Grace's Table (4 page)

4

The temperature in the kitchen rose incrementally with the level of activity needed to prepare a meal for twelve. Grace opened the window to move some of the hot air.

A soft Sunday hum drifted in. It was her favourite day of the week; the closest she got to her childhood quiet. She could hear insects going about their business among the star jasmine flowers on her back patio; birds making friendly conversation from the jacaranda's branches. Somewhere, a few backyards away, she picked up the rhythmic pop of someone hitting what might be a ball in a game of totem tennis. On the second-floor balcony of the unit next door, a woman was hanging washing over a clotheshorse. Grace watched as she snapped creases from a pillow case, shorts, a towel. Each action cut the air like a pistol crack.

On weekdays these sounds were lost. The city swallowed them up in its wakefulness, its business: wheels turning, braking; car engines accelerating, decelerating; clip-clopping shoes and conversations on the move. There were the sounds of progress too: drills, hammers, angle grinders. And those of harm or danger: sirens, alarms, unknown crashes and bangs.

The smaller fibres of sound – those Grace could hear today – were the ones she liked best because they were the ones that revealed the true fabric of people's lives. It was odd to think that on weekdays they were mute. At Harvest, she remembered such noises – wind-cracked sheets drying on the line, the distant thunk, thunk of a fence-post driver – as the defining sounds of any given day of the week.

The eleven o'clock news broadcast came on the radio. Grace already knew what the headline would be – the same as it had been for close to three weeks now. But habit forced her hand to reach across the kitchen bench and turn up the volume anyway.

‘Still no change to the state of residents' footpaths overnight,' the reporter began. One look out the window that morning had told her that. ‘With waste reported to be chest-high in some areas …'

Chest-high?
Grace tried to imagine it. It could be fairly called thigh-high in parts of her street, and that seemed bad enough. Still, leave ten or a hundred bags stacked long enough in the February heat and the smell was terrible.

‘Union officials and local government members have been in crisis meetings overnight but there's still no sign of a resolution to the dispute.'

‘Nothing new there then,' Susan said, and turned the volume back down.

Grace went to the fridge, took a cauliflower and bag of parsnips from inside and sat each on the bench.

‘Kath will hate having to come here today.' Grace thought of her old friend on the outskirts of the city, as she started cutting the cauliflower into florets.

‘It'll do her good to get off her mountain. See what's happening in the real world.' Susan took the second pot of potatoes from the stove. ‘Not too small,' she said to Grace on her way past to the sink.

Grace ignored her. ‘The world's as real as she likes it where she is.'

‘Each to her own, I suppose. But I couldn't stand it.' Susan started opening cupboards under the sink.

Mother had always said something similar about Harvest – that it was as close to the real world as she liked and that the far-away city could stay just that, far away. At the time Grace too had thought each to her own, desperate to be shot of Harvest, desperate to be nothing like her mother, as Susan probably felt now.

‘She was always so outgoing,' Susan said to the inside of a cupboard. ‘I never understood why she took herself so far off the social map in the first place … Where's the colander?'

‘The other potatoes are in it. I'll get something to put them in.' Grace took a plastic bowl from inside a cupboard and emptied the first batch of cooled potatoes into it. She then took the other pot from the sink and upended it into the colander, tilting her head back from the steam. ‘Maybe after living a busy life she decided simplicity was the ticket.'

‘Taken a ticket to sit and wait beside her grave more like. She's given in to it.' Susan moved in on the cauliflower, took over from Grace.

Grace knew the
it
Susan referred to was age.

‘She never struck me as the type,' Susan said.

‘There's no type. Ageing happens to everybody.'

‘But she was always so out there. As a girl I wanted to be just like her when I was her age. Remember the zany-hat stage I went through? That was Kath. Just as my failed attempts at smoking were. Remember that tin Dad used for his rollies, the one you always kept full for him? Certainly came in handy during that particular phase.'

Grace remembered the tin because she had given it to Des. She still held the image in her mind of the male peacock that was pressed into its gold metal lid, tail feathers on full display. Bev had found her filling it with fresh rollies once. Grace was sitting alone at the kitchen table the day her friend came by, unannounced, to the back door. Not that an announcement was necessary, but if Grace had known Bev was calling in, then she might have found her doing something different.

‘Are you doing it to keep busy?' Bev had asked, hand resting gently on Grace's shoulder.

Her friend's voice was anxious but Grace was in no state to soothe. She didn't look up from the cigarette she was crafting. Instead, she ran the tip of her tongue carefully along the gummed edge of the Tally-Ho paper and sealed it. She picked up a match and poked the hairy tobacco ends inside, then put the completed cigarette in the tin. She pulled another paper from the packet and started over again. ‘Yes,' she said. ‘Keeping busy.'

‘Oh, Grace,' Bev said softly.

As Grace remembered it her friend had remained at her side, arm round her thinning shoulders, until she'd fitted the last one she could into the tin.

She got the rolling of Des's cigarettes down to a fine art – the tobacco tight, but not so tight that you couldn't move the air easily through it, and not so loose either that it burnt down too quickly. He never thanked her for keeping the tin full, but neither did she stop doing it.

‘Kath was my idol,' Susan said, ‘and now I have trouble remembering why.'

Who could deny Susan her feelings of betrayal: to have imagined a future for yourself, only to discover it wasn't the right one.

Grace looked up from the potatoes, quite drained in the sink now, and watched Susan as she worked the knife through the cauliflower. She remained a tall woman, and attractive in an unadorned way. Peter's Jane had always needed trimmings to create such a look; Susan could still pull it off with the assets she'd been given from birth.

Yes, she's carried herself well, Grace thought, admiring her straight back and long neck. Des had taught her not to round her shoulders on her height. Pull yourself up tall, Susie. Let the world see what my girl's made of, he'd say. And Susan would press her shoulders back and lift her chin in a way that made her look more proud than confident. Either way, Des was always pleased with the result.

But changes were at play with Susan, Grace had noticed, and age was the umpire. Her daughter's upper arms were going the way of an older woman's, a little saggy, and the V of her neck showed the tell-tale lines of the child who'd always enjoyed the sun. Her dark hair, a feature Des had admired from the moment he'd laid eyes on the tiny damp mop at birth, remained thick and shiny but Grace knew she'd been colouring it for a while to hold back the grey.

Grace felt a pang for her daughter's lost youth. And a greater pang for Susan's fear. No matter how hard people tried to run, age would always take hostages.

For Grace, the regrets had long passed. She'd come to accept that when she stood naked in front of a mirror now, features of her elderly mother looked back at her. There was the same short white hair and cartography of lines to her face. Her breasts hung lower than they once had and her abdomen was no longer flat. The once thick, springy pubic hair was sparse and wiry; a diminished crown above withered rose petal folds. Her legs were more bone than meat.

The image was an irony. Just as Susan had strived to be like Kath when she was younger, Grace had reached out, eagerly, for her future too – years ticked off by quarters; declared almost five, nearly ten, finally sixteen. Now, she wished she'd preoccupied herself more with remaining a child.

‘Maybe you'll want to be like her again one day,' Grace suggested. ‘Live a simple life on a quiet mountain.'

‘Not likely.' Susan brought the knife down to cleave the last floret, a large one. ‘There'll be no quiet mountains for me when I'm old.'

Susan started on the parsnips, left them long and quartered, just as she liked them.

Grace enjoyed making bus journeys within and to the edges of the city. She liked the way the cumbersome vehicle settled gracefully with a whoosh of air at each stop and floated off again like a hovercraft. The rhythm of the movement soothed her.

The previous week Grace had taken the bus to visit Kath and her mountain.

‘I need some fresh air,' she'd said to her friend on the phone.

Kath had laughed her raspy smoker's laugh and said, ‘And you're calling me?'

Ada made the trip with her – round, reliable Ada – a friend who'd been ticking the years off with Grace longer even than Kath had. They were a quartet once, with Bev, but she was gone now. As one of a long line of lopsided, breast-less women in her family, Bev had received her cancer as though it was a long-awaited visitor finally come knocking. It had escorted her out the door a dozen years ago now. Grace missed her as though it was only yesterday. Her friend's gentle hand had rarely been far from Grace when she needed it.

She and Ada sat in the middle of the bus where experience had shown them a smooth ride. Grace imagined how they looked to others: both white-haired and each dressed similarly for comfort, not high fashion, with permanent press and cautious hemlines. Short-legged Ada sat at the window, knees apart due to anatomy not choice, tips of her sensible shoes struggling to touch the floor, and the hem of her skirt pulled down decorously. She clutched her handbag to her lap with both hands, rarely relaxing her grip – but neither would she hesitate to lift it and use it as a weapon if required – and leant in to Grace a little to listen each time she spoke. Grace was a head and neck taller than her friend, with her long legs either stretched out in front or pulled back under her seat, ankles crossed one behind the other. Like Ada she had both hands on her handbag, but more for comfort than protection, and the top hand lifted from time to time to add emphasis to what she said.

The two friends talked for most of their journey to the city's north-western fringe. Much of their conversation was about the garbage strike – it consumed most conversations – but to a younger person's ear, Grace supposed they covered it in ways that were predictable.

Wouldn't have seen the city like this twenty years ago.

Never had so much to throw out, I suppose.

Not half as much.

Ah yes, times that weren't so good were lauded, proudly, as obstacles unique to a different generation, for building character, as if it were a construction project finally completed.

But Grace had grown from a family, and a community, where flaws and failings and wrong choices were worn like a hair shirt, suffered privately in fear of
pull yourself together
or
you've made your bed
gibes from people for whom stoicism was a way of life. But there had been Arnott's biscuits, strong tea and the indirect counsel of friends.

‘What's the old maid doing here?' Des had asked Grace, more than half a lifetime ago, on finding Kath sitting in his lounge room one Saturday afternoon.

Des wouldn't have believed Grace if she'd told him of the lovers Kath had had, was still having. Depending on his mood, he could only see her friend as either a barren crone or a cigarette-rolling dyke.

‘Shh – she'll hear you. The girls are coming in for afternoon tea, that's all.'

‘Bloody hell. Don't any of you have jobs to do?'

‘Des, please, keep your voice down,' Grace hissed. ‘Besides, do you work every minute of the day?'

‘No, and I shouldn't have to. Don't forget who puts the meat on the table.'

Bev's head bobbed past the kitchen window and along to the back door. ‘It's only me,' she called, and opened the screen door to let herself in. ‘You still here, Des. Thought you'd be long gone by now, knowing we were coming round.'

‘No one informed me you were, otherwise I would've.'

‘Consider yourself informed now.' Bev gave Grace a peck on the cheek and a wink.

Bev got away with more than most women around Des because of the shape of her arse. Des slapped it now and took himself outside. His jaunty whistle suggested he thought he'd got the last word – or hand – on the matter.

‘He's no quality bottle of red, that one,' Bev said, rubbing her rump. ‘Not likely to improve with age at all.'

Embarrassed, Grace changed the subject. ‘Come through to the lounge. Kath's already here. Ada shouldn't be far away.'

‘Don't you reckon thirty-eight's a bit young to be classed an old maid?' Kath asked, as Grace and Bev entered the room.

‘You heard.'

Kath gave Grace a how-could-I-not look.

‘Is that what he called you?' Bev looked at Kath, amused.

Grace distracted herself by clearing a place on the coffee table to make way for the tea tray they would share later.

Kath, dressed smartly in a fashionable scoop-necked frock, her curvy calves shiny in nylons, got up and did a hunched old-woman-walk across the lounge, stooped over an imaginary cane, one hand pressed to her back. Grace wished she could relax into the laugh along with her friends.

‘What am I missing?' Ada came through from the kitchen.

‘The wisdom of Des,' offered Kath, still chortling.