True Stories (10 page)

At Christmas, One and Two arrive at Five's house for the big family dinner. They walk down the hall and become instantly aware of a certain quality of silence issuing like smoke from one of the bedrooms. They rush in. There stand Four and Five, bent over a table, heads together, backs to the door, working hard at something. They glance up as One and Two barge in, but their eyes are blank with concentration and without speaking they return at once to their task. One and Two push in beside them and see what is on the table: Five's six-month-old daughter, flat on her back, looking patient but slightly puzzled. Four and Five are trying to squeeze the baby's fat feet into a tiny pair of red leather boots. The boots are much too small, but Four and Five will not accept this. Quivering with suppressed giggles, they lace and tug, applying force to the leather and the flesh as if the baby's life depended on it. It is a bizarre initiation rite into the family passion for shoes. Shoes bought in haste, that don't fit.

One day in winter, One leaves her muddy Doc Martens on the front verandah. Next morning they are gone. She searches everywhere, then curses thieves and gives them up for lost. Several days later, in the afternoon, the doorbell rings. One opens the door and sees Four on the mat, beaming at her with a wicked look. Instinctively One's eyes drop to Four's feet. On them are the missing Docs.

‘That'll teach you,' says Four suavely, ‘to take better care of your possessions.'

In David Jones' ‘perthume' department, Two says to One, ‘Here—let me squirt this on you, in case I hate it.'

Four possesses an absolutely reliable brutality when it comes to clothes. ‘Should I buy these trousers, Four? Look, they're only thirty dollars.' Four runs a cold eye over them, and turns away. ‘Buy them if you want to look like a
stump.
Like a
mallee
root.'

One and Three enter a shop. Three scans, then heads unerringly for a rack of dark, sober, important-looking garments. One grabs her by the back of her jacket and steers her firmly towards a row of pretty, soft, pale, flowery dresses. The expression of suspicion, self-dislike and severity on Three's face, while she tries on a dress and examines herself in the mirror, reminds One so much of herself that it squeezes her heart. Three buys a dress. Next time One approaches Three's house, she sees a slender, long-haired girl standing out on the pavement, with the wind swaying her loose skirt. ‘Oh, how pretty,' thinks One. She gets closer and sees that it's Three, aged forty-five, wearing the dress they chose together.

A Deeply Wounded Postcard

If there are five of you, you form a complex network of shifting alliances.

‘For six months,' says Five, ‘I'll mostly hang out with Four. Then she'll say or do something that shits me, but instead of slugging it out with her on the spot, I'll show her the door in a restrained manner and then get straight on the phone to One: “Can you
believe
what Four just said to me? Fuckin' bitch!” And then I'll move over to a different camp, for a while.'

‘I was outraged,' says Three to One, ‘by what you said about that African movie as we came out into the foyer. I'd been so moved by it—and you ruined it, in one smart crack. I had to get away from you, before you completely destroyed it for me. I came home and wrote you a letter about it. Which I didn't send.'

‘I wrote Three a terrible letter,' says One, ‘and I posted it. I quaked for a week, then she sent me a deeply wounded postcard. I apologised, and it was never mentioned again. But ooh, I'd love to have a fight with her.'

‘Sometimes,' says Five, ‘I despise myself after I leave one sister's house, thinking about how I've curbed my behaviour in her company. To please her. It's so easy to slip into a style of dialogue that suits the one I'm visiting.'

‘Yes,' says Four, ‘and when you get home you write the letter.'

‘Five had the nerve,' says One, ‘to write me an extremely snippish letter. I had to go for a walk to calm down. And then I wrote her a scorcher which said all the things I'd been bottling up for years and hadn't had the nerve to say before. I said, You listen to me. I said, How dare you. I said, I should come over and kick your arse right round the block. That sort of thing. I censored the worst bits, and then I posted it.'

‘When I got the letter from you,' says Five. ‘I was paralysed. I also noticed you'd cut off the bottom of one page, so I realised there'd been even worse things. I sat on the end of my bed. I could hardly move for half an hour.'

‘The bits I cut off,' says One, ‘I pasted into my diary. That's how I remember what I originally said.'

‘Why
don't
we yell at each other?' says Four.

‘Because,' says One, ‘we're so in love with the idea of our family continuing that to speak truly and honestly would jeopardise it.'

‘Isn't that a bit pathetic, though? I think we should yell at each other.'

‘You start.'

‘All right. “Get out of my sight, you moll.” How's that?'

‘This is
serious
, Four—do you mind?'

‘OK. Sorry. But you did yell at me once—don't you remember? I came over to borrow some money and you lost your temper.'

‘I remember now I yelled at you that you were so selfish you never asked me how I was, or anything about
my
life—all you did was whinge about
your
problems. You bawled and howled, it was dreadful, and I said, “I'm sorry if this hurts you,” and you said, howling away, “It's all right, because I need to know why nobody likes me.” And that of course was so tragic that
I
started bawling, and then you looked at me with your red eyes and said in a weird, polite, choked sort of voice, “And how's work going lately?” We both cracked up laughing—and then I lent you five hundred bucks and you went home.'

‘I had a fight one night with Two,' says One, ‘outside Trinity Chapel after evensong. We'd gone to hear the choir. I'd left a cake in the oven before I came out of the house and I was worried about getting home in time. I was strapping on my bike helmet, and Two started in on me about the Old Testament readings, which had been about the parting of the Red Sea. She said, “It's awful. It's
racist.
” I said, “Oh, don't be ridiculous.” She said, “I am
not
being ridiculous! Imagine if
you
were an Egyptian and had to sit there listening to that!” I lost my temper and yelled at her. She didn't turn a hair. You can say
anything
to Two—she never takes umbrage, she just keeps on arguing. I realised how grotesque I must be looking, scowling and red-faced with my hideous helmet on, and I broke off and said “I've got to go straight home.” Two said, “Yes, go on—go home to your
cake.
” I pedalled away, to cross the university grounds, and I suddenly thought, “Goodness—we've had a fight!” But I didn't feel bad. I felt great. I felt exhilarated. And I yelled back to her, “The music was fabulous!” I could see her rippling along behind the fence railings as she strode back to her car—she didn't answer, but just waved and kept walking. I zoomed home on my bike, thinking, “Hey! Fighting's not so bad!” The next day I wrote her a postcard saying something to that effect. And she sent one back, quite cheerful and dignified, saying, “That wasn't a fight. It was a
disagreement.
” '

‘Yes, you can really have a fight with Two,' says Five. ‘There's something thrilling about her bluntness. She's got no shame. And she doesn't get so
personal.
'

‘It must be because she's done assertiveness training,' says One. ‘I think it must teach you to do your best to get your own way, but if you don't, you don't sulk. You just cop it. It's quite impressive, in a gruesome sort of way.'

‘I fought with Four,' says Five. ‘It was very beneficial. I realised I wouldn't be able to go
on
with Four unless we had a fight. I said dreadful things. She was crying and crying—but she was taking it all on board. I had to respect her for that. I kept trying to put her to bed. She said, “Fuck you—I don't
want
to go to bed!” But I kept on trying to force her to.'

‘That would've been because of what I said about Whatsisname, I'm sure,' says Four. ‘He was a
pretty
vile guy, which Five later came to realise…whereas I knew it all along, and said so.'

‘Three and I were building up to a smash,' says One, ‘but we sidestepped it. She played the martyr, basically, and I panicked and became feeble and began to appease her.'

‘We're always very quick to apologise,' says Three.

‘That's our way,' says One, ‘of keeping everything on a safe, superficial level. We say, I've hurt her. I'll call it rudeness and say I'm sorry.” Whereas if we were really going to have some form of intimacy, we'd yell at each other—“damn it, get that look off your face!” '

‘I hold back from fighting, usually,' says One, ‘because if I say to my sister what I really think about her, I'm licensing her to tell me what she really thinks about
me.
And I don't know how to defend myself against that. I'm afraid of it. Because sisters don't subscribe to each other's mythology. To the myths of each other.'

‘I'm scared of you,' says One.

‘I'm scared of you, too,' says Three.

They laugh, and look away. Then they glance at each other again, curiously. Gently.

Theatre

There is a tendency in our family to brood on slights. Each likes to tell a story in which she appears more sensitive and more hard done by than another. We would rather be wounded, and glory in our outraged sensitivity, than take it up to the offender and make a protest to her face. Thus we end up with a series of shrines. Each of us (with the exception perhaps of Two, who is more robust, frank and fearless) keeps a private shrine to herself, with a little lamp inside it eternally flickering, and the oil that feeds it is the offences dealt out by her sisters. The misplaced smirk, the thoughtless crack is stored away, and for a while the little ego-lamp burns more brightly—until there's the shift, when the incident is related to one of the other sisters as a story, constructed and pointed with the primary aim of provoking laughter and a momentary sense of alliance. It becomes another chapter in our fanatically detailed, multi-track story about ourselves, which is hilarious, entertaining, appalling, obsessive. It is related in a secret language composed of joke pronunciations, silly accents, coded phrases whose origins were forgotten long ago but which are heavy with meaning and will always raise a laugh. We are major characters in the stories of each other's lives; we are all acting in an enormous comedy that will go on till we die. It has no audience but its own performers: our children and husbands roll their eyes and walk out of rooms. Its time scale is an endless, immediate now.

Obsession and Intimacy

‘Once I was raving on,' says One, ‘about my family to a bloke I know who's got four brothers. After a while he started twisting in his seat, and then he burst out, “Anyone would think you were the only person in the world who had a family!” I felt foolish. But I sort of couldn't
help
it
.
'

‘I have to hold myself back,' says Five, ‘with anyone I meet, from talking about our family. My friends are probably driven bonkers by the way I
go on
about it. They never seem to need to talk about theirs. I prod them. I say, “I didn't know you had a brother. Tell me about him.” But they say they can't be bothered. “Why?” “Because he's boring.” How can a brother or sister be
boring
?'

‘I think it's something wrong with
us
,' says One. ‘I've spent my life trying to have friendships outside the family which will provide as much intimacy as I get from my sisters. It's a doomed enterprise. So I keep crashing and smashing and falling out with my friends. They can't stand the demand for intimacy and attention. I bore them, I irritate them, I wear the friendship out.'

‘I don't think intimacy is the problem,' says Two. ‘It's because you're too bossy. We're all too bossy.'

‘
I
never got this intimacy from our family,' says Three. ‘A lot of people say they envy me having four sisters—but no one ever hugged or cuddled, to comfort. It wasn't done. I was at a friend's place recently when her older sister came round, looking wretched. Between our sisters, a rough joke would've been made—Come on, pick up your lip before you trip over it! But the younger one had a good look and said, “Ah—what's the
matter
?” The older one shed a few tears and said: “Life's too difficult. I'm trying to work, and there's the baby, and I have to do a course if I want to keep my job—it's too much for me.” And the younger one said, “Oh, come here”—and sat her sister on her
lap.
Can you imagine any of us doing that? Then they ran a bath and got in it together. I heard them laughing and shrieking. I felt terribly envious. Maybe you others had that sort of closeness. I never did. When I had a hysterectomy, I was abandoned. See? You hardly even remember it. One came down and minded the boys for a couple of days, but the rest of the time I was on my own, with a new baby and two toddlers, too weak to get out of bed. It was…desolate. I learnt not to look for help from the family.'

‘Yes, that's shameful,' says One, ‘but do you realise how perfect your marriage seemed, from the outside? You looked as if you had everything sewn up. You didn't ask for help. There's an art in asking.'

‘I know how,' says Three, ‘but I wouldn't.'

‘Why?'

‘I was afraid of indifference.'

‘
Would
there be indifference, if you showed weakness?'

‘It's not weakness,' says Three. ‘It's need. It's better not to show need, if you're not going to get your needs met. I've learnt that. I worked out where people were going to care enough, and I went there.'