Odyssey In A Teacup (10 page)

The most opened door in my home was the fridge door, and the fridge itself was always chock-full. Not so at Ralph’s place. Norma had a nice big fridge in her kitchen because Albie worked on the refrigerator production line at Malleys. But four kids in the house going through growth spurts combined with Albie’s meagre wage meant that the fridge was sometimes as empty as george and simon’s heads. Ralph had realised their heads were empty when he was thirteen when Norma dished up brains for dinner. He’d stared at the serving plate in the centre of the table.

‘What’s this?’ he’d asked his mother.

‘Brains.’

‘Hmm ... are things so tough that you had to lobotomise your two oldest sons?’

‘Ralph!’ Norma had feigned indignation (she had a soft spot for her youngest son, and she was very proud of his extraordinary intelligence).

simon and george had stared at him blankly. Either they didn’t know what a lobotomy was, or they’d actually had the procedure.

But Albie was pissed. ‘C-c-can’t you see there’s f-f-food on the t-t-table!
D-d-d-dummkopf!
’ It must have seemed to him that Ralph was raising doubts about his capacity as a provider. Obviously, Albie also didn’t understand what lobotomised means.

Ralph looked again at the brains on the platter:

Three—
.
All nanoscopic—
. His thoughts were confirmed.

Norma mostly dished up other cheap cuts of meat: sausages, brisket, tripe, mince, lamb shanks, or stewed rabbit. Ralph never ate fillet steak or anything out of the ordinary unless he stayed over at our place. He was resigned to the fact that that was just how things were at home, and he didn’t see any point in moaning about quality or quantity. Louwhiney didn’t care what she ate, but she had an insatiable appetite and hated being kept waiting. She hadn’t progressed from the instant gratification needs of the infant, and whimpered like one at dinnertime.

Ralph dealt with this with his usual
savoir-faire
. ‘Your Louwhining is using up energy. That’s only going to make you need more food, you know. So ... you could always start nibbling on your own flesh. God knows, there’s enough there to feed all of us.’

‘Why don’t you go and get stuffed!’

By the time Louwhiney got to fourteen, it looked like she had taken Ralph’s advice as well as her own. She’d lost a whole lot of weight, and her virginity—very frequently, according to Ralph. And for a spell, he’d changed his sister’s nickname to
‘Loueasy’
(whispered it, though). He knew Norma would be upset to find out that her daughter wasn’t chaste, but he only kept it to himself because he figured as long as Lou
easy
-whiney kept getting porked, she wouldn’t pork up. Figure conscious, she’d eat less and there’d be more food for him.

But before Louwhiney became
Loueasy
, Ralph had to hang onto his school lunch, because after she finished her soggy tomato sandwich, she was on the prowl, like a herbivorous predator feverishly hunting him down in the schoolyard to try and swipe his soggy tomato sandwich, which was what Norma put in their lunchbox every day. What I wouldn’t have given to find one of those in mine.

Because Joe was a good provider and Sylvia was a good homemaker, and because they were both of middle-eastern descent, it meant there was enough money to buy and to cook with unusual and expensive ingredients found only at the Central Market in the city. This meant that we often had alien meals. Mostly, I enjoyed these—but
only
at dinnertime. It was distressing for me to open an overcrowded lunchbox the next day to find leftover lamb kofta, dolmades, deep-fried kibbeh, falafel and pita. It wasn’t so much that the contents looked like an assortment of turds on flatbread, but in the days before Australia became multicultural and ethnic foods started to become mainstream, these lunches had me pegged as a freak. I already felt like one at home; I didn’t need to have it affirmed in the school lunch shed. I protested.

‘Why can’t you just give me normal food?’

‘I do give you normal food.’

‘It might be normal in the motherland, but it’s not normal here.’ I grumbled often enough to wear Sylvia down (she’d taught me well).

‘
Oeuf!
Here’s money. Buy your bloody lunch from now on,
pest
!’ It was music to my ears.

When we were in primary school, each morning, those of us in our classes who were ordering lunch wrote what we wanted on a brown paper bag and put the money inside it. The lunch monitor from each class—and I had the honour of being one for a month—dropped the orders off at the shop across the road, and collected the basket of lunches (appropriate change in each bag) just before midday. I usually ordered a fritz and tomato sauce sandwich, or a pie, a pastie, or a sausage roll. And every single day, I had a cake: either a vanilla slice, Neapolitan, cream bun, lamington, Kitchener bun, or apple turnover. It made me feel Australian.

At high school, the tuck shop was on the premises, and I always bought an assortment of lollies for recess. Sometimes, I didn’t have quite enough money so I borrowed from Maria, an Italian girl in my class. Maria came from a wealthy family so we all took advantage of her, although, I was one of the few who always paid her back. People used to line up to borrow from Maria and she never said no. The boys in the class nicknamed her ‘Lollipop’ (an all-day sucker). Maria never learned how to say no to anything or anyone, so she retained her nickname. But by the time she finished school, this moniker had nothing to do with confectionery.

My favourite sweet was liquorice. I especially loved liquorice blocks. These came in a flattish sheet of connected two-centimetre squares, which could be torn off into sections. One cent would buy you four blocks, so I was in heaven on the days that Maria lent me five cents.

‘I wonder why you swallow liquorice black and it comes out green.’ I mentioned this to Ralph in passing.

He called me the next day after school. ‘They use blue food colouring.’

‘What? What are you talking about?’

‘The liquorice manufacturers. They use blue food colouring, which is why it comes out green.’

Ralph had obviously been to the library. Even before he got his library card and discovered
Human Sexual Response
(the book), he spent a lot of time at libraries where he self-diagnosed his OCPD and amassed useless bits of information.

‘Although ... that in itself is a riddle,’ he continued. ‘When you combine black and blue and brown, you should get a dark, warm grey colour. Or even purple. Hmm ... the whole digestive process is a mystery, really. Like, why is corn so hard to digest? Even a baby eating pureed corn will probably excrete it as whole kernels.’

At that stage of my life, I didn’t much care if babies crapped out a whole buttered cob with little holders on either side. And although it was good to know about the liquorice upload/download colour difference, I wasn’t overly concerned; I just loved it. I also loved the candy teeth and gums. But sharing the love was not in my best interest in second year high school.

My English teacher was Miss Parker. She was forty-something, and had a blokey voice. Miss Parker was a very tall, broad woman with a long face, bulbous nose and short, tightly-permed black hair. She also had very hairy arms and was in dire need of an upper lip wax. And, she wore vanilla-scented perfume. Joe always put a sickly-sweet vanilla deodoriser in whatever car he was driving. Miss Parker smelled like his car, so already, she and I were off to a bad start.

Miss Parker had a very gummy smile that exposed exceptionally long cuspids—the longest and yellowest I’ve ever seen on any human being. Her fingers were also yellow from too many cigarettes. In spite of this, she was so proper and schoolmarmish that I didn’t think she actually had a first name. And if she did, it was probably ‘Miss’. But neatly printed on her roll-call sheet was ‘Miss K. Parker’. The girls in the class thought ‘K’ stood for Kathleen. The boys thought it stood for Kunt.

Kathleen (or Kunt) wore twin sets and looked like she applied her face makeup with a trowel. In hindsight, I believe she may have been a drag queen, although she said, ‘I’m a thespian, not an actress.’ No one actually knew what the difference was, but a thespian sounded more important. Anyhow, we had to do more play-acting in her class than in any other English class in the school years after. It seemed, though, that thespians were serious people with no sense of humour. Once, when Miss Parker asked me a question, I smiled at her with my false, candy teeth in place. Everyone except Miss Parker thought it was funny. I think she was sensitive about the state of her teeth and might have thought I was making fun of her, which I was.

‘Quite the clown aren’t we, Miss Roth?’

‘I was just play-acting.’ The class laughed again.

‘Come here! And bring your writing exercise book with you!’ she boomed.

When I got to her desk, she grabbed the book out of my hand and wrote something on the first line of a fresh page, handed it back and said, ‘You can stay back after school. And you’re to write this two hundred times.’

I looked in my book and saw she’d written, ‘I must not be stupid and disruptive in class.’ I started to laugh.

‘And
what
is so funny now, miss?’

‘You’ve written that you must not be stupid and disruptive in class.’

The class erupted.

She slammed her hand on the desk and yelled, ‘YOU CAN WRITE IT FOUR HUNDRED TIMES!’

These days, restating something over and over is called a mantra. In those days, repeatedly writing lines was called an imposition. Either way, if you want something to change, you have to really feel and mean what you’re writing or saying. I invested no feeling in these lines so nothing changed. I remained stupid and disruptive, apparently, because I kept getting impositions that said so. I felt right at home in Miss Parker’s class. I probably filled several chapters in her bad books, although I never flashed my candy ivories at her again.

Sweets remained my opiate. Then again, so did savoury ... which pretty much covers all food. But the girls in my class didn’t understand my relationship with food any more than I understood theirs. The disparity became apparent in Home Science around the same time as the teeth incident (my second year of high school was not a good one).

Back then, Home Science was exclusively for girls, and it didn’t take long to realise that we were being groomed to eventually become Stepford wives. This didn’t sit well with someone like me. The other girls were kind of WASPish (snooty White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) and seemed happy to fly in formation, while I tended to fly in the face of convention. And the gossip in the schoolyard after the lesson in the third week of that term made it sound like I
had
walked on the wild side!

We were finally getting into the practical stuff and learning how to cook (after we’d learned to sew, knit and iron). At this lesson, we had to grill a lamb cutlet, and boil a small potato, a carrot, and a handful of fresh peas.
Wow.
Talk about underwhelming. This was neither the kind nor the quantity of food Sylvia dished up at home, but who cared? I was going to eat what I made. And I tucked into it with gusto. As the other girls in the class were struggling to get through their meal, I polished off everything on my plate, picked up the bone with my fingers to gnaw at any remnants on it, licked my fingers, wiped my hands on a cloth napkin, then put my hand up.

‘Yes, Ruth,’ said Miss Foley.

‘Can I please have some more?’

An audible, collective gasp filled the room. Conversation ground to a halt. The clattering of cutlery stopped. Everyone turned to look at me.
Shit.

‘You pig,’ said nobody, but it was telepathically transmitted by everybody. I felt it keenly (I now understood Oliver Twist’s shame). These girls just did not get it. They weren’t Jewish, so how could they?

I felt so traumatised, I borrowed enough money from Maria to get myself a buttered finger bun just after the lesson when the rest of the school had lunch. The other girls sat in the lunch shed moaning about how bloated they were, and whispering to each other while they stared at me like I was from Nix. Named after
Nyx
, the goddess of darkness and night, it’s a moon that orbits Pluto. So what if it had yet to be discovered. The point was, it was still there, and the way these girls looked at me made me feel like nothing.