Roadside Sisters (4 page)

Recalling this episode as she listened to the domesticated waterfall filling the washing machine, she had a vision of herself and Wanda sailing into the void. And as the car somersaulted, end over end until it crashed and exploded in flames at the bottom of the chasm, it was trailed by a spectacular flight of
black-and-gold sleeveless polyester-mix football jumpers and massive undies with super-absorbent gussets.

With the first load of washing on, Nina made herself a cup of tea, slapped a chunk of Coon cheese on a Salada biscuit and thought about ringing Meredith. She considered this for a while, fearing that if Meredith knew Annie was having second thoughts she might bail out too. But then . . . if she made a pre-emptive strike?

This sort of strategic thinking was second nature to Nina. She had, after all, spent fifteen years pleading with, persuading, cajoling and threatening her husband and sons to comply with her directions. And if those tactics didn’t work, there was always the trio of last resort—flattery, bribery and/or tears. In the end she risked making the call. There were too many details to finalise—including whether she would need a new outfit for the wedding. Finding anything in a size 18 that looked halfway decent on her would take some serious effort.

As it turned out, Nina’s fears were well-founded. ‘I know I said I’d come, Nina, but I’m flat-out here at the store. If I go away now there will be any number of my ladies utterly furious that I’m off for two weeks at the end of April, and I can’t leave it to Caroline to run everything, she’s not up to it. That comes to $350.80—shall I put it on credit?’

‘Pardon?’ said Nina.

‘Would you sign here, please? That’s lovely, thanks so much. I’ll call you when that silverware comes in . . . Bye-bye now.’

‘Hello? . . . Meredith, can you hear me?’

‘My regulars will be considering themes for winter and eyeing off the pear and apple needlepoint cushions through the front window. And where will I be? Lost somewhere in the back of beyond! They’ll kick their Shar-Pei puppies in sheer frustration all the way down High Street. And, truly, who could blame them?’

Nina glanced out her kitchen window to next-door’s lemon tree, as if she needed reassurance that she was actually on the same planet as Meredith. ‘Really?’ she marvelled. ‘There are women who actually change their cushions according to the seasons?’

‘Oh, don’t be daft, Nina, of course there are!’

Nina walked to her lounge room and surveyed the ten-dollar cushions she’d bought years ago from Home Depot. Dark brown corduroy, so they didn’t show stains. There were only two seasons in Nina’s home. Football and cricket.

‘Meredith, you promised!’ Nina tried not to sound too needy. She knew that wouldn’t cut it with Meredith any more than it had with Annie.

‘I don’t remember promising anything!’ Meredith was indignant. ‘I did say it sounded like it could be fun, but—’

‘And it will—it will be heaps of fun. Please come. I promise you’ll have a great time! You’ll kick yourself if you miss out!’ This was Nina at her upbeat, pleasing best.

Meredith, however, was scarcely listening. ‘That tablecloth is genuine Irish linen. Quite hard to find these days, but you really shouldn’t settle for anything less if it’s for a christening
luncheon . . . Those sheets? Egyptian cotton. Feel them. Superb quality.’

Nina thought of the boys’ favourite flannelette sheets covered in a million tiny pills. She spoke up over the clatter of a herd of high heels on the polished floorboards of Meredith’s store. ‘Annie’s coming over on Saturday to check out the van. She’s really looking forward to the trip. She’s so excited.’ Another white lie. All in the good cause of Nina’s sanity. ‘She really needs a break. And so do you. Why don’t you come over as well?’

‘Look, I have to go. There’s a veritable traffic jam here in napery. Alright, I’ll come over on Saturday around lunchtime. But I’m not promising—’

‘I know. You’re not promising anything.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Great! See you then.’

Nina immediately put plans into action for her Saturday summit. She was confident she could persuade both Annie and Meredith to come. She was good at this sort of thing. She should have been a member of some kind of delegation to draw up a road map thingy for peace in Iraq.

It was almost midnight when Nina wrestled another container of bolognaise sauce into her freezer. It was a refrigerated shipping container of motherly concern. She wiped wet hands on her T-shirt, dragged damp blonde hair into an elastic and surveyed her handiwork. There were six days worth of meals in there now, all labelled and colour-coded. Blue for weekday dinners,
yellow for weekends and green for lunches. Pasta sauces, casseroles, stews, meatloaf—all microwaveable.

She planned to write a list of what could be cooked to accompany what—mashed potatoes, rice, vegetables—and stick it on the fridge door under a ‘Batman at Movie World’ magnet. She knew the boys wouldn’t bother to read it. They would scoop the food straight from the freezer/microwave/dishwasher-safe containers onto toasted Tip Top muffins or white no-fibre bread.

Nina tried to imagine how her sons would cope while she was gone and could only see unwashed hair, unfinished homework and unmade beds. She hoped to somehow get them through it snack by snack, meal by meal. Perhaps every time they peeled back a blue, yellow or green plastic lid, they would remember her. Nina had also stocked up on assorted biscuits, snack bars, chips, powdered sports drinks and instant pot noodles. There were enough instant pot noodles in her pantry to circle the earth, Nina estimated. Enough pot noodles to tie her up from top to toe—around and around, until they suffocated the life out of her.

All that afternoon, as she cooked, cooled and measured the food into containers, Nina had been wondering how she had managed to navigate her boys to a place where the kitchen was a crashed, alien spacecraft, where every domestic dial, switch and appliance was a technology apparently developed by a race of superior beings from a galaxy far, far away.

As she caught herself humming the theme tune to
Star Wars
she reflected that even her innermost thoughts had been colonised by her boys. She was the one who was from an alien race.
Stranded on a planet she didn’t recognise, with beings who spoke a foreign language. For fifteen years now she had been trying to understand what was in their hearts. If she had come even close when they were young, now that they were teenagers, it was as if they were spinning out of her orbit. Out past East Malvern to the dark side of the moon.

When Jordan was born, and then the twins, Anton and Marko, Nina remembered being amazed at how they had instinctively imitated every cement mixer and fire truck. ‘Brrrmm, brrrmm . . . Woo-hoo.’ The next years were accompanied by the ‘ch, ch, ch’ of Thomas the Tank Engine and the ‘thwack, swish . . . aaargh!’ as an orc’s head was cleaved from its body by Aragorn. It was as if they had been implanted with a silicone sound-effects chip.

In those far-off days when the boys were toddlers, Nina often found herself, at a mothers’ group, drawn by the gravitational pull of pink fluff to watch the little girls play. They chattered and cooed like a flock of rosy pigeons, plump fingers carefully placing tiny tiaras on dollies, easing flimsy pantyhose over slender plastic legs and negotiating minuscule buttons. Here was a language she did understand. She wished and wished again that she had been given a daughter.

Watching their bent heads, Nina had felt an almost overwhelming urge to take up a hairbrush and draw it through long hair loosed from ribbons and plaits. Hair the pure, burnished colour of childhood—Snow White, Rose Red and Ebony Black. Hair from a fairytale. Of course, she had never dared to be so intimate with another woman’s child.

A screech of pain and a call of ‘Nina, it’s one of yours!’ would jolt her from her Rapunzel fantasy and propel her to the sandpit. She lived in dread that one of her sons would maim a playmate for life. ‘Thwack, swish, aaargh!’

When she was gathering her sons to leave and the last misappropriated vehicle or plastic block had been prised from angry fists, the secret longing would insist upon making itself known and Nina would find herself saying aloud: ‘I wish I’d had a girl.’ She knew that as mothers smoothed and folded tiny pink jumpers against their bosoms, they were congratulating themselves on their own good fortune. Even as they chanted: ‘Count yourself lucky. Girls can be such bitches. Wait till they’re teenagers, you’ll be grateful then. Boys look after their mothers. Girls leave.’

They were hand-me-down mantras from mothers and grandmothers who, generations earlier, had perhaps recognised the particular, exquisite anguish of a woman starved of feminine comfort. But Nina was cursed to live in the New Age, where everything happened for a reason. Every woman created her own destiny. If Nina had given birth only to boys, it was because she had somehow willed it.

Nina slammed the freezer door. She was driving the van to Byron, and that was that. Even if she had to take her sister-in-law Monique instead. Although the thought of Monique packing her crystals, herbal teas, aromatherapy candles and chanting Hindustani goatherder CDs into her straw basket made her shudder. No. There was nothing for it but to get Annie and Meredith to come with her.

She snapped off the kitchen light and then . . . bugger! Nina had lived in this house for ten years and still forgot that if she turned off the light in the kitchen and the boys had gone to bed, she would have to grope her way through the darkened lounge room to the switch at the bottom of the stairs. She felt her way along the edge of the couch with damp fingers and, through the gloom, could just make out the banister.

Twang!

‘Ow, ow, ow! Shit, shit, shit!’ Nina yowled in pain. She’d stubbed her toe on an electric guitar left lying on the carpet. It hurt like hell. She slumped on the stairs and rubbed her foot. The impact had also jarred her bunion, which was now wailing like a back-up singer to her throbbing big toe.

Marko appeared on the landing, rubbing sleep from his eyes. Nina glanced up and thought he looked like an angel standing on the stairway to heaven. She noted he wasn’t wearing his loose cotton pyjama pants. He’d have that rash around his crotch again. Are there mothers in heaven? she wondered. Will they need me then?

Marko picked his sweaty jocks from his bum and grizzled, ‘Mum, can you get me a drink of water? I’m thirsty.’

There was simply no way to appreciate the sheer majesty of the RoadMaster Royale without taking a good few steps back. Two, three, four paces . . . right to the nature strip, from where the truly epic proportions of the vehicle were finally revealed. The gleaming white behemoth looked to be firmly wedged in the carport.

‘Good lord, Nina, this thing is massive! Are you sure you can even get it out of the driveway?’ Meredith retreated further, scraping the heel of her white leather sandal on the bluestone guttering and stumbling onto the street.

‘Of course I can get it out,’ Nina declared. ‘I got it in there in the first place, didn’t I?’

This one was a flat-out lie. In fact it wasn’t Nina who had backed the RoadMaster down the narrow drive, but her husband Brad. It had taken a good half-hour, many obscene oaths and the life of a prized pink hydrangea.

‘The whole idea is ridiculous,’ snorted Meredith. ‘We should just fly both ways. We’d be there in a couple of hours. We could
be sitting down having a cocktail, looking out over the ocean, the same afternoon.’

Nina nodded and marched down the concrete drive, pausing to pat the snub nose of the hulking beast with affection, as if she was approaching a prized milking heifer in a stall, saying: ‘There, there, old girl, easy now, easy.’ She was fumbling with the key-ring, trying to recall which one of a dozen keys opened the front door, when she heard Meredith’s voice from behind. ‘Oh-my-good—!’

Nina turned to see her rooted to the spot in front of the truly arresting sight of a giant decal of Elvis Presley rampant—pelvis thrusting, microphone held high.
The King
was plastered from roof to wheel.

‘Why?’ asked Meredith. She was apparently seeking a logical explanation.