Escape (22 page)

I stared at the carpet. There was a layer of fluff at least an inch
thick. I had been neglecting the vacuuming as well. 'I've done a lot
of books for them by now,' I told him. 'Schools are taking class sets, I
mean, they know they can rely—'

'Well not this time, it is clear. You only need once to make a
mistake and people remember forever. Imagine if I had missed one
firestick when I was juggling?'

I dug my shoe into the carpet. Beige fluff covered the toe entirely.
I quickly stepped on it, patting it down.

'Well?' he repeated, his voice peremptory like a school principal.
'Why are you late?' I almost expected him to ask for a note from my
parents. I hadn't told him about my outings with Clara. I don't know
why. I just felt the impulse to close up after a happy day out, the way
Venus flytraps snap shut if you prod them.

'Don't know,' I mumbled, my face going red. How could I say that
I had been too happy with Clara, that I'd felt for the first time in my
life that maybe I could be a good mother. Or at least, that I might learn
how to be.

His eyes bored into mine. He was like Madame Curie with
her X-ray machine. 'I think you 'ave been too distracted at 'ome.
Now Clara is older, she takes up more of your time. She must go to
school.'

'What do you mean, she's barely two!' Fear twanged through my
chest, making my voice screechy and thin. 'She's not
allowed
to go to
school yet!'

Guido sighed. 'No, I don mean primary school, oh this
maladetta
language, what is it? The school before the main school, you know, 'ow
is it called?'

'Day care,' I said dully.

'Yes, that's it. You must do this for Clara. It would be good for 'er
to get out of the 'ouse, she is always indoors with you. She is a bright
child, she needs this stimulation, and then you can concentrate on
your job. Good, you will find out tomorrow about this day care.'

'It's not that easy to just book in, there are places reserved, you
know—'

'Why 'ave you not looked into this? You are the native 'ere, I do
not know about such things. You must start looking tomorrow.'

'Yes, all right, maybe for just a day or two a week.'

'No, you must do for five days, otherwise you will not be able
to work with continuity. In Italy children go to school for six days,
Saturday included.'

'But they come home for lunch, the afternoons—'

'Oh well,' he smiled, 'it never did me any 'arm. You ask anyone –
your friends, your parents, they will all agree.
Porca miseria
, Rachel, it
is time!'

It was true. And everyone I knew did agree with Guido. Maria, all
the Friday women, my mother and father. So why did it feel so wrong?
I thought how I'd felt just yesterday, breezy almost, walking hand-in-hand
with Clara back from the beach, with our little pile of shells and
a fish skeleton and a bottle of sand that we were going to use to make a
diorama. I'd felt finally I was getting somewhere, even with my terrible
sense of direction. I was so happy with Clara, I wasn't frightened all
the time any more, I felt I had something to give her, even if it was just
this overwhelming love and interest in what went on inside her. Sure,
there were times when I felt trapped, bored, frustrated. But we were
getting somewhere, weren't we?

Maybe I could just work a little harder at night, ask Clara to look
at her books for an hour in the afternoons while I read mine?

'But that's not fair to Clara,' said my mother. 'Why should she be
deprived of company, solitary hours while you work? It's impossible
anyway not to be distracted with a little one around. There's a good
day care place opened up in Tryon Street, have you noticed the signs?
I'll go and investigate.'

So Clara went to day care which opened from eight in the morning
and closed at six at night.

'I don't need that long!' I told Guido, who thought we should avail
ourselves of all the time that was on offer, particularly as there was no
cost saving for fewer hours. 'I just can't write for ten hours a day – I
can't concentrate that long.'

'No?' said Guido pityingly, his eyebrow arched. 'Is all practice.
You keep pushing yourself a little more each day, and you will see the
progress you make.'

It suddenly occurred to me that Guido didn't know at all any more
how I felt about anything.
Because you don't tell him
, said the voice.
You
keep secrets like a little kid
. But if he had known, would he have cared? I
looked at him standing at the doorway of the kitchen, leaning elegantly
against the wall. He wore his pale pink cotton shirt with the charcoal
trousers that I'd ironed at the weekend. It was hard to get that central
crease just right – too much iron and the crease shrieked at you, too
little and the line wandered into vagueness, smudging the first time he
sat down. Underneath the charcoal pants were his boxer shorts. These
had to be ironed as well, being cotton, a natural fibre that tended to
chafe, he said, if allowed to crease. He looked back at me. His eyes
were cool. He looked at me the way he looked out the window.

I sat down suddenly on the brown sofa. My knees felt loose.

Guido frowned. 'And also you must teach our daughter Italian.'

'But I don't know Italian, well, only the very little I've learnt in
translating for you.'

'You know the basic verbs, the names for things. You can look it
up in the dictionary, what you don know. Clara is very young, she will
not need more complicated language until later. And it would'elp your
translation of my poems.'

When I left Clara at day care, she cried.

'She'll be fine,' said Rosemary, Sheridan and Martha, the girls who
had to mop up the floods made by children and their mothers. 'Don't
worry, they all do it at first.'

I looked around and saw no other child was crying.

'Will she cry forever?' asked one little blond girl at the end of the
second week.

'Is because you keep her too close to you,' Guido said when
I told him about the crying. 'Always you are there at her side, is not
'ealthy. You will see, this day care will be good and make 'er more
independent.'

Clara stopped crying around the middle of the third week. When I
left her on the Wednesday she just stared at me blankly, her green eyes
wide. From the back of the room Rosemary waved me away, making
a silent
go!
with her mouth. I hesitated, watching Clara's eyes, waiting
for them to fill slowly like the sink in the laundry with the dripping
tap. They didn't. She just drew herself up, taking a big breath, and gave
me a half-smile. Then she turned and ran over to the girl who'd said,
'Will she cry forever?'

'See,' said Clara, 'I've stopped!'

The next morning was the same. Lovely Sheridan said she was
participating well in the games. And didn't she know a lot about
insects? And bacteria? In two days she'd trained the children to cover
their mouths with their hands when they coughed.

'You see?' said Guido. 'I told you so. You don 'ave to worry no
more.'

It was true. Clara seemed quite chatty when she came home, even
if she was more tired. When I tried to teach her the word for tired in
Italian,
stanco
, she put her hands over her ears and shouted, '
Na na na
na!
' She slept better. I was the problem now.

When I came home in the mornings after dropping her, my
arms seemed to lengthen at my sides, hanging loose and empty. I was
hollow, as if all my insides had been scooped out. I missed my daughter
terribly.
Do your work
, said the voice.
Bulletproof vests would never have
been invented if women just sat around on their bums, crying all day
. I
tried to read about the tiny bones of the hand, the metacarpals, but
saw Clara's little dimpled knuckles instead.

'Isn't it fabulous having those hours to yourself?' cried Lena on
the first Friday that we could all meet. 'Don't you feel free?'

'Sometimes,' said Rita, 'I spend the first half-hour trying to decide
which treat I'll have first – it's so precious, that time to yourself, you
want to use it well!'

'You're so lucky, you lot,' Doreen sighed, 'being able to stay at
home and have the house to yourself. I'm always rushing to work after
the drop-off . I'd give anything to just wander around, shave my legs, I
don't know, read a book in the bath . . .'

We didn't meet as often now, what with Doreen working full-time
and Lena's new editing job at her publisher's office. We didn't talk
any more about babies and survival, hysteria and chaos. They had all
moved on; they were talking as women, as grown people, about jobs
and politics and education. I was still stuck, gorilla-like, walking on
my knuckles, unevolved and hooting with pain.

My own work wasn't going well. After The
Human Body
, I had
been commissioned to write a new series, 'Natural Disasters'. The first
book was to be
Floods
. At the beginning of each book, when I sat down
to the blank page, a drowning feeling came over me. Often I went back
to look at books I had already written, published now with snappy
covers, and tell myself, see, you've done it before, why can't you do it
again? But the neat printed pages with the words in their typed suits
looked foreign, not familiar. I couldn't remember how I'd constructed
those sentences.

Of course I knew I wrote them, the printed words said so on the
cover:
Rachel Leopardi
. It was more that I didn't seem to have access
to her, to that Rachel who had broken through the wall and found the
facts to tell a story. I just couldn't find her. Once the book was finished
she was gone forever, swept away downriver like a log in one of my
floods.

After a few weeks I had a routine. I'd drop Clara off and go into
my bedroom and kneel by the bed. I put my face into the sheets
where there was still the smell of her, from when she'd woken next
to me.

'Don't you feel free now?' Lena had said. No, I felt like a prisoner
in a cell. I was trapped by freedom. So
much
freedom, hours and hours
of blank page, more than I had been used to for years, and everyone
agreed that I should feel great, but there was just the emptiness, and
the misery.

One Friday morning I found an empty spider's nest clinging
to a fold in my bedroom curtain. It was papery thin, shaped like
a shower cap. There were hundreds of tiny holes like pin pricks,
through which the baby spiders must have escaped. I lay the nest
in my palm. I thought I would keep it for Clara to see, and explain
how the tiny babies had lived inside it. But when I touched it with
my finger, so gently, it fell away to dust, leaving just a white stain on
my hand.

'Why don you take a lesson from your daughter?' Guido said. 'She
does not cry any more.' He made an effort, drawing himself together
like Clara when she had to do something difficult. He touched my
face. Smiled. 'Come here, we have some time before I have to leave.'
And he put my hand on his crotch.

A sob burst from my throat. Under the rough material of his pants,
I felt his semi-hardness turn soft in my fingers. Guido looked down at
me, disgusted. My hand dropped to my side.

'I have to go out,' he said. 'Don worry, I will have breakfast on the
way.'

When he was home, I tried to keep my crying for the bathroom.
The running tap and then the shower drowned the noise. As the warm
water ran down my face I could surrender to the heaving in my chest,
and it was almost ecstasy. When he went out, I didn't have to waste
water.

Crying in the bathroom was a habit from childhood. It was the
only place where I could lock the door and run the water, and none of
my father's homeless boys could barge in.

If Guido caught me crying he would go very still, glance at me
quickly, then away. If he was standing near he would shift his weight
from one foot to the other and sigh, tapping his fingers together, as if
he were waiting in a queue. I didn't know what was happening inside,
in his secret self – perhaps he was counting all the greasy fingerprints
on the kitchen wall, or the cobwebs around the light fittings. He just
seemed to be waiting, still as stone, until the crying passed.

Our long stretches of silence pooled into a lake, flooding
occasionally, and we were marooned on our opposite banks, waving
half-heartedly at each other until the tide went down.

'I'm sorry,' I said at night, when he came into my room. I was sorry
about the lake and my muteness and my stupid inability to cross over
and the endless tears. But I couldn't say all that. And he'd kiss me, or
squeeze my breast, but somehow, the lake was still there and I didn't
feel forgiven by his touch any more, at all.

Soon after we were married, Guido had decided that we should do a
monthly shop together at the Italian quarter across town. He hadn't
approved of the white pasta that I'd brought home from the local
shops, or the parmesan in plastic. 'Is disgusting,' he said, 'how can we
live like this?' He'd looked quite anxious, twisting his hands together
into a knot. I would have done anything, then, to smooth the tangle of
his fingers. Guido said we should buy big quantities of food at a time,
to last as rations – it made sense to stock up, because it was a long
tedious drive to the Italian quarter.

We always went early in the morning to beat the traffic. We
bought four hundred grams of gorgonzola, half a kilo of parmigiano,
fifteen packets of the good yellow durum wheat pasta. I had to ask
my parents for another loan to buy a new fridge, to accommodate
the monthly shopping. Since my mother had already given us her
money from Great Aunt Leah, I felt quite sick about my request. But
the gorgonzola, Guido told me, was too good to waste. The food from
the Italian market was all delicious, and for weeks after the shopping
we would have little
assagi
, tastes of different cheese and sausage after
dinner, as if we were at a real
trattoria
.

But after Clara was born and the war began, I could hardly
swallow.

At the market, Guido encouraged me to order the groceries in
Italian now, as practice. He would stand back and point, prompting
me, making rapid selections in my ear. 'Get the provolone, no, it looks
ancient, choose the fontina instead.'

Often I'd stumble to a halt in the middle of a sentence, my tongue
huge in my mouth. I heard my accent, hard and nasal, my shameful
vocabulary. I saw the condescending smiles around me, the twitch of
Guido's raised eyebrow. The cheese moistened and blurred behind
the glass. With each second I seemed to expand like Alice, too big and
clumsy to scuttle down any hole.

When the salesperson chose a piece of parmesan Guido didn't
like – 'Too much rind for twenty dollars!' – or cut the mortadella too
thickly, he'd ask them to do it again. '
Cretino
,' he'd mutter.

I'd smile blankly ahead as if I hadn't heard, cringing damply inside
my blouse. When the man finally gave us all our packages, re-cut,
rewrapped, I whispered to Guido to say thank you.

'No, I will not,' he said as he strode out the door.

When we were outside I ventured to remonstrate. It was
excruciating, I told him, so embarrassing. Why was it so hard for him
to be civil? Guido looked at my sweaty lip and curled his own. 'Rachel,
cara
, you do not understand. When you have only lived in one place all
your life, you cannot judge because your vision is limited. Is cultural,
this thing – we in Europe do like this. The man is there to serve, you
are there to order. He is there to take your money. You are there to get
the most for it. For what else you go in the shop? To become the best
friend?'

'No, but we are all human beings! We all deserve respect. Surely
you can adapt your customs? Be friendly?'

'
Uffa!
' Guido rolled his eyes. 'The customs in this place?
Everywhere there are the superlatives. You go in the post office and
they say "'Ave a
wonderful
day!" – they don even know you, maybe your
brother just died. You order three stamps – "
Fantastic
!" they say when
you give them the lousy dollar. Is false, this custom, so superficial all
this exclaiming. What do the people have left to say in private?'

While we waited at the counter, I sometimes thought about the
cafe we used to visit before we were married. Once, after the shopping
was finished, I suggested that we should take Clara there to sit down
and have a little something, just as a treat, remembering the dreamy
smell of espresso, the luxury of being brought what we'd ordered, and
how the cannoli had melted in our mouths. Guido snorted in disbelief.
'You spend good money to sit in a cafe with a bad picture of Mount
Etna on the wall? You eat stale cakes when we have just bought the
monthly shopping? Are you
pazza
?'

He was quite right, I knew it. Even so I thought wistfully of the
past, of the time before the introduction of food rations and the
monthly shopping and the implacable feudal system.

As we trudged to our car, illegally parked – 'All these stupid rules,
in Roma is not like this!' – my heart would drop. Guido would lift up
the boot and we'd pile in all the packages: the cheese, the small soccer
field of pasta, the little bottles of
caperi
, the large jars of anchovies and
olives, the mortadella, salame, prosciutto,
melanzane sott'olio
. Then
we'd stand in the heat while Guido tore off chunks of Italian bread and
slices of mortadella and munched, ravenous, in silence. Fumes from
the heavy traffic rumbling alongside mixed with the smell of food.

There is nothing to look forward to, I thought one Saturday. Not
even one benign moment. I looked at the grey asphalt of Parramatta
Road shuddering and flashing in the mirage of heat. It went on until
the metal horizon filled with cars filled with shopping that would have
to be unpacked and put away and cooked and eaten and argued over.
It was all duty and shopping and ironing and feeding and even when I
did all that, what was expected of me, every minute of every day, it still
wasn't right. I couldn't make anything right.

Clara had lingered in the pasticceria, hoping for a sweet from the
nice man serving. When Guido had finished eating I began to pick
up the remains of bread and the cheese and mortadella. I imagined
crashing the boot down on my fingers. I heard the crack of bone, saw
the gush of blood. It would be sweet, almost.
Would serve you right
,
said the voice. The pain would sing.

'
Porca miseria
, what 'ave you done?'

I hadn't crushed my fingers. I'd thrown the crusts of bread and
slabs of ricotta cheese and slices of mortadella and loose black olives
marinated in rosemary and lemon right back into the boot. I hadn't
wrapped them in their neat packages. I'd just tossed them in handfuls,
a gluggy mishmash of colours flying from my fingers.

We both stared into the boot, at the mess of torn bread and
cheese and oily meat smeared across the other neat little parcels of
food wrapped in white greaseproof paper. If only you could freeze
moments and rewind them, pretend that they hadn't happened at all.
'Is
incredibile
, Rachel, what you 'ave done. This car will stink,' Guido
was still yelling. 'How could you do this? You are a mad woman! I
'ave married
la pazza
!' He turned to me with the same look I'd seen
him give salesmen in shoe shops, people on buses, dog turds on the
footpath.