Mothers Grimm Read online

  Danielle Wood is the author of the novel The Alphabet of Light and Dark, the short story collection Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls and a biography, Housewife Superstar: The very best of Marjorie Bligh. Together with Heather Rose, she is ‘Angelica Banks’, author of the Tuesday McGillycuddy adventures for children. She lives in Hobart and teaches in the English program at the University of Tasmania.

  www.daniellewood.com.au

  First published in 2014

  Copyright © Danielle Wood 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Grateful acknowledgement is given for permission to reprint a line from the poem ‘Everybody’s Mother’ by Liz Lochhead from Dreaming Frankenstein, copyright © 1984. Used by permission of Polygon Books. The story ‘The Good Mother’ was previously published in Griffith Review.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74175 674 6

  eISBN 978 1 74176 235 8

  Typeset by Bookhouse, Sydney

  Nobody’s mother can’t not never do nothing right.

  LIZ LOCHHEAD

  contents

  prologue

  lettuce

  cottage

  sleep

  nag

  prologue

  the good mother

  NOW THAT YOU think about it, you realise you’ve known her your whole life. On the magazine pages and billboards of your childhood, she was fair as Rapunzel with a shoulder-length haircut. You were indifferent to her, back then, barely registered her presence. Or so you think until you realise you can remember precisely the way her hands looked—their fingernails short and practical though still perfectly tipped with white crescent moons—as she drew V-shapes in menthol rub onto the chests of her ailing children.

  She wasn’t always the Vicks Mum, of course. Kneeling by the bath, she would soap her toddler’s blonde mop into a quiff of white foam and promise you No More Tears. To soothe the unsettled infant, she could provide her favoured brand of paracetamol, as well as the comfort of her pert moulded bosom inside a candy-coloured shirt. With a plump, two-toothed cherub on her hip, she would de-holster a spray pack and vanquish the invisible nasties on the bright white porcelain of her toilets and sinks. For she was the Good Mother, as safe and mild and effective as every unguent she ever squeezed from a pinkly labelled tube.

  The Good Mother had the powders to return muddied soccer shirts to brightness and the potions to ward off sore throats and flu, but you realise now that her true power lay in those hands with their Frenchly polished nails. Remember how she placed them coolly on fevered brows, cupped them around mugs of chocolately-yet-nutritious fluids, splayed them protectively over the shoulder blades of her sleeping babes? Yes, you remember, although it occurs to you only now how implausible it actually was that the peachy boys and girls they found to match her could have been born from her trim blue-jean hips. Come to think of it, where did those children come from? Did Dad ever stop breadwinning long enough for her to rest a hand on the honest chambray of his shirtfront? If he did, you cannot remember it.

  This is how it is for the Good Mother. She pricks her finger when she’s embroidering. The bauble of blood teetering on her fingertip sets her to thinking, and soon she is noticing the deepness of the red and the way it shines against the snowy ground beyond her window. Add the ravens-wing black of the window frame, and voila! She’s knocked up and has chosen her child’s colour scheme to boot.

  This is how it is for you. Deep in denial, you hardly even tell yourself when you stop taking the Pill and start taking folate. Your partner would probably be quite interested if you were to let him know how much better is an unprotected ovulatory orgasm than a regular Pill-protected one, but this knowledge feels for some reason like a secret, so you keep it to yourself. Although you become obsessive about taking your temperature and despite your new habit of cooling your post-coital heels high on the bedhead, there’s nothing doing. You get your many test kits from pharmacies in different suburbs so that the sales assistants don’t start getting to know you, but no matter how many mornings you lock yourself in the bathroom with a bladder full of potent overnight piss, there’s only ever one little line in the window of the white stick.

  It’s been three years since the rash of weddings in your life, and now it’s thirtieth birthday parties. And there she is. Over there by the cheese plate, scooping a strand of fair hair behind one ear and staring down the camembert as if she knows its sole purpose in life is to kill her unborn child. You haven’t thought of her for years, if ever you have thought of her consciously at all, which is why you don’t recognise her. You say hello and she clinks her water glass against your thrice-emptied champagne flute. Wearing something white, and tight, she sinks into a chair and sighs, and it’s only now, as she stretches her hand a full octave across her belly, that you notice her fingernails. They’re exquisitely oval and pink as confectionery, each one smoothly iced with white. She gestures at the empty chair beside her and then somehow you are sitting in it.

  At all those weddings, people would ask, ‘So, what do you do?’ Not anymore.

  ‘Do you have children?’ she asks, stroking herself as if she is her own pet.

  ‘No,’ you say.

  ‘Not yet,’ she soothes.

  Fuck off, you wish.

  ‘Your first?’ you ask, tilting your champagne towards her belly.

  ‘Oh, God no! This is my third.’ She laughs and her free hand flies up into the air. When it lands again, it is on your knee. She looks right into your face now and smiles.

  ‘I’m so fertile, my husband only has to look at me and I’m up the duff.’

  You make deals with God. You make deals with the Devil. You’re not fussy. But as a wise man once said: ‘It’s the saying you don’t care what you get what gets you jiggered.’ So you say it, and you’re jiggered, but what you give birth to is a hedgehog. It’s prickly and its cry is a noise so terrible that you wish someone would scrape fingernails on a blackboard to give you some relief.

  You learn that hedgehogs are both nocturnal and crepuscular, but yours doesn’t sleep in daylight either. In search of support and camaraderie, you join a mothers’ group. You turn up at the clinic covered in prickle-marks and with your squirming hedgehog in your arms. The other women are there already, sitting in a circle nursing their soft, boneless young. The only seat left is beside the Good Mother.

  She’s wearing pale pink and making smooth circles on her baby’s back with her hand-model hands. Things are different since you last met, and you’re prepared to forgive her if only she’ll tell you how it is that her eyes are so bright and her skin so clear. You’re desperate to know how it is that her shiny golden hair is brushed. Clearly her child sleeps, but what is her secret?

  ‘You know what they say,’ she says, with a contented smile. ‘Calm mother, calm child.’

  One day, you fall into a de
ep, deep sleep. Valiantly the prince fights his way through forests of fully laden clothes horses, past towers of empty nappy boxes, to reach you where you lie with your rapidly greying hair straggling around your face. He puckers up. His lips brush yours.

  ‘You stupid fucking prick,’ you yell at him. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing? I only just got to sleep!’

  This happens more than once.

  Your hedgehog gradually morphs into a child, a boy whose sunny countenance is sufficiently beautiful to make you forget the spines and the sleeplessness. When you conceive again, you are pregnant with the vision of a placid, smooth-skinned human girl child, but what you give birth to—although female—is just another hedgehog.

  When Hedgehog II is a year old, your partner announces he is leaving you.

  ‘I think you have a personality disorder,’ he says.

  ‘Of course I have a personality disorder,’ you say. ‘I haven’t slept for three years.’

  So your partner moves out, just as your maternity leave expires. Your plan had been to go back to work part-time, but now that you’re a single mother you have to work full-time to afford childcare for two kids. The economics of this confuse you, but you’re too busy thinking about how you’re going to manage to worry about that as well. When you go into the childcare centre to make inquiries, your little hedgehog clings to you and makes her sanity-withering cry. The carers hold closer the human children they have in their arms and offer you a three-day trial to settle in your hedgehog before you have to leave her there for real.

  On the first day you leave her, she screams until she vomits, so you take her back home. On the second day you leave her, she screams until she vomits, so you take her back home. In a fairytale, things are always different on the third go. But this is life and on the third day you leave her, she screams until she vomits, so you take her back home.

  Then comes the day that you are to go back to work. Is that Rumplestiltskin giggling in your mindscape as you hand over both your second-born and the bale of hay-spun gold? The carer takes a tentative hold of your hedgehog. You smile and coo. You turn your back and walk out the door and, as you do, you hear your hedgehog screaming. The effect is like having your uterus torn out through your ear holes. You are sure you can smell vomit.

  You only just make it out the kiddy-proof gate before you begin to weep. The weeping makes you red and puffy in the face and now you are hardly presentable for work. In order to pull yourself together, you call in to a café. You open the door and look inside but every table is taken. There’s one bar stool but you think perhaps it’s the Good Mother sitting on the neighbouring seat and nursing a peppermint tea. You’re not certain, but there’s something in the blonde foils that makes you wonder and you’re in no mood for her today. And, besides, by now you’re too experienced to fall for her ol’ empty-seat routine.

  Outside there are no free tables either, but two women who are taking up only half of a large table gesture for you to join them, so you do.

  ‘Thank you,’ you say, and they nod in unison.

  You take out your fold-out mirror and try to hide the blotches on your face with powder. Then you notice how peachy is the skin of the raven-haired woman sitting on the same side of the table as you. And the skin of the redhead sitting across from her. Each of them has a slim-line pram in a bright, interesting colour. They push their prams to and fro with gloved hands. The gloves are reasonable, aren’t they? It’s winter. It’s cold. You’re telling yourself all of this even though you already know.

  No, no!

  It’s her. Both of them.

  And although she’s talking to herself across the table, she’s really talking to you.

  ‘How old?’ one of her asks.

  ‘One,’ the other says, with a can-you-believe-it manoeuvre of the eyebrow.

  ‘Incredible,’ she says. ‘I mean, is there anybody who thinks it’s a good idea to a leave a one-year-old in childcare?’

  You take a vow of silence. You will not speak to her. You will not look at her. You will not accept seats at her café table. Out of the corner of your eye you glimpse her, auburn-haired, in a Dettol advertisement, and wonder when you’re going to clue up to the fact that these days her hair can be any colour at all?

  You tell yourself the consequence of breaking your vow is that your twelve brothers will turn into ravens, or something. In order to hold to your promise you make sudden reversals in supermarket aisles, hide from her in clothing store change rooms, buy bigger sunglasses for their greater protective surface area, teach yourself sign language out of a library book so that if she speaks to you, you can easily pretend to be deaf. You are doing well. Until your eldest child starts school.

  You know which is the Good Mother’s Volvo. It’s the one with the My Family stickers on the back window; she’s the one with the handbag and the mobile phone. At first, you think this knowledge will help you to avoid her. You can just make double the number of Green bottles when you start singing as you lap the school in your Hyundai, but soon you realise the Volvo is parked multiple times around the perimeter, no matter how early or late you arrive. This is her territory. Here, she is omnipresent.

  It’s almost Mother’s Day and the kids in your son’s kindergarten class are given a photocopied page to fill in. Mostly, the page is taken up with a blank square in which each child is to draw a picture, but above the box there’s a line of text that is followed by what you will come to recognise as the ellipsis of doom.

  I really appreciate it when my mummy . . .

  A week later you see the completed tributes where they’re pinned up on the wall just inside the classroom. All the figures in the pictures wear bright colours and most have hands pronged with twelve or more fingers. Little Laura reports she really appreciates it when her mummy tucks her into bed at night. For Oliver, it’s his mummy’s cupcakes. Tara appreciates it when her mummy takes her to the library.

  Already you are predisposed to like Clytemnestra, who is a tiny little skun rabbit of a thing to be lugging around the name-equivalent of four suitcases and hatbox. You see that Clytemnestra’s had a go herself at changing ‘mummy’ to ‘mummies’. Her picture is a constellation of mint green spots: she appreciates it when her mummies don’t cook peas. You are still smiling at Clytemnestra’s peas when the Good Mother materialises beside you in her black puffer jacket. She patrols the pin-up board with her eyes.

  ‘Ummm-aaahhh,’ she says, happily shocked. ‘Look what David’s done.’

  You haven’t yet found your own son’s handiwork. And now, even though the Good Mother’s manicured index finger is pointing right at it, somehow your eyes are still missing the mark. They are slipping over all the generously endowed hands and circle-striped bellies. You don’t want to know.

  The Good Mother realises she’s going to have to read it out for you.

  ‘I . . . really . . . appreciate it . . . when . . . my mummy . . .’ She snickers, snickers, before she continues: ‘. . . buys takeaway.’

  Under the sentence, written blackly at your son’s instruction by one of the teacher’s aides, there is a disturbingly accurate reproduction of the golden arches. You want to protest that you never take him there yourself. It’s your ex who does it. And the birthday parties! It’s not as if you can say no to these things. Well, not unless you’re . . .

  The Good Mother interrupts your thoughts with a hand on your upper arm.

  ‘Oh, honey,’ she says. ‘You must be so embarrassed.’

  Literary scholars view it as a mystery to be solved by careful textual analysis. Psycholanalysts propose theories that involve words like ‘splitting’ and ‘internalisation’.

  But you could give them a much simpler explanation.

  Yes, you could tell them, couldn’t you?

  There is no mystery for you.

  You could tell them exactly why it is, in fairytales, that the Good Mother is always dead.

  lettuce

  There was once a man and a wom
an who longed for a child.

  This is not their story.

  THIS IS A story about lettuce but it begins with a species of Arnott’s biscuit called the Orange Slice, which is a sandwich arrangement involving two fairly plain biscuits stuck together with a disc of orange cream. At the age of eight, Meg had never eaten one, although she had come close. Her piano teacher, Mrs Salmon, used to give out biscuits on a tiny round plate (that Meg was amazed to learn was actually called a biscuit plate), which she sat on a painted tea-tray alongside a glass of milk. Sometimes the biscuits were Caramel Crowns and other times they were Kingstons, or—Meg’s favourite—Venetians. Once she had eaten her biscuits and drunk the milk, Meg would be expected to settle down at the keys with her Children’s Bach.

  Mrs Salmon, who didn’t have children, was both more generous than a mother and less resigned to the inevitable. That is, she was free and easy with the number of biscuits her pupils ate, but a spill of milk on her rug was a catastrophe. Meg was large for her age, with thickish wrists and undifferentiated knees. By moving slowly and carefully she usually managed to avoid being clumsy, but one day when Mrs Salmon put out the tray with two Orange Slices on the lovely little biscuit plate, Meg reached out rather too quickly to take one and bumped the glass, which teetered, and toppled. At first, the result was a bright white Rorschach blot on the plush patterning of the Persian rug; then it began to sink in. Mrs Salmon was forced to cancel Meg’s lesson and Meg had to sit by the door and wait for her mother to pick her up while Mrs Salmon on her knees mopped and scrubbed, the skin inside the collar of her silk blouse turning red and blotchy. And all the while the Orange Slices sat uneaten on the biscuit plate beside the errant, milk-stained glass.

  The uncomfortable feelings that Meg began at this time to associate with the Orange Slice were only intensified by a later incident, which took place very early one Sunday morning in the house of the man who lived across the road. A woman and her daughter had recently come to live with the man, a breeder of Cavalier King Charles Spaniels. He had soft curling hair and large dewy eyes and had never before been known to have a lady friend. He kept his many dogs out the back in cyclone-mesh pens that had concrete floors and were easy to hose out. Each pen had a kennel in the corner and each kennel was painted in a pastel shade and filled with charity-shop sheets and blankets that the spaniels dragged out and shredded for entertainment. The woman had bright blonde hair and a powder-blue car but, because she parked it at the top of the man’s steep driveway, none of the women in the street had been able to run into her on the footpath and find out what she was all about. Not even Meg’s mother had quite enough pluck to turn up at the front door with a tea towel full of scones.