Love and Other Perishable Items (10 page)

“Her despair.”

“Right.” It’s a struggle to express this one. I lean down to my schoolbag under the table, haul it up onto my lap and fumble around inside it.

“My mum has this really busy, really full-on job that she does Monday to Friday, plus she’s got Jess to look after, plus my dad, plus all the housework and … she’s really unhappy. The air in my home … is heavy with my mum’s unhappiness. And her exhaustion. And her sheer dissatisfaction with her life. And I hate it. I can be up in my room when she’s in the kitchen below and I feel her despair seeping up through the floorboards and into my room and throughout the whole house. You can hear her banging pots and pans, or cursing the vacuum cleaner.…”

“What’s this thankless job that she does?”

“She’s a high school teacher. English and history.”

“Where?”

“Riley Street High.”

“Shit. Tough school.”

“Yeah. But you know, I’ve worked out what’s really to blame for my mother’s lot in life.”

“And what’s that?”

“Feminism.”

“Feminism?” Chris raises one eyebrow. “Please explain.”

I find what I was rummaging for in my bag—a tattered set of photocopied pages—fish them out and slam them down on the table.

“Well, our English teacher, Mrs. Cumming, made us read this thing called
The Feminine Mystique
, by some feminist called—”

“Betty Friedan.”

“Yeah, that’s the one. It was published in 1963 and—”

“Sorry, I need a judge’s ruling on this—your teacher gave you
The Feminine Mystique
for tenth-grade English?”

“Yes.”

“The same teacher that gave you
The Bell Jar
?”

“Yes. She’s pretty wacky.”

“I’ll say! Continue.”

“So, yeah, from what I can gather, Betty was writing about how after the Second World War there was this massive campaign to get women—”

“Middle-class white women, not women,” Chris interjects. “That’s who she was writing about really—she began her research on ex-classmates of hers from college.”

“Whatever,” I say impatiently. “She said women had been kind of herded back into the home and told that femininity equals being a “stay-at-home wife and mum.” Apparently this lifestyle meant that most of them went insane with misery and developed Valium habits. Eventually a backlash movement developed called second-wave feminism, which tried to get the
women back out into the world and not just be wives and mothers and dependent on men. And thanks to second-wave feminism, my mum spends all day getting shoulder-charged by a bunch of delinquent teenagers, picks up Jess from preschool, goes to the supermarket, comes home, cleans up the day’s mess, gets the dinner on, gets Jess in the bath, folds the laundry, gets Jess out of the bath, serves the dinner, clears up after dinner, puts Jess to bed and collapses, waking up to do it all again the next day.”

I pause for breath. Chris looks thoughtful.

“Well. I guess you have a point,” he says. “It can
seem
like women like your mum got sold down the river by feminism, or at least caught in its wake. But really, don’t you think they are getting screwed by patriarchy, not feminism?”

“I don’t know. But before feminism, at least she wouldn’t have had to do
everything
.”

“Just the kids and the housework.”

“Yeah. If she’d lived in the fifties, at least she could have had her Valium and her lie-down in peace once the kids were at school. She could have had a moment to read the paper and have a coffee in the sunshine. Maybe even see her friends. Go for a swim. All she’d have to worry about was how to work the latest ‘vacuum-cleaning machine.’ ”

“Down with feminism!” Chris raises his beer in a toast.

“Down with feminism!” I laugh, and do the same.

“Seriously, though,” says Chris, gesturing for me to wipe some mozzarella off my chin. “The Stepford Wife thing would totally suck if that was your whole life. It’s not The Way. Let’s not blame poor Betty for the sexual division of labor in your household. Speaking of which, where does your dad fit into all of this?”

“My dad.” I stop chewing. “I’ll tell you about him another time. I’m exhausted after all that—”

“Ranting.”

“Right.”

“Grade A ranting.”

“Whatever. So what about you, Brutae?”

“What about me?” He raises one eyebrow, all film noir.

“What do
you
hate?”

“Well, I hate, you know … stuff.”

“Stuff. I just bared my soul and you hate ‘stuff.’ ”

“Betty Friedan and a dislike of smoking is your soul?”

“Cough up.”

“Right now, Youngster, you remind me of a mosquito buzzing over what she thinks is a nice, normal, juicy vein, angling to swoop down, stick in the old proboscis and suck up some blood to take back to the kids. Little does she know that she’s hovering over an artery and when she sticks it in, she will be exploded by a back draft of arterial spray.”

On the Formica lies the now-empty pizza tray. My mouth burns from the spicy pepperoni. I am sipping my second beer and Chris is finishing his third. My watch says it is eleven. On a school night.

“Whillikers! It’s almost pumpkin time,” says Chris, gesturing to Rino for the bill. “You better drink up so I can walk you home, Youngster.”

“I’m fine to go by myself. I do it every night after work.”

“Can’t have you walking home alone at this time of night. You shall be escorted.”

“Righto.”

I am getting nostalgic about this night and it hasn’t even finished yet.

Outside there are chilly gusts of wind—winter is coming on fast. We walk through the dark, still streets, our footfalls and voices the only sounds.

“Will your parents be up?” asks Chris. “Should I prepare to field questions as to why I’ve had their prize-scholar daughter out on a school night?”

“Definitely not Mum. Dad might still be up, but he won’t ask any questions. You don’t have to come with me to the door.”

For a while we walk in silence. Then with slightly lubricated daring, I ask, “So who’s the girl?”

“Girl is Michaela. She went to my uni for a semester.”

“And what’s so great about her?” The darkness hides my pout.

“It’s not something I can easily explain, Youngster.”

“Pourquoi pas?”

“Well, we just … I …” He gropes around for words. “Look. Tell me to bugger off if this is getting too personal, but you’ve never had sex, have you?”

I gape in the dark. Should I lie? Would I score points? Would he see right through it? Maybe it would put me in with a fighting chance if he thought I had!

“I … no.” Truthful old Amelia.

“Well, depending on who you’re doing it with, you can go to this whole other place. Michaela and I went there. I haven’t been able to get back.”

We walk in silence.
Whole other place
?

“Why’d you break up?”

“She went back to Perth. From whence she came.”

“And it was just over? What about the long-distance thing? My friend Penny’s mum came over from the U.K. to be with her dad.”

“She got back together with her boyfriend over there,” he says stiffly. “He’s called Brad, if you can believe it. Worst of all, on the day I put her on the plane home, I found out that they’d never really broken up. They were just
on hold
while she was over here. Believe me, if there was no Brad, I’d have moved to Perth as soon as I could raise the airfare.”

“Crap,” I volunteer sympathetically, silently thanking the powers that be for Brad.

“Certainly was,” he agrees. “Is, I should say.”

“Like Pip and Estella.”

“Except that Pip never actually got his leg over.” Chris grins through the darkness.

“Well. We don’t
think
he did.” I gesture for him to stop. “This is my house.”

Coming to a halt, we face each other.

“Thanks for dinner,” I say. “It almost makes up for the bastardry.”

“My pleasure. I’m just trying to teach you to be a discriminate kisser.”

“That’s kind of you. Here I was thinking you were just being a complete A-hole.”

“Tell you what.”

“What?” I tighten and untighten my grip on my schoolbag straps.

“You welched on telling me about your dad. I welched on reciprocating a whole conversation. Here’s what we do. We write each other a letter in lieu of the conversation.”

“A letter about my dad.”

“Yep.”

“All right.”

“Now. It’s time you were in bed.”

We slip through the front gate. Fishing out my keys, I creep up to the window and peer through a crack in the curtains. My father is reading in his easy chair next to the heater, a cigarette and a glass of Madeira in one hand and a copy of the
New Yorker
in the other.

“Good night then.”

“Good night, Youngster.”

I let myself in and quietly close the front door behind me. One of the tranquil moments from Liszt’s Concerto number 1 in E-flat Major wafts through the living room door. One of Dad’s favorites. It
is
nice.

“Amelia?” my father calls out.

“Yes,” I call back from the hallway.

“Where have you been?”

“Dinner with a friend from work.” I head toward the staircase. Just before I put my foot on the first stair, he appears at the other end of the hall, still holding his Madeira glass.

“Good night then.”

We regard each other.

“Good night, Da.”

The First XV

I get to school every day in one of two ways. On nice days, I walk, which takes fifty minutes at a brisk pace. On crummy days, I catch the bus. Two buses, actually. One into the city, where I wait at Taylor Square among the social dregs of the night before for another bus to take me to school. That too takes fifty minutes, all up. Go figure.

This morning I take the bus. Standing alone at Taylor Square, I shiver in my thin school jumper. Penny and I are not on the same bus route. She lives at Maroubra Junction and comes from the opposite direction. There is a metal bench next to the bus stop sign that I sometimes sit on to wait. Today there is a homeless man asleep along its entire length. He wears tattered black clothing, his skin is darkened with grime, his long gray beard is streaked with dirt and in his sleep he cradles a bottle-shaped paper bag. With a cold gust of wind, his stench of filth, despair and illness reaches my nostrils. I move several steps away and shift from one foot to the other against the cold.

Later that day Penny and I sit on the grass among our group of friends, eating our lunch. We’ve always been a tight twosome within the larger group.

“How’s Jamie?” I ask.

“A bit better, I think. But he’s going to be there for a while longer.” Penny draws her knees up to her chest, pulling the hem of her sweater down to her ankles. “Apparently we all have to go there for ‘family therapy.’ Mum’s up in arms because she reckons it implies that she’s somehow to blame for Jamie. ‘It’s not all about you,’ I tell her, but it doesn’t get me very far.”

“You said that to your mum?”

“Nah.” She smiles. “But I think it all the time.”

I wish I had something to say in return. I offer her an apricot bar (the sugariest treat you can get at our school’s health-food canteen), which she accepts, and we sit in silence for a moment.

The First XV rugby team from the boys’ school is strutting out to the middle of the field. Wednesday. Scrum training day. Once assured that all eyes are upon them, they begin their warm-up exercise display. Bulging hamstrings are stretched languorously. Large shoulders are carefully rotated in their sockets, displaying to best advantage the pecs and biceps attached. The coach circulates, grunting encouragement and consulting on quadricep stretches and groin strains.

“Frickin’ alpha males,” mutters Penny mutinously.

Chris’s lament that girls like Kathy eat boys like him for breakfast is still fresh in my mind. These boys don’t eat anyone for breakfast—they don’t have to. They are secure in their position. Only some junior and senior girls are allowed to approach them, and only after being given certain cues. They have parties where there are burly boys on the door to prevent any gatecrashers from entering. No one from our group of friends has ever been to one. Girls who are invited to these parties are hand-picked. In my imagination, the parties involve smoke-filled rooms, kegs of beer, swimming pools, perfume and testosterone hanging heavy in the air, and pair after pair of folded strong male arms straining against their “fashion T-shirts.”

Who is at practice today? I can see Ed Kennedy, Steven Harris and Jeremy Richardson. Luke Silburn, Monty Donachy and James Roberts. To name a few. The funny thing is how I know so many of their names. I have nothing to do with them. I’ve never
even spoken to one. Yet somehow their names have seeped into the collective consciousness of the whole school. You hear whispers of their names along the corridors and across the school grounds at lunch. Information about which of them are dating what girls, who had a party last weekend, who was invited and who is casually mentioning that they went and did what to whom. I even know that Monty Donachy’s first name is short for Montague. Go figure.

After warming up, the boys begin the somewhat comical routine of scrum practice on the scrum simulator thingy—a large hunk of metal that substitutes for the opposing team of hulking heads and shoulders. I wonder if there is a proper name for this contraption. They line up in formation and bend down to assume the position, arms around each other’s arses and heads hovering close to the two pads in front. Then, with a terribly masculine
Hunh!
they thrust forward, all heads, thighs, arms and arses interlocked. The boys at the front have slammed their heads between the padded struts of the scrum simulator, and straining and grunting, they all push push push to move it back a few inches. Coach roars encouragement for a few seconds, then they all break away. Repeat the process. You lose track of how many times.

Every pair of eyes on the large school grounds, male and female, is unable to look away from this spectacle. Sometimes I think I can feel a silent alliance among certain groups who resent the privileged position that these meatheads occupy. To me, the whole exercise is just so visually ridiculous that I can’t believe the whole school doesn’t burst out laughing. But no one does. No one is brave enough to openly challenge the status quo. And
maybe deep down we all hope to be invited to one of their parties one day.