by
Helen Garner
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Bought myself a sewing machine at Grace Bros, a demo model which, the Brother consultant earnestly assures me, ‘only Vicki and I have ever sewn on’. Vicki (big hair, raking red false nails, missing side tooth, gold-rimmed specs) tells me the shop runs classes. ‘You learn to make a skirt with a zip, and a shirt with a collar.’ I lug it home, dizzy with ambition.
cute
The play was ‘splendidly written’, in that Irish style that half of me wants to relax and swoon into, while some drier, more English aspect of me draws back in scepticism: Look out, you are being seduced.
I try to behave with some sort of grace. I try to be pleasant and generous. But I actually feel I’d like to give up this draining attempt to be married, to go and live somewhere high and sunny, on my own. With the windows open. Yesterday my fantasy was to ask him if we could each write down a list of good and bad things about being married to each other, and try to talk about them and work them out. But I haven’t mentioned this idea because I know what his response would be—one of his incredulous laughs: ‘Why the hell would we bloody well do that.’
:(
I get home from work late afternoon, loaded with food for tonight’s dinner, and find a note from V. He’s down in the park having a coffee with X the painter, do I want to come down? I conquer a surge of female martyrdom—How hard I work! How much money I spend! How little thanks I get! I get a grip, put on a record and set about cooking the meal. By the time he comes in I’m cheerful. He reminds me of a short trip we’ve been planning to the Flinders Ranges. His tone is so reluctant that I say, to let him off the hook, ‘You don’t feel like going, any more?’ ‘Aw, it’ll be all right, I s’pose.’ Does it come from his family, this tendency to take all the joy out of something in advance? Or is he just being ‘level’? Is it the weary struggle of writing his novel? Or is it me? Am I a bore? Am I distracted? What am I doing wrong?
I took Mum and Dad a copy of True Stories. ‘Errr,’ they said, looking at it with peculiar gingerly expressions. Dad said that the cover photo made me look old, and ‘didn’t do much’ for me at all. Then, while explaining to me how to sharpen a knife against a stone, he demonstrated with his blade across the smooth surface of my book’s cover, this chancing to be the flat object closest at hand. My niece and I shrieked about this later, but once more I’m winded by their ignorance of social forms—I mean, doesn’t one learn from life to say ‘Congratulations’? Whatever one might feel about the quality or significance of the achievement in question? Less and less do I understand them. They become more mysterious to me, with every passing year.
:(
A woman with a racked, pointed little face tells me that her husband has fallen in love with one of his students and ‘it’s been hell all year’. They’re talking about selling their house, trying not to wreck things for the kids. Apparently he doesn’t want to leave, though: ‘He says he’s stopped seeing her, but he weeps and wails and says he can’t bear it.’ ‘Kick him out,’ I said. ‘You can’t live with that.’ The man wreaks havoc but lacks the guts to give the coup de grâce, so she has to do it.
rough
V has been stewing over a remark the minister made at Robert Haupt’s funeral: ‘We should be glad that his tribulations are over.’ V said it was a ludicrous misrepresentation of Haupt’s whole approach to life. I agreed that it was a misrepresentation, but suggested it was an attitude integral to a Christian’s beliefs, which in his own church a minister has a right and perhaps even a duty to express. A fierce argument broke out. I retreated to the closed-in balcony where we eat (which V has from the day we moved in referred to, for some reason, as ‘the sewing room’), and sat at the table to sew a button back on my nightie. It’s nice in there, the cheesecloth curtains that I made puff and drop on a breeze. V walked through the room. Seeing me stitching away there he said in a soft voice, ‘Good room for sewing, isn’t it.’ I realised that to see me sewing, by hand or with the machine, releases in him a flow of feeling. While being touched by this I also secretly resolve to make use of it, if and when things get rough. I mean that I could sit down with a needle and thread, and bring about a lessening of tension.
Since I got back from Melbourne I’ve had to stay in bed with a horrible cold, coughing up brownish-yellow stuff. V’s gone to the gallery with X the painter. He mentioned with elaborate casualness that they’d had ‘a few coffees’ together while I was away. I realise that by getting sick I’m encroaching on his private daytime social life, which he so often and so strenuously denies the existence of. Yesterday he kept remarking on how ‘much better’ I seemed, and when I announced early today that I was going to stay in bed again he seemed surprised and taken aback. I suppose he’d already arranged the X outing. No suggestion that I might go. Oh hell. Should I pay attention to my instincts here? Can I be bothered letting jealousy develop? If you’re a man’s second wife you know for a fact that he’s capable of anything.
ack
A manuscript by the music critic John Clare is studded with moments of electrifying power and beauty: Sydney’s ‘brassy, maritime light’; ‘a ferry walked on tiny spines of light’; two drunks wrestle in the Cross, and one stretches the other’s ‘cardigan a yard at least’; a man frenziedly about to fuck a girl in a dark lane sees over a fence, through a kitchen window, ‘four people gravely playing cards’. Gravely. I take off my hat to that.
<3
Opening at random Lichtenberg’s Aphorisms I note that V has put a mark in the margin beside this: ‘To excuse one’s own failings as being only human nature is, provided one has meant well, every writer’s first duty to himself.’ It is? I flip the pages, seeking more clues to his thoughts about himself. Feel as criminal as if snooping on a diary. A page corner has been folded: under it I read, ‘It is very charming to hear a foreign woman speak our language and make mistakes with her fair lips. Not so in the case of men.’
ahhh