Roadside Sisters (12 page)

Meredith had long been a subscriber to the old adage that, after a certain age, a woman had to ‘choose between her face and her backside’. Nina was certainly carrying a bit of weight but her plump, round, unlined and pretty face was a testament to the saying. Meredith had no bum and the result was evident in the bathroom mirror—most mornings she saw that her face looked like the site of a landslip in Ecuador. She should tell Nina how attractive she was . . . and pass on the name of a decent beautician and hairdresser.

And she should tell Nina how much she enjoyed her company. She was a busybody, that was true, but she was also so . . . comfortingly motherly. Not that Nina would welcome that description. She had some ‘self-esteem issues’, that too was obvious. Too much daytime TV. Every time you turned on one of those mind-numbing programs, it seemed there was a woman on trial for some maternal misdemeanour or other. The accused would sit with tears rolling down her cheeks in front of a studio audience while husbands, friends and children all charging her with a range of female failings. Too overbearing, too undemonstrative, too tidy, too slovenly, too generous, too miserly. Mothers were to blame for everything these days, it seemed.
Motherguilt
—someone had even coined a name for the low-lying cloud of dread every woman had hanging over her head. It was a damn sight easier twenty years ago, when it was all men’s fault.

Meredith stopped, turned her face to the sun and tugged her white singlet over the top of her navy jogging tights. She shuffled her feet so that her new sports shoes were perfectly aligned—toes and heels together. She stood tall, breathed in to lengthen through the spine, then out to engage the muscles of her pelvic floor and flatten her abdominals. ‘Zip up and hollow,’ she said aloud with some satisfaction. Perhaps Nina might also benefit from Pilates. She would give her that phone number too. The morning sunlight refracted through the water and infused Meredith’s body with cleansing, invigorating energy. A walk along the beach was the perfect way to start the day. She hadn’t done it in ages.

Last night’s mosquito invasion aside, Meredith was surprised to find she was enjoying her campervan experience. She had woken this morning and surveyed the few square metres of her new domain—the modest row of wood-veneer cupboards over her head, the plastic domed reading lights and the expanse of synthetic curtaining—and felt a curious lightening of her load. If she had been in her own bed in Armadale, she would have been mistress of some five hundred square metres of pure wool carpeting, a hectare of raw silk curtains, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Italian furniture and German appliances, French cut-glass light fixtures, hand-painted wallpaper, a hundred-year-old hedge . . . and an empty den. She had to admit that, as much as she adored her home, there was something oddly comforting about being away from it—eating fish and chips out of paper, and living in a cheap plywood-and-aluminium box. Perhaps it was as simple as having nothing to dust.

‘It’s just one more thing to dust’ was one of the favoured sayings of her mother, Edith. It was what she said when she was given a piece of Wedgwood or Belleek fine china for her birthday. It would be admired for the day, then sent straight to the ‘good front room’ and placed in the famous crystal cabinet. Meredith never saw any one of the precious items inside it used for any occasion in almost half a century. The family sat down in the kitchen every night and ate from plain white plates and ugly pyrex casserole dishes while a table setting fit for royalty remained behind glass. Even if the Queen of England herself had come to tea, Edith would not have surrendered the key to the crystal cabinet.

Striding along, right at the point where sand met sea, and relishing the painful strain in her thigh muscles, Meredith’s pace did not slacken. She could see Annie up ahead and was determined to run straight past her. It would do Annie good to understand that her selfish act had cost both her and Nina a decent night’s sleep. She didn’t want to even think about what had transpired in the early hours at the campsite at the end of the caravan park.

Meredith was startled by a splash in front of her and saw that Annie had torn off her clothes and was diving, naked, through the aquamarine shallows and out through the breakers. She caught a flash of smooth white glistening thigh and was reminded of the Royal Doulton figurine of a mermaid she had once bought for her mother.

When Edith died last year and it had been left to her to pack up the contents of the old house in Camberwell, Meredith had
dropped her father, Bernard, off at the nursing home and then returned to the house to find the key to the crystal cabinet. She had chosen a hammer from the neat shadow board in the garage, carefully laid newspaper on the Axminster carpet and then smashed every teacup, teapot, serving platter and gravy boat. The mermaid was saved until last. One blow had taken its head clean off.

Why had she even bought her mother that mermaid? she wondered. With her tight springy perm, permanently pressed slacks and neat blouse, there was no-one more unlike a mermaid than Edith. Now that she thought about it, she had never seen her mother wet. Not even from the bath, or the rain. Meredith was horrified to realise she was humming one of Edith’s favourite songs, Rod Stewart’s ‘We Are Sailing’. She pounded all the way back to the caravan park in silence.

‘Do you remember when we played here at the arts festival?’ Nina asked as the van trundled towards Mallacoota. The day was still, and unseasonably warm. Nina was loving the drive through the Croajingolong National Park to the sleepy coastal town. She was deep in the Australian bush now. They’d all been silent for a good hour, savouring the tangy smell of the eucalypt forest.

‘I know it was in the mid-eighties, but I can’t remember a lot more than that,’ said Annie who, after a sheepish apology, had finally been readmitted to her perch between the front seats. In fact, a good many of Annie’s memories of that decade had sunk beneath a tide of drugs and alcohol. The places she had been and people she had met now swam up to her like apparitions from the Lost City of Atlantis.

‘I first came to the Mallacoota Festival with Briony when we were doing comedy,’ said Meredith, who had wound down her window to feel the breeze on her face. Both Nina and Annie
hooted with derision. The Epidurals! They’d forgotten about that time in Meredith’s life when she had styled herself as one half of a comedy duo. Meredith had almost forgotten too. Had that insane woman with the hairy legs and armpits and spiky hair really been her?

The Epidurals had first met at their weekly mothers’ group at a ‘wimmin’s space’ on the first floor of the Fitzroy Food Co-op. Meredith’s children were preschoolers then—Sigrid three, and Jarvis a baby. Briony had eighteen-month-old Artemis. The two had bonded over mashing lentils, pausing only to salute each other with organic carrot and parsnip juice. They were sure the vegetables were straight from the farm because the juice tasted slightly of dirt. Clean, pesticide-free dirt, they smugly reminded each other.

Briony always carried a small vial of Dr Bach Rescue Remedy in her wicker basket and would administer four drops of Cherry Plum Flower Essence on Meredith’s tongue in the case of emergency, to ‘restore emotional balance’. In the beginning Briony hadn’t been sure that lentil vomit on an alpaca wool poncho actually qualified as an ‘emotional emergency’ but when Meredith began to hyperventilate, Briony thought she could make an exception in this one instance. After that, Meredith called for the Rescue Remedy even as she hauled her stroller up the wooden stairs to the ‘wimmin’s space’, and Briony was happy enough to administer the dose. After all, it was about wimmin taking responsibility for their personal emotional, physical and spiritual well-being.

In the early eighties Meredith’s husband, Donald, had been starting out as a filmmaker. He’d scored some work on
The Man From Snowy River.
In the dim kitchen at the rear of the tiny terrace in North Fitzroy Meredith had measured the seconds and minutes until he came home by the individual grains of couscous, barley and oats she ran through her fingers. She had spent hours boiling, steaming and rendering them into something the children would stomach. When the kids discovered cornflakes at her mother’s place she reasoned that corn was a grain after all, and was quietly thankful she’d found something they’d swallow. She didn’t feel the need to mention this to Briony. One of Briony’s favourite cautionary tales was about the scientific experiment with rats that fared better by eating the cornflakes box rather than its actual contents.

When, finally, Donald returned, with
Snowy
in the can and before pre-production started in earnest on
Crocodile Dundee,
he honoured his part of their bargain. During Epidurals rehearsals, he’d bring the kids along, asleep in the double stroller. He even laughed at the dick jokes. Meredith had loved him then. They were a team. She was a liberated woman and he was a Sensitive New Age Guy. Briony suspected that declaring themselves SNAGs was just another ruse men used to get wimmin into bed. Donald protested he’d never had the least desire to get wimmin into bed in his entire life. Meredith’s comedy career had taken her on a round of dingy Melbourne pubs and clubs and once to the Adelaide Festival. She and Briony were routinely abused as ‘a couple of hairy dykes’ by the drunken hecklers from bucks’ night parties. Standing at the bar after the show with their arms
around each other’s waists was a good way to fend off boorish pick-up lines.

They had abandoned the Epidurals after one particularly nasty review in
The Age
: ‘The Epidurals is an apt name for this pair of die-hard feminists, because that’s what every man and quite a few of the women in the audience were calling for after an hour of unfunny tampon, leg-waxing and armpit-shaving jokes. After a night crossing and uncrossing my legs during the put-downs of male genitalia, I knew an epidural wouldn’t do the trick. The only way I would see this act again is under general anaesthetic. Utter rubbish!’

Meredith never forgot that public mauling and years later, when she heard this same critic on ABC radio hosting the afternoon show, she had logged on to the website guestbook and written anonymously that he was ‘Utter rubbish!’. This had given her a great deal of satisfaction.

‘So, do you ever hear from Briony?’ Nina asked Meredith as the van purred along beneath a canopy of branches.

‘She sent a nice card when Edith died. She’s up in Cairns, running some mad tree-house eco village tourism thing in the Daintree apparently.’

‘Well that apple hasn’t fallen too far from the tree.’

‘Meaning . . . ?’ Meredith leaned forward to catch Nina’s eye as she drove. Meredith knew exactly what she meant: that owning a swish interior decorating and homewares store was a long way from parsnip juice at a wimmin’s co-op.

Nina blithely continued: ‘Don’t you ever look back and wonder what went—’

‘What went
right
? Thank God Donald did so well in movies financially in those early days and was able to drag us out of that hovel in Fitzroy. Look at most of that old arts crowd now. You still see them hanging around the cafés, looking a million years old. Still renting. Poor as church mice, most of them. Thank God I left all that behind and made a success of myself for my family’s sake. That entire era was an utter aberration, as far as I’m concerned.’

‘You don’t mean Sanctified Soul as well?’ Nina was crushed. Being on the road and singing with the group was one of the best times of her life.

‘A bunch of silly feminists singing black American, gypsy and protest songs?
A cappella
? It means “unaccompanied . . . without music”. Stupid. Waste of time.’

‘Oh, that’s crap, Meredith!’ said Annie. ‘We had a great time. And out of all of us you were the one who was the most passionate about changing the world. Remember how you used to get stuck into me and Nina for wearing high heels?’

‘She was right,’ said Nina. ‘I’ve got bunions now. They hurt like hell if I wear stilettos.’

‘You and Briony would come to rehearsals covered in paint,’ Annie continued. ‘And you both used to brag about defacing almost every advertising billboard in the entire northern suburbs in the early eighties.’

‘I used to watch out for those billboards,’ Nina recalled. ‘I remember going to work on the tram down Nicholson Street and getting this thrill every time I saw some half-naked woman
in a lingerie ad covered in slogans. It made me think things were changing.’

‘“Smash Sexism”, “Adam and Even!” and “Use the ‘F’ word—Feminist”. Wasn’t that the sort of stuff you used to spray?’ Annie asked with some amusement.

Meredith turned her face to the window. ‘Actually Briony was the billboard specialist. I wasn’t good with heights. I was better at the back of toilet doors. “Men put us on pedestals and then look up our dresses”, that was one of my favourites. And “Feminism Spoken Here”. I liked that one too. I used to carry a black texta in my bag.’ She paused. ‘I’ve got beeswax lip balm now.’

Annie laughed at the irony of it. ‘Hah! Like to see you try to deface an ad for
Australia’s Next Top Model
with lip balm.’

‘Well, there you have it. In the end we didn’t achieve anything really. Look at women in the media today—porn stars and princesses—that sums it up, doesn’t it?’

‘But at least girls today get to choose what they want to be,’ Annie pressed on. ‘That must have been the point. That must make it all worthwhile when you look back.’

‘And what’s Sigrid chosen? To get married at twenty-four!’ Meredith huffed and planted her bare feet on the dashboard.

‘You had Sigrid at twenty-five,’ Nina reminded her.

‘And that’s what I’m saying—nothing’s changed. I’ve told her she can do anything with her life, be anything she wants.’

‘Maybe you should have been more specific,’ Annie quipped.

Meredith’s toes scrunched with annoyance. ‘That’s just a stupid punchline, Annie. You know what I’m saying.’

‘Well, maybe she’s rebelling,’ Annie offered. ‘The way you did with Edith.’