Chapter 30

chapter thirty

Last October

‘I’ll try the apple crumble,’ said Joy to the waitress at the David Jones cafeteria, where she sat opposite Savannah, surrounded by a triumphant array of stiff, shiny, string-handled shopping bags at their feet.

‘With ice-cream or cream?’ asked the waitress.

‘With both,’ said Joy firmly.

It was a family tradition to always try the apple crumble whenever it was on the menu, in the forlorn hope that they might one day find an apple crumble as good as the one Stan’s mother used to bake. It was her signature dish, like Amy’s brownies. Everyone apart from Joy got misty-eyed when they ate apple crumble and said, ‘Not as good as Grandma’s,’ while Joy thought to herself, Trust the old bag to never share her secret recipe. One day someone would work out the missing single ingredient and then she’d be properly dead.

‘Please may I have the apple crumble too?’ said Savannah in that funny, almost childlike well-mannered way she had. ‘Also with ice-cream and cream.’

‘Same as your mum, then.’ The waitress flicked her notepad closed. It was the second time that day they’d been mistaken for mother and daughter as they’d shopped, trying on clothes in adjacent change rooms. ‘Do you want to see what your daughter thinks?’ a shop assistant had said to Joy as she tried on a long-sleeved floaty floral dress in a colour she would never normally wear.

Savannah had convinced Joy to buy the dress. ‘You look really beautiful,’ she’d said, eyes narrowed. ‘And it’s twenty per cent off. It looks well made.’ She’d dropped to her knees on the floor beside Joy and folded back the hem of the dress to show her. ‘Look at the stitching on the lining. That’s real good quality.’

That’s real good quality.

The phrase had snagged in Joy’s consciousness. It sounded incongruous from a girl of Savannah’s age. Like something Ma from Little House on the Prairie would say. And yet it was one of those moments where Joy felt she was seeing the real Savannah, as if her interest in the dress made her forget herself for a moment and a veil was lifted. Savannah was so ready to serve, like a hotel concierge, unfailingly courteous and warmly interested in your plans, that Joy sometimes had to remind herself not to bask in that interest, just like a self-absorbed hotel guest. It was an effort to make Savannah talk about herself but she was chipping away at it. She’d noticed it helped if it was a bit later at night, and just the two of them, especially if Joy suggested a nice little glass of brandy. That was when Savannah had told her about her ‘highly superior autobiographical memory’.

They’d been talking about Joy’s memoir-writing class and how there were some periods of Joy’s life that were just a blur.

‘I wish my memories would blur a bit,’ Savannah had said, looking into her glass. ‘I remember everything. The details never fade.’

Now Joy pushed aside the cutlery on the café table to lean forward, chin resting on her hands, to properly examine Savannah. She definitely looked better than when she’d arrived on her doorstep. Joy wished she could say it was because she’d done such a good job looking after her, when in fact the opposite was true: Savannah had done such a good job looking after her.

‘Are you feeling tired?’ Savannah asked her.

‘Not at all,’ said Joy, although she was a little. ‘Thank you for convincing me to get that dress.’

Savannah smiled. ‘I bet Stan will love it.’

‘He’ll love the discount,’ said Joy.

‘It’s a good dress,’ said Savannah.

Joy’s mother would have appreciated Savannah getting on her knees to check the dress’s lining. She used to do that sort of thing: check the stitching of the seams, tug at the hems. Sniff contemptuously if it wasn’t to her liking.

Joy had loved a long lingering day of shopping with her mother. It had been hard when the children were little and their tennis was all-consuming, but once every year she and her mother would have a day just like this. It was so satisfying, so pleasurable, going from shop to shop, hunting out bargains, accessorising an outfit, realising that the blue in that new blouse was a perfect match for the blue in that skirt, and then sitting down for a break at a café like this to rest your aching feet and discuss what else you needed.

Joy’s daughters both hated shopping. Amy began to mutter about commercialism and bright lights and ‘feeling like a rat trapped in a maze’, or some such nonsense, while Brooke was so task-focused, tapping her feet, her hand on the small of Joy’s back, hurrying her along: ‘Chop, chop, Mum, a fast shop is a good shop.’

Brooke only ever shopped online these days (‘You should try it, Mum, click, click and you’re done!’) and Amy apparently got her clothes by scrounging through charity bins, so Joy had given up suggesting shopping excursions.

But when Joy had suggested she treat Savannah to a day at a fancy shopping mall to thank her for everything she’d done while Joy was in the hospital, Savannah’s face had lit up even as she quickly said, ‘Oh, that’s not necessary.’

‘It would be my pleasure,’ Joy had said, truthfully, because today had been like rediscovering a forgotten part of herself, the part that perhaps only existed when she was with her mother, who had no interest in Joy’s tennis, or even, to be honest, Joy’s children, but did have passionate opinions about the right colours and necklines to flatter Joy’s body. Joy had assumed her daughters would at least have a passing interest in fashion, but they both found it frivolous and irrelevant, almost contemptible, like playing with dolls, which neither of them had done either. Joy had spent hours playing with dolls as a child.

‘I know exactly the right necklace to go with your shift dress,’ said Joy to Savannah. ‘A long kind of heavy chunky pendant that sits right here.’ She pointed at her collarbone. ‘Although I’ve noticed you nearly always wear that key necklace, don’t you? Is it sentimental?’

Savannah’s young face became momentarily rigid and jaded, as if she were thirty years older. ‘A friend gave it to me for my twenty-first birthday.’ She lifted the key from her neck and tapped it against her chin. ‘She said it symbolised “doors opening for a brighter future”.’ She smiled cynically at Joy. ‘I’m still waiting for those doors to open.’

‘I’m sure lots of doors are about to open for you!’ said Joy. She recognised the rousing tone she used to employ to little avail when Amy got ‘the bad feeling’.

‘Well, you opened your door to me.’ Savannah’s face softened. ‘So that’s a start! Maybe I could get a green pendant.’ She bent towards the shopping bags, pulled out a corner of the dress and pointed at the fabric. ‘To pick out the green colour of those little squares? What do you think?’

‘Perfect,’ said Joy, and her eyes filled with unexpected tears as she felt a thin, sharp, strangely pleasurable piercing of grief for her mother, who would have loved this day so much, who might have found it so much easier to bond with a granddaughter like this. Her mother had died over twenty years ago, and Joy’s grief at the time had been so complicated and strange. Her mother hadn’t been an especially good mother, and she was an even worse grandmother: she found her grandchildren too loud and too large, and so excessive in number. ‘Why would you want more?’ she’d said to Joy when she told her she was pregnant with Brooke.

When she died, just three months after Stan’s mother had died, Joy kept spinning in the opposite direction when faced with her grief, which was hers and hers alone, because she had no siblings, and her children much preferred their other grandmother, because of the secret cash hand-outs and that damned apple crumble.

It was perfectly possible to avoid grief when you have four children who all play competitive tennis, and nearly one hundred more tennis students requiring your attention, and one husband grieving his own mother and dealing with his own mid-bloody-life crisis, and when your relationship with your mother had always been entangled in disappointment and love, so Joy spun and she spun until one day her grief caught her, in the laundry, as she pulled a ruined blouse out of the washing machine, a blouse that her mother had told her to only ever wash by hand in cold water.

It was as though Joy’s subconscious had only just that moment caught up with what she rationally understood: that she truly wouldn’t see her mother again. Her mother would never again phone at an inconvenient time with an unreasonable request. She would never again tell Joy that she hated February. Or that she hated August. Or that she hated November. (She only liked April.) Pearl Becker never would find the happiness that had continually eluded her and their relationship would remain a puzzle forever unsolved. That day Joy had lowered herself to the floor with her back against the washing machine, the sodden ball of her ruined blouse dripping all over her skirt, and sobbed, violently and shockingly, and then, shamefully, she’d shouted at a tennis kid who unexpectedly opened the laundry door and caught her there. (It was a wonder she hadn’t got a complaint from that kid’s mother.)

But this sadness she was feeling now felt natural, wholesome and uncomplicated, as if finally, after all these years, she was grieving the way normal daughters grieved for their mothers: the way she’d like her own daughters to grieve for her one day, not coldly stuffing their mother’s clothes into a big black garbage bag, the way Joy had done, the day after her mother’s funeral, without a single tear, or even a tender thought, but also not crying on the laundry floor weeks later in that strange paroxysm of grief that would have so mortified her mother. (‘Get up!’ Pearl would have cried, yanking Joy up by the elbow. ‘Someone might see you!’)

‘Thank you.’ Joy leaned back as the waitress delivered their apple crumble. She said to Savannah, ‘I know just the shop for that necklace. We’ll go there straight after this.’

‘Well, only if . . . if that’s okay,’ said Savannah, suddenly looking uncomfortable. ‘You’ve already spent quite a lot on me. Your children might not approve.’

‘Darling, I should be paying you a salary,’ said Joy. ‘You are like a full-time chef! And housekeeper! This is the least I can do.’

‘Well, but don’t forget I’m getting free rent,’ said Savannah.

‘I’m the one getting the bargain here,’ said Joy stoutly. She thought of Brooke, on the phone this morning: ‘Mum, if you actually want to employ this girl as a housekeeper or whatever you want to call it, you need to do it properly.’

Of course Joy couldn’t employ Savannah as a full-time chef or housekeeper. She didn’t know anyone with a housekeeper. That was for movie stars and Americans. Possibly people from the eastern suburbs. Not for ordinary people like her and Stan. However, it had occurred to her last night that perhaps they could let Savannah stay as a kind of lodger. Why not? Savannah could get a job, somewhere local, and stay in Amy’s room, and pay nominal rent, or no rent at all if she kept on doing the cooking.

But Stan wasn’t at all keen. He said, when they were in bed last night, the door shut, that it had been over six weeks now and it was probably time for Savannah to think about finding her own place.

‘But why the rush?’ Joy had said, taken aback. She thought he enjoyed Savannah’s company as much as she did, but since she’d come back from the hospital, he’d become more reserved around Savannah. All that chattiness had stopped. He found excuses not to join them at mealtimes. He and Savannah didn’t seem to be watching that television series together anymore. It was such a pity.

‘Did something happen while I was in hospital?’ Joy had asked him.

‘Like what?’ said Stan, his jaw clenched.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘You just don’t seem as happy about Savannah as you were in the beginning.’

‘She’s been here long enough,’ said Stan. ‘That’s all I’m saying.’

It had been so odd.

After a moment she’d said, ‘Have you been talking to the children?’ The children were being such children about Savannah. She could not believe that Amy had accused Savannah of making up the story about her boyfriend, based on some documentary Logan had supposedly seen with a similar story, as if there couldn’t be similarities in people’s experiences.

Stan had said nothing and she refused to give him the satisfaction of innocently, idiotically repeating the question, a little louder, the way she would have when she was twenty, or yelling, ‘Answer me!’ like she would have when she was forty.

She was sure she was right: the children had got to him and that’s what accounted for his sudden coolness towards Savannah. He was more influenced by their opinions than he liked to pretend. He would argue vehemently with one of them about a particular issue and then, just a month or so later, spout the very same argument presented by one of the children as if it were his own, and categorically deny that he had ever said or thought otherwise.

It was all very well for Stan to say that Savannah had been there long enough. He wasn’t the one who would be back in the kitchen at five pm every day, staring with despair and boredom at the refrigerator’s contents, sliding the vegetable crisper open and closed, open and closed, hoping for inspiration.

This hatred of cooking must represent something else, because why get so worked up about it now, after all these years? Once upon a time Joy was up at five am every day, she’d coach class after class, deal with the laundry, the dog, the accountant, the homework, her mother, her mother-in-law, and then she’d cook dinner for a family of six (at a minimum, there were always extra people at the table), and she’d done it without conscious resentment or complaint.

Now that it was only ever her and Stan at home, cooking should feel like a breeze. She had whole days at her disposal to plan and prepare, to pore over recipe books if she chose, the way Savannah pored over her beloved recipe books (so many for a girl so young!) with such focus and pleasure, her mouth hanging slightly open as if she were reading a romance novel. Joy had time to wander about specialty supermarkets looking for unusual ingredients, except she wanted to cry with boredom at the thought. What was wrong with her? She thought of Brooke’s brisk, surprised suggestion that they try some sort of meal delivery service, or, if she wanted a housekeeper, hire one! According to her children, anything could be fixed online. They were always reaching for answers on their phones, they couldn’t go more than five minutes without looking something up. I’ll look it up, Mum. I’ve got it. I’ve booked it. I’ve ordered it. They tap-tap-tapped with their thumbs and it was done. There was no need for her elderly fuss.

‘I’ve been meaning to thank you for taking care of Stan while I was in hospital,’ said Joy now to Savannah. ‘I hope he wasn’t too grumpy? He can be grumpy.’

‘It was no trouble,’ said Savannah. Joy couldn’t read her face. Had he been grumpy with her? Or just odd? He could be strange, and young people weren’t patient with strangeness, they wanted clear-cut explanations for everything, including exactly why people behaved the way they did. They hadn’t yet learned that sometimes there were no answers.

‘My daughters would say that he shouldn’t need anyone to take care of him,’ said Joy. ‘But he’s from a different generation. No help in the kitchen at all.’ She paused, reflected. ‘He’s good at opening jars.’

She wondered how Debbie Christos was going without Dennis there to open jars. Debbie had dainty wrists. Joy should tell her to call Stan anytime she wanted a jar opened. Any time.

‘How is the apple crumble?’ asked Savannah, because she knew about the family’s quest to replicate Grandma’s apple crumble.

‘It’s a good one,’ said Joy. ‘But still missing something.’ She licked her spoon. ‘Actually, it’s not even close, to be honest. I don’t know why she could make such a good crumble. She couldn’t bake anything else. She was a nasty old drunk.’

Yet for some reason her apple crumble tasted of love. It was a mystery.

‘Maybe the secret ingredient is some kind of alcohol,’ said Savannah. ‘Whiskey?’

Joy pointed her spoon at her. ‘Now that would make sense. Clever.’

‘I’m going to try it this weekend,’ said Savannah, and Joy could see that she’d pleased her by calling her clever. ‘I’m going to crack the Delaney family apple crumble mystery.’

Joy watched Savannah touch her spoon with the tip of her tongue and put it down again. She didn’t really eat. All she did was cook. She was too thin. Joy wanted to tell her she was too thin but she’d learned that you had to be careful what you said. Amy and Brooke had once overheard Joy saying, ‘My daughters have enormous feet,’ and she’d never heard the end of it. She hadn’t meant anything bad by it! They did have enormous feet.

‘You don’t eat much, do you?’ she said to Savannah. Surely that wasn’t offensive. ‘For someone who loves to cook so much, I mean.’

‘I used to have a big appetite when I was a kid.’ Savannah dug her spoon into her apple crumble and swirled it around. Did she think Joy couldn’t tell that she wasn’t actually eating? ‘I was always hungry.’

She looked at Joy with a fixed, almost belligerent expression, and Joy backed down. Perhaps she’d accidentally ‘body-shamed’. There were a lot of new rules for life and she hadn’t caught up on all of them. Her children, who had come into the world completely uncivilised and learned all their good manners from her, sometimes cried, ‘Mum! You can’t say that!’ She always laughed as if she didn’t give two hoots, but in truth these inadvertent transgressions upset and embarrassed her.

‘How long had you been going out with that boy?’ she asked Savannah. ‘The one who –’ She touched her own eyebrow where Savannah’s injury had been.

‘About a year.’ Savannah’s face was impassive. She scraped a spoonful of froth from her cappuccino.

‘Had he ever hurt you before?’

She wasn’t checking up on her story. Absolutely not. She was just asking questions, trying to understand her.

Savannah put down her spoon and said, ‘Can I ask you a question? About your . . . marriage?’

Joy had that odd feeling again that here was the real Savannah, relaxing for a moment, being her true self, taking off her mask.

‘Go right ahead,’ she said expansively.

‘Was there ever any . . . infidelity?’

‘Oh!’ said Joy. She wiped her mouth with her napkin and sat back.

‘It’s a very personal question, I know,’ said Savannah.

It was a personal question, but Joy had just been asking Savannah personal questions about her relationship, so why shouldn’t she ask them back?

‘No,’ she said, and it was no problem at all to bat away that blurry shameful image of another man’s lips bending towards hers.

‘As far as you know,’ said Savannah.

Joy blinked.

‘I didn’t mean to imply anything by that,’ said Savannah.

‘Of course you didn’t,’ said Joy. ‘You’re right: as far as I know.’

‘You were lucky,’ said Savannah thoughtfully, ‘to meet your soulmate when you were so young.’

‘Soulmate,’ repeated Joy. ‘I don’t know about that. He was just a boy. He’s not perfect. I’m not perfect. When you’re young you get so worked up about things you think you could never forgive, like, I don’t know . . .’

‘Birthdays?’ Savannah lifted a crumb of the apple crumble topping and rubbed it between her fingertips. ‘Like forgetting a birthday?’

‘That sort of thing, yes,’ said Joy, although she’d never cared that much about birthdays or anniversaries. She wanted to say, Oh, darling, you’ve no idea.

She remembered that day they were all driving to the Northumberland Open on the Central Coast and the boys wouldn’t stop fighting in the back seat, and she could feel Stan becoming unnaturally still in the driver’s seat and her stomach was churning in anticipation, and she turned and hissed at the children, violently, silently contorting her face to try to make them stop. It was during the height of the battles between Logan and Troy, when it seemed like each argument between them was a matter of life and death.

And then Stan put on his indicator. His flicker. That’s what they used to call the indicator back then. Funny how words disappeared, became quaint and ridiculous, like fashions and opinions you once held dear. He put on his flicker, stopped the car, undid his seatbelt, got out, closed the door, and Joy thought, You must be joking, Stan. We’re on a highway. But he wasn’t joking. He missed that day’s matches. The kids all lost their matches. Bizarre behaviour.

Husbands could do worse! That’s what she’d always told herself. She knew of husbands who hit or shoved or shouted terrible abuse. If Janet Higbee lost a game on a double-fault her husband tweaked her nose and said, ‘Stupid goose!’ Janet always laughed merrily, but it wasn’t funny, anyone could see that it hurt and humiliated her, and poor Janet was annoying but she didn’t deserve her nose tweaked just because her ball toss was too low.

Joy remembered another club member from years ago, a pretty girl called Polly Perkins who was an absolute demon on the court, not scared of coming to the net, as aggressive as any man, but had to record every cent she spent in a little notebook for her husband, a hot-shot university professor. Once, Polly told Joy about a terrible argument she and her husband had the previous night because he wouldn’t ‘give her permission’ to buy a new iron. Polly said the old iron kept spitting rust stains onto her clothes. She showed Joy the brown dots on her white tennis skirt. Six months later Polly walked out on her husband and moved back home to New Zealand and Joy often thought of her when she did the ironing and hoped that she’d found happiness and a new iron that didn’t spit rust.

A husband could leave, like Stan, but a husband could also never return, like Joy’s father. Stan always came back.

The truth was that most of the time Stan was more patient and less prone to anger than Joy. When the kids were little her mood remained set at a permanent low level of simmering irritability.

Did he not think that she too dreamed of walking straight out of her life when she got angry? She regularly fantasised about doing what her father had done all those years ago: walk out the door to ‘see a friend’ and never come back. Sometimes she abrogated responsibility by fantasising about kidnappers bursting into the house, bundling her into the back of their van and taking her away for a long rest in a nice, cool, quiet dungeon.

But walking out the door was never a real option. She was too necessary. Only she knew the children’s schedules, where everything was, the vet’s name, the doctor’s name, the teacher’s name.

But Stan could walk out without a moment’s thought. Sometimes he simply left the room and that was fine. Normal people did that. Sometimes he walked around the block and perhaps normal people did that too. Sometimes he went for a drive and came back an hour later. Two hours later. Three. Four. The longer he went, the less normal it became. The longest time was five days.

‘Here’s what you do,’ Joy’s mother said when Joy finally confided in her about her husband’s strange, shameful habit. ‘Make sure you’re wearing lipstick and your nicest dress when he walks back in the door. Don’t cry. Don’t shout. Don’t ask a single question about where he’s been. Hold your head up high, and act as if you didn’t even notice he was gone.’

She’d followed her mother’s instructions to the letter. If she gave those same instructions to her daughters they would have howled.

She only broke her mother’s rule once. It was late at night and she and Stan were in bed, the door shut, both still breathing heavily from sex.

‘Why do you do that?’ she’d whispered into his chest. ‘Disappear? Walk out?’

At first she’d thought he wasn’t going to answer, and then he finally spoke.

‘I can’t talk about it,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s okay,’ she’d said, and it was okay, but it also wasn’t okay. There were tiny seeds of bitter resentment at the centre of her heart, like the tiny bitter seeds at the centre of even the sweetest apple.

They never talked of it again. When she said, ‘It’s okay,’ she accepted the deal. He always came back, and it only happened maybe once, twice a year, and as his hair greyed and receded and eventually vanished, and his cartilage crumbled, he did it less and less, until one day she realised it was something from their past, like his long curly black hair, like her PMT.

‘You have to make compromises in a relationship,’ she said to Savannah. ‘You muddle along.’ She stopped because she could see Savannah watching a woman and a little girl in a pale pink leotard and tutu who were sitting at the next table. The girl’s hair was pulled back in one of those ferociously smooth ballet buns.

‘Cute,’ she said to Savannah.

‘I did classical ballet.’ Savannah’s eyes were still on the child.

‘Did you?’ said Joy, with interest. In spite of Savannah having said that she had ‘highly superior autobiographical memory’, she hadn’t shared all that many of those memories that she remembered in such superior detail, presumably because they weren’t such good memories. It was nice to get a new concrete detail. It made sense too. Savannah had that beautiful straight-backed posture and a kind of grace to her movements.

‘My mother would have loved me to do ballet. Did one of your foster carers get you into it?’ asked Joy.

Savannah looked at her with unfocused eyes. ‘Huh?’

‘The ballet?’ said Joy. ‘How did you get into ballet?’

It didn’t seem like a typical pastime for a child shunted between foster homes, particularly ‘classical’ ballet.

‘Oh,’ said Savannah. ‘I just did a few introductory lessons. That’s all.’ She looked at the little girl and her lip curled. ‘She shouldn’t be eating a cupcake if she wants to be a ballerina. So much sugar!’ She spat the words out through thin, pursed lips. She sounded once again like someone else. Joy wondered if she were unconsciously imitating some awful authority figure from her life.

Savannah pushed aside her apple crumble with contempt, as if someone had been forcing her to eat it. ‘I’ve had enough of this.’

‘Yes. Me too,’ said Joy. She sipped her tea and looked again at the little ballet dancer, her tan-stockinged legs kicking as she happily munched on her cupcake.

Joy felt all at once desolate, because she knew that Savannah had just lied to her about ballet, and Joy didn’t understand the lie, but if she was lying about that, then perhaps Joy’s children were right about Savannah, and she so didn’t want her children to be right about Savannah.

‘Joy?’ said a familiar voice, and Joy quickly rearranged her face into one of warm sympathy for her widowed friend Debbie Christos, who had walked into the café, which was disconcerting because Joy had moments earlier been thinking about her dainty wrists, and also about kissing her dead husband.