Once I took Michael upstairs to my room while my mother had gone out. I didn’t necessarily want to sleep with him, I just wanted to see what he looked like in my room, and let the image set itself in my mind for eternity so that every time I felt the walls closing in, I would be able to pull it out of my mind like a developed Polaroid tucked carefully between the pages of an illicit diary. And then I would be able to tell myself, hah hah, I broke a rule, and the frisson and the crude sense of accomplishment in breaking the rule would be my consolation and my power.
If we really wanted to sleep with our boyfriends, as I knew many of my classmates did in high school, none of us would be stupid enough to do it at home anyway. A girl from Hong Kong in my English class lost her virginity in the cinema, but we never asked her what movie she was watching in case she burst into tears because it was inane and forgettable trash. In fact, we weren’t even supposed to find out about it, except that her boyfriend thought it was a neat trick to brag to his mates, and then word got around to the girls’ school and it was the end of Sherry’s academic career. I saw her alone on the train, hair neatly tied back in a ponytail, staring straight ahead, pretending she couldn’t see anyone. Any greetings of “Hi Sherry!” were met with suspicion – she thought that we were teasing her. Then the next time I saw her on the train it was in the lap of the boyfriend, although a few months ago she wouldn’t even hold his hand in public. She sat slumped like a ventriloquist’s doll and glared at any girl who dared cast looks at her boyfriend.
What did my parents think – that I was so uncontrolled I would not be able to restrain myself whenever there was a bed around? In that case, Michael and I had better not walk through the furniture department in Myer, or who knows what progeny could be created to torment us in the future, the way we were tormenting them? Or were they merely afraid that I was so stupid and meek that I would let my boyfriend take advantage of me? Probably it was the latter, because the idea of your daughter having kinky thoughts of any kind was a terrible, terrible one.
Michael entered my room awfully reluctantly because he knew we were breaking The Rule, and he was a kind boy, a decent boy, a boy who wanted to be with me not because of sex, obviously, because otherwise he could have dated the girls flinging themselves at him in college (or so I thought). He sat awkwardly on the edge of the bed, shoulders slumped, worried like hell about the return of my mother. I looked at him, and the image I saw was not one of a suave, languidly-leaning-on-one-elbow Casanova – the kind of person that my parents feared above all else. Didn’t my parents know that I would not have gone for that type? Couldn’t they see that Michael was more anxious than I, and that I wasn’t planning to ravish him? I was nervous myself; it was the agitated frisson of pretending to do the forbidden. “I like you,” I said to him. I like looking at you. I like the perfection of your eyebrows and your angular face like a Lucian Freud painting. I like your fingers that are much prettier than my own. I like the fact that you are sitting on that bed even though I told you about its distasteful history. I like the fact that you don’t make a big deal out of my pretentious room. I like you sitting here and instead of being my chattel you could become a permanent fixture. I could keep you in the wardrobe and feed you bits of food, and we would be happy living this closeted existence until we were discovered.
Or more likely, until the doorbell rang.
*
“Just tell her the truth,” he said to me later when my mother had left, and my shakes had started. He spoke as if the answer were that simple.
My mother had returned from picking up my sisters from school and seen me come downstairs to open the door. More importantly, she had seen Michael following behind me.
The first question she asked was, “What were you doing upstairs with the boy?”
“We were vacuuming.” If my face were any straighter, you would be able to sign an affidavit above my eyebrows.
My mother said nothing, but I knew that my irrepressible desire to clean the house would be reported to my father. She left shortly afterwards without saying a word to me, to drive my sisters to their maths tutor. She didn’t even yell at me, but her look said it all. It was as if I was doomed, and she was leaving me to complete whatever prurient business we were up to, because it was all too late.
And now Michael was trying to fix it up for me, feeling the burden of guilt that was with me always.
“Just tell her,” he said slowly, like a benign philosophy professor with the best of intentions but so removed from the practicalities of this world that I could weep, “that you just wanted to kiss me.”
I looked at him and didn’t know what to say. The sheer ridiculousness of his suggestion astounded me. “I’m not even supposed to be kissing you, don’t you understand? They think – or they like to think – that the most we get up to is hand-holding. So what do I tell her now, I took you upstairs because I wanted to hold your hand?”
I wasn’t being fair, and I knew it. I was asking him sarcastic rhetorical questions when none of this was his fault at all. He would never understand, and not because I was a cynic and overwhelmed by the futility of it all. No, I was a realist, and I had choices to make. One of them was to keep silent about certain things, so that he would never understand, because what he did not know could not hurt him. How could I ever tell him that before my mother left us both home alone, she took me upstairs to her walk-in wardrobe and whispered, as if he could hear up a flight of stairs, a room and a wardrobe and understand Teochew dialect, “Is it safe to leave you here with him?”
“Yes,” I groaned, because she was irritating me, but she had to ask me the question a couple more times, each time stressing the word “safe” with greater intensity, until my annoyance was starting to make her anxious and she thought that if she asked me anymore it might just incite me to get it on with him as an act of rebellion. She then hissed in my ear, “Don’t you ever let him upstairs, you never know what he could get up to.”
And he hadn’t got up to anything, in fact it was me who initiated it, who invited trouble, who could not be content with innocent stolen kisses between classes but had to pose him like a doll on my purple bed, like a little girl playing with Barbie and Ken dolls.
“I’m just going to stick with my story,” I said to him slowly and firmly. “We were upstairs vacuuming.”
He looked at me as if I were mad. “You reckon they will believe that?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then why are you telling a lie?” He couldn’t understand it. “We weren’t even doing anything wrong!”
“The truth, Michael,” I said, “would be worse than a lie.
The truth would be a threat. It would torment them forever.”
“But we didn’t even do anything!”
“I know.”
“You’re going to get into trouble.”
“No kidding.”
“You’re shaking,” he commented. Way to go, astute observer.
Once the shakes started, it would be a while before they stopped.
If I was only good for one thing, it was creating the first human seismograph. Michael didn’t like to touch me when I was in this state, maybe he thought I was fragile, or maybe he thought that I would find it patronising. But it distressed him. The next thing he said was, “Tell her
I
told you to go upstairs.”
That put a sudden end to the trembles because I was too stunned to move. I stared at him.
“No, no,” he corrected himself. “Tell them that I
made
you go upstairs.”
I thought the shakes had damaged my eardrums. “What?”
“Tell them I made you do it. Tell them you’re not to blame.
Tell them
I’m
to blame.”
The consequences of my vacuuming lie were calculated to be miniscule and to protect all parties. It was nothing but a little see-through white lie, it was threat-minimisation, it was to stop the torment on both sides. But the consequences of this other lie he wanted me to tell were monstrous, earth-shattering. The consequences for him – how could he even consider
that
? Did he think I would really tell such a huge monstrous black falsehood? What on earth was he thinking?
How could he take responsibility for such a thing?
“But you didn’t make me do
anything
! We didn’t do anything!”
He raised one eyebrow, as if to highlight that this was what he had been trying to tell me all along.
This made me think about my own stupid story about vacuuming, and to realise with devastation that I had probably instilled in him the need to lie, except that he was sincere and he did not understand the nuances of untruths, the different levels of diplomacy, the different degrees of fake. He probably thought one lie was just as good as another, and so long as you knew the truth, that was all that mattered. So why not come out with one that would get your beloved out of the most trouble? You would be unscathed because you knew the truth, and the truth would set you free. He did not understand this complicated sense of self based on others’ perceptions and how one little lie about your honour could mark you down, make you a pariah or psychologically pock-mark you forever. His sense of ignorance was unwittingly brave and inadvertently defiant, and it was for this innocence that I loved him.
In the end, as I knew from the beginning, the vacuuming story worked. During dinner my father didn’t say anything, because he was too embarrassed, and he could not dispute my story because to do so would be too awkward, and who knew what sordid tales could emerge. There were some things he was better off not knowing, as far as my father was concerned.
*
When I was at home, I was wearing a mask. I could not be flippant or funny or laugh too loud lest my parents thought me an uncontrollable flirt, or worse, smitten. The worst thing about our relationship was the being watched. We were putting on a show. He was trying as hard if not harder than I was to be acceptable – to be the obedient prospective son-in-law. He drank the herbal medicines my father made, and adopted what he thought was a manly reticence. He offered to help me with the dishes, and I responded automatically, “No, no, it’s alright, Michael, go sit down and watch some telly.”
“You know,” he whispered to me one day as I was at the sink, “if we ever … errr … live in a domestic-type relationship, you can’t do this. It unbalances things.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to live in a domestic relationship with him, but if I did, I would have done anything to make his life easier. I owed him the world for his persistence, for his understanding. I felt guilty that he was even coming here at all. It was a one-and-a-half kilometre walk up the hill to Avondale Heights, to meet up with mediocre me, to be with me while I went about my daily duties. He was with me while I cooked and cleaned, and collected my sisters from school, and he carried my sister’s purple backpack on his back.
This isn’t me!
I wanted to yell,
I am more exciting, there is
more to me than these menial tasks, there is more to my life than
what I do! I am sorry there is not much more you can see, but it’s all
there. You probably feel gypped.
I felt so much guilt and stress that it put my stomach in knots. My intestines had probably already macraméd a stringy bag, waiting for my heart to drop no less.
How could I compensate for wasting the youth of this unassuming boy? He was so easily made content but I still wanted to make it up to him, even though he did not expect compensation. So I washed his clothes. I made him meals. I packed his stuff when he was about to move out of college back to Perth for the summer holidays. He could have done it himself, shoved all the washed and unwashed shirts and socks into cardboard boxes, little did he care about neatly folded squares of clothes and carefully ordered cartons. It was then that I began to have my doubts, and realise the truth: that this packing, this cleaning, this fussing, was not what he appreciated about me. Anyone could have done it for him, and many girls were probably willing. Many girls were probably willing to do more.
*
But still, I drove him home every evening, and my father would want to come with us if it was getting too late – that is, past
10
.
30
p.m., in case I ended up twisting the car around a telephone pole. We had to weigh up the value of time – him staying longer at our house with my father accompanying us on the car-ride back to his college, or me driving him back early so that we could have the car-ride alone together. We opted for quality, not quantity.
That night, Michael looked at me with sad-labrador eyes, feeling sorry for both of us. “Now you’re going to have to drive home in the dark alone. I wish you could stay over. It would be so much easier.”
Easier?
He meant with him, in his bed.
His bedroom was always a mess, clothes strewn over the toughened wooden furniture that had belonged to generations of students, and socks spewing forth from every corner. Books lined his shelf – Plato, Mill, stories by Borges, drawings by Escher, and some hardcover
Sesame Street
books from childhood.
Cleaning his room, I found remnants of a life I barely knew. It lay there exposed for me, budding forth from his drawers. Photographs from an ex-girlfriend, artistically done and mounted on black cardboard – black-and-white landscapes with him in a big woollen jumper sharing the scenery with some sheep. Talk about stereotypes, I thought, you don’t see me posing in photos with my homies from Footscray in a dimly lit alleyway. But in reality, I was insecure, and I was jealous because someone had looked at him from all those angles. I carefully wrapped the pictures up in a jumper, because I could tell they were precious to him, the way he looked at them wistfully. I couldn’t even bring myself to look through his yearbook. There was a picture of him in there, at the college ball, with a black-haired big-bosomed girl. Another ex-girlfriend? At the very least, his date for the evening. I couldn’t look at him any more. I became awkward, shy, shoulders forward, eyes downcast concentrating on what I was putting in the boxes. He had, after all, let me go through all his things. “I have nothing to hide from you,” he said, and I had to honour that honesty, because I wouldn’t have let him go though my stuff, never in a million years, not with my cupboard full of diaries dating from age twelve plotting Armageddon against various people who made me miserable, and a new updated will stuck at the back of every edition. I didn’t want him to see all of that. This was a girl who had never travelled outside Melbourne, who lived in the same western suburbs all of her life, who spent her spare time knotting up her insides like ropes. I was a fake, and sooner or later he would find out.