A Charm of Powerful Trouble (28 page)

If there are sisters, then one must be bad and the other good. One ugly the other beautiful. One fair, the other dark. One fallen, the other redeemed. There is always an ‘other' when there are sisters. Stories tell it that way My mother said that when she was a girl she took these stories literally. It wasn't until she was older - much older - that she saw that these dichotomies were really aspects of the same person.

Beth was always the difficult one. She spat out food she didn't like, simply refused to swallow it, so there it was - broccoli or mashed turnip - in a big
splot
at the side of her plate. She talked too loudly, talked with her mouth full, and picked fights with Emma, so that there seemed to be a perpetual festering quarrel between them. She ran away from school so often that the teachers knew at once where to go to look for her. When she was young it was the park at the end of her street; when she was older a certain coffee shop near the school. She didn't head to these places so regularly and predictably because she was stupid. It was simply that she didn't care; getting caught was part of the game. And she was clever, so clever that none of this affected her school results.

When she was older she went out at night without her mother's permission to pop concerts with her friends. She went to the airport and screamed when the Beatles arrived. At one of the concerts she wore a see-through blouse with nothing on underneath - she showed it to Emma the next morning before rolling it into a ball and putting it into her bottom drawer.

She was beautiful. Beauty gives you advantages and Beth took them all. People will put up with more from you if you are beautiful. Countless boys were interested in her. They'd ring her up and she'd casually tell them off and laugh at their bumbling attempts to go out with her. She cared for none of them.

But Emma swallowed everything. She swallowed the idea that girls must be polite and kind and considerate to others. She finished up her dinner tidily. When her mother was tired, she never moaned that she was bored but played by herself in the garden with her collection of dolls. She kept a pebble as round and as smooth as a lie in her pocket to suck on when she felt lonely.

Every morning their mother brushed out Beth's and Emma's hair and plaited it for school. But Beth was never satisfied. She made her mother pull it out and plait it again and again so that it looked just right, though she could never explain what ‘just right' was. One day, as Emma sat meekly at the table with her school ribbons in her hands waiting for her turn, her mother picked up a sharp pair of dressmaking scissors that lay nearby and hacked off Beth's plait, just like that - and threw it down in frustration on the table.

Beth's dark plait drops down in front of Emma - she can hear the plop as it hits the table top. Years later Lizzie's blonde one does the same. Our mother looks as though she's seen a ghost.

Emma woke in the night with the urgent need to pee. She put on her light and made her way as quietly as she could down the ladder from the loft. Yesterday afternoon Flora had showed her the outdoor dunny and said it was better to pee on the grass so they didn't fill it too quickly There was a torch near the back door in case you needed to go outside at night.

Emma took herself a little way from the house and squatted on the grass. She hadn't given up hope that there might be blood one day, though she hadn't done anything to hasten it. She had vague thoughts of running up and down hills, or of sitting in a hot bath with a bottle of gin. Isn't that what you could do? Or when she got back to Sydney she knew that one of the women who came to the meetings would be able to arrange something for her if she wanted it.

She closed her eyes and rocked backwards and forwards and she told herselt
My nume is Emma Montgomery and I have nofather or mother or sister or anyone who is close to me in the world. There is only me and the night the stars and the damp grass and the yeasty odour between my legs.

There is the thing inside me, the small wriggling tadpole thing.

She tried to think of Blake Yeats but she couldn't even call up his face. He had met a man named Hans in Amsterdam and he and Hans were travelling to Venice. That was the last she'd heard of him. His letters were coming less and less often and she knew that one day they would cease altogether as he and Hans rode off into the sunset together. My mother knew what Blake Yeats meant when he whispered harshly in her ear that he
wished she
was a man.

Emma thought of Claudio, of his smile and his startling eyebrows and his air of supreme confidence, and of all his wafting madonnas, and he seemed very far away and unattainable. She wiped away a self-pitying tear and took her head from her knees and looked up at the world. The night was predictably lovely, with clear, bright stars.

After Beth died there were reminders of her everywhere. The routines and patterns of their life gaped with her absence. Emma's mother couldn't bear to go into Beth's room, so it was left as it was, the door shut. Emma crept in there sometimes and lay on her sister's bed. She gazed at the posters on her wall, glanced through her magazines, hung her head over the edge of the bed to stare at the dust balls and withered apple cores beneath it. She flicked through Beth's stack of records and opened and shut the lid of her record player. She examined the clothes in her drawers, shaking them out and looking at them wanderingly, then putting them to her nose briefly before folding and replacing them.

She longed to escape the dull routine of her mother's suburban house, which was even more chill and claustrophobic after Beth died. All the fighting had left the house and, Emma saw, any of the life and vibrancy it might have had as well. She wished for some of Beth's anger, she longed for her to flounce once more through the door, to yell at her for dabbing some of her precious perfume along one wrist, to hear her say in her careless voice,
Emma, you are just so square
.

But Emma was a good girl, a good daughter. She finished her last year at school, won a scholarship and enrolled at university. She'd have liked to be able to rent a room in a student house but that was out of the question. She longed for danger and difference; she stood in the dusky night and hugged her arms around herself and felt the thrill and possibilities of life.

Without Beth to compete with there was an opening for her to be the bad girl, the beautiful and bold girl, but she wasn't brave enough for that. She couldn't get out of the habit of doing what her mother wanted (a sensible arts degree, not art school) and wore what her mother chose for her (pleated wool skirts, hand-knitted jumpers, a machine-knitted twinset for best). But she practised little subversions. She'd bought a pair of old jeans at an op shop and each day when she arrived at the university in her pleated wool skirt she headed to the toilet to shuck it off and slip into the jeans. They soon became filthy through weeks of not being washed and she liked them that way She let her shirt hang out under her jumper, messed up her hair, and that was all that was needed to effect a transformation.

Emma didn't want to do things behind her mother's back. But she didn't want to hurt her either, so she pretended to be the daughter her mother wanted. She thought that what her mother didn't know wouldn't hurt her.

Wearing a pair of old blue jeans was the least of the things Emma kept from her mother. She had also told her that she was staying back at night to use the library when she was really attending women's liberation meetings at an old house near the university, the house she later moved into.

My mother understands disguise and metamorphosis better than most people. The skins you can slip out of to reveal the person you really are. You can slip into a disguise, too. Put something on.

Or you can change from within, become an amorphous mush and form into something other. It was no accident that she created the sculpture of the leather woman. She was as slippery as a snake, my mother.

When her mother died, it was the real thing.

It wasn't like her father, or Aunt Em, who had appeared to be merely swallowed by the universe, sucked up into a mysterious and grand state of non-being. Her mother's death was the way death was meant to be: painful and drawn-out, a gradual sickening and wasting with time for tears and regrets.

Emma sat with her, wishing she knew what to say Her mother craved sweet, cold things; Emma bought her tubs of icecream from the hospital shop and spooned it tenderly into her mouth. ‘I miss Beth,' her mother said.

At another time she said, ‘I was always so angry at your father for leaving us like that. Always tramping off into the wilderness . . . going off on that . . . wild-goose chase for new plants when he had a wife and daughters dependent on him. I did my best to look after us all. I'm only sorry now that we didn't have more fun.'

Every time her mother spoke like that Emma couldn't find a reply It wasn't that she wanted to remain silent. It was that she was already in the habit of not saying what she felt. For she didn't even know what it was she did feel. She patted her mother's hand. She thought,
I'm too youngfor this. I don't know how to help people die.
Her mother said softly, looking at her pleadingly, daring Emma to contradict her: ‘When I get out of here I don't want to waste another precious moment inside the house. We'll take picnic teas to the park, to the beach.'