Rebellious Daughters (6 page)

My father and I kept travelling around the country, strolling along the ramparts of medieval fortresses and wandering amongst ruins of Byzantine cities. Despite all my resistance, the trumpets, harps and mountains I'd heard of during all those tedious Bible readings at school gradually came to life. I saw my father cry for the first time ever at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial as he searched in vain for the names of relatives and friends from his shtetl, so many murdered during the war. I couldn't find any words that might comfort him. I kept silent, tentatively reaching out to hold his old, pale hand, feeling empty and full at the same time.

From then on, most days, coming back to our hotel in Tel Aviv after our day's journeying, we would swim together at dusk in the warm waters of the Mediterranean. My father had never worn bathers before and, for the first time, I saw his withered right leg, a remnant of
childhood polio. Holding my tears back, I helped him as he limped back towards the boardwalk, past peddlers with wagons harnessed to exhausted donkeys trying to sell us their wares under the shadow of new shiny towers. ‘How much?' my father would ask the wiry men. But the answer never mattered; whatever the price was, he bought me their wooden camels and
hamsas
embedded with blue stones to ward off the evil eye.

Towards the end of our trip I was growing weary of touring and kept myself amused by making origami birds out of shiny candy wrappers, waiting for evening when our tour group would go to a restaurant, and after that the theatre or a discotheque. I was still grieving that lost opportunity for my first kiss back home. But there was always the hope I might meet some Israeli boys my own age and get the summer love locally (although, where we were, over the other side of earth, it was winter).

On New Year's Eve, our tour guide took us to the Khan, a popular nightclub in Jerusalem carved into an ancient cave. I leant against a limestone wall, praying that my father wouldn't embarrass me by dragging me out onto the dance floor. My fate, as it turned out, was far worse. The greasy bus driver grabbed me and pulled me away from where I was seated, his hands pawing at me. It was then, while looking over the shoulder of this jerk for an escape plan, that my eyes met with a young boy's stare homing in on me from under his mop
of sandy blond hair. He sauntered across the dance floor and, hovering for a moment, cut in and stole me away.

‘I'm not letting you go,' said my young rescuer and, as we danced the steps of
The Bump
, my teenage heart filled with the thrill of anticipation of my first kiss.

As a 15-year-old, I had a vastly different take to my father on what constituted longing when it came to the Promised Land. Swept up in my new romance, I refused to go along with him to see his long lost friends, feigning excuses that I was too tired after our daily bus tours and wanted to stay in the hotel room to rest. He said he understood, reluctantly leaving me behind, but I noticed his eyes were teary as he kissed me on the forehead and said goodbye. Ten minutes after he left, I would sneak away and meet up for some heavy petting with my new crush. For the rest of the trip, I barely spent any time with my father. One evening, when he finally ventured to ask why I didn't want to be together anymore, I put on my best Daddy's Girl voice:

‘Don't you want me to have some fun with kids my own age?'

He slipped on some cufflinks, straightened his tie and kissed me goodbye. From the balcony of our hotel room, I watched him limp down the road and disappear.

Step 3: ‘Preparation of the Material for Cutting'

I watched the stranger dive into the deep end, his arms
spread out like wings as he arched his body, plunging down below the surface of the water. Coming up for air, he rolled over, facing the mottled clouds. He floated slowly over towards me. A row of ants paraded along the edge of the tiles, their line detouring around where I sat with my legs dangling in the coolness of the water. It was my first day off after a long week of night duty as an intern in the casualty department, my mind occupying that foggy space between moonlight and sunshine. I had just come from breakfast with my father, who'd recently sold the family house. My mother had died a couple of years earlier and he now lived alone. I'd moved into a share house by then, but visited him several times a week. I brought him gefilte fish, read him the ‘Hatched, Matched and Dispatched' section of the Jewish newspaper and watered his pot plants. We would watch
Jeopardy
together, until eventually he fell asleep and I snuck out the door.

‘What's a tumour?' The young man floated on his back as his voice drifted towards me.

‘Pardon?'

We'd just met that afternoon, lounging around a mutual friend's pool, sipping lemonade and laughing at each other's lame jokes. Young. Intoxicated by the scent of possibility.

‘I fell off the roof yesterday,' he said, smiling. ‘Tried to fix the aerial just after I ran the City-to-Surf.'

He told me how he ended up visiting the emergency ward just to rule out a fractured rib. There were no broken bones but they found a shadow on the X-ray and made an appointment for him to come back on Monday for more tests. So, instead of dwelling on this all weekend, he decided to fly to Melbourne and have some fun with friends.

Swimming over to the stairs, he gripped the metal rails, hoisting himself up over three steps at once. I felt myself sinking into the depths of a sea where there is no up or down, no landmarks of fish or weed. I loved how tanned and strong he looked, filled with the calm certainty of being alive. I ignored the ominous possibilities of what might lie beneath his ribs. I was in my early twenties then, wanting to escape, at least temporarily, from the suffocation of my relationship with my father, who had become much needier since my mother's death. Here was this man, with his taut abdomen and broad shoulders, who appeared to me a harbour of strength.

I didn't realise it then, but I was falling in love with a dying man. I moved to Sydney several weeks later to be with my new lover, leaving my father alone in his apartment, his hours filled with watching daytime quiz shows.

‘I am human too, you know,' he said during one of my guilt calls home.

‘What do you mean?'

I knew exactly what he was telling me. My father was
fading away, his body and mind shrivelling gradually into the world of dementia.

‘Come back.' His voice was trembling. ‘I need you.'

But I stayed in Sydney, leaving behind a dying man in his seventies, only to find myself with another, much younger, dying man.

That lover has lately been haunting my dreams, drifting up from amongst the dead. Happy memories of him surface with the buoyancy of ghosts, unlocking the door of forgetting. The waves we surfed at Bondi Beach, our spontaneous road trips to ‘Hay, Hell and Booligal', and drawn-out midnight Scrabble games, emerge suddenly through the fog of time. He is back, but I do not hang a welcome sign on the door; I still feel guilty even though so many years have passed, because eventually I left him, too.

This is what happened: two years later, while my father was still living through his small days of visits from the chemist and the district nurse, my lover began his own process of slowly disappearing, loosening his grip on life. I saw him vomiting incessantly after chemotherapy as he shed skin, hair and flesh, grimacing in pain after surgeons carved his chest up like a roast chicken. We grew apart as he began to die; I struggled to watch him journey down those tracks.

One day, I left work early to surprise him with some pumpkin soup from the health food store – the only
thing he could stomach after his sixth round of chemo. I found him in bed with my close friend. I packed my bags straight away and fled Sydney, leaving him behind, his lungs slowly filling up with death. And I left my father back in Melbourne as well – old and lonely, his frail body shrinking in unison with his memory.

I quit my job, dumped my white coat and stethoscope in the Salvation Army bin and flew to New York City, to embark on my childhood dream of becoming a writer. To hell with them both, I thought. I was young and sharp and filled with longing. No sick men were going to rain down on me anymore, wash away my dreams. I took poetry classes, started a Masters in Writing at New York University, had an affair with a biochemist who also ran a dance company, went to hear Doctorow and Sontag speak, ate lobster in the back of a Buick driving up the coast to Maine. I felt I had finally started drafting a brand new pattern for my life, instead of recycling the same frayed material. I was happy, even though fraught with guilt.

The call came in the middle of the night. My father was in hospital after a sudden stroke. I quit my studies and boarded the first flight home, intent on caring for him – which I did for a while, with home help and a nappy service, juggling my shifts back at the hospital. But the day I accidentally ran his wheelchair onto the road and he went hurtling out onto the tram tracks, was the day I
realised I just couldn't do it anymore and decided to put him in a nursing home. I was only 26 years old then and even though I decided to stay in Melbourne and pursue my writing there while working as a doctor, I still struggled with the burden of being a dutiful daughter.

Step 4: ‘Turning up the Hem'

In 1991, I kissed my father goodbye and left him sitting in his wheelchair as he watched
Jeopardy
in the communal lounge room of his nursing home. I had just turned 31 and once again found myself running away from him. Two days later, I stood beside my Israeli husband, waiting for the train to arrive at the Champ de Mars. We were on our honeymoon and had just been up the Eiffel Tower to view the lights of Paris by night, and were en route to Haifa, the city of his birth, where we would make our home for the next ten years. Was it a complete accident that I married a foreign man?

People crowded into the station, jostling each other as they escaped from the frosty evening air. Then an announcement over the PA system saw everyone disperse. Remnants of my high school French came back to me through the fracas: Attention!
En arête tous les trains. Corps morts
. A dead body on the tracks had us walking silently all the way back to our hotel. I left Paris with a sense of dread.

The following day we walked through the door of our
apartment in Haifa ready to start a new life together. My husband, a tall and strong man, lifted me over the threshold. Just as he lowered me, the phone rang with the news that my father had died the night before. He was buried the next day, without me there to say goodbye.

Step 5: ‘Individualising Stock Patterns'

It is 1993, October 19th – my father's birthday. Mine too. It is also the day I return to work, not long after my first child is born. I stab a curved needle through someone's broken skin, pulling the edges of the wound together with blue, nylon thread, using delicate mattress sutures. I learned to sew like this in medical school. I reassure the patient that she is in good hands – after all, I am a tailor's daughter.

*Section titles from Mason, Gertrude, 1935, Tailoring for Women, A
&
C Black, Ltd

THE GOOD GIRL

JAMILA RIZVI

I've always been a Good Girl. Not a pretty girl. Not a brave girl. Not a cool girl. Not a nice girl. But a Good Girl.

It's a funny word, ‘good'. The adjective you were never allowed to use in high school English class because it was the lazy option. ‘Good' lacked the requisite nuance or academic flair. Also syllables. Open a well-thumbed copy of the dictionary and the second listed definition for ‘good' is exactly the one you'd expect. (I say dictionary because it sounds more highbrow but obviously you could just google it.)

2.
Adjective
. Having the required qualities; of a high standard. ‘A good restaurant'.
Synonyms
: fine, quality, superior, competent.

But when we speak of ‘good' girls, the goodness at stake is often not one of excellence or ability. Rather, we tend to embody the first and original definition of ‘good': 1.
Adjective
. To be desired or approved of.

True to that definition, I have desperately sought the approval of others for as long as I can remember. Who comprises this elusive group of ‘others' has changed over time. Friends, colleagues, coaches, lecturers, bosses, employees, neighbours, the local barista, strangers on social media… But it began, of course, with my parents.

I'm a ferocious reader, a trait inherited from my mother. A primary school teacher and devoted lover of fiction, she dutifully read aloud to me before bed every evening when I was little.

‘
The elephant and the bad baby
went rumpeta, rumpeta, rumpeta
down
the road', read Mum, emphasising the same words she always did. By the time you read something aloud to a three-year-old for the 32nd time, there isn't a lot of room for innovative eloquence.

The Elephant and the Bad Baby
was a standout favourite of mine. It's a tale of an elephant riding through town with a baby on its back, collecting delicious goodies from kind strangers. In a truly reprehensible act of rudeness, the baby demands more and more treats without ever saying ‘please' or ‘thank you'. Ultimately baby gets his comeuppance, which is the resolution I would spend
the whole story gleefully anticipating.