Rebellious Daughters (13 page)

‘
Ella etho
and taste this,' he commanded.

I took a mouthful of the vile brew and tried not to gag as I swallowed. I faked an incredulous look of surprise, ‘Oh Baba, I must've mixed up the salt and sugar.' Baba stared at me with suspicion as I waited for the inevitable explosion. It never came. Instead, Baba ordered me to make him another coffee. ‘This time, make it right,' he said, his voice edged with steel.

I scurried to the stove and made him another
kafe
without incident just as I did every day from then on until Baba put a premium on homework in high school and the pursuit of straight A's instead of his coffee. But as I brewed the replacement, I felt secure in the knowledge that I had a choice: to obey or disobey. I now knew I could deviate from the norm and didn't always have to be the good Greek girl. It was a choice I didn't fully explore until a decade later when my rebellion took full flight above the sandstone buildings at Melbourne University.

A MAN OF ONE' SOWN

SUSAN WYNDHAM

My diary for 1969 has a cover printed with fashion images from Swinging London and a flimsy lock that long ago lost its key. I didn't have much to hide as an 11-year-old, at least not until July 6 when I wrote: ‘I love Paul', then on July 7: ‘I began my first period. Mummy was very nice.'

Those haiku-like lines capture me as a child teetering on the brink of womanhood, elated, reluctant, tipped over by my hormones. That night, when my body leaked a few rusty drops of blood, I tried to curl into my mother's lap and sobbed into her shoulder, too well informed
to be afraid I might die, but afraid all the same. On July 16 I reported only that the Apollo 11 astronauts, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins, had taken off for the first moon landing. The diary ends there, as we were all rocketing into the unknown.

That year, before most other girls reached puberty, I was tall for my age, top of my class, and felt a sudden rush of confidence. I fantasised that I was Olivia Hussey, the beautiful woman-child of heaving chest and breathy speech in Franco Zeffirelli's
Romeo and Juliet
. I was infatuated with my sixth class teacher, Miss Everingham, who applauded my spelling, moulded my handwriting, and invited me into a small group she took out for ice cream cones after school. There were other fleeting crushes. I felt faint if the teenage boy next door smiled at me as he passed by in his army cadet uniform. And I was in love with the Monkees. My mother had taken me to their concert at the Sydney Stadium and I'd caught a comb Micky Dolenz flung from the stage. But ‘I love Paul' was different. I fell for him at first sight and 14 years later we were married.

We met in the winter of 1969 on a night when my mother was taking her young sister and me to the ballet. Dressed up in a striped woollen dress and a hairband, I climbed into the back seat of our Mini Minor so we could pick up my favourite aunt. She was waiting outside her apartment building with the older man she had begun
seeing and, beside him, his 16-year-old son, slender and blue-eyed, in shorts and long socks. As they saw us off, Paul's white-toothed smile made my stomach fizz. He seemed so mature, so gentlemanly compared with the boys I knew. For the rest of the drive I interrogated my aunt about him and from my theatre seat the dancers became just a chorus to my imagined pas de deux.

Seeing Paul was easy because he became part of the family – my step-cousin big-brother idol. My aunt and his father moved into a Victorian terrace house and Paul was often there with his Irish setters, helping his father with the renovations and charming us all with his cheerful attention, strong arms and enthusiasm for practical jobs. We drank tea amid the dust and walked the dogs in the park. Soon Paul was dropping in to our place for dinner on his way home from Maths coaching and the life of my tiny family grew more exciting.

I was a good girl then, closer to my mother than most girls of my age. We'd lived alone since I was a baby, and I told her everything, so now I could share my first love with her. None of us knew then how fateful my aunt's choice of husband would be for all of us, but Mum must have wondered at her little girl's intensity.

My parents had married too young, she at 19 and he at 23, and by the time I was born, nine years later, he was in love with another woman. After he left us, my father had been overseas or interstate for much of
my childhood. When he was home, he was as attentive as he could be, taking me fishing, kite-flying and to the ABC television studios where he was an executive, bringing gifts from Vietnam or Disneyland, but he wasn't part of my daily life. Once at school, when I was seven, our headmistress advised me to ask my father to fix a broken badge, and I responded with tearful melodrama: ‘I don't have a father'. During my teens, he lived nearby with his wife and daughters, and we had a warm but formal relationship. He was worldly and handsome, with a smooth broadcaster's voice, and took me to the new Opera House for concerts. But if ever there was a need to choose, I was on my mother's side.

Since her divorce, my mother had always had suitors, mostly conventional businessmen, some rich and married, who took her out to dinner but hardly rippled the surface of our life together. Scarred by my father's departure, she had made me her vocation. Sometimes we went for a drive in her latest Mini, especially in the quiet melancholy of Sunday evenings. We chatted and drove down suburban streets, peeking through lit windows at family scenes that reminded me of my favourite children's books about an English girl called Milly Molly Mandy and her extended family, cosy in their thatched cottages. We might sound like a lonely pair, but we were content in our twosome, watching other lives with anthropological curiosity rather than envy.

We were still friends and confidantes in my early teens and often went to movies, art galleries and the beach. Mum loved having my friends at home and they loved her warm, informal style, just as I enjoyed the novelty of their large houses, two parents and siblings. She was a rare divorcee in those days, an exotic and mistrusted species, but life was often simpler without a father: fewer rules, one less person to please, no one between Mum and me. I didn't yearn for more of Dad or for a replacement. But as I tiptoed towards adulthood and Mum began to sniff the air for a possible mate, our tight partnership was threatened and it became clear that I needed a man of my own.

The next year I kept a diary was 1973. Between its psychedelic floral covers, in dense round handwriting that spills over the allotted lines, is the self-portrait of a 15-year-old who frets about being pimply, fat, ugly, stupid, overworked, lazy, exhausted, depressed, and is keen on boys who don't want her, disdainful of those who do. How exasperating to see myself turn into a predictable teenager. Perhaps I was reading too many
Dolly
magazines.

I showed the world a more confident face: a straight-A student and, in my headmistress's report, ‘a source of positive pleasure to me about the school with grace, poise of manner, and her eager interest in all manner
of things'. Before the end of the year I decided to study Arts at university and become a journalist, exactly the path I would take. Again, as with my feelings for Paul, I showed astonishing clarity amid my teenage floundering.

At home, however, there was one consuming source of anxiety. In 1973 Mum started an exciting new job, helping to assess scripts with the government funding agency for the burgeoning film industry. Suddenly she was mixing in bohemian circles unfamiliar to a Liberal-voting, church-going, middle-class mother. When a floppy-haired film director with undisciplined libido walked into her office, she was ready for action. She must have thought – if she thought at all – that having steered us both safely through my childhood she deserved some distraction. Looking back now from my post-menopausal plateau, I can see also that she was shoved into sexual obsession by her body's final lunge at fertility. No longer just mother and daughter, we were two women divided by the rocky peaks of female desire.

Mike was fun to have around at first. He was 14 years younger than Mum, which made him only 14 years older than me. I felt sophisticated in their company. We visited the sets of a film he was making and went to see Woody Allen's
Bananas
. Over dinner he argued about politics in cynical ways Mum and I had never heard. There was nothing fatherly about him and I would have found any paternal moves presumptuous. But he disrupted our
placid life: his loud laugh and heavy tread, his cigars and musty body odour filled our tiny house, and soon the air carried the sweet-and-sour reek of sex.

By the second half of the year I was writing in my diary: ‘I like him but hate him, and hate myself for feeling so.' ‘Mum and Mike stayed home for dinner to keep me company and as they were going out for ‘coffee' I burst into tears. I hate myself, as it is none of my business but I just hate the whole affair.' ‘Felt really depressed, “dead inside”, especially about Mike and Mum. Cried and couldn't stop. Mum kind but probably won't change.' ‘I like him but when I know they are jumping into bed the minute I leave, I feel sick.' ‘Mike came – I stayed away.'

Our twosome had been bent out of shape and I didn't know how to be one of three. I wanted Mum to be happy but she was acting like an adolescent who stayed out too late and broke the rules of our household. She was smoking for the first time, her humour was more salacious, her laugh wilder. She and Mike spent far too much time in her bedroom and the fleshy sounds from behind the door frightened me. Wasn't I meant to be the unruly one? Somewhere in my hard teenage heart I worried, too, that she would be wounded again.

Mum had created a secure, happy home for us and built her career from necessity. She never thought of marrying again for less than love. And yet I saw the stress that
weighed on a single mother. I knew about her nervous breakdown that had followed my birth. Then there were her weekend migraine headaches, the social anxiety that often kept her home, the inadequate pay and the exorbitant mortgages banks demanded from her. Much later she told me about the even darker side of her life as a divorced woman in the ‘60s: the driving instructor who had pushed my young mother down on his car seat during a lesson and raped her, the illegal abortion that followed, the married men who escorted her to her car after dinner parties and groped her. And now there was Mike, a sexual libertarian who flouted courtesies, a tom cat seeking comfort but never to be tamed.

Much as I adored her, I did not want to be my mother. I wanted the freedom that came from being both independent and loved, financially and emotionally secure; I wanted a career and a husband. All that was much more possible for those of us reaching adulthood in the ‘70s. The new prime minister, Gough Whitlam, uncle of a school friend, had made university education free. The generation of women between Mum and me was bashing down professional, social and sexual barriers. Thanks to them we stood astride the gap between old constraints and an almost-anything-goes freedom. We just had to work out how to jump.

In January 1973 I read ‘Girls Who Say No', a magazine article about the rise of teenage sex, and worried
that being a virgin made me odd, even at 15. I wrote: ‘I realise I am obsessed by sex, emotions, etc. I feel that I am gradually maturing but also become more confused. Does one ever grow up?'

I kissed plenty of boys that year, or they kissed me, a tongue down my throat so I couldn't breathe, sloppy lips mashed against mine. Mostly the boys irritated me with their awkward conversation, their shyness or their unwanted persistence. And always, moving in and out of the foreground, there was Paul.

Beyond our family gatherings, he and I edged towards our own intimacy. Although Paul was caught in the continuing tension between his divorced parents, his mother welcomed me at their house. We hung out with his friends, listened to music, went to the beach, and talked for hours about our family and other dilemmas. He was easy company, bright rather than intellectual, handsome though not tall, with a fine Roman nose and capable tanned hands that raked through his thick hair. At 20, he was trying a series of courses and jobs, unsure what he wanted after his exam results thwarted his ambition to be a vet.

There was also the question of Paul's sexual leaning. His father thought he was partying with some of the wrong types and showing qualities that were not entirely masculine. He was too domesticated, too sensitive, too inclined to giggle and wave his hands around. Paul was
offended by a suggestion that he should see a psychologist. Scattered through the early pages of my diary are notes such as ‘Paul looks and acts more queer every day'. I was hearing the adult talk, but part of Paul's appeal was his difference from the clumsy men and boys who pursued Mum and me. Among my early childhood models of male behaviour had been the interior decorators my mother had worked with as a secretary for years. Most were gentle, funny, young gay men, unthreatening to her and kind to me despite their snobbery and shadow lives. I had even added a couple of their names to the list of crushes inscribed on my pencil box. So if Paul had more style than machismo and preferred theatre to rugby, that was a plus.