Eloquent Silence (43 page)

Marvin: ‘It didn’t work, then, did it?’

Me: ‘No, but it might yet.’

Marvin: ‘Bullshit.’

Me: ‘Yes, Marvin, if you say so. I bow to your superior wisdom and life experience.’

––––––––

G
raeme’s first wife’s sudden death was a terrible shock to her family. The fact that their father took up with another woman came as a surprise to most of them, and not a pretty one as they seemed to think he should live out his days being cloistered with his family.

Before we were married and were still living in separate homes, I overheard such comments as –

‘Wouldn’t you think she’d stay away and let us have the time alone with Daddy when we’re here on holidays?’

The fact that Daddy wanted me there and invited me to stay was not in the equation.

––––––––

P
icture: A family gathering somewhere during Year Two. Marvin is in the kitchen being aided and abetted by wife Wendy and the two sisters-in-law, Carla and Rebecca, who are serving the roast meal he is carving.

From my spot in front of the television I can hear him ordering,

‘That’s Valerie’s. That one is for Valerie, Carla. That’s Valerie’s like that! Leave it, Wendy, leave it just as it is! Rebecca, hear what I’m saying, please! Don’t you touch it. Just leave it alone. It’s fine like that.’

I know it’s mine because I am the only Valerie present on that particular day and I know it will not be especially good. I may not be the brightest light on the Christmas tree but something tells me he is making a point. I sit and look towards the kitchen, open-mouthed and wondering what treat is in store for me.

We gather at the table. Everyone else has ample meat, two, three slices folded on their plate. Mine is his chosen slice, tiny, with streaks of gristle through it and fat surrounding it, the slice with ‘Valerie’ written on it in invisible ink.

I hadn’t as yet taken on the role of second wife so there was still time to outrage me out of the game with these simplistic methods. He wanted to offend me. He succeeded in doing so but I stayed on ‘keeping company’ with Graeme regardless. Sometimes very uncomfortably but I’m made of pretty perverse stuff. Reflecting on my fate I decided that I still wanted to be with Graeme and would put up with a little more rubbish if needs must.

Because of this and other ornery behavior I was aware Marvin had made himself and/or the others a promise to rid the family of me for reasons best known to themselves. Probably because they didn’t like me because I’m not their mother/ mother-in-law. A rare insight granted to me via means of my female intuition over the progress of two years at that point.

Ridding themselves and their father of my presence would automatically raise their mother from the dead. Not!

I assessed them with cold, level eyes and decided that I would not let them scare me off for both Graeme’s and my sake as we needed one another and got along well together when we were not being subjected to this kind of infantile behavior.

Graeme, who hated personal conflict of any kind, said I shouldn’t expect his children, their partners and the grandchildren to love me the way mine love him because I had divorced their father whom nobody liked at that time.

However, his children’s mother, whom they liked a lot, had died a natural, swift and unexpected death. That made a profound difference in the acceptance stakes and I must not expect to win them over to any further extent than cool politeness and quiet jeering.

Okay, says I. I don’t love any of you all, neither, so how do you like them apples?

Henceforth, I never did expect love in any form from any of them. Although I thought in time they would cease to see me as an outsider or freakish or weirdo or alien or however they judged me to be, it didn’t happen. That they would come to care for me the way my children cared for Graeme. Boy, was I in for a shock.

I could always tell when the adults had been particularly into me with knife-like precision as the children couldn’t hide their attitude to me the way the adults could. Those of the younger generation would regard me like the wicked witch of the north while the adults were giving a passable imitation of treating me like an ordinary human being. This was just a little two-faced behavior in case their father should notice they thought of me with contempt.

Yes, I could always tell by the kids, God love ’em. Game and set to the older generation but not match. As yet for the moment, anyway. I let each strained moment pass for the simple reason that it suited me to do so.

––––––––

I
grew incredulous at the things about me that sent them into paroxysms of amusement. When I bought my first computer, the guy who sold it to me connected me to an Internet Service Provider. In arranging the e-mail address and the account name and address with the company, he spelt my name and the street name, (which happen to be the same), incorrectly. ‘Percell’ instead of ‘Purcell.’

I had proudly sent Marvin and Wendy an e-mail, along with any other family members whose address I happened to have. There was no reply from them, but when Wendy telephoned her father there were gales of laughter from this end of the conversation along with comments about people who didn’t know how to spell their own name. Marvin had wondered who this strange person was sending him e-mails. Valerie Percell. Who in God’s name was that? Wouldn’t you think even the worst clueless dunderhead in the southern hemisphere could spell their own name? More jocularity. Petty. Precious. Vomitus.

––––––––

O
nce Graeme and I were spending a couple of weeks with Marvin and Wendy at their home in the south where he had been transferred for his banking job. We were going to launch out by ourselves for a few days, do a little touring around. We hadn’t made any motel bookings for the first night we would be on the road.

Marvin said he would take care of it, found his motel literature and rang a motel on the other side of the state.

‘I want to make a booking for my father-in-law and his wife for tomorrow night,’ said he, a mass of officiousness.

My ears pricked up and I wondered why a motel owner on the other side of Victoria would care whether the couple were his parents, his parents-in-law, two single people, two lovers, or three blind mice.

Might he just as well have said, ‘I want to make a booking for tomorrow night for two people by the name of Purcell?’

Would that not have served the purpose? Did he expect the motel owner to come out and give me a special inspection from head to toe because I was not actually Marvin’s mother-in-law but only the wife of his father-in-law, the interloper going around in disguise as a real wife? Was there a dotted line upon which I would have to sign as an intruder into the Purcell family?

Graeme just stands there with his bare face hanging out, unreadable, blank. Defending me was never his strong point. He knows Marvin is God’s gift to efficiency when it comes to dealing with traveling questions and motel bookings. I walk on eggshells trying to pretend I am so stupid that I do not notice I am the outsider some twelve years into the relationship.

––––––––

M
aybe it was the fairy penguins that finally did it. Or rather, what happened with the fairy penguins. On our trip back to our home town from where we had been visiting, we were accompanied some of the way by Marvin, Wendy and their children. Graeme and I went to the beach at dusk to see the fairy penguins coming from the beach into their burrows for the night.

In the afternoon we had found a burrow with a pair nested inside and discussed this with Marvin. Red-faced with indignation, he proceeded to work himself into a lather about the shocking behavior of unspeakable tourists who flash camera lights into the faces of the tiny, defenseless birds. The sheer awfulness of these ignorant tourists and the virtue of tour guides who confiscate cameras in the face of this behavior filled Marvin with wide-nostrilled righteousness.

Marvin and Wendy along with their sons, Oscar and Harvey and daughter Mahalia, went on home to their abode, as this was as far as they were accompanying us. Marvin’s habitual halo was visible to Graeme, as always.  He regards this person as an intergalactic being lacking only in wings, propelled along by a shaft of sunlight beaming from his nether regions. There is a succinct and more basic way of expressing this, but you will know what I mean.

Graeme and I set up our vigil on the rocks by the ocean, eventually spying a fairy penguin between two boulders. I watched the weeny bird while Graeme climbed around looking for others.

Unsuccessful at finding more, in the course of time he returned to the burrow where I was keeping watch, and to my amazement and horror, set off a flash in the little creature’s face.

I yelled at him, ‘Don’t do that. You shouldn’t do that.’

I ran off towards the car but paused beside the burrow of the pair we had seen earlier in the day. Graeme caught up with me and shone his torch into their Lilliputian faces cringing in fear inside the burrow. They had been running in and out of their nest before he arrived while I watched them in silence.

They were frozen, terrified when he flashed the torch into their nest. Next, he flashed the camera into their petrified little faces.

Graeme said it was the only way he could get a photograph and laughed with his mouth wide open in delight to think he had managed to capture the birds on film. I knew that come Hell or high water he would want a photo for his family back home in the Alice, proof positive that we had seen these diminutive creatures on our trip to Victoria.

When we got home he must have hot-footed it off to tell the rest of his family about the episode the way he bolted off to tell them about every tiny incident in our lives,. I can just imagine him entertaining them with his anecdotes about my semi-hysteria over frightening the little creatures with bright lights.

At the next family gathering fairy penguins were mentioned and much sniggering behind hands ensued. At a later date, Marvin sent a message to say he would try to get a photo of fairy penguins during the three weeks holiday Gordon and Carla spent with them in the south. The message caused more hilarity and hoots of laughter.

So letting a flash off in the face of these miniature creatures became the in-house joke for Graeme’s clan that season. Call me dim-witted, but I simply can’t see the humor in terrifying these tiny birds with a torch or a flash, nor even, for that matter in my getting upset over the same. I fail to see humor in torturing defenseless animals but obviously I’m on my own there.

How much of our relationship was private and how much was common knowledge, seeing as Graeme felt called upon to visit his local sons and their wives every day if possible? I suppose he had to talk about something to pass the time away. Our discussions or differences of opinion as well as my idiosyncrasies would have been as interesting as anything else when news was a little on the scarce side. It all helped to keep the fire of righteous indignation going when it came to getting me out of their lives.

I soon learned after our marriage that he told every blessed thing to his family immediately, things that I often thought were too personal. Like how I had purchased new multi-colored briefs for him. I was bemused as to why anyone would care to discuss their underwear with their grown children.

Unfortunately, they never learned to keep this exchange to themselves, but had to sneer, roll their eyeballs or suck in their cheeks and blow out hard to show they were in the know about our personal discussions.

I found this habit annoying and trivial in the extreme, and his family’s tendency to display their knowledge tasteless and crass. I waited for some brilliant comeback to arrive into my head ready to be delivered but nothing ever did until three days later.

And yet he respected their privacy, never telling me personal details of their lives or their business. Not that I wanted to know. Why the difference in attitude? Was he displaying his broadminded acceptance of my triteness? With the air of condescension, was he making excuses for me in my eccentricity and asking them to forgive the strangeness of the company he chose to keep and the woman he chose to marry?

I wonder did he care about me for myself or was I only there to make up the numbers so his children could live their lives without worrying about his being lonely? Was he trying to make their perceived judgment of me turn me into a normal seeming person in their estimation? Trying to help them forgive him for allowing my muscling in on their precious group?

At first he would come back and repeat their comments about my peculiarities and oddities until he got his head bitten off a few times. But I know that didn’t prevent him reporting every incident to them verbatim. I could tell by the expressions on their faces when certain areas of our lives came into discussion that they knew more about me and my family than I probably did myself.

After twelve years I hadn’t gained a place in anyone’s heart. Not a chink had been opened to me. I was still the eccentric outsider while they all clutched together in loyal style and laughed at the peculiarities of me and mine. They had a few of their own that wouldn’t stand too close scrutiny. I remained politely remote, determined not to allow them to upset my equilibrium although this was done with difficulty at times. In my heart of hearts I knew that our days together were numbered.

Being a second wife is ‘for the birds.’ Stress had become my constant companion and I was sick unto death with the whole set-up.

––––––––

O
r maybe it was the Chicken Kiev that finalized the marriage as it staggered on to its inevitable end. While we were on this same jaunt in Victoria—the holiday featuring the fairy penguins—for some consecutive days Marvin reported that his children wanted Chicken Kiev for dinner on Thursday night. I said I would provide the ingredients.

After trying to purchase fresh Chicken Kiev, I found I had to purchase frozen ones. I didn’t cook the meal, knowing this would contaminate the chicken with my unseemly germs and make it inedible, leaving the preparation to Wendy, who cooked the pieces with vegetables.