Grace's Table (11 page)

‘Why nursing?'

Jorja shrugged. ‘I don't reckon it'd be boring.'

Nursing had beckoned Grace from a photograph in a magazine. The picture of the nurse was a good one for catching a restless girl's eye – it conveyed seriousness and possibilities. The uniform was serious, with its creaseless fall, the collar demurely high, the starched cap like a crown on the girl's head. A fob watch rested above her right breast like a medal and her hands, one resting on top of the other in front of her tightly belted skirt, looked soft, and pretty. The girl's face captured the possibilities. She looked out at Grace not with the empathy that the job would demand, but with a
Come and join the fun
dare, and the corners of her mouth, turned ever so slightly up, implied the girl was happy. That photograph was all the job description Grace needed.

She'd gone to the city with the hope of becoming that girl, but she never did, not really. Adult life proved more complex than that one-dimensional snapshot. Sometimes the work was too serious; the possibilities too few.

She found other things though. Anonymity for a start, a freedom she'd only dreamt of in Harvest. She could walk the streets of the city late at night with friends, coming home from a dance or the pictures, and not have to worry about who might see her. There were no phone calls to Mother the next day by a neighbour or a relative, calling on the pretext of a chat, only to let slip that Grace had been spotted, out late, shoes swinging in her hand. She loves a good time, that Gracie, they might say with a small laugh, which had the power to fold Mother's brow and leave it folded for days. In the city the magnifying glass was removed.

But she never did achieve those soft, pretty hands. As a nurse she found a different kind of dirt. She found it in infected wounds and soiled beds or on the dead when she washed and laid out their bodies. Her palms and fingers discovered blood – thick, sticky – when she lifted half-limbs, bandaged broken heads. Vomit, piss, pus; they all left their mark. Some days she struggled to touch her own food. And her hands became chapped and reddened too, just like Mother's, abraded by scrubbing brushes, harsh soaps and disinfectants.

But they remained gentle, she was told.

*

‘You've a gentle touch,' a woman, diminutive both in stature and confidence, said to Grace. ‘He'd be grateful for that. I'm sure he'd tell you himself if he could.'

Her husband hadn't been able to say much at all for several days, though when he'd first been admitted to hospital the things he did say as he fought his delirium tremens didn't suggest to Grace that he cared too much for gentleness. But she smiled at the wife, complicit with her attempts to recall only the good.

Grace remembered the day as hot and humid with no breeze for the ward's open windows to catch. The woman fanned her husband with a folded newspaper, giving herself purpose, Grace suspected, rather than him relief, as he was oblivious to the heat. He was mostly unconscious, and when he did stir he muttered incoherently or plucked at some invisible lint or bug on his starched sheet. Grace supposed liver failure could be a kind death in this way, though she knew enough about its causes by then to suspect that his family had probably known lesser kindnesses. He could, of course, have been the type of drunk who simply went to sleep after two or six too many. But the confused looks of pity, contempt and disinterest on his sons' faces told a different truth. As did the way the mother jumped when her husband shouted some curse from his semi-comatose state.

Grace was still struggling to lose her country girl's gait, her country girl's drawl, her country girl's startled look at the helter-skelter of city life, despite living there more than a year. She was never sure if it was her long legs or her cow-eyed country innocence that attracted Des.

He was the youngest of the five siblings around that bed, all of them men. Grace supposed if a woman was to be widowed in mid-life, as Des's mother was soon to be, then five able sons were her ticket to some comfort in her old age. Years later, she realised the stupidity of the thought.

When Grace was attending to his father, she could feel Des's eyes following her, as she worked her way round his bed, straightening covers, checking a chart, taking a temperature, a pulse. With a country girl's trust – that took many more years to lose than the drawl – she'd look up, fingers still pressed to his father's thin wrist, having lost count of the thready beats, and stare right back at him. Sometimes he'd look away first. Mostly she was the coward.

When she was at another patient's bed, and out of Des's line of sight, she had the opportunity to watch him instead. She decided there were contradictions at play in this man, contradictions that only revealed themselves when he thought he was alone and unobserved. Grace would watch as he carefully adjusted the sleeves of his father's pyjamas, pulled them out straight where they'd been rumpled or twisted up to his elbow in a way that would be uncomfortable for the conscious. At other times, when his father was flushed and sweating, he'd gently lift his head and turn his pillow over to the cooler, dry side. Grace had seen wives and mothers perform these small caring acts without a second thought, but rarely men. And yet there were other times when he'd sit in a chair beside his father's bed and spin his hat round and round in his hands between his knees and not even raise an eye in his father's direction. Or he might only stay a short while, study the form guide, then leave without so much as laying a hand on his father or saying a single word to him.

As his father's stranglehold on life slipped further, Des would sometimes look across his gasping, jaundiced body and wink at Grace. The first time he did it she was confounded, and looked to check nobody had seen, especially his mother. But she stared blankly and didn't notice.

It became a game then. He might let a single finger caress her back or arm as she leaned in to his father to freshen up the stale acid smell of his breath with a mouth swab, or to reposition a limb.

Are you always so gentle
?
he'd whisper, genuine in his enquiry. At others, he'd be more playful:
You're enough to make a bloke wish he was dyin'
.

She couldn't deny she was flattered by his attention and figured it was the kind of thing that had lifted the corners of the girl's mouth in the recruiting photograph. But she also sensed confusedly that he was both a man who cared, and one who didn't.

‘I kind of hope the ol' man lingers on as long as possible,' he said to her on one occasion when he was at his father's bedside alone.

‘I can't see him lasting much longer,' Grace said, her voice gentle, like her hands. ‘I'm sorry.'

Des laughed. Grace looked at him, mystified.

‘We've pretty much accepted the ol' bugger isn't going to dodge this bullet,' he said. ‘What I meant was when he goes I'll have run out of excuses to visit the hospital. I could always slip one of my brothers something, I suppose. That'd give me reason enough to come back to visit.'

Nineteen by then, Des's pluck appealed to Grace.

‘Mind you, I wouldn't trust any of them getting tucked in at night by a pretty girl like you. So unless you wanted to make it easier for me …'

Grace felt a fresh plume of warmth creep up from her neck.

His father did take more days to die, more than Grace would like to have seen anybody have to fight for each breath.

Des remained, caring, then not.

‘So do I have to poison one of my brothers or not?' he whispered urgently on the last afternoon, behind the closed screen of his father's bed.

His father had taken on the type of breathing that left a family poised at every exhalation, waiting and wondering if there'd be another breath in. Grace could smell the defeated sweetness that fermented in the air above his bed. She knew it as the smell of death.

Des's persistence made her want to resist him, to show him she was choosy and not won over by such jokes and winks.

But city girls took risks, Grace reasoned. Only country girls accepted boy-next-door mediocrity. She'd felt taller, and prettier, since she'd left Harvest. And this taller, prettier Grace felt confident that day.

‘Here.' She passed Des a folded slip of paper.

‘It's fair to say you won't be bored nursing,' Grace said to Jorja. ‘But your hands will get dirtier than you know.'

Grace started to work at a troublesome run of couch grass that had threaded its way between two beetroot plants. She dug deep with her fingers to loosen the weed's roots. ‘Gardening – it's tough love,' she said, holding the extracted weed up triumphantly to Jorja.

‘Like nursing?'

‘Yes, I suppose like nursing.' She looked at her hands, the fresh dirt under her nails. ‘Who'd have thought they'd happily dig in soil again.'

‘I'm glad they do. These taste much better than any Mum buys.' Jorja held another cherry tomato out to Grace.

Grace put the fruit in her mouth, enjoyed the sweet acid burst as she crushed it between her teeth. ‘I'll have to teach you how to grow your own.'

‘Why, when I can come round here and eat as many as I like?'

Grace gave her granddaughter a wry smile. She'd been as ignorant as Jorja at her age, assumed the patterns in her life – people, places – were fixed and unchanging.

Now when Grace thought of her childhood home, she could see it more as her mother had. She saw the flat and fertile flood plains cupped in the hands of the surrounding mountains, scooping the land towards the southern coastline. She considered it a pretty landscape. Those mountains, she realised now, were more changeable than she'd given them credit for. They could be lost from sight to heavy rain, capped with white or shimmering purple behind a veil of heat. Sometimes they were grey with smoke; at others crisply green or frosty-footed under a clear blue sky. She could see the dams in the paddocks too, sparkling like diamonds on fingers. Except in the years when they were empty with drought and the landscape took on the appearance of an old sepia photograph. But now, even when she thought of those various shades of drought brown, she considered them as colourful as an artist's paint box.

How did she fail to see the beauty of those mountains when living at their fingertips?

9

Ada's son dropped her at the door the way a parent delivered a child to a party. He was already turning back down the stairs to leave, calling, ‘Have fun,' as Grace answered the chime.

‘Oh. Hi, Grace,' Max said, looking up. ‘Happy birthday. Hey, I've got a bit of running round to do today so any idea what time things'll wrap up?'

‘I don't know, Max,' Grace said, annoyed. ‘It's not your regular two-and-a-quarter-hour party slot. It'd take me that long just to blow out the candles.'

Ada, with her poor bruised face, shuffled uncomfortably on the front doormat.

‘How about you call later – when you get a chance,' Grace said. ‘I can let you know how things are going then.' She gave Max a tinkling-fingered wave goodbye then put her arm round her friend's shoulders and coaxed her inside. ‘Bloody kids,' Grace said, supporting Ada as she lifted her tender leg over the door stop. ‘Setting curfews – at our age.'

Ada's purple cheek creased into a smile and closed her already swollen eye even more. ‘Happy birthday.' She embraced Grace, tentatively. ‘I'm sorry, but I haven't been able to get to the shops to buy you a gift.' Ada lifted her hands then dropped them in a helpless gesture.

Grace shooed the apology away. ‘We both know there's nothing I need.'

‘Still, your seventieth!'

Grace laughed. ‘So now I've reached the same decade as you.'

With arms linked, Grace and Ada moved slowly through the house.

There was a time when the two women were on all fours together on the grass in one or the other's backyard, small children at their knees or riding on their backs. Ada's son had enjoyed a good tickling then, or tying himself in knots over a game of Twister. Max and Peter had all the time and imagination in the world to run amok with costumes and sticks and large cardboard boxes. Now their creativity stretched no further than what was required to complete their tax returns.

Some couples' closest friends had been decided by their children's friendships. Ada was exactly one of those child-forged friendships, created by Peter's schoolboy mateship with Max. The sons were only acquaintances now, but the bond between their mothers was made of stronger stuff.

And Grace had found other friends in a variety of places. Bev she'd met in her new-to-the-city nursing days over a cheap bottle of cider smuggled into the nurses' quarters. It was the first of many, and over them they'd laughed or moaned at all manner of things from Matron's unfortunate lazy eye, magnified behind her thick glasses, to night shifts – that scourge to their social life. Kath came later in Grace's life, on a long train journey back to Harvest. Even on that first day Kath, who'd never had to share her life with a man, could comment on Grace's need to do so objectively.

Grace remembered a day Ada and Bev had come to help her with a sixth birthday party. Ada knew the skills of getting order from a bunch of littlies. Bev was keen to learn whatever would be needed by the large bulge beneath her floral maternity dress. Bev had maturity on her side. She'd come to marriage later than Grace, and to a man who didn't think conception necessarily need take place on the honeymoon; he'd let her have her career first. Des reckoned Bev's husband was a man shy on pride. Grace reckoned Bev was lucky to be given a choice.

It was Claire's sixth birthday party. She was a popular girl at school and had refused to cut her list of ten guests by a single one. She greeted each six-year-old at the door like the lady of the house, gave them their allocated party hat, before marching them through to the backyard where all the games were set up.

Susan, who'd not long before hit double figures in age, had been put out over Claire's party. ‘How come she gets to have ten people? She's s'posed to only have six.'

Grace's party rules were one guest for each year celebrated. Susan had been reminding her all week she'd broken her own rule.

‘I wasn't to know they'd all be able to make it,' Grace had said again and again.

‘It's not fair. You should've sent out only six invitations.'

‘Come on, you'll get to play the games and eat the party food as well. You can be my big helper.'

‘I won't play any of their stupid games – they're babies.'

And now the sulkiness continued into the party.

Susan didn't move from the day bed, where she lay in a knot of skinny arms and legs, as Grace went in and out from kitchen to backyard with snacks and drinks. She knew her eldest daughter was only pretending to read the comic book in front of her; mostly her eyes strayed over it to the backyard. But if the younger children were noisy when they came inside the house, she'd make a great show of lowering the magazine to her chest in order to scowl at them. Once, she even yelled
Get outta there
to one little girl, who mistook the closed door to the girls' bedroom for the one to the toilet. As if this wasn't enough, Des had bellowed from his shed more than once for them to
Keep that damn noise down
, because he couldn't hear the races being called on his radio. Grace imagined Claire's young party guests quivering with relief when their mothers finally came to collect them.

Claire, fortunately, was oblivious to her sulking sister and cantankerous father. She led her gaggle of friends confidently through one party game after another, making sure the parcel stopped fairly along with the music and that blindfolds were secure when each girl faced the donkey.

‘Chocolate brownies, as requested.' Bev had placed a square Tupperware container on the kitchen bench when she arrived.

‘You've put the recipe inside, of course?' Grace now removed the container's lid to reveal a perfect display of brown squares dusted with icing sugar.

‘Can't a girl have her secrets?'

‘Not one this tasty. I could eat them every day.' Grace took a square and bit it in half.

‘Which is why I won't give you the recipe. If you could make them for yourself they wouldn't be special when I made them for you.'

Bev's brownies were gooey and rich; seamed with caramel and studded with walnuts. Grace had been trying to get the recipe from her friend since she'd first had one. The only clue she'd been able to extract from Bev was that she'd been sent the recipe from a Canadian penfriend. They were dark as a cave and not so much crumbled in the mouth as dissolved. Some of the ingredients Grace could guess, but any attempt to copy the brownies had produced nothing but a poor second cousin. They were destined to be loved by all but made by no one but Bev.

‘Chocolate brownie?' Bev called to the still supine Susan.

‘Are they your brownies?' Susan asked.

‘The one and only.'

Susan's eyes lit up.

‘If you want one, though, you'll have to come and get it.'

With some eye-rolling and much huffing and puffing, the comic book was dropped to the floor and Susan levered herself up from the day bed. She came over to Bev and took a piece from the container offered.

Bev winked at Grace.

‘Now, I'll put two more pieces aside just for you, but only if you take these out to the others.'

‘Do I have to?'

‘I'd like you to,' Bev said.

‘I'm not playing their stupid games though.'

‘No one's asking you to. But I know Aunty Ada would appreciate you helping her to organise them, you being the older girl.'

Grace kept cutting oranges into quarters, trying not to look at Susan. If her elder daughter thought the request came from anybody but Bev, then she'd be back on the day bed quick-smart.

‘All right then.'

Bev took two brownies from the container and put them on a small plate. ‘Yours for later.' She passed what was left to Susan.

Grace noticed Susan's slow journey outdoors was fortified by another brownie. Once among the hungry revellers, though, and she heard her snap at a child, ‘Just one, you greedy girl.'

‘She got out of the wrong side of the bed this morning,' Bev said.

‘She does most mornings.'

Bev rested her hands on the kitchen bench and pushed her spine up like an angry cat's. ‘Ah, that feels good.' She swung her sizeable belly from side to side. ‘So what's triggered today's humph?'

‘Ten guests when there should have been six.' Grace arranged the quartered oranges on a plate.

‘So why are there ten? I thought you had some rule.'

Grace shrugged. ‘I do. But it just didn't work out. All the girls here invited Claire to their parties earlier in the year but I didn't expect them all to accept in return. So Susan's feeling hard done by.'

‘She's a sensitive girl.'

‘Too sensitive some days.' Grace started to peel and quarter apples.

‘So what will you do next year?'

‘Hope Claire's got it down to seven friends.'

‘And if she hasn't?'

Grace shrugged again.

Claire burst into the kitchen, breathless and with her conical hat tipped to one side like a dunce's cap on a drunk. ‘We're one piece short,' she panted.

‘How can you be short?' Grace asked. ‘There were plenty there.'

‘Well, all my friends had a piece, so that's ten. Then Ada had one, and Dad took two … and so did Susan, because she said she had to carry them out so she deserved them. So that makes … how many? And I haven't had any yet.'

‘Here, have these.' Grace passed Claire the plate with the two pieces put aside.

Claire took one and ate it in two bites, then scuttled to the back door again.

‘Do you want the other piece?' Grace called after her.

‘You have it,' Claire said, and disappeared.

‘Here.' Grace pushed the plate across the bench to Bev. ‘You seem to be the only one who's missed out.'

‘No, keep it for Susan.'

‘It doesn't sound as though she's gone without.'

‘Still, a deal's a deal.' Bev pushed the plate to one side.

‘Look at you, having to help me along like I'm a frail old woman,' Ada said.

‘You are, aren't you?'

‘Feels like it.'

‘Your confidence has taken a battering, that's all. It'll come back.'

‘Do you think confidence is something that continues to grow at our age?' Ada stopped walking to look at Grace. ‘It might do for children – they can only get stronger, more knowing. But with us, confidence eventually has to hit the ceiling and from there the only place left for it to go is down.'

Grace looked into her friend's troubled face and saw the plea coming from those sore eyes, begging her to help find that distance from the ceiling she needed.

‘There is no ceiling, Ada. We'll always live with the stars above our heads.'

Ada looked up. ‘I see a ceiling,' she said.

Grace refused to follow her friend's gaze. ‘Then we need to spend more time outdoors.'

Ada patted the top of Grace's hand and the pair moved on.

Grace didn't know how long she could help and protect her friends. Those years she had on them, years that had made no difference in their middle age, did now that they were all in their seventies. For Ada to be struck by a truck's mirror regardless of whether Grace was there or not showed that the benefit of those few years was finite.

The two friends moved past the lounge and along to the dining room, where Ada stopped and looked in. ‘Table looks nice,' she said. ‘You've used the plate Jimmy and I gave you.'

The plate, at one end of the table, was busy with English cottage garden blooms. It had been a gift from Ada and her husband to Grace and Des for their twentieth wedding anniversary. It had come decorated with an assortment of dainty petit fours Ada had made. She'd wrapped the plate in clear cellophane and tied off the top with colourful curling ribbon. Grace had admired the plate and its contents, told Ada it looked like a piece of art, too good to eat. Des had said,
Might look pretty, but let's see how they taste
. He'd got to the bow with a pair of scissors and tossed the cellophane to one side. The petit fours obviously tasted as good as they looked because he consumed the lion's share, taking each in a single mouthful.

‘Yes, some of the old favourites out.'

‘The church plate. Bev's.' Ada knew many of the stories behind Grace's plates. ‘And the commemorative one from Moreville. Sixty years, wasn't it?' Ada craned her neck to see.

‘Yes. Sixty.'

By the time Grace retired, Moreville was celebrating more than sixty-five years of caring for the aged. She found she couldn't eat off that particular plate, though she valued it. It reminded her too much of the pur
é
ed food she'd fed to people, homogenised blobs of grey or green or brown that were rejected more often than swallowed. She'd set the plate at Meg's place, the youngest member of her family, and therefore furthest from needing such a diet.

Ada looked round the table, nodded, almost imperceptibly, at each plate as she passed it. Grace knew she was counting the places. ‘Only twelve, then?'

‘Only twelve.'

‘Shame.'

The word shame was one of those with disparate meanings. The first, as Ada used it now, expressed sympathy, the other, as Susan and Peter would have it, expressed disgrace.

‘Just the thought gives me the creeps,' Peter had said, after learning of Jack. Grace remembered how he'd visibly shivered.

Susan must have phoned him that morning. She had called in early and unannounced to find Grace and Jack sharing breakfast in their pyjamas. Unfortunately Susan hadn't seen the quiet intimacy of the moment – the sectioned newspaper shared between them, teapot handle turned for the other's ease, the casual touch of one foot against the other's under the table. Instead, she'd looked at Grace as if to say,
How could you
?
Grace had felt dirty under her gaze.