Love and Other Perishable Items (11 page)

The bell for sixth period sounds.

“What have you got now?” I ask Penny.

“Double art. You?”

“Study period. I’m going to write that letter to Chris.”

“Ah. Well, if you need a break, come and wave at me through the art room window. I’ll strike myself down with indigestion and need to be excused.”

“Will do.”

Dad

Dear Chris,

In the cold light of day, I’m not really sure what to write about. We just said a letter “about my dad,” didn’t we? That could mean anything. Plus it could go on forever, starting from my earliest memory of him and finishing with the manner in which he said good night to me last night.

I can be a pretty wordy lass (you may have noticed), but I seem to be struggling here. Let me tell you about my friend Penny’s dad first. It might be easier for me to describe my dad by juxtaposing him with another one. Having been friends with Penny since seventh grade, I have had ample time to observe her dad. He works at your uni. He used to lecture in history, but now he does something to do with advising exchange students. He likes it.

When I first met Penny, I noticed that every day she’d pull out a lunch box. In it would be two sandwiches made with white bread, a piece of fruit and four crackers with peanut butter and margarine. Sometimes the sandwiches would be tuna, sometimes ham and lettuce, sometimes cheese and tomato,
but the tomato was packed separately in foil so it wouldn’t make the bread go soggy. She was often ambivalent about the crackers and let me have them. Eventually I asked her how come she always had this packed lunch—surely some days you just can’t be bothered making it. I have those days. Or some days I’m running late and don’t have time to make it. “My dad makes it,” she said. And he does. Every morning he makes lunch for her and her brother, Jamie. Get this—when I sleep over on a school night, he makes it for me too!

One time I was sleeping over at Penny’s and we were at the kitchen counter making brownies. Her dad comes in, puts an arm around her, hugs her, kisses her cheek and says something like, “What’s my girl making today?” And when I’ve been over on weeknights, he kisses Penny’s mum when he gets home from work. Like, openmouthed and with feeling. Did you ever see anything like it?

On the mornings when Penny’s dad has to be at university early, he gives Penny and her brother a lift as far as the uni, and they join their buses from there. On the days that he works from home, he gives them a lift to the bus stop at Maroubra Junction to save them the twenty-minute walk.

On the weekend he potters about the house in overalls, fixing this and that, washing all the school uniforms and hanging them out to dry. Penny’s brother, Jamie, plays on a soccer team—well, he did before he got sick recently—and Penny’s dad coaches the team! Seriously. One night a week he and Jamie go off to practice at Lambert Oval and they play against other teams on Saturdays.

One night I was sleeping over at Pen’s and we decided to go to a movie. Once there we decided to see a double feature and were home two hours later than we’d said. Penny’s dad was waiting up in the living room when we got back and sprang to his feet saying, “Where were you girls? I was worried. You must call if you are going to be late.”

It’s not hard to figure out that these things made an impact on me because it’s very different over my way. For starters, my dad is away a lot. He is a director. Plays, TV, film. One of the best. There is not a whole lot of work in Sydney, so he has to go where the work is. This means that up to five months of the year he is away, and it’s been that way for as long as I remember. Directing a play in a different city, touring with a play, doing an episode of a TV show on
location. Last year he went to Perth for three months at a time to teach at the Academy of Performing Arts, and he has a semi-regular gig teaching at a drama school in Singapore. When he is home, he’s out rehearsing a lot, or in his study going over scripts and notes. Or worse, he’s between jobs.

You’d think that when he’s away, it would be harder for my mum, as she’s essentially a single parent. But, in truth, there’s less tension at home when he’s away. As you might have gathered from my Betty Friedan “moment” the other night, my mum does almost all the housework, works full-time and takes care of my little sister, regardless of whether Dad is home or not. I help where I can, but I’m at work three weeknights myself now. I try to keep a low profile at home and not do anything that will (a) bring me to Dad’s notice or (b) add to my mother’s despair.

When Dad is away, the yawning inequality in the “sexual division of labor,” as you put it the other night, is less obvious. When he is at home, I almost always feel angry with him and, it seems, he with me. So all our interactions—which are pretty few and far between in any case—are laced with anger. The ultimate insult comes in the evening, when he fills
the family space with cigarette smoke. Well, they both do. Not only are they going to give themselves cancer, they’re going to take me and Jess with them.

When I picture my mum in my head, she is coming in the front door at 5 p.m., holding Jess on her hip with one arm and a bunch of shopping bags in the other. She always looks tired. On days that I’m not working after school, I try to tidy up the kitchen a bit before she gets home, but more often than not she gets home to a complete mess.

Which brings me to how I picture my dad in my head. About a year ago, I got home from school, hot and sweaty from touch football, and dived into the shower. It was the first time in ages that Dad had been home when I got home from school. He was back in Sydney and preparing to cast a new show. I was in my room drying off and getting dressed when there was a sharp knock on the door and my name was barked out imperiously. I pulled on the last of my clothing and opened the door. Dad informed me I was to “put away the breakfast and lunch things” in the kitchen before Mum got home. Then he disappeared in the direction of his tiny study at the back of the house.
Breakfast and lunch things?
I thought. It was after 4 p.m. I toweled off my hair and slouched down
to the kitchen. The sight that greeted me immediately clarified my orders.

On the kitchen table were the remnants of his breakfast and lunch. There were several dirty plates, a teapot filled with sodden tea leaves, a tea strainer bleeding brown into the pale wood, crumbs everywhere, some raw bacon rind, a heap of apple peelings, a dirty cutting board, a bread knife and the honey jar. The griller was open and displayed a layer of dirty congealed fat. In the sink were the three bowls that Mum, Jess and I had had our cereal in that morning, rinsed and neatly stacked where I had left them. I stood there, tasting my anger and outrage with an open mouth, wondering why on earth he hadn’t as much as thrown out the scraps. Where the hell did he get off thinking that the women of the house existed to clean up after him? I leapt down the stairs two at a time and knocked on the door of his study.

When I was bidden to enter, I demanded to know why he hadn’t cleaned up after not one but two of his meals, and why I should do it for him. My father is extremely quick to anger. His anger is one of the things on this earth that I really fear. It leaves me in no doubt of how powerless I really am. A minute later I was back in the kitchen, disposing of food
scraps, rinsing crockery, wiping crumbs and oozing those familiar tears of impotent rage. That is the image of my father that dominates at the moment. Between that and my mother’s despair, what do you do?

Thanks for listening. I feel like I could tell you anything. And everything.

Amelia

I debate whether to add a row of
x
’s under my signature and decide against it.

Eighth and final period is math with Penny. The worst time to have math. Penny proofreads my letter for me.

“You know,” she says, handing it back, “I can’t remember what we used to talk about before you met this guy.”

“Hmmm.” I stuff the letter into my backpack.

After final bell, I get changed into my work uniform and hurry out to the bus stop with Penny. My bus has already pulled up.

“See ya,” I call over my shoulder, running toward the throng. “Movies on Saturday night?”

“Um, I don’t think I can this week. I’ve got a thing. Family …”

“Okay.” I wave goodbye.

I squeeze onto the bus and ride to work, marveling that the aroma of teenage boy remains so pungent even though the weather is turning cold.

Chris is already on the register next to mine when I get to work.

“Check it out, y’all”—he punches the air in greeting—“Amelia Hayes is in da house!”

Bolstered by the warmth of his greeting, I walk, maybe even
strut, with uncharacteristic daring around to his side of the register and pull my letter out of my pocket.

“You requested a letter, Mr. Harvey,” I say, “and I done brung.” I slide it into the side pocket of his black cargo pants. Whillikers! I just pulled a move straight out of Street Cred Donna’s book!

Chris stops scanning groceries for a moment and faces me. He smiles. It is a special, never-before-seen version of his usual winning smile. He fishes out some folded yellow paper from his other pocket.

“And for you, Ms. Hayes,” he says, sliding it into the side pocket of
my
black pants and giving it the tiniest pat.

I back away a few steps and go behind my own register.

My eyes bore two holes into his back for the duration of the shift. At about eight, he turns around and bends down to retrieve a potato that’s escaped from the scales. When he stands up, he winks at me and smiles.

Heaven help Amelia Joan Hayes, for she cannot help herself.

January 25

The workdays are long, especially when it’s sunny outside. Ed and I have set ourselves the target of making up a new in-joke at the beginning of the week and having it instituted across the part-time staff by week’s end. Young Amelia is the quickest of the lot, by a long shot.

There’s this egotistical little shit of a checkout operator by the name of Jeremy. He’s all of fifteen or sixteen and doesn’t he reckon he’s a player. He holds court down at the service desk on Thursday nights to a seemingly unending stream of private school girls. Sells them cigarettes, no doubt, and flirts like it’s going out of fashion. Bianca flirts with him shamelessly, which fuels his ego even more.

I always thought that being completely superficial was mostly the realm of girls. I can see that Bianca, Kelly and, in my rare moments of lucidity, Kathy are pretty plastic when you get down to it. Jeremy is their male equivalent. I can’t stand him.
He
doesn’t have a pair of breasts to redeem him. After work I see him hanging around the food court with his skanky minions, wearing a
baseball cap backwards
—no shit.

Amelia is Jeremy’s opposite. She’s real. She’s literate. I like her a lot. Or maybe I just like the idea of her. Because she’s so young that she’s out of the question, I can mentally make her into the Perfect Woman in Waiting. Is that what I’m doing?

Moving swiftly on.

Yesterday morning I started work at seven, helping out in Perishables until the store opened at eight. I worked through till close at nine, by which time I was climbing the walls. At five to nine, I was minding the service desk while Ed was out for a
smoke. Bianca was busy making some careful adjustments to Jeremy’s bow tie and gestured to me to do the closing message over the store PA system. It usually goes a little something like this: “Attention, customers, the time is now five minutes to nine and this store will cease trading in approximately five minutes. Please conclude your purchases and make your way to the checkouts. Thank you for shopping with Coles, the Fresh Food People.” I sometimes wake up at night saying it. Anyway, I picked up the microphone, and instead of doing the closing message, I started belting out “Khe Sanh”—this ’80s pub rock anthem about the miserable homecoming of a Vietnam vet. And I got as far as there being no V-day heroes in 1973 before Bianca wrestled the microphone from me and spat chips.

While she shrieked at me with Jeremy smirking behind her, the PA crackled to life again and Ed’s voiced boomed through the store. He continued where I had left off for a good few lines until someone wrestled the back dock mike off him. Ed and I are as one.

It turned out there weren’t any customers left in the store.

January 30

Rohan’s back from Europe. Going to the pub with him, Mick and Suze. Now.

February 8

Uni resumes in three weeks. Rohan has found an apartment in Newcastle and we are going up for his housewarming party next week. He starts the new job in two weeks. I’m still working
twenty-five to thirty hours per week at Coles, but really hope to cut it down to twelve when uni begins. Zoe has also found herself a graduate position at an accounting firm in the city, and Dad is chuffed. She reckons she’s moving into her own place as soon as she saves enough money for rent and furniture. Good for her, I say. She hasn’t told Dad and Mum about this plan. Dad will freak out big-time and say she should stay at home until she can buy her own place. “Why throw your money away on rent?” is his standard response. I see the payment of rent more as an investment in your own sanity and independence.