toilet lid, reading Nancy Drew. The nanny, Esmeralda, caught her a few times, once as Rachel tossed out a school lunch that she had told her mother she’d finished. Esme clicked her tongue. ‘Little girls should not lie to their mothers,’ she said, but Rachel didn’t care. Esme didn’t scare her; Esme would never tell.
To lie was more thrilling than to tell the truth. She told the other kids in her grade three class that her father was a sailor. He was almost always away at sea. When he came home, he brought her dolls, and necklaces made from rubies and pearls. Sometimes, he was a pirate with an eye-patch, but he never wore it at home. He let her play with his sword. He would take her, one day, on his ship, and at night she would sway to sleep in a hammock below deck; the waves would rock her side to side and the seabirds would sing her a lullaby. In grade four she told a teacher that her father was a handsome movie star. She couldn’t say which one, because her mother had sworn her to secrecy. Only when Rachel said that her parents had a torrid affair did her teacher look sceptical. A few weeks later, when Rachel’s mother came home from the parent-teacher evening, she combed through Rachel’s bookshelf. The Harlequin romances were seized immediately.
‘Where did you get these? You are way too young to be reading this trash.’
Rachel just shrugged.
‘I found them in the free box at the library,’ she said. ‘Not the school one, the local one. Esme took me last Saturday. I forgot to ask if it was okay to take them.’
Her mother sighed. When Gunther taught Rachel to read he told her it was the key to never being bored. He told her that once she knew the sounds that the letters made, the words would come to her and the world would open a thousand secret doors.
Gunther was right. And Rachel knew then that she was good at lying. Truth was, Esme let her have the books after Rachel found them in Esme’s basement bedroom. ‘Better to read about it in a book than to be so curious you go looking in the wrong places.’ Esme said. ‘That was my mistake.’
Esme had children back home, in El Salvador. They were teenagers then, a boy and a girl. Rachel figured out that Esme must have been fourteen when she became a mother.
‘They do things differently in their culture,’ her mother said, when Rachel pointed this out. ‘Don’t say anything to Esme about it. It’s rude to ask too many questions.’
These were the lessons that Rachel grew up with: don’t talk too much about yourself; don’t ask too many questions. If a lie is easier than the truth… if it protects… if it doesn’t harm. But it’s hard to stop once you begin. The truth becomes hazier and hazier, like Washington DC in the middle of summer. No wonder her mother has chosen politics over medicine. No wonder she has found a home on Capitol Hill.
Chapter 5
Judy’s memories don’t begin until she was five years old. She must have been five, because she was on her way to school, waiting on the side of the road for the yellow school bus that had been taking her brother for three years, her red leather satchel clutched to her chest, the stalks of corn behind her like a wall of rustling green. Her brother, Joshua, was ignoring her, talking to the Lindsay twins from the farm next door, and Judy busied herself kicking the gravel, counting to fifty in her head, going over the ABC forwards and backwards, and picturing the contents of the lunch that mother had prepared that morning. Rose had showed her where everything went in the tin box: sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, an apple, a slice of buttermilk pie. Judy had 10c in her skirt pocket for milk at lunchtime and every few minutes she would stick her hand into the pocket and feel the thin dime in her fingers. The outside edge was bumpy where a nickel was smooth. It made her feel powerful. She was half the height of a corn stalk but here she was on her way to school.
When the bus pulled out in front of them Joshua hopped on board without even looking back at her and started shouting hellos to the kids he knew. He went straight to the back, with the other tall, lanky grade fours and fives who had spent the summer helping their dads on the farm. His skin was as brown as anyone’s.
‘Don’t you try’n sit next to me on the bus,’ he’d hissed as they walked down the driveway that morning, stopping to wave to Rose, squinting into the already hot sun. ‘You sit up the front with the other babies. I sit in the back.’
Judy clambered onto the seat that was three back from the driver, next to a girl who was smaller than her and had brown pigtails and a crooked part. She looked down at her own shiny black shoes and noticed a smear of chicken poop from when she had fetched the eggs that morning. She’d have to remember to wipe that off as soon as she got to school. That was the other thing Joshua had said to her. He was warning her about trying to hang around him during recess or lunchtime. ‘There’s only one reason to come up and talk to me during the day, and that’s if someone calls you a hick. They call you a hick, tell me. I’ll give them a knuckle sandwich.’
Judy didn’t expect school to be a challenge. That first day would prove her right—it wasn’t. School was where she felt like she belonged. Her memories before that day are absent, she thinks, because there was nothing worth remembering. Dad would have been in the cornfields or with the cattle, trying to get some calf untangled from a fence. Joshua would’ve been bugging his dad to let him drive the tractor, or throwing rocks at the kittens that never stopped being born. And Rose would have been in the kitchen or in the laundry, or on the couch with a cloth over her eyes, humming a tune that nobody ever recognised. She was going to have another baby, a topic which made her eyes fill with tears and her back ache, and made Ezra sigh and say ‘another mouth to feed’.
