Eloquent Silence (29 page)

Annette had asked the unanswerable question, her lips pursed in concentration.

The friends all nodded their heads and smiled. Who was to know how children would grow up and treat their parents? They had all been loving mothers but their outcomes differed widely from many other women they knew whose children and grandchildren kept in touch regularly.

Christine spoke slowly, as if telling someone else’s story.

‘My daughter used to tell me until not so long ago that there would always be a place for me at her home, they would always be available to me. Christmas Day was coming up and I like to have a meal with whoever of my family is available as I’m not capable of cooking for the whole crowd any more. I knew she and her husband are having a big family Christmas Dinner there for his family.

‘So I said to Erin, “What about me? When do I come?” and she replied, “I don’t know. We’re having the other side.” There was no mention made of my coming at any time. What about this place that was always supposed to be there for me? Finally I was asked, but I was terribly hurt.

‘The place that was supposed to be there for me is never mentioned any more.’ Christine smiled, ‘Superfluous now,’ she finished.

‘I had to have stents put in my coronary artery and went to stay with my daughter who was in the city at that time,’ said Carmel. ‘My husband and I arrived a few days before my procedure was to take place as Vivian’s son was in hospital and I’d wanted to be of comfort to her but she didn’t want or need such comfort as I had to offer. She was so irritable and hostile with me that I spent the first night in tears before going in to hospital to have the procedure done in a day or so. By that time she had warmed to me slightly. I hadn’t needed to come down until the day but I thought to be of some comfort to her. She didn’t need or want it, though.

‘Then when I’d had the stents in I came straight home to my house a hundred miles from the hospital the next day after having the procedure because I was just too uncomfortable to go back there, she was so unwelcoming. I’m sure she never even noticed how she hurt me or how awful she’d been to me. That was her right as a hostess, I guess.

‘Vivian and her family, also my son and his family who were in the city that day never came near me in the hospital when I had the stents in. I felt I simply had no choice but to come home to Dawson even though I was supposed to stay close to the hospital for days in case of bleeding.

‘I was unwelcome and hightailed it out of there as soon as I could get the rubber on the road. These things are often not stated aloud but are implied well enough so that you know what the truth of the matter is, that you’re not wanted.

‘Thank God I can say my mother was never unwelcome in my house or my car or any function or any part of my life. I would never have invited her to stay or to be all day in a car with me or at a party and then made her feel uncomfortable and in the way.’ Christine was a thin, frail old woman with all the life worn out of her by her grumpy, gloomy old husband who had passed away some years previously. He had made a point of always trying to come between Christine and her mother but had never succeeded. It often seemed to Christine that this had been his mission in life and when her mother had passed away he had died not long after, his life plan apparently thwarted.

‘I know what you mean, dear. I call it the Policy of Exclusion,’ Paula chimed in. ‘Having lived out my allotted span, I’ve seen this behavior in action many times. Women, not only family but also so-called friends think this a tricky way of showing their priorities. They  ask you to come to their house or in their car or whatever the occasion calls for.

‘But then they pointedly ignore you and when someone else who they prefer comes along they make a flying dive for them, hug and kiss and welcome them, exclaim all over them and openly flout their joy at finding this wonderful person to be still alive in the universe, hoping you’ll notice that you don’t measure up to the importance of this other person. And you do notice, believe me you do. All this after they’ve spent hours with their nose in the air where you’re concerned. They’re giving you a message without saying a word and thinking you’re too stupid to know you’re being put on the periphery.’

The group of friends chortled loudly, all having experienced these lessons in being snubbed at some stage in their long lives.

‘No wonder the Bible says life is supposed to be three score years and ten,’ added Veronica.  ‘Enough, that’s enough. I don’t really want to die but I don’t really want to live either. I have little or nothing to live for. The future is only more of the present and the novelty has worn off that, I can tell you.’ Her voice was acidic, edged with hurt. ‘I have a great hollowness inside me that will never go away now, I think.’

‘But then I’ve always taken things too seriously and let them hurt me too much. When I had my first boyfriend one hundred years ago, we went together for two and a half years, on and off—mostly on. I tried to be a what was classed as a decent girl and not get into trouble and disgrace my parents.

‘However, little did I realize that this boy was only with me until he got to go the full nine yards . As soon as that happened, he put his hat over it and ran, as the old people used to say. Told me he’d be back. You couldn’t see him for dust. Put his tail between his legs and ran in case I should happen to expect any commitment or find myself in the pudding club,’ she laughed.

‘I often think about him. What a fool I was to love him when he was tearing around behind my back trying to win as many hearts as possible and then come back to me to have a conquest, while I was eating my heart out loving him. Before you could say “Jack Robinson” he was living with another girl. What a muggins I was as a young woman!’

‘My grandmother used to say “Don’t turn over rocks if you aren’t prepared to see the fearful creatures that live beneath them.” I try to leave the rocks in place but sometimes they rise up of their own volition and show me their unpleasant underbelly,’ Robyn told her friends as she began to load her wheeler-walker to return to the bus depot. ‘Underbelly of a rock, hey? Is that what’s called a hard place?’

‘Finished your shopping, dear?’ asked Annette when the others had wound down.

‘Yes. Just need to get some bird seed for Killer. We’re going to watch the fairy penguins tonight, you know. I inherited him from a friend. I think he knows me almost as well as I know myself, looking out from those steely little eyes of his. He’s a force to be reckoned with if I don’t feed him on time.’

They parted with an air of hilarity, already looking forward to the next opportunity to confess and confide in a fortnight’s time.

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D
uring the school holidays, Buddy, aged six, liked to come to work with me for the day. This was a combined treat and babysitting arrangement that we both enjoyed. We usually made the arrangements for a Friday, as I finished work at 12:30. He enjoyed playing with my felt pens, rubber stamps and stamp pad, scissors, glue, old fashioned adding machine and electric typewriter, my tools of trade in my Public Service office.

On this particular Friday morning he settled into my office very quickly, spreading his equipment out on the two desks and over every available inch of walking space. Sheets of A4 paper, discarded adding machine rolled paper, pens and bits of sticky tape, old envelopes and cutout men soon littered the office. Within half an hour Buddy had succeeded in covering both desks and had happily invaded every inch of available space except the safe where I kept the money.

However, he did all this in the nicest possible way and I never thought to object.

As a cashier for the Defense Force, around and about and over his head, I paid out thousands of dollars worth of claims by cash and check to other employees of the Defense Department. Fearing the claims would end up with a drawing of his sister on them, I locked them in the safe to be dealt with on Monday when I would have a little room to spread my ledgers around. Meanwhile, I looked in vain for a spot where I could count my cash delivery and do a balance when the money arrived. Nothing. This, too, had to be postponed until Monday.

Armaguard arrived to deliver a large amount of money and I continued to do battle with Buddy’s works of art until I found a spot where I could reconcile the cash delivery. Still there was not enough room to place the ledgers on a desk and record the transaction. I surrendered to the inevitable and counted the cash amongst his rough copies of ‘Flopsy and Mopsy’, the story he was preparing to type up shortly.

Morning tea time came around. We downed tools and made ourselves a cuppa. Buddy took his tea and I took my coffee out onto the front steps of the building into the sunshine. Buddy settled in and felt like a little confidential chat.

‘Aunty Lauren said you made her a cotton wool sandwich when she was little, Nan. Why did you do that?’ he asked me curiously.

Feeling a touch of guilt for this barbarity, I replied,  ‘The doctor told me to give her that because she had eaten a pin, Buddy.’

He considered this in silence for a while as he munched his chocolate chip biscuit. He must have decided it was an acceptable action to take and wondered what the consequences were.

‘So what happened then?’ He swung around to make eye contact with me so that he would not miss any essential information. His blue eyes swept my face as he tried to make out what kind of monster was hiding within the skin of his grandmother.

‘The cotton wool was supposed to wrap around the pin and pass through her,’ I explained, unable to be any clearer than this, unfortunately.

He mused over the mechanics of this, opened his mouth a couple of times to ask a question but must have decided to do so would not be seemly. Eventually he seemed to have worked out the hang of it for himself and commenced chewing happily on his biscuit again.

‘Mmm.’ Some more reflection, then, ‘Did Daddy ever eat anything like that when he shouldn’t have, Nan?’

‘Your Daddy tells me that his first memory is of crawling around the kitchen floor and finding a button under the kitchen dresser. He said he popped it in his mouth and ate it when I wasn’t looking,’ I told Buddy, smiling at the mind-picture I had of his father crawling around the kitchen floor.

‘Did you make him a cotton wool sandwich?’ Buddy was pleased to be getting the low-down on the skeletons rattling in the family cupboard and liked the way this conversation was turning out.

‘No, because I didn’t see him eat the button and he was too little to tell me, so I didn’t know,’ I told hm. ‘He couldn’t talk then.’

‘Where’s the button now, do you think, Nan?’ Buddy asked seeming fascinated with whereabouts of this illicit object.

‘I guess it’s probably passed through him by now, Buddy,’ I laughed. Daddy has reached and passed his twenty-eighth birthday.

‘Oh.’ Another chocolate chip biscuit and some rainbow cake later—

‘What else did they eat that was naughty?’ He seemed certain there was more dirt in the family archives and was really getting some inside information now.

‘Your Aunty Lauren ate some tablets that I had in my dressing table drawer. Daddy found some asprin in a box that Grandad used to take fishing with him. The box was under the house. Daddy managed to eat all the asprin, which must have been pretty hard. He and Aunty Lauren had to have their stomachs pumped out. Not at the same time, of course.’

‘How did you do that?’ Furrowed brow and large blue eyes.

Family history was something of a marvel to Buddy at that moment in time.

I explained the rudiments of the process to him as best I could but I hadn’t actually seen the pumping out taking place. He was quite impressed, though, simply by the thought of it all.

‘What about Aunty Jill? Did she eat anything wrong?’ Buddy was enjoying getting the lowdown on his relations.

‘Not that I knew of.’ Suddenly, I was sorry to disappoint him.

‘Were they all naughty when they were little?’ A hopeful glance in my direction and an intimate little smile of encouragement.

‘No. Not very. Jill was very busy. She ran full pelt all day long and asked questions non-stop. But she wasn’t really very naughty, just a bit tiring. Lauren and Daddy were very quiet children, but the girls used to argue back and forth fairly often. ‘You did.’ ‘I didn’t.’ ‘I was.’ ‘You weren’t.’ That kind of thing.’

‘Like that?’ asked Buddy, thinking I guess of similar altercations between himself and his small sister.

‘Yes, lots of that kind of thing went on some days. Daddy tried swearing when he was four or five and I washed his mouth out with soap.’

‘Hmmm!’ said Buddy, and mulled over this with a smile, no doubt having wished to be a part of the drama.

We sat on for a while, enjoying the mild winter day, both wrapped in our own thoughts. I recalled the previous winter when we had gone for a day out to Southbank Park in Brisbane.

The time came for Buddy to go to the toilet and my Prince Charming had taken him to the men’s block.

‘I know how to spell ‘sex’ but don’t tell Nan,’ Buddy had confided man to man to Prince Charming. ‘S.E.X.’ said Buddy, with a preschool lisp.

‘What did you say, Buddy? F.E.X?’ asked Prince Charming as they emerged from the toilet block.

‘No,’
shouted Buddy at the top of his lungs.
‘I said S.E.X
.’

He drew a few glances with that one! Prince Charming would have liked to distance himself from the child, I guessed, knowing him as well as I did by that time.

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T
he thought of Buddy and Prince Charming reminded me of the time when PC and I were engaged, or rather PC had bought me a ring and I was engaged but PC was only pretending to be. It seemed like a good idea to him at the time for reasons that I never could fathom.

Buddy had felt he and I should have a little heart to heart talk about my marriage to PC, illuminating me as to the working of the birds and bees.

‘When you and Ambrose get married will you stop going to work and stay at home to look after the babies?’ he asked in his large-blue-eyed way.