Grace's Table (8 page)

‘Another hot one,' Des said, looking out the kitchen window.

Though it was still early, Grace could feel the weight of that heat pressing against the stillness in the room. ‘I miss the cold,' she said, almost to herself, as she watched the heat shimmer above the toaster.

‘Miss the what?'

‘The cold. From Harvest. When I was a girl.'

‘You can have your cold. Give me the heat any day.'

‘But it's all the same. If we're lucky it gets cool at best. But usually it's just one day as warm or warmer than another. When you feel really cold – hard frosts, a bit of snow on the hills, that sort of thing – you have to make adjustments and it's those adjustments that let you know you're still alive. Otherwise how can you tell the difference from one day to the next?'

‘By the six o'clock news. That toast ready yet?'

Grace hooked a nail under the metal edge of the drop-sided toaster. The Bakelite handle had broken off long ago. She passed the hot toast from hand to hand and onto a small plate she'd taken from the cupboard. She embedded a butter knife into the dripping tin beside the stove and dragged it across the bench toward her. From inside she dug out a generous measure of the fat and spread it right to the edges of the toast.

She handed Des the plate. He slid the toast onto his and set about cutting it into symmetrical squares, which he used to mop up the leftover juices and fat on his plate. She always marvelled at this attention to detail and the neatness with which he ate, which never went beyond his meals and the dissection of slabs of meat.

Des rested back in his chair, flicked crumbs from his shirt to the floor. His front was much flatter than it should have been. But nursing had shown Grace that disease didn't always present itself as expected. Sometimes it worked covertly, mostly under the surface, like an iceberg. Des rolled his tongue around his teeth, licked and smacked bits free from the gaps. He washed down whatever he'd collected with a swill of tea.

Peter strolled into the kitchen, eyes half-closed with sleep and hair sitting every-which-way but flat. The smell of stale alcohol secreted from his skin as much as it came from his breath and dominated the musty smell of sleep.

‘Big night out with the lads, mate?' Des asked.

‘Ugh.'

Des chuckled in between taking slurps from his tea.

Peter opened the fridge, propped himself up against the door, scanned the shelves before closing it again, empty-handed.

‘There's nothin' to eat.'

‘There's plenty. You just need to be here when it's served,' Grace said.

‘Give the kid a break. Can't you see he's had a big night?'

‘So?'

‘C'mon, help the young fella out and cook him a good recovery breakfast. Sit down, champ. Mum'll rustle you up something.' Des pulled a chair out from the kitchen table, slapped the seat of it.

‘You can wait until I finish my tea.' Grace sipped at her tea slowly, tried to savour it, but the flavour was lost. Disgruntled, she got up, tipped the last of it down the sink. ‘I'll make you poached eggs,' she said, clanging a saucepan onto a burner.

‘Give the kid a fry-up like you gave me. It's the best cure for a hangover.'

‘I've used up all the bacon and sausages,' she lied.

Des slid his cup across the table. ‘Any more tea in the pot?'

Grace took the empty cup back to the bench. She added a dash of milk then filled it with tea from the pot. It was dark and strong now. Stand a spoon up in it, Pa would have said.

‘Don't forget to sugar it,' Des called. ‘Just the one.'

Grace added two, and stirred.

‘I don't think he knew how to take responsibility for what he ate,' Susan said, after a silence, wrapping her empty pods into a bundle with the newspaper. She got up and took the package to the bin.

‘Compost,' Grace called.

Susan changed tack from bin to compost bucket. ‘After all, he left school when he was barely fourteen. Wasn't one to read much. How was he to know better?'

‘The doctors told him, so he knew well enough,' Grace said.

‘I suppose you both did.'

Grace picked up the last pod, a malnourished looking thing whose failure to thrive made it not worth the effort.

‘Which is the odd thing really.' Susan rested both hands on the edge of the sink and stared out the kitchen window.

Grace watched her daughter's back, stiff, straight, and wondered if she was taking in the view or considering the paradox. Given the view wasn't much she could only assume it was the latter.

Grace wrapped her pods up neat and tight like a butcher's bundle for the compost bucket, and forced it down on top of Susan's.

6

‘They look like op-shop specials.'

‘Eclectic, I'd call them.' Grace defended her twelve assorted dinner plates, from finest bone china to heavy earthenware. ‘That one I painted myself, when I was going through a crafty stage. Thought I was the next Clarice Cliff.' This was a plate lurid with simple but bright purple and yellow crocuses. ‘And this one …' she held a white porcelain plate up to the dining room window, where the sunlight made it appear translucent, and thereby revealed its quality, ‘was one of a pair given to me by Bev. That's what makes it special. More than the Wedgwood mark on the back.'

‘Aren't you worried it'll be broken?'

‘Better to have it out to enjoy but at risk, than tucked away in the back of a cupboard where there's no pleasure in owning it.'

Susan shrugged. ‘I suppose so, but once it's gone, it's gone.'

‘Aren't we all.'

‘What about this thing?' Susan lifted a large and weighty nut-brown stoneware plate from the table. ‘Scratching around to find a twelfth?'

Grace laughed. ‘That's the one I keep to remind me of church.'

‘Church?'

‘The church plate. It was ugly as sin too.'

Just as the plate Susan held was the ugliest on the table, the Catholic Church in Harvest had been the ugliest building in town. It dominated a large bare block on the outskirts, across the road from the equally austere Catholic primary school. The grass along its concrete paths was trimmed with precision and there was never a trace of the last wedding's confetti to be found on the ground. Not even its wide, stepped entrance or fancy tiled floor in the vestibule made it softer on the eye. Whenever Grace walked into the building she felt as though she was entering a large, red-bricked coffin. Each Sunday, as Mother drove towards it, Grace's spirits dropped.

‘Why doesn't Joe have to come with us?' Grace knew the answer but was in the mood for goading her mother.

‘You know why – he has to help your father.'

‘What – read the paper?'

‘Don't start, Grace. This is just what we do. Accept it.'

Did she only have to accept it for another two years, until she was sixteen like Joe, when she too could fabricate some plausible excuse not to go? Somehow Grace didn't think it would be that simple.

Sitting on the hard pew listening to Father Donnelly was enough to make a girl, even a good girl, consider passing the time by scratching her name into the blond timber seat. Most Sundays she would just sit there, flicking a nail across the inside seam of her glove or looking around at the different pudding-topped hats on the women's heads, wishing it would end, and soon. But the minutes still ticked away too slowly to the sound of Father Donnelly's voice. The worst Masses were at Lent when the portly priest made his slow pilgrimage round the Stations of the Cross. Grace was guaranteed to nod off then, usually brought round by her mother's sharp elbow.

Father Donnelly was a man who tried to instil faith through fear. The slap he'd delivered Grace's face during her Confirmation ceremony felt more like a punishment from Mother than a welcome to receive the sacrament. Whether he'd got some pleasure out of it or if he really believed his was the hand to pass on God's message, firmly, Grace couldn't be sure. What she did know was that he spoke with a city boy's private school voice – all big words and confident delivery – so she never understood why he needed his lofty altar to speak down to his farming congregation.

‘Hard times befall us all,' he said, ‘but that does not mean – cannot mean – the giving must stop until those hard times are behind us.'

Grace fidgeted in her seat, shifted from one buttock to the other to relieve the pressure on her tailbone. She felt a firm nudge from her mother's arm, warning her again to keep still.

‘Did Jesus abandon you during the hard times? Care less? Give less?' He paused here for effect, Grace guessed, more than to give the congregation time to mull over the question. ‘No. No, He did not.' Father Donnelly looked down and shook his head reverently. Then, looking up again, he startled those who'd not had the benefit of Mother's elbow with the fervour in his voice. ‘No! He became more resolute. He made more sacrifices. Gave more. Suffered more for His people.'

Grace thought about how Father Donnelly's cheeks often went dusky during his sermons. The purple spider veins on his nose stood out all the more too, as did the red lines tracking across the whites of his rheumy eyes.

‘And that, my children, is the thought I'd like you to hold as our bearers pass the plates round today. Of those sacrifices Our Lord made for us. Of the suffering He endured in our name. And then ask yourself – can I give a little more? Can I suffer a little too, just as He did for me?'

There was a general rustling in the congregation as people reached for wallets and purses. Mother passed Grace some coins as she did each week, but this time Grace refused them. She made fists of her gloved hands on the tops of her thighs so that her mother couldn't force them upon her. She watched the plate pass along her pew from hand to hand, cupped palms passing low across its top to hide what they dropped.

She couldn't think about the generosity of Jesus as the plate moved towards her. Not while the clouds remained scarce in the sky and the holes in the soles of the men's shoes showed cardboard through them when they kneeled to have the wafer put on their tongues.

‘I call it my greedy plate,' Grace said to Susan.

‘A good one for Tom, then,' Susan joked.

The previous day Grace had cleared much of the clutter in the dining room
in preparation for her family coming to lunch. Until then, the room's prevailing smell had been of dusty doilies and aged timber. And the moss-green velvet drapes had always depressed the sunny look of a day so were now folded up and in the back of a hall cupboard, where they would likely stay. Now a new kind of light entered the room through net curtains.

Jack had helped Grace with the makeover. She'd felt guilty that he wasn't going to benefit from his efforts, but then again, they rarely ate in this room, so he would only be missing out on her company, which on this occasion was probably just as well.

When at Grace's home, they took their meals together at the kitchen table. They would sit facing one another, chairs placed on the long sides of the rectangular table. Close enough that the small, often subconscious, acts of intimacy could be shared: a hand to a sleeve, fingers laid over fingers.

Des and Grace had sat facing each other too, but their chairs had always been positioned at the distant narrow ends.

Jack, a man who couldn't abide idleness, would cook for Grace in her home. He was a brave cook – adventurous and experimental. He'd often arrive armed with special ingredients, ones that had rarely seen the inside of Grace's kitchen before – robust-flavoured olives, large as a man's thumb; delicate orange-bearded scallops with cushions of white meat in a half-shell; once, a whole, pale duck. Some of his adventures and experiments tasted better than others, but it was fun to watch the alchemy of his cooking.

His specialities – pasta sauces and marinades for meat, poultry and fish – always started with a base of ground garlic and onion –
scaffolding
, he'd call this pungent paste – and he'd build from there. He'd season generously, and taste regularly with a long-handled teaspoon. Sometimes he'd hold the spoon out to Grace, his other hand cupped under it to prevent drips getting on her shirt.

But generally he was a messy cook, a dish for every element or stage of the process. Grace would clear the clutter away for him, wash and dry his dishes, either during the cooking chaos or after they'd eaten, and initially with some vexation. But gradually she recognised that accommodating the long-term habits and idiosyncrasies of another requires respectful patience and some concessions. Eventually she simply saw it as her job, while Jack took on the one that she'd laboured at for years, and not always so joyfully.

It was a novelty to sit down at her kitchen table to a meal that had been prepared by someone else. Jack would look at her, expectantly, as she took her first taste of his rustic puttanesca sauces (no two the same) or the marinade used for the duck (a second never attempted), and she would give him an honest appraisal, as Jack demanded.

‘Don't gloss it up for me, Grace,' he'd say. ‘You either like it or you don't. Only rule is you've gotta tell me why, so I can work on it.'

In this way food was often the focal point of their meal-time conversations, their voices vibrating with satisfaction as they ate.

Kath said,
That's because food replaces sex the older you get.

To which Grace had replied,
Speak for yourself!

So Grace would tell Jack – respectfully, mindfully – what she thought of the food he served her. And in so doing, it awakened her palate to new and interesting flavours again. Often, all she need say was
Delicious!

At other times, Grace raised her judgements as questions:
Maybe duck breast would have been less fatty?
or
If the sauce was simmered for a little longer, then the flavour of the tomato might be more intense?

In this way she hoped Jack would know that in tasting his food she noticed all of the stages that went into its creation, and wasn't just delivering him a blunt response to the final product.

She'd been served enough
yuk
s and
disgusting
s in her life to know that it often forced those tasked with providing family meals to cater to the lowest common denominator of taste, a state that not only threatened the cook with culinary boredom, but was also a sure-fire way to take those all-important ingredients,
love
and
care
, out of the process.

Through Jack, Grace learnt to show food kindness again.

She also rediscovered the rich and complex pleasure that food provides. Once again, she stopped to marvel at how the rough, crazed husk of a lychee could give up such a tender, sweet fruit. For the first time in years she shared the same food from the same plate as another: crispy-skinned whole fish, the unwounded white flesh of a nectarine. And as for the duck, Grace learnt that the best cut was its tender, succulent breast.

And sometimes after Jack's meals, she would leave clearing away till the next day.

Back in the dining room, Susan liked the makeover.

‘Oh, that's much brighter,' she said when she first entered the room. ‘And smells less grandmotherly.'

A framed photograph of Grace's five grandchildren sat on top of an old china display cabinet. It was given to Grace as a gift for Christmas just passed. The shiny chrome frame and colourful clothing the children were wearing brightened the dark mahogany of the cabinet.

Susan picked up the picture, studied the faces in it, then set it back down on the doily Grace used to protect the timber.

‘It's a great shot,' Susan said. ‘Look even better without the old doily under it.'

‘Then you'll be pleased to hear I threw a number of them away yesterday.'

The factory-made ones anyway.
Those she'd stitched as a younger woman, and those worked by her mother, she'd put to one side. Grace hadn't been able to bring herself to throw them out. She knew each stitch had been made with care, an act that was owed respect. Besides, Susan might want them one day, though the clutter-free lines of her daughter's home didn't indicate it would be any time soon.

Susan hadn't been one to squirrel items away to fill a glory box as a young woman. In fact, Grace didn't think her daughter had kept much from her past at all. There were no favoured items of childhood clothing or books tucked away in a dusty box. No special teddy bears, toys or dolls to pass on to her own children. Grace had envied those mothers who complained their spare rooms were made unusable by the boxes of treasured items their children kept stored in them. Her spare room had always been disappointingly uncluttered.

Grace recalled how her daughter would burn her class notes in the incinerator at the end of each school year; did the same with those she'd accumulated from teacher's college.

‘Why don't you keep some of them?' Grace had asked. She knew many were marked with
A
s.

‘What for?'

Grace shrugged, not really certain why herself, but knew in burning them Susan lost any opportunity to know why in the future.

‘Burning them is so final,' she said.

‘Exactly why I'm doing it. That stage of my life is over. Time to move on and make room for the next one.'

Grace had flinched each time she saw the plumes of smoke generated by Susan's need to
move on
. It reminded her of Des. Too much had been burnt over the years. There were too few boxes.

After inspecting the dining room, Susan slipped her hands into oven mitts, opened the oven door and removed the baking tray from inside. The lamb erupted in a firework of fat as she lifted it onto the stove top. Once the spitting settled, she started basting the meat. The smell of roasting lamb, garlic and rosemary filled the room.

‘Smells good,' Grace said. ‘Brings my appetite back. It's been off lately.' Grace, with mitts of her own, took the tray of roasting vegetables from the oven. She shut the door to keep the heat in before starting to turn them.

‘Why's your appetite off?'

‘Maybe because of the strike. It used to get a good workout when I went for my walk.' Grace hadn't allowed the garbage strike to break this daily practice. ‘The smell of backyard barbecues, Stern's bakery at the top of the road. Some days I felt half-starved by the time I got home. Go straight to the biscuit tin when I walked in the door. I'm hardly tempted now.'