Australian Love Stories (4 page)

When I open the mailbox I find a large white envelope with no return address. It is a St Valentine's card with a heart on the front, painted in something like shiny red nail varnish. It says,
To Vonnie, the sexiest woman I know
. There is no signature. I open a bottle of champagne in celebration. I can't find a champagne glass so I drink from the bottle. It feels incredibly decadent. Especially as it is still morning.

I take off my clothes and stand in front of the mirror in Sammy's room. I look at my body which has become unknown territory. I run my hands across my breasts and wonder at the changed topography. My belly is like a marsupial's. The thin mauve scar which underlines it is almost completely hidden beneath pubic hair. I put the champagne bottle down on the floor and go into my own room. I rummage in a box and pull out the purple satin dress I found at an op-shop last week. I wriggle into it. The strapless bodice fits like a glove. Above it my shoulders look all wrong, too wide and lumpy. My chest should have the same sheen as the glossy fabric but is instead like dough set aside to rise. I put on high heels, lipstick. I imagine candlelight. I run my palms lightly over breasts, shoulders, down my arms. The skin feels as papery as the bark of ti-trees.

I make sure all the lipstick is gone before walking up the street to collect Sammy from kindergarten. He has a Valentine's card from a girl called Sky.

The next morning I go to the hairdresser's. Not for a cut or a style, although that's what I'll ask for. I go for the hands that will hold my head just so, lean me back over the sink and stroke the hair from my forehead. Someone will massage my skull, lovingly, the way mothers wash children's hair. Someone will place my neck there, just a little to the right, just a little lower, hmmm, lovely.

While I wait I flick through a magazine, the kind I never buy. There is a diagram of a woman's body. It is patched in different colours according to how much touching that part of the body receives. Red is for heavily trafficked areas—the pubis and breasts. Shoulders are orange for a moderate amount of touching. Hands are also orange. There are small spots of yellow for occasional touching scattered over the diagram like outbreaks of skin disease. Lips are yellow; parts of the face. In my mind I colour my own body map like a rainfall chart of loving. No red. No orange. Some yellow, mainly hands, torso, face. All from my son.

The hairdresser has fingernails painted black. Black hair. Hair and nails shine like the exterior of a coffin. In my purple dress she would look like a movie star.

In the mirror, my new haircut makes me feel as if yet another part of my body has become a stranger to me.

Sammy kisses me goodnight and I am conscious of a little splash of yellow across my mouth and cheek. I hold him to me but he laughs and pulls away.

I go to bed, too. My fingers stray around my body, exploring like a new kid on the block. Scrubby parkland, I think as my fingers creep through tangled pubic hair. Virgin wilderness. Untracked. Pristine. I wonder how long I need to touch myself
there to ring the changes from yellow to orange to red. As I imagine it, I feel colour pooling, warming through ochres to bright hot madder.

Last century, women's hysteria was treated by physicians in clinics. The treatment consisted of massaging the woman's clitoris until she reached orgasm, allowing release of fluids and restoring her to health. I would like to make an appointment with my modern doctor for an out-dated treatment.

I don't know if it counts on the rainfall chart if you touch yourself.

I scan through phone ads. There are women for every male fantasy. Every nationality, age, hair colour, proclivity. One or two advertisements feature men. I stare at them until the words blur. I flick over pages till I find ads for healing, reiki, Swedish massage. I telephone.

When I leave the massage room, my body is red from top to toe. I radiate heat and energy as I walk down the street to catch my bus. Anybody looking must see my bright aura. There is one part of me which is achingly untouched, a snippet of bare canvas crying out for paint. I rush inside the house to touch and touch that one part, until it explodes into red, pales, explodes again, pales again, explodes red, and I am stranded on my bed glowing like an ember in shuttered half-dark.

By next morning the glow has gone. My skin is oversensitive. I feel separate fibres in the cloth of my shirt. My face will not settle comfortably in its covering. My thighs shiver as if with cold.

Sammy picks up my Valentine's card.

That's just like your writing, Mummy, he says.

I book for another massage. In the waiting room, I read about an autistic woman in America. She isn't able to
relate to people emotionally. She doesn't have relationships, doesn't understand how they work. Yet hugging and holding are the things which ease her edgy autistic world. Since childhood there hasn't been enough hugging in her life to meet her needs. So she has designed and built herself a hug machine. It is based on contraptions used for holding calves, wedging them between two pieces of metal and tipping them up. She has controls within reach and can change the pressure of the hug at will. She clamps herself in this crush whenever her need is great. She stays there for hours at a time.

I imagine being pressed—as if held in the strongest arms— for hours, a day, as long as I like. My whole body responds, relaxes, at the mere thought of it. Calm enters my limbs.

I have a mission. I ring around metal fabrication companies trying to describe what I want without giving away its purpose. I am met with puzzlement, suspicion. My father would have been able to build it. On his farm he sized up any need, considered materials and design, then set to work. Posthole diggers, tree stump removers, self-opening gates. He also made a crush for the cows. Something like the autistic woman's but less elaborate. He used it for drenching, castrating, branding. If only he were here, we could have pored over designs on butcher's paper, made adjustments, additions. He would have built it for me.

Or perhaps he simply would have hugged me.

Finally a man returns my call, saying he'd like to come over and discuss my project. He says he is a one man operation and prides himself on being able to make anything.

If you can imagine it, he says in a reassuring voice, Max Assunzione can build it.

We arrange a time and I sit with a pencil and paper making drawing after drawing and scrapping each one until suddenly the doorbell rings.

Max Assunzione at your service, says the man on the doorstep.

I take in his tree-like frame and a smile as wide as a wedge of watermelon. I warm up under the sunlamps of his eyes. But mostly what hold my attention are his hands. He spreads them in front of him like an offering.

I know we said Wednesday, Yvonne, but I was in this area on another job when I called you and I ended up with a bit of time up my sleeve. So I thought I'd drop by and maybe we could make a start.

His hands are like the largest knobs of ginger you can buy if you go very early to the farmers' market stalls. They are buckled and blunted and ridged. My fingers itch to trace a callous back to its source. The hands clasp like a priest's against his overalled chest.

So what do you think?

What do I think?

Shall we make a start?

Oh. I think…My son…There's no time…

His smile widens and he says,…like the present.

I smile back at him. I suppose you're right, I say. Come in then. I've been making some drawings.

We sit on opposite sides of the coffee table. I watch the way he listens to me. His concentration is such that I see my crush taking shape in his mind and almost expect it to materialise in the room beside us. He looks at my drawings. He makes new ones.

Suddenly the door flies open.

Sammy!

Mum! You didn't come and get me!

Sammy. Oh my god. Did you walk home by yourself?

No, I walked home with Sky and her mum. They live further down the street. Hello.

Sammy climbs onto Max Assunzione's lap as if he's known him all his life.

Sky is my girlfriend, he tells Max. She sent me a Valentine.

Sky's a beautiful name, says Max.

He puts his hand on my son's hair, cradling his head. I let my own neck relax and drop my head slightly backward.

Mummy got a Valentine, too.

Max's sunlamp eyes turn my way. I'm sure she did, Max says.

From a person who writes just like her, Sammy adds.

My head snaps forward again. My neck tenses. The sunlamps only burn brighter.

Funny, isn't it, says Sammy. Why are your hands like that?

Sammy!

Because I make things with metal. Metal's hard on hands.

Sammy, go and wash your own hands and you can have something to eat.

Water trickles in the bathroom.

I'm sorry about that, I say.

That's alright, Max says. I like the way kids are so straight. And anyway I'm aware of my hands. My hands tell me who I am. When I get anxious or uncertain, I only need to look at them and think, I am a man who works with metal, who makes things that other people need. The only thing is…

He opens his palms and looks them over.

Yes?

The only thing is, they are so hard and ugly that… He puts his hands palm-down on his knees. That women don't…

He smiles down at the floorboards. You know, he says finally.

No. I can't believe it, I say.

He looks up at me. Yes, he says, it's true. I've felt them cringe away. I don't dare to try any more.

I reach out and put my hand on one of his. I turn it over and look at the rough terrain of his palm. I take the other and lift both hands to my cheeks, slide them down my neck and over my shoulders.

Mum, Sammy calls, are we going to have cake?

Yes, I say. First let's get the fire going.

Max Assunzione and I gather the drift of scrunched and twisted butcher's paper strewn on the floor to light the fire. We touch whenever we are within reach. My body begins to turn yellow. We stuff the papers into the fireplace, make a tepee of kindling sticks, load in wood. Soon the air is crackling. An orange glow enters the afternoon.

What are you going to make for us? Sammy asks at dinner.

Max looks at me. I have put on my purple dress. A spark spits and fizzes in the fireplace. A log falls into red coals with a sigh.

I'm going to make you a swing set, he says.

Sammy claps his hands.

Oh Mum. Cool!

WHY CUPID IS PAINTED BLIND

The Lesson

KEVIN BROPHY

At the end of his street, which is at the top of a hill, there is a medieval church with tombstones lolling around at all sorts of angles right up to the walls. Hundreds of years ago there would have been a neat parish cemetery in the block of land beside the church and a garden of flowers between church and graves. It took those few hundred years for the multiplying tombstones to tumble across the lawn into the flowerbeds and up to the walls of the church. Now the April jonquils and the bluebells grow any which way in surprising corners and gaps. The whole place is fenced off, but people still gather in the church to hold services, sometimes for a new funeral. They can always find a place to squeeze a shiny new plaque between the old tombstones. There is always room for more if you have yourself cremated. The names on the tombstones are the names of the streets around here. There's a Mr Thorobold, ‘Barrister', who died in the eighteenth century, he has two streets named after him. There are two signs at the gate to the church grounds, one listing the names of local men who died in the Great War and the other asking people to take away their rubbish.