Grace's Table (17 page)

There was a sense of permanence to Jack's presence now; they saw each other once or twice a week. Equally permanent was Susan and Peter's resistance to him. But Grace looked upon this in much the same way she saw Jack's tattoo: something to be lived with.

His tattoo listed the names of his ex-wife and two children, their birthdates directly under each. The letters and numbers were distorted with age – the M in Marion a crushed accordion of vertical lines, but still readable. His wife had left him,
passed me over for something better
, he said. Grace's image of this other woman was of someone fussy, but courageous. Jack said she had it all wrong, that his ex-wife was simply a slut. Some nights Grace slept with those names and dates around her. She eventually got used to their company.

It was hard to imagine Susan and Peter ever doing the same.

Grace watched Peter as he studied the contents of his glass. She could see his anger by the way he gripped the stem, in a fist. Susan flicked at the thickened corner of her napkin with a fingernail, face impassive. As usual, what her daughter was really thinking was out of reach to Grace.

So many years had passed since Des's death, and still Peter and Susan looked to the door for his return. What business was it they needed to finish with him? One more
Good girl
pat to the head; another firm handshake, the words
You do your old man proud
? Grace had been dulled by Des's shadow, while Peter and Susan had always shone beneath it.

‘Peter, would you mind carving me off another slice of lamb, please?'

‘Oh, yes, please. Me too.'

Kath and Ada's plates still had meat left on them.

Peter put down his glass and took up the carving knife and fork again. ‘Anyone else want seconds?'

Most agreed they'd had enough.

14

‘Are you really seventy-six now, Kath?'

‘As far as my birth certificate can be trusted, Susan, I'm afraid I am.'

‘You look good for it.'

‘Dare I say, perhaps a husbandless life has had its advantages!'

‘Dare I say, you might be right.' Susan laughed.

Grace wondered what Susan saw when she looked at her now seventy-year-old mother. That she looked good for her age? The last time Grace had seen her own mother she was struck by how old she had looked. Mother had been not much older than Grace now, yet surely her mother's neck had been more pouchy, like a tortoise's, and she remembered how the face-powder gathered in the liver spots on her cheeks, accentuating them like lichen on pale wood. Her mother's eyes had almost disappeared into the tired folds surrounding them and her voice had lost some of its authority. By then, she only moved with joint-creaking reluctance, whereas every crisp step had previously been as much the purpose as the destination. She no longer saw or tasted the ants in the sugar bowl that made their way into her tea on the sugar spoon, and yet she still pegged her underwear to the inside of the line in case someone should call round.

Grace was yet to recognise those same features within herself, those telltale signs that suggested she'd started the slow surrender to age, yet she suspected Susan had. And if she had, Grace wondered how her daughter interpreted them. Did she see only the physical changes – incapacities to be feared or suffered in her own future? Or did she focus on how that surrendering might hint at something else – the lost opportunities, the disappointments and failings that could lie ahead? Did Grace remind Susan that you could reach seventy and still have things uncompleted, things not started, things that would never be started? That at seventy you could have a head full of words that no one wanted to listen to, memories no one wanted to live, sadness no one wanted to feel?

Grace supposed there were few people who comfortably looked into their future. Looking into the past was bad enough.

‘How old are you, Aunty Ada?' Meg asked.

‘Seventy-five.'

Meg looked at Kath then back to Ada. ‘Oh.'

Honesty sat comfortably on a six-year-old's face, and Ada smiled.

‘Getting hit by a truck has a way of ageing you, dear. Maybe when all the bruising's gone away, Kath can look like the
old
girl again.'

Normally Kath would have been quick with a retort, something like
Older, but naturally brunette
at least
or
Wisdom comes at a price
. Today she remained silent.

Grace looked from one to the other and worried her friends were accepting the order in which they might head to their graves, taking their numbers – one, two, three – like tickets in a deli queue. Her thoughts leapt back to all that talk earlier, on the patio.

‘All the worry over what's in the backyard, Peter,' she said, thinking out loud, ‘maybe what it's really telling us is to be mindful of what we throw away. To think twice before letting something go.'

‘Who needs to think twice about throwing away rubbish?'

‘Mum's using a metaphor, Jane.' Susan held her hand out to her sister-in-law who handed her plate over at an angle, the knife and fork almost sliding off and onto the tablecloth. Susan righted it just in time. ‘Do you want me to take your glass while I'm at it?'

Jane wrapped her fingers round its stem. ‘No, thank-yup.'

‘If we were all as mindful as you, Mum, we'd have backyards that were just as unnavigable,' Peter said. ‘You never throw anything out.'

‘I do throw things out, just not the things you think I should. And my backyard is navigable. You've just got to steer your path through it.'

‘And that's where choosing the right way starts, kids. Right here at home.' Richard tapped the tabletop with his finger several times, leaving a cluster of dents in the damask cloth.

‘Argh!' Jaxon collapsed back in his chair, arms hanging straight at his sides, feigning exhaustion. ‘Dad's gonna give us one of his don't stray from the path lectures.'

‘Well, Little Red Riding Hood did and we know what happened to her.' Meg looked earnest. ‘Gobbled up. Just like that.' She tried to click her fingers but had yet to develop the strength to do it properly.

‘I expect we've all thrown things out we wished we hadn't,' Ada said. ‘I can remember things from my childhood that ended up in the bin – letters, dolls, trinkets – things I'd like to have back now, to remind me of the person I was then. So don't criticise your mother for taking her time to decide what's worth keeping and what's not. A decision made in haste only frees up time for regret later.'

‘I'll keep that in mind, Ada,' Peter said, ‘when I'm
mowing
– then regrettably digging out the several rolls of chicken wire buried in the long grass down the back and snagged into the mower.'

‘You won't ever throw that picture of us out, will you, Grandma?'

Grace followed Meg's finger to the portrait of her five grandchildren on the china cabinet behind her. It was an outdoor shot. The three youngest were lying on a lawn on their stomachs, Meg with her chin cupped in the palms of her hands; Tom and Jaxon rested on their forearms either side of her. Nick and Jorja were sitting back to back behind them, like bookends.

‘No, Meg, for as long as I'm alive you'll always have pride of place, looking over my table,' Grace said.

She always felt those grandchildren at her back as if she was in the foreground of the photograph looking out – and the younger generation, with their smooth faces and perfect teeth, were gazing over her shoulders. She was comforted by that youthful legacy. While they existed even the dead were never completely gone.

The feel of cold, pink lamb under the hand, the taste of mango, the healthy perfume of fresh chard – Grace wondered what would spark her family's recollections of this day in the future. Would it be the touch of real linen napkins, soft and pliable with age, as they pressed them to their lips? The sharp taste of vinegar reminding them of her freshly made mint sauce? Or maybe it would be the sight of rusting corrugated iron that would return them to this day, years from now.

It was the turpentine smell of camphor that always reminded Grace of why she'd left Harvest.

At seventeen she had missed a period. Before the due date for the second had passed, morning sickness also told Filip that Grace had a secret she could not keep.

Filip's prior gentleness was unravelled by this sudden understanding. Grace flinched as he lashed out. Once, twice, three times he dented the fibro of his living room wall, before he slumped into a chair, defeated.

‘How?' he asked, over and over, head in hands, knuckles bloodied.

His self-pity made Grace see a different man.

‘You're the science teacher, how d'you reckon?' She paced his lounge room, unable to settle.

‘Of course I know how it has happened. But we were always very careful.'

‘Not careful enough.' She kept pacing, arms hugged round the telltale swelling of her breasts.

‘
Ebam!
' Filip brought his fist down on the arm of the chair and Grace heard the timber give a little.

She knew no Macedonian but some utterances were universal.

‘I cannot marry you.' He wouldn't face her. Instead, he spoke to his shoes.

‘
What?
But you said you loved me.'

‘And I do, but I am to marry someone else. It is all arranged.'

‘Arranged? When was it arranged?'

‘A long time ago.'

Reality slowly dawned on Grace. ‘And you never bothered to tell me? What was I then – just something to pass the time with?'

He looked up at her but said nothing. Years later she'd understood that look, of a damned man. He might have to honour his old-country traditions but he'd sold himself short in doing so.

At the time, though, she cared nothing for his honour, only hers. She stopped pacing, picked up an ashtray from the coffee table and hurled it at him. He didn't flinch as it whistled past his head and smashed against the wall beside the dents made by his fist. His face, his body – one Grace knew the surfaces of intimately – said something more hurtful:
Do your worst, so we can end this.

She knew then she couldn't marry him either, not even if his arranged bride was to drop dead that very day.

‘After all your big talk,' she said, ‘you're just a bloody coward like the rest of us.' And left him with his shame.

Outside, she stood a while in the hot Harvest sun. The whispered stories from girls about hot baths, empty gin bottles and knitting needles terrified her, as did those of lying on sheets stained with the blood of the three or five girls before in a backyard abortionist. But at seventeen, and with no husband, she wasn't brave enough to walk the small-town streets of Harvest with a growing belly. And neither did she think her spirit could withstand several months of hiding out on the farm under the scrutiny of her mother's damning eyes.

She looked left then right down the dusty, sleepy street as though choosing a direction. She turned left, towards home.

As it turned out, it was Mother who decided. Fierce Mother. Pious Mother. Mother of little love but much practicality.

‘Drink this,' she said to Grace.

Grace saw her mother as one of Macbeth's witches then, or Snow White's stepmother, but she had to trust in that foul-tasting drink. But while she drained the cup, and many others like it over the next few days, she never doubted that her mother would just as happily kill the mother-to-be as the foetus, in order to rid herself completely of the shame.

When the cramps started that's what Grace thought her thin-lipped mother was doing with each silent drink – until the blood and clots came away, soaking rag after rag, which Mother tossed into the fiery, secretive mouth of the wood stove.

So it was that, with the herbal camphor smell still in her throat, she recalled the photograph of the smiling nurse in the magazine, and soon after followed the path towards a nursing career and away from the disappointment permanently etched on her mother's face.

Jane, hand still firmly gripped round the stem of her wine glass, let out a plaintive, ‘Oh, Grace, don't talk like that. You make it sound as though you're not going to be around much longer. You know I'm emotional at the best of times, let alone after a couple of wines.'

Susan rolled her eyes. ‘And then you're emotionally incontinent.' She leant across to take Jane's glass from her, but Jane moved it out of reach with surprising stealth.

In an extraordinary show of sobriety, Jane said, ‘At least no one can ever accuse me of being a cold fish.'

Startled, Susan opened her mouth to say something, but then thought better of it.

‘I never told your Pa,' Mother had said into her cup, ‘about that incident – before you left Harvest.'

Grace had been back on one of the few visits she made to her childhood home, three young children in tow by then. Joe was running the farm and Pa had been laid to rest deep in the cemetery soil. For all Grace knew the tufts of grass from his land were still caught between his bony fingers. She liked the idea of that.

Mother was sitting, still at the old red-and-white flecked Formica table, finishing one of the many cups of tea she had in a day. Grace was preparing food for their dinner, ready for Joe's return from the dairy. It was a quiet evening, except for the clack, clack of the ceramic milk saver in a saucepan of milk she was heating for custard.

She had stopped turning the key on the tin of ham she was opening when her mother said those words, but she couldn't look at her. The topic had remained unspoken since Grace took that first drink. To hear it reduced to an incident all these years later, didn't take away any of the fear and hurt and guilt that had come before or after.

‘I thought you should know that. In case it was important to you.'

Grace placed the tin carefully on the table, not trusting herself to open it any further without cutting herself. The narrow ribbon of tin that had gathered round the key hissed a little as it uncoiled. She sat down opposite her mother but still couldn't look at her.

‘It is important to me,' she said. ‘Thank you.'

‘You were lucky it worked, you know.' Mother drained the last of her tea and clattered the cup into place on the saucer.

Should she express gratitude? Grace wondered. Was that what her mother expected? It was never a word she could associate with what they'd done.

‘I didn't expect it to,' her mother continued. ‘I wasn't sure of the quantities. Guess work, really.'

Grace looked at her mother then. ‘And if it hadn't worked?'

But her mother looked away. She sighed into the dusty-lavender sky beyond the kitchen window. ‘I've thought about that a lot over the years. At the time I figured I'd have taken you to the city and found a doctor to finish off what I'd failed to do. Later – years later – I wasn't so sure. But it's enough to say I still feel the weight of that decision every time I go to church.'

Grace saw then that shame was more powerful even than God. But maybe she'd got it wrong. Maybe they'd both got it wrong.

‘Still, what's done is done. No undoing it now.' Mother slapped her hands on her thighs, then pushed herself up from her chair. She gathered the dirty cups and saucers from the table and took them to the sink.

The table was scattered with pale cake crumbs, left over from lunch. Grace gathered them together with the edge of her hand and pushed them into a pile. She imagined the mound as equal to the size of a seven-week foetus. Given the smallness of the cluster, could it be considered such a big sin?

But the question of whether she'd sinned had already been answered, first when Peter was born and she held the fully formed reality of what she'd got rid of in her hands. And many times since, even just then as Claire ran through the kitchen, two ponytails flapping at the sides of her head like the ears of a Bassett Hound.