I tried to tell him things. Unpleasant things, but unless I made a nice anecdote out of them it wouldn’t register. I knew he liked to hear the stories about the Janome sewing machine I got for my twelfth birthday, but not the story about the pills I had to take at seventeen. As an insider, my life wasn’t interesting and quirky; I was only a good storyteller, and I was running out of quirky anecdotes. I was meant to be the stoic little survivor, an everlasting fount of energy and optimism. “You know, Alice, sometimes I wish you
would
cry,” he told me, but I thought that if I did, I would be like all other girls, and I liked to think that I was different, that I was special. But in actuality I was just a better scriptwriter.
And pretty soon, I realised that the script was running out. Pretty soon he might decide to tune into new romantic comedies on other channels, and it was with this realisation that the paranoia started kicking in. I would wonder about every attractive young woman I met at parties, even when he was not there. Why me, not her? Why why why? He could probably get sex out of that one. He could get easier parents out of the other one. I knew the paranoias were mine and mine alone, demons I had to reckon with, that arose through no fault of his. Once in front of friends he made a joke about being with other girls, and I went morbidly quiet.
“Why would you get upset? Unless of course, you think it would actually happen.”
He had a point there.
I found four little unopened foil packets in his room while I was packing for his journey back to Perth, and I hid them between the pages of a book I found on his shelf –
2001: A Space
Odyssey
. There was no need to confront him or make a big deal out of it because of course I knew he had had sex before he met me, otherwise he might not have been so calm about waiting and waiting, and that thought didn’t make me feel jealous in the way the photos did, but it did make me cautious because sooner or later being me would not be enough, and there would be no sex to keep us together, and it would be the end.
*
What would happen when I told him I didn’t want to have sex? He would be understanding, and kind, but I bet he would think,
this is all your parents’ doing, all these stigmas, and if you could only
overcome them, you would be free
. It was either rebellion or no rebellion. We had just watched
Pleasantville
at my house after dinner, a movie about a
1950
s
Brady-Bunch
world existing within a television screen, where everything was black-and-white and placidly “perfect”, until some kids from half a century later enter the scene and introduce some colour into Pleasantville, and life is no longer as pleasant, but more exciting.
“I wish your parents would stop seeing in black-and-white,” Michael had commented before he climbed out of the car.
But Michael, I wanted to say, it is not the matter of sex or no sex that liberates a person. I would never spend a night in your room, and you will never understand the reasons why, because you will think that it is only to do with my parents. I only get one go in this lifetime, Michael, and I don’t want to screw up, literally speaking. One chance, do you understand? But he did try to understand, to the best of his ability, because he knew the limitations, and worked carefully within them, until “We’ve got to be careful not to make your father aggro” became his refrain. The difficulties we faced were seen as kind of exciting, kind of heroic. Proof of our love, how much we were willing to suffer. I supposed he was suffering for the
idea
of love, but why would you suffer for someone so banal?
After a while, it probably began to dawn on him that this was not a game, that it was a series of rules and regulations, as strict as the army. He probably began to see me as a series of dos and don’ts. Once we got caught in the rain, and he said, “Oh no, what is your father going to say when he answers the door and sees that I’ve brought you home all wet and dishevelled?” as if it was his fault that it had rained. In order to help me maintain my independence, while simultaneously appeasing my parents, he had to tread a fine line between being overly solicitous and grossly negligent. I knew it was hard on him.
We spent a lot of time in the small, dark uninhabited rooms in the attic of the Old Law Library at Melbourne University. It was our secret place, and I would block the window on the door with my shawl while we were together. I asked him whether I made him happy, which was something I had never doubted before, but now I was losing faith in my own capacities. He laughed, there was no doubt about it, he gave me his answer and I knew he meant it. He had laughed because it was a stupid question with one obvious answer, and he meant the answer.
“Do
I
make you happy?” he asked me in return, and I knew he expected the same honesty. But the only answer I could give him was a white lie, and then I started to cry. He probably thought that this confirmed what I had said, but actually I was crying because I was a liar, and the truth was that being with him made me miserable. No longer did I feel the urge to share my observations of the world with him. He could see my world for what it was – a set of rules and finely drawn lines and fraudulent erasures.
A
ND
so when his bags were all packed and he was heading back to Perth, it was the end for both of us, although he did not know it yet. He had waited for me to finish work so that he could say goodbye. I had never in my life so adored him, and my stomach had never felt so knotted.
“Where would you like to go?” I asked him, although I knew he would let me lead. That was what I loved about him. This suburb was my turf, he let me show him everything through my eyes. In the end, I decided to take him to the park where Chinese New Year was held every year. It reminded me of a few childhood days spent with my family, before the little sisters were born, when my brother and I ate barbequed corn-on-the-cob and ran away from the dragon as it approached. Our disbelief was suspended for those few moments when the dragon came to face us – we forgot that there were merely four sweating young men underneath, thrashing their limbs about to make the material move. The creature seemed to take on a life of its own. People clamoured to be near the dragon, but I shrank from its noise and violence and glaring bulging eyes.
But this was not New Year. It was dusk in summer, and the park was quiet and clean. We found a bench and sat down, facing the flowerbeds. We sat in silence for many moments. I was growing cold, and I wrapped my arms around myself. After a while, when neither of us had yet started to speak, I realised that Michael already knew. He knew that this was not a silence of ease, of familiar companionship, because he did not tell me that he was going to call me from Perth, or tell me that he was going to miss me when he left. We did not look at each other. He hummed a waiting-in-the-lift tune. He was probably trying to annoy me out of my reticence, so that we would at least have a starting basis on which to fight. “
I hate it when you hum that
goddamn stupid tune!” “Well, I find it soothing and meditative.”
“It’s crap, and you’ve left me with no choice but to leave. This is the
end!” “You’re leaving me over a tune?! No! Wait, I have more in my
repertoire!”
If only it were that easy.
He sighed and picked at his fingernails. When he had produced a result that would keep a manicurist in business for the next two weeks, he put his hands away and turned to me: “You didn’t bring me here so I could just say goodbye to you, did you?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Because now I can’t seem to say it.”
I remained silent, and could not look at him.
“Because if I do, I have a feeling it is going to have more significance than just being away from each other during the summer break.”
I looked at my own nails and decided I had some wrecking work to do.
“I’m right, aren’t I?”
I remained silent.
“Oh. I see. You brought me here to tell me something.”
I finally looked at him.
“Then tell me.”
So I did.
It started with the three words that I was taught always to keep to myself, to expect from men, but never, ever to give away. The three words that caused my grandmother to fight all her life, the very three words that compelled my mother to leave her family and walk through three countries by foot to spend the rest of her life in an alien land that she would never understand, and that would never understand her.
And the consequences of the three words to me, for me, how real they were.
When I had finished, he didn’t look at me for a long while.
He looked at his hands, fingers curled towards the palm. Then he finally looked at me with … what? Disappointment? Hurt?
Perhaps even contempt, which I had never seen before. But one thing I did not see in his gaze, as hard as I looked, was surprise.
For that I was relieved.
“You think,” he told me, “that love is this ‘one true love for ever and ever’ kind of thing, don’t you?”
That was probably contempt I saw on his face.
“No, that’s not true.”
But perhaps it was.
Yet how could I explain how sometimes having the right feelings was just not enough, how it was never enough, for a “forever kind of thing” – a decision you make for life, for better and for worse, and how I did not want to make this decision at eighteen.
“But you don’t have to. Geez, it’s not like we are going to get married anytime soon or anything!”
Yet I knew that the dating was over, the honey in the honeymoon period was way past its expiry date. He would find other girls to adore him. If this went any further, I would be doomed because I would doom myself. Secondhand goods. I adored him. It was so easy to make him happy, I just had to be me. But time was running out,
I
was running out, there wasn’t much left of me to give. I didn’t want to give him faulty goods because he was the type of boy who would never ask for a refund. And the only thing of value left of me to give him would leave me valueless. Dented washing machine no one wants to use.
“I wrote you a poem,” he told me, “I was going to give it to you.”
I said nothing.
He looked at me. “Would you still have done this if I had given it to you?”
I looked back at him. He thought that a poem could change the course of things. It reminded me of that young mother in the fifth deck of the
Titanic
, who read her two little children fairytales as the ship was sinking.
“Yes. I would have still done this, Michael.”
I seemed to care bugger-all for lofty romance.
I seemed to care bugger-all for feelings. “I’m sorry.”
He began to cry. I had not expected this. I didn’t know what to do. I wiped his nose with my sleeve because there were no tissues around. This seemed to make him even more upset, so I had to use the other sleeve.
“Come on, it’s snot that bad.”
He stopped sniffing. He stared at me.
“My God, it’s terrible!”
“No …”
“Bloody awful!”
“No, come on …”
“Hell, that was atrocious! Never heard such a bad joke. You should be
pun
-ished for it!”
“Damn you! What about yours?” I retorted, and somehow those words had a tear-triggering effect because pretty soon I was in dire need of tissues or at least uncharted terrain on my sleeves. “Damn you, Michael!”
“This is worse than the time we ate raw chilli at that restaurant to see who was more stoic.” Of course we both remembered. Fanciest place in Footscray, with butcher’s paper on the tables on top of the white tablecloths, and there we were, not realising that our dates were numbered.
We sat in silence, and the sun set. It grew colder, and we wrapped our arms around ourselves, tacitly knowing that we were now already separate, that we could no longer allow ourselves to keep each other warm.
Finally, he looked at me. “Well, I’m going to miss you.”
“I’m going to miss you, too.”
We sat like that for a long time, not speaking, knowing this was the last time we would be sitting together like this. We were just-ended lovers in a sense. Lovers in the sense that we loved each other wholeheartedly, with a sort of childhood faith.
“We’d better be heading off.”
We did not look at each other as we walked down to the station.
“I still don’t understand, Alice,” he finally said as we reached our destination.
But he did not doubt that I loved him, because I had wiped his nose with my sleeve. I waited for the train with him, and it soon arrived.
“Well, goodbye then.”
“Goodbye, Michael.”
And there I was, a solitary girl in a sales uniform, standing on Platform
1
of Footscray station watching the
8
.
43
p.m.
Flinders Street train leave and snake its way past the graffiti-covered concrete walls and into the grassy wilderness of no-man’s industrial wasteland. If this were a film, it would be about now that there would be a shot of a single extended arm out the window of the train, and then the close-up of the hero’s tearstained face would fade away and the credits would start to roll, perhaps accompanied by some poignant, bittersweet tune.
I knew that Michael would go home and unpack his carefully packed suitcases. He would find the little presents I had left him – photographs, books, toiletries, cards. He might even smile upon discovering what I had carefully packed between the pages of his copy of
2001: A Space Odyssey
. “Crazier than I thought,” he would think, and take out the four or so foil packages and throw them in the bin, because it’s not like he couldn’t buy them again. And in time, I hoped, he would think of me with a certain fondness, despite the girlfriends to come and the ones that had gone before.
And I would go home and continue the other play, the one that has not ended, the one that will never end, and I would resume my role as “dutiful daughter”, this time with more understanding and compassion.
I could see my mother at my same age, riding on the back of my father’s bicycle in Vietnam, her hands around his waist, the excitement and frisson of trying to evade the bicycle behind her – her sister Ly was always tagging along. I could see her trying as I did, as hard as I did, to get some time alone with the man she loved, to forget about the drudgeries of work and duty and let her hair fly loose and revel in her youth and beauty, and the fact that this man nine years her senior, her former boss for crying out loud, thought that she was the most incredible, delightful, charming creature to have graced the earth. So much so that he was willing to take her to a foreign country of which the only thing he knew was that it didn’t snow, and to live with her for the rest of his life and see their lives multiply into four new ones.