Reading Madame Bovary (18 page)

In the morning, somewhat dejectedly, she and Tony agreed that – The Free School or Montessori – no one system was ever going to be just right.

That evening she made a snap decision, and surprised herself. In the end, she realised, we resist that which has shaped us for the worse, and as the product of stiflingly conservative education systems, she and Tony agreed to go with the spirit of '
68
and send their son to The Free School.

At first Mattie was happy enough, and made friends with another boy his age, Jordan. But Jordan only came on certain days and the rest of the time Mattie was restless and bored. He especially hated the compulsory rest period after lunch, and could never drop off to sleep. They knew this because the ageing hippie, Dean, who used to strum the guitar and sing folk songs to lull the fidgeting children into a nap, would sometimes let Mattie ‘play' with one of the guitars when he wouldn't settle. He even gave Mattie some strumming lessons and taught him a simple chord that he could get his chubby fingers across. ‘You should have him taught lessons,' Dean said one day. ‘Mattie has a natural feel for the instrument.' But when she came to collect Mattie, often he would be waiting for her and ready to scoot through the gate. He seemed bored, and she began to dwell on Maria Montessori's dictum that there is often a fine line between freedom and chaos, and chaos is not stimulating but oppressive. Now she began to fret about his eager little face that was almost too happy to see her. While it might be gratifying for her, it was not in other ways a good sign. There were many nights of talking over her fears with Tony, and at last, despite the additional expense, they decided to take Mattie away from The Free School and enrol him at the Montessaurus.

Maria Montessori had designed her didactic toys to be self-correcting, and now they were about to become self-correcting parents.

From the first day Mattie settled in happily, and soon requested that he be allowed to stay on for aftercare activities with a sweet young woman named Missy. Whenever Frances arrived to collect him he would plead with her to stay with Missy for just a bit longer. There was always some exciting and well-organised game about to start, or some ingenious piece of craft being undertaken, and after that he would run to swing, just one more time, on the old tyre that hung from the great oak at the centre of the courtyard. Here they all were, safe within their idyllic high-walled space with its cedar chalets, its sunny decks and its courtyard of leafy Californian shade.

One afternoon, as she was walking Mattie home from his enlightened but fortified school, they paused beside a wide road and waited for the traffic to pass. She remembers looking both ways and seeing no car at all, but then, as they began to cross, a white jalopy appeared on the horizon, hurtling at speed straight towards them. With terror in her heart she yanked her son towards the median strip and stood fuming on the grass as the jeering teenage driver and his two accomplices gave her the finger on their way past.

‘You bastards!'
she screamed, as the car went racing, recklessly, on down the wide, tree-lined boulevard. It was broad daylight, at three in the afternoon, and they had just played chicken with a woman and a child.

All the way home she wanted to bellow her outrage, her impotent anger. How dare they!
How dare they!
But she could have screamed as much as she liked. They were outside the castle gates.

By the time they returned to Sydney they were sold on the Montessori method. Mattie had been happy there and, almost incidentally, had learned to read within six months, with no coaching at home. They sought out the nearest Montessori school and discovered that some things were not portable. They had been given a rare glimpse of the ideal and were unlikely to find it again. This local Montessori was intensely competitive. Information night seemed to be full of ambitious parents who wanted their children to get a jump on the rest; to get out of the blocks fast and get ahead in the game of life. Frances sat next to one handsome father in his late thirties, a solicitor, who explained his concern that his young son of seven was not showing much form in his studies. ‘All he seems interested in is Rugby League,' he said, with genial intensity. ‘He won't get into law or medicine that way.' And he explained that to combat any early slide into mediocrity he had enrolled his son in a Saturday-afternoon coaching class in maths.

Reluctantly, they gave up on the Montessori idea.

Years later, she asked Mattie what he remembered about the San Diego Montessori school. Not much, he replied, except that he'd been happy there. Did he remember the didactic toys? No. Not even the Golden Bead Material? No. Did he remember Clara and Joan, or Missy? No. All he remembered, he said, was swinging in the sun on a big tyre that hung from the oak tree in the yard.

Perfect

When we first moved into the house

When we first moved into the house overlooking the blue hills we were comfortable but not inspired. It was a contemporary two-storey brick house with a large sundeck. Inside it had beige carpet with mushroom tints, heavy curtains in a bold pattern and bland, expensive furniture from David Jones. When my friend Chris first came to visit she said the place had an impersonal feel, like an upmarket motel. There were conventional watercolour landscapes on the wall and lots of expensive cookware that hung from hooks in the kitchen. The kitchen had everything except charm. It, too, was oddly impersonal.

Yes, we were comfortable in this house. We felt safe. We'd always lived in the inner city, in a claustrophobic terrace on the flat with no aspect and a redbrick factory wall opposite. The kids loved this new house – the ‘motel'. They liked to sit out on the redwood sundeck and eat pizza for supper and do their homework from books nestled in their laps. You could gaze out at the hazy blue hills and listen to the bird sounds at dusk, and watch the fiery red sky over the purple scrub. At night I dreamed calm, reassuring dreams in which the light was bright and the land, the plains beyond, breathed with the sense of an immanent and joyful future.

It was a suburb built on steep hills

It was a suburb built on steep hills and the houses had high foundations and split levels and cantilevered sundecks and rambling bush gardens that fell away into gullies. For the children it was a climb from the bus stop to the house and I was nervous parking the car on the narrow woodchip drive, so steep was it, so sharply angled. This was a suburb where walking the dog was a strenuous hike; where you had to have two cars per family if one of you wasn't going to be exhausted from walking up the asphalt slopes. Not that we made serious complaint: it was the leafy, rearing hills that gave the place its character.

The children were intrigued with all the gadgets in the kitchen: the lemon press, the sugar thermometer, the lobster cracker, the boat moulds. ‘What's this, Mum?' they'd ask, holding up some oddly shaped or corkscrew implement that, for all they knew, might have belonged in a Guatemalan torture chamber. ‘A whisk,' I'd say, ‘an apple slicer … no, they're ice tongs.' And if we couldn't work out what it was, we'd call it an egg scrambler. We were easily amused.

I'd known her slightly

I'd known her slightly, the way you know a lot of people in a city you've lived in all your life. She wasn't conventionally pretty but there was something about her that men found attractive. Something hungry. When she was young, I'd heard, she'd been much admired; the girl most sought after; the girl who always had her choice of lovers.

She was very slim, with high cheekbones and such a strong bony chin that she looked almost wolfish, and sometimes even haggard. She had the kind of dusky skin that brings with it a darkness under the eyes. Once I saw her in an expensive boutique in the mall, and although she was short she somehow dominated the place. There were three assistants and they were all attending on her. They seemed very familiar, in a respectful way. Her small, smartly dressed daughter hovered near her hip with the same deferential air as the salesgirls. She had just finished trying on some clothes and was sorting through what she wanted. Within seconds she had decided on four complete outfits. I got the impression she shopped there often, that she was a regular. I was in awe of the casual ease with which she bought four outfits at a time.

She had this air about her – she was arrogant and smug but at the same time she had an intense, even haunted look. Don't ask me how someone can be smug and haunted at the same time, she just was. And there was that defiant quality, like an insolent schoolgirl. I was envious of her spending power, not of the fact that she could afford it – I suppose
I
could, in a way – but of the fact that she felt comfortable being able to buy so much at once, regarded it as her right. I imagined her as a woman with wardrobes full of clothes.

When first we saw the house advertised for rent I must admit that I wanted to look it over not only because we needed somewhere temporary to live but also because I was curious to see how many wardrobes she had. In fact she had only two, in the master bedroom, and when she went she left them empty. She couldn't possibly have taken all her clothes on the trip with her; she must have packed them away, perhaps in the cellar.

But now they were devoted to their children

They had left their books on the shelves, though, and for educated people they had surprisingly few – and very predictable ones. Again, as with the furniture, there was that peculiar lack of anything idiosyncratic or out of the ordinary. And interestingly, where there was something angst-ridden, like White's
Riders in the
Chariot
or Camus'
The Plague
, it seemed to take on the character of its situation and become complacent, just another complacent book on a complacent bookshelf. I should mention that
he
was the deputy director of the local TAFE college, so perhaps he kept his books at work. I knew him to be a handsome man, flirtatious. It was obvious he fancied himself with women but whether he went any further than flaunting it I've never heard, although a friend of mine said he goosed her once at a party. She'd known the two of them when they were engaged and she said they were intensely sexual together, narcissistic. But now they were devoted to their children, a boy and a girl, always ferrying them to drama classes, or tennis lessons, or pottery group, or something.

That sundeck

That sundeck became a seductive space in our lives. As the weather warmed we seemed to spend more and more time on it. It was where I read the papers in the morning. The children had their breakfast there. Our dog, Percy, lolled about in the sun. I moved my sewing out, set up a coffee table permanently in the corner and worked on my files. There was hardly ever any wind. At night we took the radio out and listened to Triple J. We were conducting an experiment: living without television. I'd yearned to try it for a while and living in a temporary place had seemed a good time to spring it on the kids. They were resistant at first but I managed to effect some tradeoffs, like more pizza for supper and permission to go to a friend's to watch favourite programmes. It meant that occasionally, in the evening, they became restless and bored. Nine o'clock was a critical time, with the homework finished but one hour to go before bedtime. Sometimes they'd sit happily on the sundeck and talk to me.

But on this particular night

But on this particular night Carla was cranky. She decided suddenly that she wanted to move her room around and completely change the look of it. She persuaded Ben to help her with the furniture and they grunted and puffed their way around for half an hour. Then she was seized with the idea of using an old batik tablecloth as a wall-hanging. It was a favourite piece of mine that I'd bought in the '
70
s when I was a student, backpacking in Java. Its faded reds and yellows had brightened up our sleazy flat in the city after Brian and I were married.

Carla began to search for it noisily, rummaging impatiently in the huge linen cupboard in the upstairs hallway. And then suddenly, everything went quiet. After ten minutes had passed without even a rustle of sound I rose lazily from the sundeck and called out through the sliding doors: ‘Carla?'

No reply.

‘
Carla!

' She came into the wide, spacious living room holding up a small book. ‘Look what I found, Mum. I think it's her diary.' And before I could make any sanctimonious adult protestations she began to read aloud. ‘Listen to this.
Tuesday, July 16. Left work early
to make sure I wasn't held up in the traffic. Got to the gym at 4. Worked
out for two hours. Really starting to push myself. Steve is away, kids ate
at Mum's. Skipped dinner. Wednesday, July 17. Scott has worked out a
new set of bridging exercises on the 5 kg weights for me. Said I'll be ready
to go on to the advanced programme soon. Can't wait. Cooked steamed
spinach and new potatoes and lean steak with pureed apple sauce and
rosemary for dinner. Stewed apricots with ricotta and brandy for dessert.
The kids didn't like the ricotta and wanted ice-cream. I ate just spinach
because I'd had a large salad sandwich for lunch (a mistake). Ran 2 Ks
after dinner. Feel very tired.

' Carla looked up at me, her eyes glinting. Ben hovered in the doorway. He seemed as bemused by this recitation as I was. ‘
July
18. Started work on the bench press. Wonderful feeling of stretching. Up
to 20 leg extensions. Broccoli and cheese pie for dinner. High in calcium.
Low-chol cheese. So tired. July 19. Couldn't get to gym until 5.30. So
frustrating. Had to get takeaway. Tired again. Why do I always feel so
tired?

' There was something mesmeric about Carla's reading. I ought to have stopped her then but I hesitated and she read on. ‘
July 20.
Used flex-time to work out from 8.00 to 9.30 this morning. This evening
swam 12 laps of the Superlife pool. Felt drained, probably because of
period, though flow has been light. Ran 3 Ks after dinner. Promised
myself a 10 K run on Saturday afternoon when children at tennis.
A treat. Steve said he thought I might be overdoing it. I am tired, but I
think it was just the fact that Juliet was up last night with a stomach
ache.
'