Love and Other Perishable Items (24 page)

2. Transfer to Perishables full-time for six months, bite the bullet and stay at home, save every cent I earn and go traveling for … who knows how long. God, I hunger for a foreign streetscape.

3. Call Michaela and tell her I am ready to be friends. As above, stay at home and work for six months. Find a post-graduate course in Perth, move there and do the friends thing with Michaela until she cracks and wrestles me into bed. Never, ever come back.

4. This one’s a bit out there, but I saw an ad in the paper for an adult English school in Japan looking for native-English-speaking university graduates to be teachers. That would certainly be a foreign streetscape.

5. Get together with Amelia. Accompany her to her tenth-grade formal. Fruitlessly try to convince her family
that I am a perfectly decent chap. Ignore raised eyebrows from family and friends. Content myself with holding hands and kissing. Accompany Amelia on the upcoming round of her friends’ sweet-sixteen birthday parties. Attempt to smuggle her into bars for my friends’ birthday parties.

I need a drink. Then I need to seriously consider my bedroom ceiling.

Later

Ease down, Ripley! You’ve blown a transaxle, you’re just grinding metal. That’s it, ease down.

August 3

The thing about the Youngster is that she makes me think. Example: she’s got this flawed but intensely held take on feminism that comes from deep within her fifteen-year-old breast. It involves how women get continuously screwed in the domestic realm—or, as Amelia puts it, “the hard-won right of women to earn money in paid employment, take out the garbage, do the housework, gestate, give birth to the children, nourish the children, care for the children, bear the professional penalties for having the children, take out the garbage again
and
do battle with the local mechanic over the cost of servicing the car.”

“You know,” I said to her a few weeks ago, “I never really thought about it that way.”

“Of course you haven’t!” blustered the fifteen-year-old. “Why
would you? You’ve been raised to take your place in the patriarchy!”

“I never!”

“It’s a
subtle
process, Chris. You wouldn’t even have noticed your own complicity.”

“Youngster,” I said, “I have studied feminism at university level. I think I’d know if I was complicit with patriarchy.”

“All right then,” said the little firebrand, “when was the last time you defrosted your fridge, went through it and threw out everything that was no longer usable, put all the stuff you wanted to keep in a cooler while you wiped out all the spillages, crumbs and bits of unidentifiable food, pulled out the crisper drawers and ledges, washed them up in detergent and hot water, dried them and then put everything back?”

Okay, I’ll admit she had me on the back foot with that one.

“I’ve never done that.” I’m not even familiar with the task. I’ve never considered that a fridge would ever need to be cleaned.

“Well, you can bet
any
money that it’s your mother that does it. You could bet your own life.”

She went on to reel off several other tasks whose existence I’d never even conceived of but the completion of which is integral to a household’s functioning. Then she demonstrated that of course my mother did them, as did hers, and my ignorance of their existence was the proof in the pudding of my contribution to patriarchy.

“Well, I mow the lawn,” I said, with a touch of attitude.

“And I bet you want kudos for it too, don’t you, you bastard! Hats off to you for mowing the bloody lawn every few weeks!”

At this point it’s best to back down and try to steer the conversation toward calmer climes. Like me, the Youngster has a vein
that pops out of her forehead when she gets excited, and sometimes I’m afraid it will burst.

But she did get me thinking. So much so that when I got home, I took out one of my Kate Jennings books. Amelia had reminded me of a particular passage. It’s from a short story, and the narrator says:

I am forty years old and women who reach that age and are still suspicious of feminism have to be wearing blinkers meant for a cart-horse. By the time a woman gets to Oneida’s age, any residual illusions about who is running the show and the interests they have at heart will have been stripped clean away
.

I keep encouraging Amelia to read Kate Jennings. Actually I want to give her a whole reading list. I want to see her learning and thinking and analyzing. I want to see a more mature analysis of whether her mother would be any better off as a 1950s housewife. I want her to really think about who’s in charge and the interests they have at heart. I want to be around for that.

I’ve just written a whole diary entry about her.

That’s true procrastination. I originally sat down to work on my thesis.

August 25

Not much to report. If I were to take stock, I’d tell you that I’m spending all day and most of the nights in my room working on
my thesis, due in two weeks. Except when I’m working. I work Tuesdays noon till nine, Thursdays four till nine and Sundays noon till four.

At home I am seldom out of an old pair of black tracksuit pants, my flannel shirt and my slippers. Exercise is my reward—if I have a productive day, I am allowed to go for a walk at about four. I walk along the nature reserve path, breathing in the cool air.

Sometimes I emerge from my room at about ten and have a glass of red wine with Mum. She misses Zoe terribly, but we don’t say as much because Zoe’s a grown woman and it’s a bit silly to moon over an adult child. I miss her too, but I’m trying to see her departure as a motivating factor for me to get my act together and do the same.

These late-night glasses of wine with my mum are something new. They are due to several factors, methinks. Firstly, with all the written work I have due, I am mostly home in the evenings, whereas I used to be out at the pub and not home until Mum was in bed. Secondly, there is the unspoken, but inevitable, approach of the day when I leave home, so we both have a Last Days appreciation of one another’s company at the kitchen table late at night. And thirdly, there’s the insidious influence of the Youngster.

My conversations with Amelia have sparked off some kind of change in my thinking. For the first time I’m curious about Mum’s experiences, along suspiciously Amelia-ish lines. For example, I asked her about when she married Dad—how easy was the transition to living with him? How happy has it been? I asked her about when she had Zoe and me—did she work through her pregnancies? Was she sick? What was the split of domestic labor like with her and Dad? How much did he share responsibilities?
When did she go back to work? How did she manage work alongside having two small children? And when I asked her that, it struck me with full force that I would never, ever ask my dad the same question. Or any guy.

One particular story she told me has stuck in my mind. When I had just turned two and Zoe four, Mum was on unpaid leave from her job as a primary school librarian. She would do a casual day here and there when her sister was able to look after me but was still essentially on maternity leave. One day she received a curt letter from the Department of Education telling her that unless she returned to her position full-time within the month, she would no longer have it and the next posting she was offered could be anywhere in the city.
Oh shit
, thought Mum. The school she had been working in was in the next suburb—it would be awful to lose that posting. Zoe was already going to preschool nearby three days a week and she loved it. The women who ran it were sympathetic to Mum’s plight and made room for Zoe to go five days a week, so that was her taken care of. But I presented a challenge. Zoe’s preschool only took kids ages three and four. Mum was loath to put me into day care for five days a week, but there didn’t seem to be an alternative.

“My little man
,
”
she said in a pained voice, across the table from her Shiraz-sipping adult son. “You and I were inseparable then,” she explained. “We had nothing but each other all day most days, with Dad at work and Zoe at preschool.
My little man
.”

She scoured the local day-care centers and found that the task of finding a place that would take a two-year-old for five days a week, on three weeks’ notice, was very difficult. Some could offer two days, some three—all useless. Finally she found a council-run day-care center a couple of suburbs over. They could take me
immediately. It was a dingy place and had an air of unhappiness about it. But there was no choice.

I remember it. They made me eat boiled spinach for lunch. When it was sleep time, they put us on fold-out beds that were too high for us to get down from without assistance. I remember wetting myself a few times because I couldn’t get down when I needed to go to the toilet. Anyway, we both remembered that every morning when she’d take me there, I’d cry and cry and try to stop her from leaving me. I’d run out into the yard and plaster myself against the chicken-wire fence next to the exit walkway, crying and screaming at her to come back.

When she’d come to pick me up in the afternoon, I’d be plastered against the same piece of fence, still crying and looking out for her return. Mum says that leaving me at that place was one of the hardest things she ever had to do.
Awful
, she said.
And your father didn’t seem to understand just how awful
.

Amelia reckons that these stories are important. Look no further, she says, the answers are in our homes. When I think of “oppression of women,” I think of the suffragettes, I think of things in the past or elsewhere, like women being forced to seek back-alley abortions, women being denied entry into universities, women having to obtain their husband’s written consent to leave the country, women being hung as witches or sold as sex slaves, women living under sexist, oppressive regimes. I don’t need to look so far away. It turns out my mum
does
defrost and clean the fridge.

I once wrote Amelia a letter and told her that she doesn’t have to look very far to see difference—despite the narrative that is spun by the prime minister and co. about how swell everything is. I encouraged her to look close to home.

She’s got me doing the same thing, hasn’t she?

All of the cleaning-product ads—
all
of them—feature women. I was watching one tonight for some new variation of surface cleaner (“that can be used on ANY surface, even glass and wood!”). With her kids screaming in the background, our protagonist faced the camera and said something to the effect of “I work full-time. I have three kids. I don’t have time to switch between cleaning products!”

Another one for sandwich bags features a professional-looking lady in her kitchen saying she doesn’t have time to faff around with cling wrap in the mornings when she’s making the school lunches for her tribe.

Where are the husbands? Why is there not a single ad featuring some dude in a suit, or a pair of overalls, saying he’s a busy man struggling with the competing demands of work, housework and looking after the kids—he needs a reliable all-purpose cleaner or a no-fuss sandwich bag?

No wonder the Youngster’s all pissed off.

September 12

Trickstered! Deceived!

Mick and Suze.
Mick
and
Suze
are together. They’ve been together for almost a year! And keeping it a secret from their best mates! I don’t know if I’m more pissed off at the secrecy or the fact that they’ve found love while it continues to elude me. All those times—oh, never mind.

I tried to ring Rohan tonight to debrief, but I couldn’t get hold of him. He’s probably got Stella up visiting. Mick and Suze and Rohan and Stella. That’s lovely. Oh, and then there’s Chris.

This was not part of the deal! It was me, Mick, Suze and Rohan—four separate entities linking forces to lessen the blow of existence. A safe base to launch from and return to in the event of a critical incident. Bloody couple kingdom now! I bet we’ll never go out again—they’ll all just want to stay home to cuddle and watch movies. And if we do go out, I won’t be able to concentrate because I’ll be all like “Oh my God,
Mick
and
Suze
!”

I handed my thesis in yesterday, a milestone that was somewhat overshadowed by this revelation. We went out to celebrate and they just came out with it.

Everything is changing so fast. All the mainstays of my life from the last four years are changing. Have already changed. But I’m still here, dammit!

I’m going to ring up that Japanese English school tomorrow.

Fuck everything; I have to get out of here. I have to have something that’s mine.

There’s almost nothing for me here.

September 18

I’m so fucking lonely.

September 20

I’m holed up trying to write my last essay. Three days in which to do it.

I’m also filling out my application to the Japanese English school.

Mick and Suze are moving in together. They both got the
jobs they wanted. Rohan’s moved into his new house in Newcastle. Stella’s just got a job up there too.

At least the Land of Broken Dreams mob remains relatively static. Ed’s having a birthday party next week.

I’m twenty-two.

September 21

It’s sometime close to midnight. I’m in my room with my third giant glass of red wine and I’m just about ready to relay the events of the evening.

Tonight’s Friday. Zoe and Terry came around for dinner. Dad fired up the grill and Mum produced steaks long-steeped in her red wine, garlic and honey marinade. Zoe, Terry and I sat silently allied through Dad’s interrogation about when they are going to buy real estate. They gave him the usual response about the difficulty in saving the required money for a deposit and then in servicing the mortgage. He said something about needing to make “sacrifices.”

After a flicker of anger, we sighed and felt the usual lead weight of hopelessness settle on our shoulders. Terry changed the subject to the Australian Football League Grand Final. When Zoe and Terry left, I scraped the barbecue and wished that daylight saving would come a little sooner. I heard the phone ring. Mum brought it out into the yard.