Addition (20 page)
The phone rings.
Larry:
Hello, Grace?
Brain Two:
Thank God we’re off that couch. Our arse has gone to sleep.
Brain One:
If you would shut up I could follow the program. Now I’ll never work out if the ex-girlfriend is a zombie.
Brain Two:
Surely you can pick a fellow zombie. Don’t you guys have a secret handshake?
Larry:
Grace, are you there?
Brain One:
Hello. How are you?
Larry:
Fine.
Brain One:
How’s the family?
Brain Two:
I think she wants to talk about something else…
Brain One:
That’s good.
Larry:
I didn’t say anything.
Brain One:
Good.
Larry:
Mum says you’re seeing a shrink.
Brain One:
I’m fine, thanks. How are you?
Brain Two:
Why are you seeing a shrink?
Larry:
Well?
Brain One:
Well what?
Larry:
Are you seeing a shrink?
Brain Two:
You’re certainly not shrunk, anyway. Your arse is as big as a house.
Larry:
Why are you laughing? What’s funny?
Brain One:
Nothing. Nothing’s funny. I am seeing a highly recommended Professor Professor to help me build a staircase to a healthier future.
Larry:
You sound different. I don’t want you to change, Grace. I want you to be how you were before.
Brain One:
I am how I was before. Only better. How are you?
Then Jill gets on the phone. I offer to babysit on the weekend so she and Harry can go out and have a romantic dinner. I feel more confident about getting around; I’ve taken the bus a few times and I’m getting quite good at it. And Larry is always asking me to visit. Jill says that sounds like a great idea, but then she checks with Larry. As Jill explains, kids Larry’s age always have something on, and Larry has to go over to a girlfriend’s place so it isn’t convenient, and I’m not to take it personally. Which is okay.
Deciding on the holiday Seamus wants to take is hard too. I used to have a list of my ideal holiday spots, a list I’d had since I was a teenager that I’d taken from a travel magazine. San Sebastian, Spain. Lake Garda, Italy. Kenya. South Africa. Paris. London. I’ve never been to one of them. But now that it’s time to plan a real holiday, I’ve lost all interest in my list. In fact, I can’t find it. I’m a bit blasé about the whole thing, if the truth be known. All that packing and unpacking. It hardly seems worth it. The other night I saw a fabulous documentary on the pyramids, and it was as good as being there, with no chance of traveller’s tummy. No heat. No tourists. But I suppose it’s good to get away. I’ll just let Seamus choose.
Today I go for a walk in the park. It’s growing colder and the leaves are starting to turn. There are lots of trees of all kinds, an old fountain and a greenhouse where plants accustomed to more consistent warmth than Melbourne provides have been grown for over a hundred years. There is a woman walking in front of me pushing a stroller. She stops next to a bench and sits her baby on her lap. The baby is in a yellow jumpsuit, the kind that enclose the feet. It is brushed cotton with small bluebirds embroidered near the shoulder. The woman holds the baby up so he is standing on his tippy toes and she is cooing, wrinkling up her nose and rubbing it against his squirming tummy.
I keep walking to the next bench where I sit and pretend to admire the flowers. As the woman bounces the baby on her lap I can see their future: I can see him at three with sandy hair and a grazed knee, running to her and crying and her picking him up in her arms and burying his tears in her neck. I can see him at eight going to the football with his hand in hers, clutching a flag and a pen, hoping for an autograph if they wait long enough, and they do because she knows how much it means to him and she is one of those patient women who will always have time for important things. At sixteen he goes through an awkward stage where he joins the chess club and decides to study law, but at twenty (after a year overseas in a youth exchange program where he loses his virginity to a Brazilian girl named Janis), he fills out and drops out to work part-time for Greenpeace and hand-make rustic wooden furniture using old timber he reclaims from demolished industrial buildings as a cross between art and protest.
Then it becomes a blur, a jumble of future memories—his first Christmas, fishing trips, his mother’s days of burnt toast and spilled tea, laughs and wrestles in the big bed, tears and tantrums at the checkout. His first wedding—to that woman who obviously isn’t right for him but his mother doesn’t say anything; she is just ready to hold him in her arms when the inevitable comes. The first time they watch
Seven Samurai
together. The first time he uses the potty. The day the dog dies and they bury it together, both crying in the backyard, shovel in her hand, bunch of camellias in his. That tenderness that boys are made of before school and hormones frustrate and sharpen them. The warmth of a small child, freshly bathed and in his pyjamas. The smell of a baby’s neck.
The shadows in the park grow longer and the wind grows colder and when I look up they are gone. I am alone.
When I came to write about this in my journal—Francine says you can ‘write your way to a healthier you’—the best way I could describe my thoughts was this: when I was a small child my uncle gave me a kaleidoscope. As I turned the wheel the little glass chips jumped into webs and sunsets and necklaces. Thinking about that child in the park was like that, but with memories.
They love my journal in therapy, which is just as well because I feel hopelessly inadequate at conversation. They all speak so quickly that by the time the brains have decided what they want to say, everyone has moved on to another topic. My journal is clearly the best, though. The Germphobics are hopeless at journaling.
Francine:
Sometimes it helps to greet your journal on each new day as you would greet a friend, so your first line might be ‘Good morning, Journal. Thank you for accepting my words and feelings today.’
Gemma:
That is the most stupid concept I have ever heard. I would rather eat my own vomit than write greetings to a piece of paper.
Gary:
There’s nothing wrong with eating your own vomit.
Francine:
What?
Gary:
Eating your own vomit isn’t actually disgusting. It’s quite sensible really, because the germs present in your vomit are your own germs and you are merely reclaiming them rather than releasing them to the environment to infect someone else.
Daria:
Gary, you are an idiot.
Francine:
Well. Yes. This is a little off the track of this afternoon’s session, which is journaling. Grace, would you like to read something from your journal?
Daria:
Eating your own vomit is so absolutely disgusting, because obviously when you vomit it has to land somewhere unless you had a special kind of floating vomit, and once it lands it would then become contaminated from whatever it landed on, so if you eat it again you most certainly ingest considerably more than your own germs back again.
Francine:
Grace? Anyone?
Gary:
Actually dogs eat their own vomit all the time.
Francine:
What?
Gary:
Dogs eat their own vomit all the time because they regurgitate anything that doesn’t sit quite right in their stomach, but they don’t want to waste it so they eat it again to see if it’s any better the second time. And it usually is.
Gemma:
It usually is what?
Gary:
A substantial improvement. The second time.
Francine:
Grace, can you read your journal please? Now?
Journal:
Autumn is now officially half over. The tree outside my window has lost most of its leaves. In spring, new growth will bring new life.
Francine:
Beautiful, Grace! What a touching analogy of your healing process!
Brain One:
I knew that. Really. I did.
Brain Two:
You are so full of crap.
Journal:
Therapy is progressing well, but I haven’t yet received a bill. I know the bills will come, because I have filled out the forms. I know I can pay them, and I know my sister will help. Yet I still haven’t received a bill.
Francine:
Oh Grace, dear Grace. Yes, you may not contribute very much to our group discussions but rest assured, you pay your bills every session! When you listen so attentively to your fellow group members speak. When you concentrate so hard on not counting. I’m glad you shared your fears, but please don’t think like that. Every day, you face your bills. And every day, brave, brave Grace, you pay them.
Brain One:
Um…thanks.
Brain Two:
I’m disgusted to be sharing a skull with you.
Journal:
Before my therapy, each night I cooked chicken and vegetables. And I ate it. Alone. Now, although I am always hungry, I have lost the will to cook. Now I make cheese on toast, or dip with Saladas or chocolate biscuits. Or I buy a burger from the café.
Daria:
I don’t believe you used to eat chicken.
Gemma:
That is so disgusting. How can you live with yourself ?
Brain One:
What’s wrong with chicken?
Daria:
Don’t you read the papers?
Gemma:
Haven’t you ever heard of bird flu?
Daria:
I don’t even go out of the house if there’s a pigeon on the lawn.
Francine:
Ladies, I think you’ll find that Grace is making an analogy about the changes she has experienced in the way she feeds her body—her psychic and emotional hunger for validation and acceptance.
Brain One:
Absolutely.
Brain Two:
I can’t take this any more. I’m having a nap. Wake me when it’s lunch time.
Seamus and I are almost living together now. He still has his room in the house he shares with Dermot and Brian, but it’s a bachelor pad—dirty dishes in the sink, dirty clothes on the floor and someone always sprawled on the couch watching sports. We end up spending most of our time at my place. Seamus keeps his running shoes and his toothbrush here, and I buy the kind of cereal he likes.
It’s much easier for me this way, because I’d worry about forgetting my medication if I wasn’t sure which house I was waking up in. Also it’s much easier for me to get to the professor’s office from my place than from Seamus’s. I catch the tram, by myself. I’m only seeing the professor once a month now to check how the medication and therapy are going. I miss him. I saw a furry caterpillar in the park last week and thought fondly of his eyebrows.
One morning I had a few jobs to do—drop off Seamus’s dry cleaning, take his shoes to be repaired, pay the electricity bill. Then there was a fascinating show on TV about gay men trapped in women’s bodies and lesbians trapped in men’s bodies. A psychologist (not mine) was saying it was very common; many men are lesbians on the inside. I’d never realised the pain these people go through— I’ve been horribly insensitive to male lesbians.
I’ve given up going to the café. With all the extra weight I’m carrying there was no way I could have orange cake and a hot chocolate everyday. Instead I make myself some carrot sticks and one and a half dates with tahini, which is much less nauseating now I’m used to it. A couple of days ago I phoned my mother and we had a lovely chat about housework. I’ve kept everything clean in the past, but I’d never really grasped the finer details. We talked about the best ways to fold fitted sheets (hold the sheet inside out by the two adjacent corners on the shortest end, then fold the corner in one hand over the corner in the other end until it envelopes it, then repeat with the other side), and the correct way to iron tea towels and shirts. I’ve never realised how clever she is. For example, when I iron Seamus’s shirts I always do the collar last. This inevitably leads to the front creasing. Instead I should iron the inside of the collar first. Genius! Then we talked about which TV chefs we liked the best. We both agreed that Ainsley gives us a headache, and Delia, while explaining things clearly in a charming accent, is a teeny bit annoying. Then my mother said that Jamie made her want to play hide the cannelloni. I felt suddenly nauseous so I said goodnight.
I’m glad my phone conversations are improving. It’s hard for the brains to concentrate on what the ears are hearing. For once I raised it as an issue in group therapy sessions, and felt so validated when two of the Germphobics nodded. Francine had a few helpful suggestions and I follow her advice to keep a box of index cards by the phone, filled with the details of the people I speak to. There are only four cards but when I get a job I’m sure there’ll be more. For example, card one:
Name: Seamus Joseph O’Reilly
Relationship: Boyfriend
DOB: 5 January 1969
Significant names: Declan, Dermot, Brian, Kylie
Comments: (space here for comments)
Under ‘Comments’ I write a sentence to remind me of our last phone call, like ‘picking me up 9 a.m. Saturday’. This has proved so helpful it’s a wonder I haven’t seen it on Oprah. I also keep an exercise book and when I have a few minutes spare I plan the next conversation I will have with someone. For example, under
neighbours
I have written ‘Comment on flowering azalea in front garden.’ Of course I don’t have the book with me when I run into the neighbours in the corridor, but it’s still helpful. I can’t imagine how I did without it all these years.
There is no good whatsoever to be had from a phone call in the middle of the night. At no time in the history of mankind has anyone rung at that hour, smiling. There are no lotteries drawn in foreign countries that you might have won. There are no exciting job offers made by insomniac managing directors of huge multinationals. Distant men do not propose at that hour. There is not even any so-so news. No telemarketer from Delhi desperate to talk about your phone contract. No partner asking you to pick up more juice.
