Good Oil (12 page)

T
HE SISTERHOOD

I don’t know exactly how it happened, but some boys have been turning up where Penny and my group of friends sit at lunchtime. They bring their lunch. They sit and talk to us. Well, not to
me
, but to most of the others and always to Penny. The boys are all in our year. None of them are the footballers I have mentioned before. My group would never qualify for a visit from them. I catch a few of their names. Daniel, Leonard, Sam, James. They are headed by a Scott that I don’t like. I’ve seen him doing the rounds of other groups of girls this year. I reckon he fancies himself a bit of a player, something special for the ladies. Some of the boys need a hair wash, some deodorant and some Clear-asil. They try very hard to appear relaxed. There is a lot of unconvincing laughter. Some of them nod to Penny as if they know her. She gives a flicker of recognition back.

‘How do you know them?’ I asked her in low tones, the first day they came over.

‘They catch my bus,’ she said, sitting straight-backed and unwrapping the sandwiches packed by her father.

Scott sits down on the other side of her and they talk for most of the lunch break.

I’m not quite sure how to conduct myself when Penny is otherwise occupied. I’m friends with the other girls in our group, but it’s strange not to be part of my usual double-act. Disconcerting. I talk to Eleni and Nicola – who are another tight twosome within the larger group – but my mind is not really on the conversation. By the end of the lunch period, there is a spark of anger in my chest that I try to push away.

I have bigger fish to fry, I tell myself.

When I arrive at work that afternoon Chris is already on his register. Kathy is hovering near him but I can see that the Kathy-virus is in remission today, and hopefully for good.

I open my locker in the staffroom to put my backpack and tote bag in. Inside is a folded-up piece of yellow paper that turns out to be several pages covered with Chris’s blue biro script. I smile and stand still, except for my thumb which moves back and forth across the paper. I imagine holding Chris’s hand – with fingers interlocking, not how your mother used to hold your hand – and moving my thumb across the join between his thumb and forefinger.

The staffroom is suddenly filled with the chatter and shrill laughter of Alana and Kelly, who have also just arrived from school and smell of cigarettes.

‘Hi,’ I say, but they don’t hear me, or even seem to see me. I head out to the registers.
Bigger fish to fry
, I tell myself again.

‘How the hell are you, youngster?’ Chris greets me warmly as I take the
Closed
sign down from the register next to his. ‘Did you get your little something?’

‘Indeed I did. I’m looking forward to reading it.’

‘How was school today?’

‘Well,’ I say. ‘There are boys sitting with us at lunchtime.’ ‘How exciting!’

‘Nah, it’s not exciting. They’re nothing special.’

‘Go easy on the fifteen-year-old boys, youngster. They’re doing the best they can.’

‘Well I wish they’d do it somewhere else.’

As if on cue, Jeremy Horan walks by on his way to the staffroom, his gaze firmly averted from Chris and me. Actually, probably just from me.

‘Hello, Jeremy!’ Chris calls, with dangerously false heartiness.

There is nothing for Jeremy to do but look over and mutter, ‘G’day, Chris.’

‘And you remember Amelia, don’t you?’

Jeremy glowers at Chris. ‘Yeah,’ he manages. ‘How’s it going?’

‘Exceedingly well, thank you, Jeremy.’ I beam and suppress a giggle.

‘Off you go then, tiger,’ says Chris. ‘You’d better not be late to your register today – Bianca’s not working.’

Jeremy stalks off.

Chris smiles at me. ‘The way he carries on, it’s as if your special moment never even happened.’

‘I know!’ I fake incredulity. ‘Maybe . . . maybe it wasn’t that special!’

‘Now, that’s just crazy talk.’

I throw my hands up.

‘Poor Jeremy, Alana and Kelly,’ says Chris, as we watch the three of them slink back past us. ‘When Bianca’s not here they actually have to do some work.’

‘It’s very, very sad.’

‘
So
sad. I wonder if Amnesty International is aware of it.’

‘How’s your thesis going?’ I change the subject.

‘Oh, that old chestnut. I haven’t really got a handle on it yet. But I have been conducting a very interesting experiment this week.’

‘Hypothesising?’

‘Hypothesising that a twenty-one-year-old male can be indefinitely sustained on an intake of black coffee, red wine, organic dates and Panadol.’

‘Hmm.’

‘It’s already Wednesday and here I am, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.’

I study his face closely. The smudges under his eyes are darker than usual; his lips are dry and ashen-coloured, similar to the rest of his face. It’s been a while between haircuts. Two days’ worth of stubble. He’s beautiful.

I hurry home when work finishes at nine, periodically checking that the letter is still in my pocket. The house is quiet. Dad is at rehearsal and Mum and Jess are in bed. There’s a note from Mum informing me that my dinner is in the oven. I retrieve a foil-covered white bowl from the oven. As I remove the foil a flurry of steam escapes and burns my wrist. I yelp and peer into the bowl. Noodle stir-fry with pork and vegetables. It smells great and I’m starving.
Thank you, Mum.
I sit down at the dining table with a fork in one hand and the letter in the other.

Greetings Youngster!

Today I come to you from a lecture on the Bay of Pigs fiasco. At least, according to the course outline it is supposed to be a lecture on the Bay of Pigs fiasco. I actually have no idea what the lecturer is talking about and I am amazed that any human being, let alone one who is supposedly a professional communicator, could achieve such a level of unintelligibility. If I’d known it was this guy lecturing I’d have gone straight to the uni bar. But no, I came skipping into the lecture theatre and took a seat in the middle of a centre row. I can’t get out without climbing over at least fifteen people and drawing all kinds of attention to myself.
I’m stuck here for another forty-five minutes.

I was thinking about what you said that time we went for pizza, about how your mum is getting screwed by this, our modern age. From your (somewhat simplistic) vantage-point, feminism has earned her the right to work full-time, do the housework, bear the children and look after them. I’m still not sure where feminism fits into it, but you are right about her getting screwed. I’ve read a lot of articles in the Herald about how workforce participation for women has grown steadily over the last thirty or so years, but hasn’t been accompanied by a rise in the share of domestic duties taken on by men. I believe it. My mum does most of the cooking and cleaning in our house. Always has. My dad feigns incompetence. At least, I assume he is feigning it.

Maybe it’s a generational thing. Our mums got screwed because they’re a generation who could get into the workplace, earn an independent wage and occupy their minds outside the domestic realm. It was only once they got there that they realised that full-time workers really need a wife to run the home and look after the children. But women don’t get one! Hey wait a minute! You mean I have to do it all? Yes they have to. In fact, they are expected to work and earn money now, because the days of a household and a mortgage being sustained on one wage are OVER red rover.

Perhaps subsequent generations will change the pattern. But I don’t think so, because we’ve all grown up watching our mothers ‘having it all’ and hence doing it all, while our fathers watch TV and wait to be called down for dinner. When you grow up, Youngster, and shack up with a bloke, he’ll be used to not doing housework and you’ll be used to the woman doing it, cause that’s what you both grew up with. There’ll be periodic fights about it, you’ll say it’s just not on and it won’t do, and he’ll nod solemnly and profess to take it on board. For a few weeks after a fight you might come home to find the bed made, the dishes washed and your best glad rags ruined in a giant, indiscriminate, well-meaning load of laundry. But some time in your mid-to-late twenties you’ll realise that consistent, equal contribution to household duties is just not programmed into his system and you can either break up with him or put up with it. Who knows what you and the lasses of your generation will choose . . .

But when I started to write this letter, I wanted to tell you more about feminism. I was impressed that your teacher gave The Feminine Mystique to a class of fifteen-year-old girls. You said that Betty Friedan was part of what is known as second-wave feminism? Did you know that it was preceded by first-wave feminism (duh!) and followed by third-wave feminism? Has your crazy English teacher taken you there yet? All this you will learn when you come to university to do Arts like me. Allow me to give you a short tutorial. You would have seen Mary Poppins as a child.
You may even have watched it over and over like my sister Zoe did, and well, I was in the vicinity. From the children’s father’s first song (what a jerk!) we gather that the year is 1910. The mother sings her opening song as she is arriving home from a day of lobbying for women’s suffrage, or the right to vote. She’s wearing her suffragette’s sash. She’s singing about all the suffragettes casting off the shackles of yesterday and marching shoulder to shoulder with their sisters into the fray. Then there are cries of ‘Votes for women!’ and talk of a fellow activist who has been arrested for her efforts. Generally speaking, these sorts of movements are thought of as First Wave Feminism, or The First Wave of Major Arcing Up.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some women were writing and protesting about how they were second-class citizens. They didn’t have the vote, they were widely discriminated against and they were essentially the property of men, especially in marriage. Then in the 1960s The Second Wave of Major Arcing Up began, where the floodgates of feminist scholarship were opened and there was prolific writing and lobbying for women’s rights in education, the workplace, the legal system, the health system and, well, etcetera. Heaps and heaps of strands of feminism were born here, which you will learn all about when you come to university.

There are some especially interesting feminist analyses of marriage, which would be very pertinent to your observations of your parents’ marriage. Even the Liberal Feminists see marriage as a major tool for maintaining patriarchy. Anyways, then Third Wave Feminism came along, beginning in the 1980s, and pointed out quite rightly that the ‘oppression of women’ descried by the First and Second waves referred mainly to middle-class and somewhat-educated white women. Who had every right to do so and made many valid points, but they used the terms ‘women’ and ‘feminism’ as if they applied to every woman in the world regardless of class and ethnicity.

The thirdies are conscious of the differences among women and the different ‘vectors of oppression’ and inequality across societies. What we western scholarly types had always called ‘feminism’ is actually ‘a feminism’. Does your head in, huh?

My favourite writer is called Kate Jennings – mention her to your wacky English teacher, Youngster, I cannot recommend her to you enough. She will tell you what you need to know about life. She will not gild the lily or beat around the bush. She will tell it to you like it is and while sobering you up completely she will also make you laugh. She belongs to no one and she’s not afraid. Here is a taste of her take on second- and third-wave feminism:

‘Well-meaning waffle about sisterhood was replaced by more sophisticated but equally dubious pronouncements about “difference”, in the sense of plurality. It is easy, of course, to give lip-service to pluralism – politicians are forever conjuring up images of rainbows and mosaics, while feminists favour braids and quilts – another matter altogether to accommodate it.’

Aren’t you excited about coming to university? You can sit around discussing this stuff all day – no maths, no biology! Just don’t take The History of American Foreign Relations. It may kill you.

Well, youngster, I hope the above will come in handy for making you look smart in front of your English class, although I’m sure you do already. Here are my closing words on ‘difference’ and ‘vectors of oppression’ seeing as how the thirdies have got us thinking about it. In a lot of sociology classes that I have been to and in a lot of scholarship in general, people illustrate ‘difference’ by contrasting us folks from prosperous, ‘lucky’ Australia to people from developing or war-torn countries. Blind Freddy can see that there are huge differences between the prospects and experiences of Aussies and people who live in daily fear of militiamen coming to bulldoze their homes, rape the women and children and then shoot everyone in the head. That’s too easy a contrast. You know what, youngster? We don’t need to look nearly as far away. I’ll bet that when you think of ‘Sydney’ you think of the terrain of your life here. The suburbs where you and your mates live, your route to school and to work, the beaches where you go to swim in the summer, the City where you might go for shopping or movies and wherever else is on high rotation in your life. I bet you don’t think of the Public Housing ghettoes in, say, Morton, with twenty-year-old mothers of three who have no idea about a life that doesn’t involve violence and welfare-dependent poverty. I bet you’re even saying ‘Where the hell is Morton?’ It’s a suburb between Mount Druitt and St Marys, out west. There’s no train line, no state transit buses and a lot of private bus companies won’t operate there. Want to do your head in? Spend a morning at the Morton Drop-In Centre and then the afternoon at Kirribilli Yacht Club.

You don’t have to look very far to see difference, Youngster. Don’t think it’s safely far away.

Thank God. This guy is wrapping it up at last.

Harvey out.

Over-stimulated, I lean back in my chair for a few minutes. Then I take my empty bowl to the kitchen, rinse it and put it in the dishwasher. It’s almost 10 p.m. Homework time – although I’d love to read the letter again and again. I carry my backpack upstairs. It’s dark except for the glow of Jess’s night-light. In my room I switch on my desk lamp and unpack my books. The letter goes in my top drawer with the other one.

It’s midnight when I get to bed. As I’m drifting off I hear Dad arriving home from rehearsal.