Brothers & Sisters (7 page)

As the weeks of that year turned into months and news of the Vietnam War was on the news every night, my sister and I began to up the ante with the calendar. It wasn’t enough just to cross out a day; we needed more. We took to scoring the pen heavily and thoroughly through the whole week, blocking out the entire seven days with the grim satisfaction of defacement. We’d compete to see who got to make the X on the final day of the month, because that person would win the right to take down the calendar, turn the glossy page towards themselves, and methodically scribble through the whole month. We approached this task like acolytes undertaking the holiest rite allotted to them. The other sister would watch, mesmerised, as the lucky one would run the pen back and forth, scribbling vertically and horizontally, until the paper began to disintegrate under the ballpoint and the saturating ink.

I see what we were doing now, because that calendar still exists, with its blue-sky image of a fighter plane, black-nosed and camouflage-khaki, suspended over twelve solid scribbled chunks of misery. We were doing everything we could, with the puny tools at our disposal, to obliterate our enemy—traitorous, intolerable time. Through our vertical and horizontal lines we slashed big extra Xs in jagged diagonal crosses. I can see them there still, with a jolt of nausea, like annihilated targets, like a giant single negation.

With all that time came awful, belated realisations. I remembered the nights before our father had left, when my sister and I would be in the bath. He’d breeze in, bringing with him the intoxicating scent of the mess where he’d just had a beer or two, mingling with the smell of cigarette smoke and conversation, laughter and weather, exertion and oxygen. The door would open and fresh air would blow through the house with him as he entered, the smell of the outside world pouring through as he hung his hat on a chair and rolled up the sleeves of his powder-blue shirt to splash us clean in the bath. He would indulge us, making the soap jump from his hands like a fish while we laughed helplessly. Once he left for Vietnam, it was like he’d taken the keys to that door, and no afternoon breeze entered the house. The air felt short on oxygen. We lost our familiarity with that hinted-at outside world, or the faint, inchoate sense that we might one day come to live in it ourselves. We ceased to breathe it in, and, like breathing, we missed it with the shock of something taken purely for granted. The Clark’s pool stayed folded in an aqua-blue pile in the garage instead of unfailingly set up there by the Hills hoist, and our school shoes remained just where we left them, scuffed and knotted under our beds, instead of side by side by the back door, dark with polish and the laces magically untied by morning. I couldn’t recall ever thanking him for any of these things, of course; they’d just been there, reliable and unquestioned. Now my heart jumped guiltily like that soap from his cupped hands; recognising, too late, every one of these small things for what they were—gestures of love from an undemonstrative man.

A parcel arrived taped with limp, scuffed paper, and we knew it was from Dad. Inside were two cylinders wrapped in newspaper which was thin and smelled different and was in a different language. As soon as I saw it I imagined taking a few pages of it somewhere—a bus stop, a park bench, the school quadrangle, somewhere public—and sitting, pretending I could read it. As I hesitated, looking at the strange writing on it, my sister unwrapped one of the cylinders and it was a beautiful black-haired doll, with white skin and pink cheeks, a tall slender figure in the Vietnamese national costume fixed onto a black wooden stand. She was wearing a long dress with black velvety designs on it, and little slippers, and unbelievably, that dress was blue. When I saw this I began to unwrap my parcel very slowly, because I knew now, with a thrilled, suppressed delight, what would be inside—an identical doll only in a pink dress. Pink! The parcels hadn’t been labelled with our names, so I’d scored.

I unwrapped my doll and looked her over carefully. It was immediately clear that she was superior on two counts. Not only was her dress pink, her hair was loose with a small bun on top, while my sister’s doll’s hair was in a cumbersome beehive. It was a red-letter day. I examined her lips and almond-shaped eyes, drawn in with the finest of black lines, and her skin as pale as a peeled egg. She was perfect in every way.

I couldn’t stop thinking about how I would look if I had a dress like that, long and fitted with the white trousers underneath. That night, I wrapped my sheet tightly around myself, right down to my feet, and looked at myself in the dressing-table mirror, holding up my hair with one hand. Our mother sometimes put our hair up in a bun for special occasions, using a thing like a donut to pull our hair through, then she’d spray it and all day you’d smell that sticky flowery smell and the pins would push into your head. My sister looked great with her hair in a bun, as cute as Gidget, but I knew that with my glasses I looked stupid, the way librarians always looked in comics, like someone to make fun of. I could have a compromise bun, though, like my doll’s. What I wanted most were her serenely uptilting, almond-shaped eyes.

When I took my glasses off and leaned into the dressing-table mirror and pulled my eyelids just slightly slanted, I looked totally different. It was hard keeping the sheet wrapped tight with both forefingers at the corners of my eyes, but I was oddly compelled towards this new, possible me.

After we turned out the bedroom light I lay with my fingers against the side of my head, pulling back my eyelids. I could stretch them into place, I thought. If I lay there all night and did it, it would work. My hands started to get tired and I began to experiment with positions where it wasn’t so uncomfortable. It would be worth it, having those beautiful, unusual eyes.

‘What are you doing?’ my sister whispered from her bed. She’d learned the perfect modulation required for icy contempt.

‘Nothing.’ But somehow, she knew.

‘That is so, so stupid,’ she said. She turned over, in her pink pyjamas, and we lay there as stiff as boards in our beds, me with my fingers braced in place, furtive and embarrassed but still soothed, somehow. It was almost like having an important job to do, something special entrusted to me.

But in the morning, my hands were under the blankets, tucked between my knees, the way I always slept. And my eyes, I noted miserably, were still round. Behind my glasses, they looked exactly the same.

Our dolls lived on a high shelf in our room, our belongings placed into their designated halves, surveying all that went on below, never played with, never mussed or ‘ruined’. They were too precious. I just had to smell their synthetic dresses and black, lacquered hair to conjure up the olfactory world of Vietnam—a world of women on tippytoes with pure white faces and eyebrows as fine as an upswept eyelash—it was warm and exotic there, and smelled like nylon and plastic and dust.

Our next presents arrived. Two square boxes this time, wrapped extensively in layers of protective paper and tape, with that same secret, spicy smell. We turned our backs to each other in tacit collusion so we wouldn’t see the other’s first. Under the layers were two identical black and red lacquered music boxes. When you wound up the brass key and turned the snib to open the lid, a tiny pink plastic ballerina pirouetted in front of a wall of mirrors to the tune ‘On the Street Where You Live’. When I heard that song and recognised it from
My Fair Lady
, a film I’d actually seen down the road at the base cinema, I felt a sudden fierce squeeze of choked recognition, as if everything were momentarily connected—the music-box factory, my father in a market in Vung Tau, the Saturday matinee, Rodgers and Hammerstein, all of it.

‘They’re not to play with,’ our mother said. ‘Put them somewhere they won’t get ruined. Imagine how Dad would feel if he came home and they were broken.’

She made sure that we didn’t overwind them or touch the fragile ballerina on her tiny spring, and after a while the shining red and black music boxes did indeed seem too special to play with, and we put them solemnly on either side of the dressing table in our bedroom, which our mother had decorated with a frilled pink tulle valance. Inside, next to the ballerina, was the little hinged lacquer drawer.

‘For all your precious things,’ our mother said.

I’m sorry to say that, at first, even our precious things were pretty much identical. First to go in were the rosary beads Nanna had given us when we visited her in Adelaide, before Dad went away. She’d let us play with her glow-in-the-dark statue of the Virgin Mary and given us each a set of old silver rosaries. She’d told us why they were so special but I hadn’t been listening; it was my turn after she’d gone to hide under the quilt again with the glowing lady, and in any case my rosaries were soon, inexplicably, broken.

Also in the drawer were our round discontinued fifty-cent coins, which we believed were very valuable.

Then I put in, secretly, some tiny pink shells Dad had sent me from a beach in Vietnam which he’d included in one of his weekly letters. Mum had told me he’d had to walk a very long way for these special shells, right to the end of a huge beach. It had been a hot day, she’d said, and yet that’s what he’d done; that was the evidence that he was always thinking of us. The shells were no bigger than my little brother’s delicate pink fingernails.

I imagined that beach; a long shining curve of it hazily disappearing into the distance. At the near end the shells were large and ordinary, scattered in their millions, but as you walked further and further towards the horizon, your feet crunching on nothing but shells, they began to shrink in size. It wasn’t until you came to the very end of the sliver of beach, a place a little like heaven, that the tiny, truly precious shells lay, a reward for true devotion. They were the ones that I had, now.

Years later, when I came across my lacquered music box in a storage carton somewhere, I lifted the lid and checked inside the drawer. I was taken aback to see in there, alongside the shells and the tarnished rosary beads, some small pearly objects I recognised with a start as my own milk teeth. What perverse childlike conviction had possessed me to save my own teeth that year as they fell out? I’d believed them to be something uniquely valuable, something worth saving, to show Dad. They looked a little creepy now, jumbled there with their sharp red edge of root exposed, but I saw my seven-year-old reasoning: the teeth and the shells resembled each other; lustrous with nacre and enamel. They seemed to belong together, like something you could thread side by side onto a necklace, something to wear next to your skin that nobody else had.

Summer came and we wore our Chinese shortie pyjamas in pastel pink and blue, decorated with dragon embroidery. They were narrow-cut and uncomfortable, chafing our sunburnt skin, but we loved them because they’d come all the way from Vietnam. We pulled them over tight, sunburnt shoulders on Sunday nights to watch
Disneyland
as heat radiated from our scarlet legs, slick with Johnson’s Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion, watching as Tinkerbell touched her wand to the Disney buildings and our favourite show started with animated fireworks. Adventureland! Fantasyland! Frontierland! We gazed, transfixed by all of them. Whichever land it was, we wanted it.