Maybe
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“Fritzy, Daria, and Me,” Story 2.
1991.
Margaret Leggett and her breasts arrived at the beginning of Year 8. When Mrs. Swan called the roll “Marguerite Le Gett?” the rangy blonde put her hand up into the cool zone (neither shyly low nor touch-the-ceiling high). Mrs. Swan nodded and smiled encouragingly.
“Margh Gargh Et Leg It?” Miss deGroot called next lesson, steamrolling every vowel that Mrs. Swan had so lovingly lofted. She didn’t bother to look up to see if anyone responded. Miss deGroot taught me maths for three years. I doubt she ever saw my face.
“Hey, Leggy Peggy,” called Daria as we all filed down the corridor and out to recess. Maybe Daria wanted to be the first to nickname the new girl, but I suspected she wanted to get close enough to see who was taller. I was taller than I liked, always sticking out in class photos. But at least I wasn’t centre stage, back row. That was Daria’s spot; mine was to her left. We both towered over Fritzy. But this new girl had legs for days, and a proportional torso over which her hair would have cascaded in gentle waves had it not been in a school-required high pony tail.
Margaret Leggett turned gracefully, with a simple, enquiring look on her face. “Yes?”
Daria, if she’d been shaken by this, didn’t show it, didn’t miss a beat. “You heading to the locker room?”
“Maybe. If I can find it,” Margaret Leggett shrugged. Of course she could find it. Follow the rest of the class. Daria smiled and pointed ahead. Leggy Peggy fell into step with her. Fritzy and I trailed behind the equine pair. The blonde pony tail bobbed, but Daria still had her by a short half head.
It took me eighteen years of crappy marriage to learn what Dar and Peg knew about power struggles on the first day of Year 8.
*****
2019.
I poured the half glass of chardonnay down the sink and regretted not pouring it back into the bottle. Could I afford to throw out wine? I looked at the back yard which would soon no longer be mine. I wasn’t much of a gardener, and honestly couldn’t tell you if that tree was an ash or a maple. Perhaps I should go look more closely. No, this is not the time to get attached to the trees. You’re not taking the trees.
Or the Adirondack chairs that we gave each other for our tenth wedding anniversary. They’re looking a little worn. I felt a pang of – guilt? regret? – that I hadn’t sanded them back and repainted them as I’d planned to do last summer.
Why? Why feel bad about that now? Did some part of me think if I’d cleaned up the chairs, pruned the roses more often, or even learned how to make a soufflé that he wouldn’t have wandered off?
I stood up straighter and said out loud “We will never sit in those Adirondack chairs sharing a bottle of chardonnay again.” There.
I reached for the tea towel. It was the un-funny and, I thought, racist one with the cartoon of stereotypical aborigines that his mother had brought back from Kakadu, gosh, it must have been over a decade ago. I picked it up and went to wipe the wine glass, but my arm wouldn’t move. I stood there looking at it in my outstretched hand, as if it all – tea towel, hand, arm – belonged to another being. On another planet.
“I will never use this tea towel again,” I said, once more out loud to an empty house, and dropped it to the floor.
In the bathroom I pulled his towel from the rack behind the door next to mine, where it had stayed untouched for two months. “I will never hang this towel again.” I dropped it on the bathroom floor.
“I will never watch him dry his butt crack and then his face again,” I said.
“I will never watch him adjust his balls again. I will never be woken by his percussive morning farts again. I will never smell his shit again.”
I didn’t miss him. Be honest. You don’t miss him. Certainly not the screaming matches.
I missed what I thought we had. He was just the compromise necessary for the existence of us. I missed the certainty I once had, that I could alternately yell and cajole my way to getting what I wanted. I missed the naïveté that once assured me that he cared enough to fight with me. For us.
I hate that I now know that I will never know who he was, let alone what we were.
I hate him for the fact that I no longer know who I am.
I hate him because I will never un-hear what my son said. Not what he actually said, which was fairly innocuous, although delivered with trepidation. (I hate that my son felt trepidation).
He probably said: “I got into UNSW.”
What I heard was: “Year 12 sucked balls with you two screaming 24/7. I’m pissing off to Sydney.”
Damn, I hate crying.
Damn, I hate hating.
What do I love? Don’t look around. Don’t love what you’ve lost.
But do I love it?
Maybe I’m not in love with a 1960’s yellow brick three bedroom, one bathroom with a newer extension master bedroom and ensuite. Maybe I’m not in love with Bentleigh, with its good old reliable Baker’s Delight where I go because I’m not too old to go to trendy bakeries but I am too old to be stupid enough to pay for their stale croissants. Iced finger buns? Ya basic. Basically awesome.
Maybe I forgot to check if I was in love.
Maybe he didn’t forget, and that’s the only difference.
Maybe someone else wants to be close enough to Bentleigh West Primary School that they’ll pay enough for half of this that I can afford a flat in Fitzroy. Daria lives in East Melbourne. Fritzy’s studio is nearby. Nicer neighbourhood, but geez I couldn’t list my address as “Collingwood.” Hey, maybe just move to the Yellow and Black? Imagine standing in the street singing with the whole neighbourhood in September!
I looked at the tea towel on the floor and stopped smiling. The glimmer of optimism fluttered away. The fear engulfed me again. I shuffle-ran to the bathroom and my lunch exploded into the toilet bowl.
Why do I have to do this?
Why do I have to do this?
Why do I..
Because you do! Wash your face, open the window, get on with it!
The doorbell rang and I smeared my sleeve across my face. Daria threw her arms around me wordlessly.
“You packed?” Fritzy asked as she walked in.
“Yes,” I lied, hastily disengaging from Daria and rushing to my bedroom. Last time I let Fritzy pack for me she had thrown in few of my clothes and fewer of my toiletries.
“What’s the problem?” she’d asked, confused, when I had discovered this in Bali. Where to start?
“Razor, Fritzy. You didn’t pack my razor.”
She had shrugged and said “You just had a baby. Didn’t they shave everything off then?”
“Not my legs, and it was eight months ago.”
I remember Daria rolling her eyes and laughing. And lending me her razor.
Now here we were, Fritzy, Daria and me, seventeen years later and once again I needed to be taken away, gotten out of myself and my life, sat down in a beautiful spot and looked after just enough, left alone just enough.
I sighed.
*****
The bell above the door of the general store jangled fit to wake the dead, which was a good thing, because I suspect the old shopkeeper had been. But he woke to full alertness the way old people used to napping do. He adjusted his jumper, which was probably older than me, over the gut it had stretched to accommodate. His wife appeared from the curtain behind him, wearing a flowery apron over a simple summer dress and the mildly annoyed expression of a woman who has been interrupted while counting cans of beetroot and will now have to start over.
Fritzy began foraging, making straight for the bacon and lamb chops.
Daria plastered her bedside manner smile on her face and approached the shopkeepers.
I stood dumbly in the doorway, letting in the heat and the flies, undoing completely the good impression Daria was trying to make. She soldiered on. “I’ve been told you would have the keys to our Air, er cottage,” she quickly corrected herself.
“Eileen’s place?” the old man asked, but he wasn’t asking.
Daria, if momentarily confused, recovered quickly, but not before the wife said “Probably listed as Tom’s.” She folded her arms across her chest. “But it’s our Eileen who runs it.”
“Does the hard work,” her husband had said, finishing her sentence over her.
“Yes, the cottage,” Daria said with the patience of one who deals daily with difficult patients. “It looks lovely.”
Fritzy, oblivious and yet not, interrupted with “We need this?” pointing to the bundles of wood.
“No need love,” the wife replied, finally smiling, “George took a load out yesterday.”
Fritzy poured an armload of meat onto the counter, happy as a pig in mud. Fritzy loves barbeques. A small black fly flew up my nose, jerking me out of the doorway. The bell jangled again as the door closed, and I headed towards the fruit and veg.
The wife pulled a set of keys from a hook near the curtain, but instead of handing them to Daria, she held them to her chest. “Enjoy your stay,” she began, then paused a bit too long as there was clearly more coming. “But I wouldn’t go wandering too near the back of the property around dusk.” Again, there was a long pause. “We’ve got a bit of a roo problem, you see,” and this time her long pause was filled by a loud snort from George.
“The roos aren’t the problem,” he said with a tinge of anger. I honestly couldn’t care less, except I caught the two different but distinct notes of warning in their voices. “Look,” he said, heaving a big sigh, “I’ll tell you straight.” (Good! Get on with it!) “Some lazy buggers are staying home having a beer letting their boys go out shooting. Moron,” he spat this last word out the side of his mouth.
“Plenty doing it,” his wife countered, “Brian’s a good boy. Eileen has seen to it.” Clearly, Tom had not.
“That hothead Jack he goes about with. He’s the problem.”
I spilled a few vegetables and a lot of chocolate onto the counter. Fritzy stopped a rolling apple with one hand, and put her other hand on my arm. I may have muttered a curse.
“Anyway,” the wife said brightly, remembering that not only were we there, but that we were paying guests of her daughter, “Just so as you know that you might hear some shots, but they’ll be nowhere near you.” She finished with a wide smile that was considerably less convincing than Daria’s.
Fritzy held her hand out for the keys and the startled woman, who had been concentrating on Daria, mutely handed them over.
*****
Daria ran her finger around her plate, through the juices, and licked it.
Fritzy just held her plate up to her mouth and slurped. She eyed my half-eaten chop, and I slid my plate to her. Daria leaned over and Fritzy snatched up the chop, at which Daria cooly ran her finger through the juices on my plate as if that had always been her plan. They both laughed.
God, I miss laughing.
I looked up. It was a clear night.
“Oh, hey, yeah, we’re supposed to be able to see Mars, right?” Fritzy asked, craning her neck, and almost toppling backwards. “What’s it look like?”
“Red,” said Daria, also lifting her face skywards. “But I don’t know where it is.”
“Near the moon just after sunset, I think,” I said, grateful for a conversation based on facts.
We threw our heads around like demented chooks looking for the moon and a red dot. Daria sighed and took out her phone to find the answer. “That way,” she pointed towards the front of the property, “but it’s so low we can’t see it through those trees on the hill.”
“Then we’re going for a walk,” said Fritzy, briskly clattering the plates together. “Less than a K up the road should do it.” I grabbed the glasses and followed her through the back door.
Daria shoved her phone in her back pocket and pretended she was only sauntering after us, but we both knew her “casual-hurry” gait well enough.
It did, indeed, take us less than fifteen minutes to round the bend of the hill. We stopped, eyes again straight up (why did we assume it would be directly overhead?), and my jaw hung open with a child-like comfort.
The menacingly loud sound of a powerful engine startled all three of us, but when the super-sized ute rounded the bend ahead, only Fritzy and Daria ran the few steps to the side of the road.
I just stood there.
The driver hit the brakes harder than necessary, I expect surprised that, actually, I didn’t get out of his way. The two standing on the bed jolted, and the smaller one nearly dropped his rifle. A cloud of dirt rose up and engulfed the truck’s lower half, turning the light from the headlamps into tan fog.
“Hey!” a voice yelled. A young voice. A boy’s voice pretending to be a man’s voice. The cocksure voice of one whose cock is not so sure, but desperately wants us to believe it is.
I stuck my hands deep in the pockets of my hiking pants and casually said “Hey, yourself.” My heart, mind you, was clattering fit to burst through my chest.
“Can you move?”
I may have acquiesced, if he’d sounded polite about it. But it was not a question. It was a snarl. A demand. This kid’s probably the captain of the high school footy team and he’s mistaken me for the ilk of either the blonde girl with the big breasts who cheers his every kick from the boundary, or the timid student teacher from the city who is going to look for a different career after trying to teach maths to wild rural kids.
“Can you back up?” I countered. “Seems there’s another road about twenty metres back. Heads straight to town, I believe.”
To my left I heard my friends move. Perhaps they were coming to stand in solidarity with me, but before they made it into the lighted patch of road, the teen quite deliberately raised his rifle.
I heard a muttered “Shit!” and some rustling of bushes.
The lad held the gun firmly, butt by his hip, right hand on the stock, left hand cradling the barrel. He pointed it forward, like an erection the power and majesty of which he could only ever have in his dreams. His upper lip curled as he glared at me. The boy standing next to him, whose own rifle was held for safety, not threat, looked alarmed, but stayed mute.
“Lights, Stu!” came the command. The driver, conditioned, flicked on the hunting spotlights. Blinded, I threw my hand up to shield my eyes.
“Jeez…”
I only heard half of Daria’s exclamation before I sucked in everyone’s air and bellowed:
“GO AHEAD AND SHOOT ME, JACK!”
The Universe was instantly silent. Even the cicadas held their breath.
I filled my lungs again. A really pissed off old cow giving what-for to a young bull over which her only advantage is surprise:
“BLOW MY HEAD OFF, JACK! GO ON, RUIN YOUR BLOODY LIFE!”
I didn’t pause long enough for the gnats to resume buzzing:
“DO TWENTY-FIVE TO LIFE BECAUSE A MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN GOT IN YOUR WAY.
AND YOU HAD TO SHOOT HER, JACK?
HAD TO PROVE YOU’RE A MAN?”
This time I left room for a reply.
Or a shot.
Neither came.
“REAL MEN DON’T SHOOT WOMEN FOR STANDING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD, JACK!”
Real men don’t cheat on their wives, Jack! I’d screamed, at another Jack, only last week. This boy might not deserve my misdirected anger, my self-righteous life lesson. But the breasty blonde or the mousy brown or whoever signs up for a life with him deserves that I give it to him, anyway. They deserve to have me scare the shit out of this little pissant before he becomes a big-arse lying cheating pissant. A real Jack-off.
What’s that? I’m abusing a child, you say?
Stuff you! He’s pointing a fucking rifle at me!
Stu turned the roo lights off.
Damn you, Stu. Now I’ll never know.
“We’re calling the police,” came Fritzy’s voice, cracking on the first word, stronger on the last.
Stu revved the engine, threw it into reverse, floored it, and skidded up the hill, turning a powerfully throbbing truck into a crab scuttling to safety. He cut all the lights in a laughable attempt to shrink into the darkness.
The last I saw of them was Brian, because I can only assume it was Eileen’s good boy Brian, yanking the rifle out of Jack’s hands, pushing him roughly onto his backside on the truck bed.
“Have you lost your goddamned mind?” Daria screamed at me, grabbing me and squeezing me and kissing my cheeks frantically.
“Maybe,” I said.