The real thing - Page 3
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 25: After the Crisis
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Catherine Harris
SCIENTISTS' CHILDREN CAN BE a sceptical lot. My sister returned to the chemist three times before she was able to accept what the little pink plus at the end of the plastic wand was telling her that she, a dedicated consumer of the contraceptive pill, was pregnant. ‘The pill's only 99 per cent effective,' she reminded her husband. But, as he later repeated to me, they were pretty good odds. Now she's having trouble deciding on the baby's name. Various options have been touted – Franklin, Milo, Jeremy - but as yet none of them has stuck; the idea that you could pluck a child's name out of thin air is ridiculous, she says. Mum is convinced the whole naming dilemma is simply a by-product of my sister's indecisiveness – a chip off the old block, she's fond of saying – whereas it's plain as day to everyone else that the issue is completely bound up with my sister's marriage breakdown and her ambivalence about the pregnancy itself. ‘You might as well give me your two cents,' she says, after Mum's run through yet another list of what she terms ‘suitable appellations', summarily knocking them down one after the other almost faster than I can articulate the sounds.
‘Choose your own name, then,' I say, losing my patience, wishing she'd just done that right off the bat, the quandary of babies' names and birth registrations and whether or not one should be having children in the first place lying well beyond my jurisdiction. Plus, she's just giving me the shits.
‘Fine, then. I will.'
‘Good.'
‘Good yourself.'
‘Fine. Just don't call him after Dad.'
In The Snow Queen an evil troll invents a magic mirror that reflects all beauty as ugliness. After the mirror shatters, the tiny splinters pierce people's bodies, freezing their hearts and blinding their souls to virtue. Even when my sister and I are bickering, the irony is not lost on me that what drives us most apart is the very thing that binds us most together, as though the cold of Dad's passing had entered our hearts preventing us from appreciating anything kind or generous about each other. We are attracted and repelled as magnets are attracted and repelled, our currents drawing and resisting in almost equal force depending on how we are positioned to one another. There's no clarity. It's not as though Dad's accident brought some truth to light. He is dead. That is all. This is what I mean when I say to her that it is what it is. No amount of honorary naming can redeem us. Refrozen snowflakes are just ice. Water has no memory. The baby has come to us whole and unique – he is an entire, separate person.
MUM WHISKS THROUGH the house, the tsk-tsk of busywork, washing and cleaning and preparing special meals. Today, for example, she'll bake pumpkin pie, she announces. Her specialty. An unpalatable briny custard concoction she picked up in the Midwest. She walks from room to room asking if there's anything more we need from the shops – milk, apples, bread? – as alarm bells start ringing in my head as loudly as they did fifteen years ago when the dish was first showcased at my cousin's confirmation party. ‘Your mother's a lousy cook,' my aunt said behind Mum's back. Except that Mum was behind her back and so heard every word. ‘The recipe had no sugar,' Mum later argued in her defence, though she also added that Dad's family had always hated her and blamed her for everything so why shouldn't she speak her mind? ‘If it wasn't for you girls they wouldn't bother with me at all,' she wailed. And then, on the recipe again: ‘There must have been a mistake.'
I was so embarrassed I hid in the back garden, taking off up the side of the house once the fracas had died down and I was sure everyone had returned to their canapés, the low simmer of small talk now firmly fixed on poor Henrietta and her unfortunate children, this being our extended family's default setting. What I've yet to reconcile is why the intensity of the feelings continue to be as blistering today as when I was crouched beneath my aunt's camellia bush, swatting bees, trying not to cry. It makes me wonder if perhaps emotions don't also have phases (though I would have hoped that this one might have passed by now) fixed in stable form like matter until their conditions are changed. Liquid doesn't just transform into vapour and then evaporate away. First it must be exposed to heat. ‘You know, Mum, I hate your pumpkin pie,' I tell her as she compiles her shopping list.
She puts down her pen and looks at me, completely aghast. ‘Well, stuff you,' she finally says. ‘I hate the way you eat your cornflakes dry, without adding any milk.'
AT THE CHRISTENING my nephew snivels and cries – an appropriate response, I think, to all that ruckus. The priest drips water on his head, small droplets rolling into his eyes, which I dab with a tiny embroidered handkerchief, the same one my uncle dabbed at me.
Earlier that morning my sister came to find me as I was minding the baby while she got ready for church. ‘There's something I have to tell you,' she said. ‘I know in the scheme of things it probably doesn't matter, but you were right when you accused me of taking Dad's Wildcats T-shirt to spite you. I did. You were always so philosophical about everything. I was trying to make you angry.'
I don't know what I'd expected her to say, but in that moment I was so relieved it wasn't something more alarming I would have forgiven her just about anything. ‘If it makes you feel any better, I never lost your Snow Queen book,' I confessed. ‘I kept it because Dad had inscribed it To my daughter. I liked pretending he'd written it
to me.'
For a second there I thought she might attempt to seize the moral high ground, but she didn't.
‘I'm really sorry,' she said.
And I was too.
So this is how it is now, our family. All chips off the old block, but slightly new. Even the baby, who I'll concede actually looks a lot like Dad, or the way I remember Dad to be. He has the same chin and eyes and when he smiles I can see Dad smiling at me, the whole history of our clan distilled down to this one tiny moment, transition after transition, phase after phase, me and my nephew tucked up under a rug on the couch, my finger in his mouth, gently rocking. ♦