True Stories (11 page)

‘It
is
rather uneven,' says One. ‘I tried to tell Four my troubles once—we were driving downtown in a car. I talked for five minutes, and she cut across me and said, “Oh, shut up—you sound exactly like Mum.” But whenever anything goes wrong in her life, the first thing she does is pick up the phone and dial my number.'

Four is the witty one. But as a child she was a tremendous howler. At the slightest rebuff she would throw back her head and roar; tears would squirt out of her eyes and bounce down her fat cheeks. One, Two and Three used to hold up sixpence at breakfast time, saying ‘You can have this tonight—but every time you cry, we're going to dock you a penny.' By teatime Four would be once more heavily in debt.

‘If we cried when we were little,' says Two, ‘Mum used to say, “Stop it, you great
cake.
” ' ‘I don't remember that,' says Five.

‘Of course you don't,' says Two. ‘You weren't born yet.'

‘Three,' says Two, ‘was the painful little sister we used to run away from. Once she tried to bribe us. She said, “I'll give you threepence if you let me come with you.” But we took no notice and kept running.'

‘I remember that,' says Three. ‘I can remember the feeling of the wire of the gate under the soles of my feet, as I hung over it and watched you two disappearing up the road. At least, I think I remember it. Maybe it's only because the story's been told so many times.'

‘Maybe,' says One, ‘it never happened at all.'

Endearments

Because endearments were never used in our family (Plymouth Brethren two generations back on our mother's side; grim-jawed Mallee stoicism on our father's), it has taken us all our lives to learn to say
dear, darling, sweetheart
, without irony.

‘At school,' says One, ‘when I was a boarder, I was sick with envy of girls who got letters from their parents that started with the word Dearest.'

A few years ago, Four sent One a telegram: ‘Dearest Darling, happy birthday, from your Darling.' The telegram was read, marked, learnt and inwardly digested, then thrown into the rubbish bin. That night a strong wind blew, and overturned the bin into the running gutter. Next morning an angry young man knocked on One's front door. He thrust the crushed and sodden telegram in her face: ‘Is
this
how you treat a man's heartfelt declaration of love? Shame on you!' ‘It's not a man!' cried One. ‘It's my
sister.
' He stared at her strangely, and stamped out the gate.

If one of us uses an endearment on the phone to a child, a friend, a lover, while a sister is in the room, she glances nervously behind her to make sure she is not being mimicked. None of us would dream, however, of mocking someone for doing this. In fact, we would (I believe) like to pet and treasure each other, to pour out floods of sweet words. But we are all engaged in the same struggle against inherited embarrassment, against a terrible Australian dryness. We maul and stroke each other's children: it's the closest we can get. And our children submit to their aunts' possessive handling with patient smiles.

Class

From the middle of the middle class there are paths leading in both directions. A family can rise or fall in class over twenty years, so that its eldest child is brought up at one level, and its youngest at quite another.

‘I used to escape from the bedlam,' says Two, ‘by going to my friend's place over the back lane. Her father listened to opera, and her mother always did beautiful ikebana flower arrangements that I loved—she was so creative. They had posh accents. The parents didn't just have single beds, like our parents did—they had separate rooms. I liked their accoutrements: engraved silver, crystal, a back sitting room. They had two spaniels called Kismet and Ophelia. They were what I aspired to be: Geelong Grammar posh people. We were down market. I wished our parents said
dahnce
and
cahstle.
Three always disapproved of my lifestyle, later on. Once I said to her, “I'd like to have a marblised wood dining table. I suppose they must be really expensive”—and she came back at me: “Even
poor
people have dining tables, you know!”—almost as if she thought my whole life was devoted to…acquisition. It probably is! I wouldn't deny it! I don't care about that now, but I used to.'

‘Once I went with Two to a department store,' says Three, ‘to buy our kids some pyjamas. I headed straight for the bargain bin, and she made a beeline for the quality shelf. When we met at the cash register, her stuff cost six times as much as mine. After I came back from Papua New Guinea I couldn't
believe
the way people in Australia spent money. Two Papuans from the mission where I worked came and visited Mum and Dad. Later they wrote to me, “What a lot you gave up, to come to us. Your family lives in a huge house, with many comfortable chairs and two cars.” I wrote back, “Yes, but in that house I have not learnt what I need to know.” ' ‘One's friends,' says Two, ‘were band-y, interesting, creative people. That got her into trouble with Dad. Whereas I had boring, stable, middle-class friends, which was approved of.'

‘I remember asking and asking,' says Four, ‘what the working class was. I mean—where was it? As soon as I got the chance I headed down market. I was desperate not to be middle class. Even my friends at school were rough as bags. I was smart but I was always in trouble.'

‘Two was deeply offended, I think,' says Five, ‘when I didn't marry X. She wanted me to marry an American and go and live on Long Island or in Hawaii. That was her fantasy for me. Frangipanis over breakfast for the rest of my life.'

‘When Five was having her baby,' says One, ‘I suffered for a while from ferocious jealousy. It was mostly displaced on to material things—on to shopping. Mum took her out to Daimaru for a swanky lunch at Paul Bocuse and then bought her a whole lot of fabulous baby clothes. When I heard about it I practically had to stay home in a darkened room for a couple of days. And Five's not even
married.
'

Afterbirth

With four sisters, there's one for most moods. Two is brilliant at cooking and gardening. Four is the adventurous one, to go out shopping and dancing with: at a certain point, whenever she and One went out together they witnessed a car crash. Five loves to talk about books and writing, and to compare the nibs of pens. In Three's company, the slightest incident becomes redolent with psychological and spiritual meaning.

Once, Three and One spent a day at One's shack in the bush. The purpose of the outing was to ‘sort out some things', to have ‘a conversation that was several years overdue'. Reproaches flew both ways. They sat sadly at the wooden table, looking at their hands. Then Three said, ‘Want me to wash your face
with
a warm washer
?' One recognised the childhood phrase. She presented her face, chin up, eyes squeezed shut, and Three rubbed and wiped, firmly; One could hear her quietly laughing. A little while later, One put some Oil of Ulan on Three's face. These things seemed very
symbolic
, as did everything else they did up there that day: tearing out the old ivy roots, sawing dead limbs off the shrubbery, making soup for the meal. Then, as they drove away towards the road home, One saw a cow in a paddock with a long red strand hanging out of her mouth. One yelled out, Three stopped the car. The cow had just finished licking the membrane off a new-born calf, which was struggling to its feet. They saw its blunt little head, its coat so matt and clean. The cow set about eating the afterbirth: the thing was clearly a membranous sac; the cow kept licking and chewing at the sloppy mound of it on the grass, dutifully gulping it down. One and Three imagined it already cold, slimy, strandy—it seemed a nauseous duty, and an image of the maternal labours they had been bitterly talking about. Neither of them remarked on this connection, but they sat there in the car, holding the dog by the collar, and watched intently for a long time. Then Three said, ‘Oh
look.
All the other cows are coming over to inspect. To celebrate.'

Music

‘Once,' says Three, ‘I was combing Dad's hair with the comb dipped in Listerine and telling him that I wanted to learn the piano. One said, on her way past, “Be a jazz pianist.” And Dad said to her, “Don't tell her what to do.” '

‘So
you
were the one who made them get a piano,' says One. ‘How'd you do it? When I said I wanted to learn the violin they just laughed and made squawking noises.'

‘Oh, I pestered and pestered,' says Three. ‘And then I set up a stall in the street out the front, to raise the money to buy one. I think I shamed them into it.'

Back in the seventies, when there was such a thing as the three-dollar gig, Four and One used to go out dancing, with all their friends, several nights a week. It would never have occurred to One to imagine herself on stage; but Four watched carefully, then borrowed a saxophone from a man she knew and taught herself a few riffs. Next thing One knew, her sister was up there in a sparkly jacket, playing ‘Suffragette City' with a women's band called Flying Tackle.

When Two's daughter decides to leave her medical course and study singing, Two invites Three and One over, one evening, to be a practice audience for the daughter's conservatoriurn audition pieces. Three and One jump in the car and rush over there, wearing clean, ironed clothes. They set up the living room like a little stage, and plump themselves on to the sofa in a line, hands folded, chins up, eyes bright. The daughter steps out to sing, sees them eagerly sitting there, and bursts out laughing. She leaves the room, and returns more composed. In the pause before she sings the first note, Two hisses to her sisters,
‘Need a tissue?'

‘One came home from university for a visit,' says Three, ‘and brought me a Vivaldi record. It was so
exciting—
I'd never heard anything like it before.'

Four is the kind of person to whom it matters how a backing vocal changes, in the bridge of the song, from ‘shoop shoo wop bop' to ‘bop shoo wop bop'. When she got of the plane at JFK she took a cab straight to Danceteria.

Three can sight-read. Three always remembers the words. Three goes to the trouble of making tapes and passing them round the family. Three must have been the only nurse at the Royal Children's in the 1960s who knew Mahler's
Kindertotenlieder.

‘In New York,' says Five, ‘I heard some black people singing and playing in the street. I wanted to bawl. I said to the person standing next to me, “Are they from a religion? Show me where to join—I want to sign up.” '

At school we were taught to sing in parts. Thus there were years during which, we would spontaneously drop into harmony, while washing dishes or on tedious car trips, or very softly in
our beds at night when sleep was reluctant to come.

Then we were grown-up and nobody sang. Hymns and carols became embarrassing. We wiped ‘The Lass of Richmond Hill' and ‘The Ash Grove' from our repertoires and went to Europe or got married.

Decades passed. Then Two instigated a Christmas concert. It was fun the first time but soon degenerated into our children miming bad pop records. Anyway when we sang together now we sounded horrible. Our voices had dropped into a lower register and lost their sweetness. None of us could hit the top notes without screeching. We soon gave it up.

But Two secretly persevered, singing along to records of famous chorales. Three played hymns on her piano at night, telling herself she was just practising sight-reading. One, at forty, finally found the nerve to take piano lessons. Four, the only one with a serious musical talent and the drive to use it, took singing lessons, practised irritatingly in the car on the freeway, and was soon able to front her own band as a singer instead of just playing saxophone.

‘I,' announced Two, ‘am going to join a choir.'

She does. And she drags the rest of us into it too, a huge Christmas charity choir with a proper conductor. You pay your thirty bucks and are issued with a score and a practice tape to learn your part from, between rehearsals.

We work hard at it, separately, at home. Our first practice is at Two's place on a Friday evening. We belt out the carols in our terrible harsh (but in tune) voices, then tackle the harder stuff. Just as we roar to the end of the ‘Hallelujah Chorus' and close our scores with sighs of triumph, One looks out the window and sees a huge pale full moon rising out of the trees.

When we sing ‘The Shepherds' Farewell' from Berlioz' ‘The Childhood of Christ', we think privately of our own children leaving us: ‘God go with you, God protect you, guide you safely through the wild.' We hope that if we can sing right to the end without crying, the music will act as a blessing.

Every Sunday we drive or pedal to the Catholic Hall at the top end of Brunswick Street and sing the afternoon away. All altos now, we are within our physical range. It's important to position ourselves in front of older women, cheerful ones of sixty-plus who come in from the outer-suburban church choirs, who know the works and can sight-sing. We rush each week to get near these guides, the ones with calm, strong, bosomy voices, who won't fade out or get flustered when the timing goes complex, but who lean forward in the tricky bits, to keep us on track.

In a large choir—five hundred or more—a beginner can afford to take risks. You can take wild stabs at the intervals, and your mistakes will be swallowed up in the rolling tide of sound. We've learnt that in daily life we barely breathe; singing requires an intake and expulsion of air so much more rhythmic and profound that at times we become light-headed and have to grip the seatback for balance.

We are women who have always been fighting our father. Maybe this is why we love the way the men's voices surge under ours, a broad band of deeper sound, something stable and generous that supports the women in their sharper, more fanciful melodiousness. We are astonished by the ability of five hundred voices to sing softly, to make a sound like a whisper. We are learning the humility, the modesty, the indispensability of the alto part; accepting the limits and the strengths of maturity.