Looking for Alibrandi
Table of Contents
To Mummy and Daddy
Marisa and Daniela—
Life is good because of you
Also for my grandparents
Salvatore, Carmela and Maria
In memory of
Giovanni Marchetta, 1910–1991
Nonno, when are we ever going to
stop missing you?
One
PANIC WAS MY
first reaction to the multiple choice options that lay on my desk in front of me. I glanced at the students around me before turning back to question three. I hated multiple choice. Yet I didn’t want to get question three wrong. I didn’t want to get any of them wrong. The outcome would be too devastating for my sense of being.
So I began with elimination. D was completely out of the question, as was A, so that left B and C. I pondered both for quite a while, and just as I was about to make my final decision I heard my name being called.
“Josephine?”
“Huh?”
“I think you mean ‘I beg your pardon,’ don’t you, dear?”
“I beg your pardon, Sister.”
“What are you doing? You’re reading, aren’t you, young lady?”
“Um . . . yeah.”
“‘Um, yeah?’ Excellent, Josephine. I can see you walking away with the English prize this year.
Now stand up
.”
So my final school year began. I had promised myself that I would be a saint for this year alone. I would make the greatest impression on my teachers and become the model student. I knew it would all fail. But just not on the first day.
Sister Gregory walked toward me, and when she was so close that I could see her mustache, she held out her hand.
“Show me what you’re reading.”
I handed it to her and watched her mouth purse itself together and her nostrils flare in triumph because she knew she was going to get me.
She skimmed it and then handed it back to me. I could feel my heart beating fast.
“Read from where you were up to.”
I picked up the magazine and cleared my throat. “ ‘What kind of a friend are you?’” I read from Hot Pants magazine.
She looked at me pointedly.
“ ‘You are at a party,’” I began with a sigh, “ ‘and your best friend’s good-looking, wealthy and successful boyfriend tries to make a pass. Do you: A–Smile obligingly and steal away into the night via the back door; B–Throw your cocktail all over his Country Road suit; C–Quietly explain the loyalty you have toward your friend; D–Tell your friend instantly, knowing that she will make a scene.’”
You can understand, now, why I found it hard to pick between B and C.
“May I ask what this magazine has to do with my religion class, Miss?”
“Religion?”
“Yes, dear,” she continued in her sickeningly sarcastic tone. “The one we are in now.”
“Well . . . quite a lot, Sister.”
I heard snickers around me as I tried to make up as much as I could along the way.
Religion class, first period Monday morning, is the place to try to pull the wool over the eyes of Sister Gregory. (She kept her male saint’s name although the custom went out years ago. She probably thinks it will get her into heaven. I don’t think she realizes that feminism has hit religion and that the female saints in heaven are probably also in revolt.)
“Would you like to explain yourself, Josephine?”
I looked around the classroom, watching everyone shrugging almost sympathetically.
They thought I was beaten.
“We were talking about the Bible, right?”
“I personally think that you don’t know what we’ve been talking about, Josephine. I think you’re trying to fool me.”
The nostrils flared again.
Sister Gregory is famous for nostril-flaring. Once I commented to someone that she must have been a horse in another life. She overheard and scolded me, saying that, as a Catholic, I shouldn’t believe in reincarnation.
“Fool you, Sister? Oh, no. It’s just that while you were speaking I remembered the magazine. You were talking about today’s influences that affect our Christian lives, right?”
Anna, one of my best friends, turned to face me and nodded slightly.
“And?”
“Well, Sister, this magazine is a common example,” I said, picking it up and showing everyone. “It’s full of rubbish. It’s full of questionnaires that insult our intelligence. Do you think they have articles titled ‘Are you a good Christian?’ or ‘Do you love your neighbor?’ No. They have articles titled ‘Do you love your sex life?’ knowing quite well that the average age of the reader is fourteen. Or ‘Does size count?’ and let me assure you, Sister, they are not referring to his height.
“I brought this magazine in today, Sister, to speak to everyone about how insulted we are as teenagers and how important it is that we think for ourselves and not through magazines that exploit us under the guise of educating us.”
Sera, another friend of mine, poked her fingers down her mouth as if she was going to vomit.
Sister and I stared at each other for a long time before she held out her hand again. I passed the magazine to her knowing she hadn’t been fooled.
“You can pick it up from Sister Louise,” she said, referring to the principal.
The bell rang and I packed my books quickly, wanting to escape her icy look.
“You’re full of it,” Sera said as we walked out. “And you owe me a magazine.”
I threw my books into my locker and ignored everyone’s sarcasm.
“Well, what was it?” Lee grinned. “A, B, C or D?”
“I would have gone with him,” Sera said, spraying half a can of hair spray around her gelled hair.
“Sera, if they jailed people for ruining the ozone layer, you’d get life,” I told her, turning back to Lee. “I was going to go for the cocktail on the Country Road suit.”
The second bell for our next class rang, and with a sigh I made another pledge to myself that I would be a saint. On the whole I make plenty of pledges that I don’t keep.
My name, by the way, is Josephine Alibrandi and I turned seventeen a few months ago. (The seventeen that Janis Ian sang about where one learns the truth.) I’m in my last year of high school at St. Martha’s, which is situated in the eastern suburbs, and next year I plan to study law.
For the last five years we have been geared for this year. The year of the HSC (the High School Certificate), where one’s whole future can skyrocket or go down the toilet, or so they tell us. Personally I feel that the HSC is the least of my problems. Believe me, I could write a book about problems. Yet my mother says that as long as we have a roof over our head we have nothing to worry about. Her naïveté really scares me.
We live in Glebe, a suburb just outside the city center of Sydney and ten minutes away from the harbor. Glebe has two facades. One is of beautiful tree-lined streets with gorgeous old homes, and the other, which is supposed to be trendy, has old terrace houses with views of outhouses and clothes-lines. I belong to the latter. Our house is an old terrace. We, my mother Christina and I, live on the top. We were actually renting the place till I was twelve, but the owner sold it to us for a great price, and although I’ve calculated that Mama will have it paid off when I’m thirty-two, it’s good not to be renting in these days of housing problems.
My mother and I have a pretty good relationship, if a bit erratic. One minute we love each other to bits and spend hours in deep and meaningful conversation and next minute we’ll be screeching at each other about the most ridiculous thing, from my room being in a state of chaos to the fact that she won’t let me stay overnight at a friend’s home.
She works as a secretary and translator for a few doctors in Leichhardt, a suburb unfortunately close to my grandmother’s home, which means I have to go straight to Nonna’s in the afternoon and wait for her. That really gets on my nerves. Firstly, the best-looking guys in the world take the bus to Glebe while the worst take the bus to where my grandmother lives. Secondly, if I go straight home in the afternoon I can play music full volume, whereas if I go to Nonna’s the only music she has is
Mario Lanza’s Greatest Hits
.
My mother is pretty strict with me. My grandmother tries to put her two cents’ worth in as well, but Mama hates her butting in. The two of them are forever at loggerheads with each other. Like whenever school camp comes along, it’s fights galore. My grandmother thinks that if a member of our family isn’t looking after me I’ll get raped or murdered. She accuses my mother of being a bad mother for not caring enough and letting me go. Mama almost gives in to her each time, and some days when the three of us are together it’s World War III.
So not being able to go out a lot is one of my many problems. My biggest, though, is being stuck at a school dominated by rich people. Rich parents, rich grandparents. Mostly Anglo-Saxon Australians, who I can’t see having a problem in the world.
Then there are the rich Europeans. They’re the ones who haven’t had a holiday for twenty years just so their children can go to expensive schools and get the proper education that they missed out on. These people might have money, but they’re grocers or builders, mainly laborers. However, they were smart. They moved out of the inner west and inner city and became “respectable.” Being respectable has made them acceptable.
I come under the “scholarship” category, and when I say that, I would rather be the daughter of a laborer.
I felt disadvantaged from the beginning. Maybe because I hadn’t gone to the same primary school as them. Or maybe because I received the six-year English scholarship. I don’t know why I tried so hard to win it. But it backfired on me because I ended up going to a school I didn’t like. I wanted to go to a school in the inner west where all my friends had gone. They were Italian and Greek and we ruled primary school. They were on my level. I related to them. They knew what it meant not to be allowed to do something. They knew what it meant to have a grandmother dressed in black for forty years. I looked like them. Dark hair, dark eyes, olive skin. We sounded alike as well. It felt good being with other confused beings. We were all caught up in the middle of two societies.
I think I had it worst. My mother was born here, so as far as the Italians were concerned, we weren’t completely one of them. Yet because my grandparents were born in Italy we weren’t completely Australian. Despite that, primary school was the only time I was with people I could compare notes with and find a comfortable place alongside. We’d slip our Italian and Greek into our English and swap salami and prosciutto sandwiches at lunchtime and life was good in the school yard. Life outside school, though, was a different story.
The reaction of the Italian mothers to my mother being unmarried drove me crazy at times. There is nothing terribly romantic about my mother’s supposed fall from grace. She slept with the boy next door when they were sixteen and before anything could be decided his family moved to Adelaide. Although he knew she was pregnant he never bothered to contact her again. We do know that he’s alive and is a barrister in Adelaide, but that’s about it. I don’t know where the logic is but back then no one was allowed to come and stay at my house. I knew they wanted to, yet I never understood why they couldn’t. God knows what their parents thought my mother would do or say to their children.
I think things got worse when I started at St. Martha’s because I began to understand what the absence of a father meant. Also there were no Europeans like me. No Europeans who didn’t have money to back them up. The ones like me didn’t belong in the eastern and northern suburbs.
I used to hear my illegitimacy mentioned during the first years at St. Martha’s, but nobody has spoken about it for ages. Still I wish someone else at school had a Bohemian mother who believed in free love back then. It’s an embarrassing contradiction when your mother gets pregnant out of wedlock because her Catholic upbringing prohibits contraception.
Even though the girls at St. Martha’s don’t mention it, I bet you they’re talking about me behind my back. I can feel it in my bones. It makes me feel I will never be part of their society and I hate that because I’m just as smart as they are.
Anyway, the other day, after the magazine incident, I couldn’t wait to get out of St. Martha’s. When I went to see Sister Louise, she handed me back the magazine and asked me to write a two-thousand-word conversation between myself and the editor of
Hot Pants
magazine.
I took the bus straight home instead of going to see my grandmother, deciding that I’d use the HSC as an excuse not to see her for most of this year.
I was relieved to be going home because it was so hot. The temperature must have been in the high nineties. I just wanted to put on my shorts and sunbake on the balcony.
I could see the English guys who live on the bottom floor of our terrace house sitting on the front veranda, stripped to the waist and drinking beer. They used to be backpackers, living in the youth hostel up the road, before deciding they wanted more privacy. I get on really well with one of them. His name is Gary and he’s from a place called Brighton in England. He always invites me in for a cup of tea, which is so strange. I mean, Australian guys don’t really sit around drinking tea, yet he seems as comfortable sipping his tea and talking about his mother as he does drinking his beer and chanting Tottenham soccer songs.
“My mother wants to know when you’re going to mow this lawn,” I asked them, taking the mail out of the box.
Our front lawn is tiny. The deal is that my mother tends the garden and the guys look after the lawn. They’re usually pretty good about it. They even painted the wooden fence and front door a beautiful deep green, which looks great because the outside of the house is yellow.
“How can you bear that uniform in this heat, Jose?” Gary asked, handing me his can of beer.
I took a sip and handed it back.
“Believe me, I’m melting.”
Later on, when I was down to a T-shirt and shorts, I made myself a sandwich. I didn’t hear Mama when she came in. She could have been standing at the kitchen door for at least five minutes before I noticed her.
She looked worried.
“You okay?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Let me guess. You’re wondering how a beautiful specimen like me could have an ugly mother like you,” I said, putting the butter back into the fridge.
That is a joke because my mother is absolutely gorgeous. She has a beautiful olive complexion. I have a few blemishes. (I hate using the word “pimple.”)