Things Could Be Worse (14 page)

If You Live Long Enough

‘Mmm, Elizabeth is so beautiful.' Morris Lubofsky was talking about his twenty-five-year-old girlfriend. ‘She's got such strong limbs. You should see her close up. I mean really close up. People look very different really close up.'

Lola Bensky and Morris Lubofsky were walking along Lygon Street. Morris continued his conversation enthusiastically. ‘You know, she's a really fabulous singer. There's no-one in the country who can sing like her.' Lola said nothing.

Sometimes Lola had to remind herself that she was very fond of Morris. She liked his sense of humour, and his dogged loyalty. When Morris held these conversations about his girlfriend, Lola didn't have to look interested. Morris was entertaining himself. He didn't notice Lola's lack of response.

Morris usually rang Lola several times a week. He rang to say how beautiful Elizabeth was, or how brilliantly her photography was progressing. Sometimes he wanted to relate what he had bought for his house, or what he intended to buy. Morris lived in a 20,000-square-foot converted dairy in Williamstown.

‘She says I'm a fabulous lover,' Morris said. Lola didn't know what to say. They went on walking. ‘We spent all yesterday in bed, and I'm meeting her for a production conference at home this afternoon.'

Morris was emerging. He was re-entering the world. He had been a dilettante. An editor of unsaleable newspapers. Morris had founded the
Teenybopper
and the underground 1970s weekly
The Joint.
His last venture had been the
Vegetarian Monthly.

Now, with an initial capital investment of $500,000 provided by his father, Morris had formed an advertising agency. He specialised in television jingles.

Even when he had worked on the
Teenybopper
, whose circulation had peaked at five hundred a week, Morris was always on the phone. Now that he was in advertising, he had installed a telephone with eight lines, a fax machine and four computers. Whenever you rang Morris Lubofsky, whether it was 6 a.m. or 11 p.m., he was always on another call. ‘Hello, hold on, I'm on another line,' he would say.

When Lola rang him up, she made sure that she had a book to read or some work to do while she waited for Morris to finish his other calls.

Now, listening to Morris, Lola realised what it was that she couldn't bear about him. He was always absorbed in himself. This was too close to what Lola was fighting in herself. It was that self-centred part of her that she knew she had to get rid of.

Why was it, Lola wondered, that a generation of robust, earthy, vigorous parents had produced cool cats like Morris, or comatose hypochondriacs like Fay Farber or Susan Wiener, or repressed depressives like Ben Hertz, who meditated and ommed all day?

Their parents had been in concentration camps, labour camps, ghettos. They'd survived for years during the war in bunkers, in forests and in haystacks.

They came to Australia damaged and penniless. But they were also resilient. They came here with gratitude, and spirit, and optimism, and a readiness to begin again. They built new lives. And they had children.

They wanted only the best for their children, and they gave them everything. ‘I am doing everything for the children. I want nothing for myself,' Renia Bensky used to say to Lola from the time Lola was a small child.

Lola never believed her. Renia would come home from the city with a new cocktail dress. ‘Look, Lola, Mr Gross did give me this dress for almost nothing. It was a sample, and I am lucky that I am, of course, a perfect SSW, and it fitted me perfectly.'

There was always something for Lola in this shopping. ‘Lola darling,' Mrs Bensky would say, ‘I did buy you some new singlets. Pure cotton. Imported from England. They were so expensive. It is something shocking how much they cost.' Lola added them to her pile of pure cotton singlets and underpants.

Morris was still talking. They had walked to the Cafe Roma, where they were to meet Garth for lunch. Garth was late. After half an hour, Morris and Lola began lunch without him.

‘My mother's chosen this fabulous lounge suite for me,' said Morris. ‘It's grey leather, art deco. It's got three couches and two armchairs,' he said. He took another mouthful of spinach lasagne and continued talking. ‘This new diet I'm on is really good. I went off it last week and gained half a stone, but as I'd lost one and a half stone, that's still a net loss of one stone. It's just a matter of what foods you eat with what. Like, you never mix carbohydrate and protein.'

Lola yawned. Morris Lubofsky was the centre of his world. And his world was the best world. His chiropractor was the best chiropractor. The coffee at Cafe Nero, next to his house, was better than the coffee at the cafe next to your house. In fact, according to Morris Lubofsky, the coffee at Cafe Nero was the best coffee in Melbourne. His barrister was the best barrister in Australia, and his proctologist was the best proctologist in the world. When Morris Lubofsky was a vegetarian, meat was poison. Now that he was a carnivore, raw eye fillets of beef minced with seaweed and soy sauce could save your life.

Morris Lubofsky was now talking about his haemorrhoids. ‘You know,' he said, ‘haemorrhoids are often a sign of bowel cancer. I'm getting rid of mine. Nowadays they can just tie an elastic band around them, and snap them off. Like crutching sheep.' Lola felt worn out. Not talking about herself had exhausted her.

Garth finally arrived. Lola was overjoyed to see him. They had been married for ten years now, and Lola still felt a soaring happiness when she saw him. Garth kissed Lola for just a moment too long for Morris. Morris coughed uncomfortably. ‘OK, break it up, boys,' he said.

Garth was luminous, Lola thought. His smile lifted him out of the ranks of mortal men. She was besotted by him. And he was devoted to her. He quietened her fears and her nervousnesses. He never panicked. He relished the present, and looked forward to the future.

Lola was mesmerised by people who made long-term plans. How could anybody be certain of what could happen in the future?

Often, in the morning, Lola woke before Garth. She would lie in bed and look at him. He always looked as peaceful as a baby. As contented as a cat. Comfortable with himself. This morning, he had had one leg stretched out on top of the doona, and half a buttock exposed.

Lola slept with the doona wound around her. She slept curled in a ball. She hugged herself in her sleep.

‘Freedom was never something you allowed yourself,' her first analyst had written, in a letter he had sent her years after she had left him. Lola didn't quite understand what he meant, but she had been pleased with the sympathetic tone.

Renia and Josl Bensky had been appalled when Lola left Rodney for Garth. Now, things were different. Josl proudly told anyone who would listen that he ‘wouldn't exchange Garth for twenty Jews'. Garth could always gauge his rating with Josl. On a really good day, Josl wouldn't swap him for fifty Jews.

Garth had a good sense of humour. He made even Renia laugh. He introduced a levity to the meals that they shared together. Garth loved Renia and Josl Bensky. He wasn't in awe of them or afraid of them. He wasn't shackled by the notion that anything he said could kill them. He teased them. He confided in them. He was generous to them. The relationship between the Benskys and Lola began to have a fluidity and a freedom and ease that they had not experienced before.

Morris, Lola and Garth shared a Zuppa Inglese and a creme caramel. Morris had said that he wouldn't have any dessert. He had then eaten most of the custard from the Zuppa Inglese, and now he was demolishing the creme caramel. ‘Garth, did I tell you about my diet?' he asked.

Jews are all diet experts, Lola thought. No Jews overlooked the importance of weight loss. Last week, Lola had been at Izzy Staub's funeral. It was a very moving service. Izzy had been a much-loved man, and many people among the mourners were weeping. After the funeral, Lola waited in line to offer her condolences to Izzy's daughters, Eva and Irena. Eva and Irena were both distraught. Irena's eyes were swollen and red. She looked up as Lola went to speak to her. ‘Look, Eva, look at how much weight Lola has lost. How did you do it?' Lola felt cheered by the thought that, even in the middle of death, weight loss was important. She made herself laugh, driving home from the cemetery, with the thought that at a Jewish funeral weight loss was a grave issue.

Morris was still talking about his diet. Lola could see that Garth was cross-eyed with boredom. Garth had never been on a diet. Morris was communicating with great intensity. He was giving Garth the details of how much weight he had gained and how much he had lost.

The obsession with food must be genetically built into Jews, Lola thought. Josl Bensky had been thirty-two when he came to Australia after the war. The few details of the first thirty-two years of her father's life that her father talked to her about were to do with food.

Once or twice a year, Josl would reminisce about the ham he used to eat. ‘Oy,' he would say. ‘Oy, was that a special good ham they made in Poland! I used to go to the Grand Hotel in Lodz. They made the best ham. It was almost sweet tasting. My father would have killed me if he had known that I was eating ham.'

Lola's earliest memories were of herself at Bialik kindergarten. She remembered hoping that she would have time to fit in a second helping of chocolate custard before her mother came to pick her up.

Lola's most humiliating memories were also to do with food. While the rest of the ten-year-olds at the Marilyn Brown School of Dancing were performing the final dress rehearsal of ‘Fella With An Umbrella', Lola was in the dressing room, eating Shirley Berry's lamington.

When Mrs Brown confronted the class and said sternly, ‘OK, who has stolen Shirley Berry's lamington slice?' Lola kept quiet. She hoped that she didn't have any crumbs on her face.

Later, feeling uncomfortable, Lola comforted Shirley Berry. They both agreed that the thief was probably Cheryl Buchanan.

The other humiliating episode Lola almost couldn't bear to recall. It was when she'd stolen Dr Bender's bananas. The Bender family and the Bensky family had gone away together for a week to Rosebud. Lola had been seven. Dr Bender was their dentist. She was a quiet, thin and intense woman. Dr Bender and her husband and daughter had been in Bergen-Belsen for six months. When they were liberated, Mr Bender had to spend six months in hospital before he could eat without vomiting.

Dr Bender couldn't work legally as a dentist. The Australian government didn't recognise her Polish qualifications. She was halfway through a Bachelor of Dentistry at the University of Melbourne. She had, however, bought dental equipment and set up a practice at her home, working mostly at night. Most of her patients were newly arrived Jews. She was an excellent dentist, and she was cheap. Her practice thrived, and she could afford to keep studying.

This week in Rosebud was the Benders' first holiday in Australia. The two families kept their food in separate cupboards. This wasn't the way that Renia Bensky would have liked it. Renia would have preferred to pool the food, but she was gracious about Dr Bender's need for division and order.

On the first day, Lola took three bananas from the Benders' cupboard. ‘Was there any particular reason why you ate our bananas?' Dr Bender asked Renia Bensky.

‘What a stingy pig that Dr Bender is,' Renia said to Josl after the debacle had been sorted out. ‘Here she is, an educated woman, and she acts like a pig. She has to count every piece of food, and she did accuse us like we were big criminals.' To Lola, Renia Bensky said, ‘Lola, you are a greedy pig.'

Lola couldn't look Dr Bender in the eye for years. She still felt uncomfortable when she thought about the bananas. When Lola was twenty-two, she had come across Dr Bender in Regent Street in London. They had had a cup of coffee together.

‘You know, Lola, your house, when you were a child, was the tensest household I was ever in.' Lola didn't know what to do with this information. It shocked her. She wanted to ask a thousand questions. Why was it tense? In what way? What had Dr Bender observed about their lives? Dr Bender was the only adult who had ever suggested that the Benskys' home life was anything less than perfect.

Lola opened her mouth. But nothing came out. The questions stayed stuck in her.

Was Dr Bender talking about the noise in the house? There was always a lot of noise. There were doors opening and shutting, cupboards and drawers banging. There were kitchen noises and bathroom noises, and instructions and orders being shouted. Was that what Dr Bender had meant?

As a child, Lola had longed for silence. She envied those girlfriends whose parents took no notice of them. Lola felt that her parents were omnipresent. At the same time she felt that they were not there. She felt as though she couldn't get a grip on them. When she spoke, she felt that they didn't listen. They were distracted by something. Something larger. Something Lola couldn't share.