Lilian's Story (35 page)

Love Stories

I missed Frank more than I could say, and had to find some echo of the love we had shared. At the movies I found plenty of men with moustaches that I could pay money to and fall in love with. I loved their strong white teeth, and the way they caught heroines in moments of crisis, and kissed them. I squirmed in my seat then, and wondered if it would ever have been possible for me. At such times, in the sweet hot darkness, with the couples around me holding hands, and others up in the back stalls giggling and being noisy with peanut shells, I remembered all my beaux and let my eyes fill with easy movie tears. I was lonely now. There was no Rick to hit me, no John to conspire with, no Ursula to woo. There were no more sandy young men handing me leaves up in a tree, and no more hungry geniuses who were willing to cry for me. When I remembered that F.J. Stroud had even been willing to confront Father for my sake, the tears began to flow so noisily that the couple in front turned to stare. Having seen what there was to be seen, they turned back and giggled into each other's necks in a way I envied.
This is my experience of being alone
, I told myself, and tried to believe that I would be rewarded in the end, like all those swimming-eyed luminously tearful heroines I resembled so little.

When the movie was over, and all the couples had wandered out, dazed from so much darkness and each other, I remained for them all to stare at on their way up the aisle. I sat, filling my seat, with my book bag beside me trying to be a companion. When even the lonely men in gabardine coats, and one or two ladies with blue hair, had all left, I still sat on, watching the purple plush curtains and waiting.

I could not have said what I was waiting for, but when the manager came and told me,
The show is over
, and asked me to leave, my grief turned to anger and I would not move. I clung to the arms of my seat, and the short fat man who was the manager went away. He came back, of course, with the pimply young projectionist, and gestured curtly at him, so that I saw I was about to be approached from both sides, and would not be able to resist their combined strength. I laughed in my cunning then, and got down on the floor, between the cast-iron legs of the seats, bolted to the floor, and the manager ordered the projectionist in after me.
Get her by the short and curlies
, he shouted.
Get her on out of
there.
My feet were braced on one row of seat-legs, my grip was firm on another. The young man crawled towards me, on his stomach in the dust and spilled sweets like myself, his young face bursting with mortified blood.
Go on, lad
, we heard. He crawled closer, so that I could smell milk on his breath and see how his nostrils flared at the dust.
What
is your name?
I asked, and I saw his mouth shape the word
Terry
before he realised what he was doing and bit the word off.
You were born to be hanged, Terry
, I said pleasantly enough,
I can see it from your eyebrows.
When his red face lunged at my hand and his teeth came close to breaking the skin I found it necessary to back away between the seats, standing up and throwing a milkshake container at the manager as a farewell gesture.

Out on the street I could not see any men with moustaches and strong white teeth, who would take me in their arms and be mine forever. Cars were embracing and men picked their noses while they waited for the lights to change. Chrome glared in the sun and made my eyes water all over again. The lights changed suddenly, a mother snatched back a child, an ice-cream cone flew out of a small fist and lay melting between the cars. There are moments when the cranky tears of a hot day sound like a machine seizing for lack of oil.

It is my season to be alone
, I told myself as the afternoon sun poured over my back.
It is my time in the wilderness. I will be
content with that, even if I cannot be happy.

How Many Birthdays Left?

It was a race now between my death and my decay. Few people knew the exact date of my birth, and few cared, but I did, and I did not want either death or decay before I had done everything I could.
I want a birthday frock
, I told the woman in the St. Vincent de Paul shop.
I want to look
very pretty, a birthday girl.
The woman was full of aplomb and smiled a gold-toothed smile, fuller of Jewish charm than dowdy Catholic piety.
Certainly, madame
, she said, and came out from behind the sad cartons of cracked boots, holding a tape measure like someone in a salon. It could have been that in her old country, where charm and gold teeth were more common than here, she had often held tape measures around large women, and done it with the same aplomb she did now.
And how old are you, if it is
not indiscreet?
the woman asked as she embraced me with the tape, but I wanted to play ladies and keep my secret:
Oh, terribly old
, I said secretively.
And I am going to have a birthday
in King Street.

I had never worn blue nylon frills before and could not recognise myself in the small mirror.
Is this me?
I asked, watching squares of myself in blue nylon as the woman moved the mirror up and down for me.
Yes,
she smiled, so that her gold glittered,
it is you
,
and you are Lil Singer, I think.
I was always pleased to be recognised, and was feeling a little hysterical from the blue nylon.
My life is almost gone
, I told this sympathetic woman, who had the air of one who had been surprised too many times to be surprised ever again,
but I think it has been worthwhile.
I laughed at the cracked boots, so that a woman in flowered cotton, who had peeked in at the door, left again quickly, and my laugh turned to crying, because I would have liked another life, or even the same one over again.

There were many guests at my party, though most of them in their folly and simplicity of mind did not realise they were watching a celebration. King Street stood and stared as I paced slowly in front of a tram that rang and rang its bell like a birthday chorus. When the driver leaned out of his cabin and yelled, I waved at him like the Queen, feeling the blue frill shiver in the breeze, and called
Thank you, thank you
, because I knew that, under the words he was shouting, he was doing his best to wish me a happy birthday. At the top of King Street I stood aside and waved as the tram twirled around the corner into Macquarie Street, and I had to sit for a little while in the gutter to catch my breath.
It is the excitement of my birthday
, I explained to the policeman who appeared beside me.
When you are old, you will know what I mean.
I nodded closely into his young face, where the blood roared with youth beneath the skin.
It is tiring, being old,
I told him,
even though I
have never cultivated the burden of memory
.

He left me at last, with backward glances, and although I did not want to walk any more, I levered myself up off the pavement at last and began to walk back towards the park. I longed for the cool grass against my back, and forced one foot after the other against a great weight pressing me backwards. When I fell in the middle of that crowded lunchtime pavement I felt my broad feet slide out from under me, and felt the unfriendly clutch of gravity. Everyone stared but no one stopped. I must have been a frightening sight, and it was years since anyone but myself had seen my white thighs, and I saw the glare of them stun the strangers as they stared and stared from beyond the circle of shock that enclosed me. My eye-shade had slipped over one eye, down over my nose, its elastic folding an ear over onto itself so the roar of the traffic, and a bus snarling up the hill beside me in the gutter, were sounds inside my own head, hurting, trying to get out. I laughed and laughed, feeling my fat shake, and could not stop laughing, because my legs, stuck out in front of me in a big foolish way, would not move to bear my weight again. I struggled, and sat on warm bitumen and settled the eye-shade over my head again and again, and my laugh was louder as my fear was greater. I laughed until I heard it sound like a roar of fright, trying to pretend to everyone and to myself that it was just old Lil making a monkey of herself and having a fool-around with her eye-shade.

I seemed stuck for ever to this patch of grey foot path.
This is not the spot where I wish to die
, I thought,
not this bit of my
native place
, and I wondered if I had shouted it, the way the dark suits were staring. Everything was staring eyes and a hopeless sweat of never being able to rise again, like a cow gone down finally, but this was no sweet pasture, and the hot grit was vile under my palms. I began to realise that I had to ask for help, but did not know how, because I had not asked anyone for help for too long, and I was having a problem with my words. They were not organising themselves in my mouth as they had always done, but were coming out in a kind of mooing. The faces stared and moved on, someone tittered, and there was no young red-faced policeman now when I needed one, only faces that did their best not to see me, busy men striding so quickly they were on me before they saw, and had to side-step with a skip so as not to lose the pace of their day. One could not step sideways in time, his life was moving so quickly, but had to step over my purple hand as it propped me up, and met my eyes and was frightened. I held up a hand, and could not stop the noises coming out of my face, and it was all the best I could do to ask for help, and I was trying through the thick blubber of my lips to say,
Just get
me on my feet and I will be right as rain.
But it was not words that were coming out of my face, and my hand continued to wave out towards those white faces and they moved away like lights at night, and others took their place, but no one could break the circle around me to touch my hand and bring me back to my body.

Until at last the woman in lilac shantung was kneeling beside me, and her handbag of lizard-skin was lying in the grit. The woman took my hand and knelt so violently I heard stitches crack, and supported me with an arm around my shoulder, and I could smell her perfume. I watched very closely as the pearls gleamed against the skin of her neck, which was no younger than mine, but had not been exposed to so many cold nights on a beach. The woman in lilac shantung was wearing lilac gloves, but as she knelt beside me, becoming dirty, she tore off those gloves and smoothed the hair back from my face with a soft pampered hand.
Lil dear, you will be all right in a moment, rest for
a moment.
I was not surprised that she knew who I was, but I was pleased, and lay back against her arm knowing again that fame of a kind must have come to me, for a stranger in lilac to be calling me so familiarly by name. But when she looked up, still kneeling beside me, and spoke appealingly to one of the suits, making her voice helpless and charming, so that the suit stopped, and promised, and moved off on his errand of mercy, I recognised that charm, that tilt of the ageing throat, with the pearls slipping against the skin. I recognised that the woman in lilac shantung was Ursula, and I was silenced by surprise.

In the ambulance I could see her knees and was touched by the way the skin was grey with pavement dirt, and how each knee was capped by the large round hole in each stocking. On the skirt of the lilac shantung were marks and smudges now that looked permanent, like those on my own, humbler clothes. In the smell of starched sheets and antiseptic I was calmer now, and fingered the lilac shantung, and would have liked to smooth the skin of the knees, but did not dare. I whispered, and although the words did not quite come out the way they were intended, Ursula understood, and brushed at the marks, and wet a finger with spit to see if they would be removed that way.
No, it does not matter, Lil
, she said.
It is time I gave up pretending.
There were many questions we could have asked each other, because the girls we had been when we last saw each other had long been lost in the elderly women we had become, but Ursula had been watching me grow old and famous. She would have read about me in the papers, would have cut out the pieces, perhaps, to show Rick when he was still her husband, and not the bride of Trotsky. And I was too weary now for any questions, and the movement of the ambulance through the streets of my city was making it too hard for me to shape words or even thoughts.

All My Sisters

I continued to resist and smile, and tried to pretend I could return to my life in the park, until the Sisters smiled and took away my book bag.
We will keep it safe for you
, they said, and they were right, I had no need of books now, or anything else. All that I was to know, I knew. They were kind and pale-skinned, all those nuns, and I came to enjoy the fragrance of starched cotton and old incense.

In the beginning they all looked the same to me, their faces all smooth and dry, like the clean sole of a foot, under their veils. It surprised me, how weak I had become, and how it became less of a luxury, and more of a necessity, to have one or another of those pale women brush my hair for me, or button my clothes.
Here we go, Lil
, they murmured and smiled. In the beginning I said,
Thank you, Sister, thank
you, Sister
, until I was sick of it, but when I learnt their outlandish names I felt easier, and realised that Sister Annunciata could be made to giggle under her veil so her flat black front shook, that Sister Evangelina of Montefiori could answer me quote for quote from William, no matter what I tried her on, and that Sister Federica with the moustache was too pious, or sad, to be any fun, but spooned the porridge into the mouths of those who could not manage, and crossed herself instead of laughing.

Even nuns grow huge under their habits, and Sister Isola could have balanced my weight on the other end of a see-saw, and would have tried if there had been one handy, in spite of being a serious woman at times, with large brown eyes full of innocent intelligence, and took seriously her responsibility towards all these nuns and helpless old people.