Love You Two Read online

  ‘Pina.’ There she goes again, that woman who’s been posing as the devoted wife and mum. Her voice sounds strained. It’s been like that for a week.

  It’s because Mum’s got boyfriend troubles. Wait a minute! I have boyfriend troubles – but I should be the one having them, not her! Mum’s not supposed to love and have sex with anyone but my dad.

  ‘Pina! Hurry up please!’ Now she’s raising her voice a little but still being oh-so sweet and loving. I’m so mad I could slap her. My life’s busted – she’s made a sham of herself and our family; she’s tricked Leo and me, and probably Dad, too. Everything I thought was now isn’t and I don’t understand what’s in its place.

  Is it a threesome, a ‘ménage à trois’, like in porn and sleazy tabloid articles? What would my friends think of my parents and me now? They always hovered around my parents, sleeping over, camping in our lounge room for whole weekends because they felt free and comfortable and could talk to my parents about anything. My friends would stay away now. I’d be the school Hunchback of Notre Dame, with verbal rotten tomatoes and stinging stares following me everywhere. It’s bad enough being size 14, frizzy-haired and zitted, and only finally managing to score a boyfriend at the end of Year Eleven, without having my parents become gossip fodder. And what would Scott think? He’d dump me, I’m sure. He’d think I’d be like my mother; seeing someone else behind his back, or worse still, seeing someone else and telling him about it. How perverted and gross is that!

  A clink of plates comes from the kitchen. I crush the printed email into my jeans pocket. I have to go eat. How do I face that impostor? Where’s the Mum who gave me some chocolate before I went into the study? The woman who hardly says a bad word about anyone is doing this to her children and her husband. If I’m cold, she’s sheer ice. If I’m clinical, she’s psycho!

  I get up and switch off the computer. I wish I could switch off the whole day, as if it was just some freaky game I’ve been playing. I could go back to her in that sunny kitchen and actually be relieved that the extent of her weirdness is her hippy homilies, micro-skirts and lack of domestic skills!

  On my way out of the study I pass the old photo in the hallway. There we are, a happy smiling suburban wog family: Mum, Dad and two kids. All dark curly hair, big dark eyes and wide smiles in year-round tanned faces.

  Mum’s still got that skinny body and all that curly hair she never straightens or cuts because she thinks it keeps her looking a lot younger than her forty-two years. I keep telling her she looks old because it’s so out of date. She just smiles that silly mysterious smile and says, ‘I’m doing just fine, don’t you worry.’ Yeah, now I know what you mean. You’re doing just fine with another man!

  And there’s Dad, slightly balding, slightly pudgy, but with that John Travolta–Anthony LaPaglia older chubby contented Italian man kind of look that older women seem to swoon over. How can he keep looking so calm and downright jolly all these years? Is he just staying with her for the sake of us kids? Excuse me, I don’t want to be responsible for that kind of misery. Get out, Dad!

  I look at Leo in that photo, too good-looking as a baby. He was all toothless smile, thick lips, wild curly black hair, big dark eyes. Hey, he could smile once! I don’t think I’ve seen him smile since he turned twelve a couple of years back. His eyes look really happy too. I hardly get to look into them any more. Leo’s got this thing of not showing his eyes, of looking away on those rare occasions he speaks to people. I keep telling him he’s got bad social skills and the kids at school are beginning to let him know it. Fourteen-year-old guys are always so weird, but my brother’s weirder. I sometimes wish I was an only child like Stella, or she was my uncomplicated little sister.

  And there’s me, but with a cuter face and no zits. Now I’m sixteen, doing okay at school, forever on a diet, and I’ve got a boyfriend – one boyfriend – who I think I love when I’m not feeling nervous about him, when he’s not drooling over every other ‘hot babe’ on the street, when he’s not doing his alpha-male one-liner baiting and calling it ‘only joking’. We’re even having normal arguments about how much time we spend together or with friends, what we do now that he’s deliberately failed Year Eleven and is going to look for a job instead of school. He’s even hinted at marriage and kids, but sex first – and soon!

  Oh my God, I never thought for a second that my mother was going through her own weird crap when I was giving her thumbnail sketches about me and Scott. She’s been responding with Dolly Doctor type lines about sex, love and decision-making in her mother/friend kind of way. She’s even thrown in some ‘gentle observations’ about how he can be pushy and possessive and uses his put-downs to big-note himself. But I quickly switch her off by snapping at her to mind her own business. It drives me crazy because I don’t want to care whether she likes him or not.

  You see, I actually do care what Mum thinks; even though she’s a loony, I always thought she understood love because she was so in love with Dad. And she’s been defending me to the nonni, who think I’m too young to have a boyfriend and shouldn’t be going out unchaperoned – ‘bad reputations’ and all that.

  Now the disillusionment hits so much more because I realise she doesn’t like Scott because he’s normal. It’s normal that he gets territorial over me. He’d never put up with a wife like her. He has standards and morals. Now I don’t think she understands love at all.

  My feet keep wobbling towards the kitchen. I feel so numb and yet so full of questions and confusion, anger and sadness. And something else I haven’t felt towards my mother before. What is this ominous pounding in my heart, threatening to flood me with black venom?

  Hatred?

  I think I hate her. For a while now I’ve been feeling something else as well as love for my mum, but I never knew how to label it.

  Now I know I was right to feel bad about her. She’s a fake. She’s a liar. She’s a slut. And there she is telling me to be careful with Scott, to respect myself, to make sure he doesn’t exploit me, that I shouldn’t put up with his ‘immature leering’ at other girls, that I have the right to feel pleasure and enjoy my sexuality. Oh please, how pathetic is all that now!

  She’s standing at the kitchen sink. She often does that when she’s got ‘fuzz in the brain’, as she calls it, looking out the window to the clothesline and the swing, the sky turning pink and orange with the sunset. She grips the sink, leans her body against it and she just looks out. Far away. The table’s set, the dinner’s ready. She’s done all the mother-things: set the stage, put out the props and no doubt will deliver a good performance. But it’s not really her.

  I take in her colourful short skirt and bright lipstick. I bought that skirt in a fit of optimism, but I was always too self-conscious to wear it. She doesn’t even know how to look like a mother. I’m never giving her my clothes to wear again. I bet she gets a real thrill out of it: a forever-dieting daughter who hands her clothes to her – the middle-aged size-10 mother – when she can’t fit into them any more. Never again will I let her keep feeding me while she goes on about how I look beautiful and healthy, that I’m big-boned and strong like my dad and his family. Bet she’s been relishing keeping me fat so she can be the thin one.

  Why hadn’t I figured it out before? She looks like a slut. As a kid, I used to think it was fun to have a cool-looking mum like her. Then somewhere along the way, I began to monitor every word she said, gave her regular sound bites on how to look and behave like a mum. ‘Dress appropriate.’ When did I begin to say things like that to her? She’d laugh and say, ‘What do you want me to wear, Mum?’ Then I’d get specific about which outfit, although finding something conservative and maternal in her wardrobe was like finding trackies and a windcheater in Paris Hilton’s wardrobe.

  At times she’d get annoyed with this de-fashion policing. Like the Sunday morning Nonna, Zi Elena and Stella came over so we could visit some dead rellie’s family. The biannual kind of rellie, who you only see at weddings and funerals, but whose go
ss about you, particularly if you don’t turn up – or if you do and show disrespect by not performing the right amount of weeping and wailing – can set the figura community vigilantes going for weeks.

  So there was Zi Elena, looking how my mum would if she wore plain jeans, a neat blue shirt, tied her hair back and eased up on the lipstick and eyeliner. Nonna’s there in regulation black voluminous frock with a slight show of skeletal ankle in sensible shoes. She was frowning at my mother, who was still wandering around sleepily with her bright green t-shirt proclaiming ‘Make chocolate, not war’, and purple satin underpants peeping out to bare legs and pink fluffy bed slippers. ‘Dress appropriate,’ Nonna said.

  Five minutes later, I emerged in my decent baggy jeans that don’t camel-toe on me and a loose jumper that hides my muffin-top hips. I was still annoyed that Leo and Dad had taken themselves off to some school event, and still cynical about the wog-logic that a generational female triumvirate out visiting the dead’s leftovers was the epitome of good families. I took one look at my mum and said, ‘Dress appropriate.’

  Mum looked at Zi Elena as if wanting her to make sense of this. But Zi Elena did her usual swift mediation of all battlefronts: looking awkwardly at Mum, frowning a little at me, patting Stella to keep her from doing or saying anything disrespectful (as if she would!) and diverting Nonna by asking, ‘Do you need to go to the toilet before we leave, Mum?’

  Mum then looked at Nonna, who refused the toilet invitation because she was too busy giving Mum her smug glare of ‘I told you so, and how does it feel to have your own daughter tell you as well?’. Then Mum looked at me, then back at Nonna, waves rippling her face. Was she going to cry? Was she going to yell? Was she going to laugh? Then it was like she decided to let it go. ‘Since when do I have two mothers?’ With that, she went into her room and came out soon after in a black dress; still too many inches above the knee, and still a bit too sexy with velvet and lace half-sleeves.

  Stella, a couple of years younger than me and one of the many deluded fans of my mother, piped up, ‘You look really cool, Zia.’

  Later that day, Nonna did her post-mortem on the funeral all the way home in the car: the stinking flowers, the fake tears shed by the daughters-in-law, who was there and who wasn’t there, and what the priest should’ve really revealed about the ‘bastardo’ in the coffin. When Nonna finally left to go feed Nonno, Mum sat in the lounge, quietly and slowly taking her high heels off. She looked up as I walked by. ‘Did I behave appropriately?’

  I hesitated. ‘Yes.’

  She looked kind of sad. Then the waves finally spilled over her face. ‘One day, when life takes you into inappropriate places, you’ll be glad I wasn’t a dress-appropriate mother, ’cos I’ll never expect any appropriateness from you for the sake of pleasing everyone else at the expense of your own integrity and happiness.’

  I couldn’t say anything. I just stood there. She smiled at me, loving, knowing. Then she got up, went to her room to change into something a little less appropriate, came back into the lounge, lay down and immersed herself in some book I didn’t bother to check out.

  I felt that day as if she was just skimming the surface of something important with me. Now, as I stare at her staring outside, I know she was. I want to cry. I want to scream. I want to run up behind her and hit her, my mum, and that scares me and makes me feel so alien from myself – like I’m losing it too!

  She turns slowly, dreamlike, about to take a plate from the sink. Her eyes are red, liquid. Her wrists are thin, but there’s muscle in her upper arms from years of lifting patients, changing bedsheets under them, pushing wheelchairs and beds. I used to think she was a kind of Florence Nightingale, but perhaps she’s just a nurse because nursing means shiftwork which means she can be away all night without us knowing where she really is …

  She looks at me and, for one second, she forgets to put on the mask. Her tired eyes meet mine. A wisp of fear flits by. Then she adjusts, puts on a smile, and plays Mother again: ‘Pina, are you okay, bella?’

  What do I say – what I really want to say? But what’s that?

  ‘Yeah.’ My voice is sharp and broken. How I get two syllables out of ‘yeah’ I don’t know.

  ‘Dad’s prepared a lovely dinner for us. He’ll be in soon, after he picks up Leo from soccer training.’ She carries the plate to the table.

  ‘Didn’t think you cooked it,’ I blurt out. I always stir my mum about being undomesticated but, like everything else, it isn’t a joke any more.

  The venom in my voice stings her. She looks at me curiously, confused, with a trace of something I now recognise as fear. What was going to be the usual sulky smile in response to my stirring is hovering on the edge of her mouth. But she goes back to the sink, letting it go – avoiding confrontation, masking, as she’s obviously always done. She gets the other plates, turns back to me, and again attempts to connect: ‘Well, as you tell me, that’s not what I do well.’

  Yeah Ma, I know now what you do well. You screw around real well. While Dad cooks and simpers after you. What a wimp! A big wog wimp. Chuck her out, Dad! And then this squeaky little voice squeezes into my thoughts: ‘But she’s my mum.’

  ‘How’s Scott?’ she now asks, doing the mother–daughter thing that’s had me fooled for years.

  I don’t want to answer her any more. She doesn’t deserve to hear from me any more. Why should she hear anything else about my life, when I haven’t known about her life.

  A car pulls up outside. The Beatles are blaring ‘She Loves You’. It’s Dad deafening himself with his tragic music.

  Mum beams (oh how sick is that!) and gets some soft drinks from the fridge. Dad comes in grinning, humming Beatles relics, Leo ambling behind. Somehow that soccer outfit just doesn’t do it on him and I’ve told him that over and over. He’s a crap player and the other guys tell him, sometimes with whacks and pushes, but he still goes out there doing it. Has my whole family got live-in-denial syndrome?

  Dad’s behind Mum, kissing her on the cheek. It’s a soft kiss, followed by this feral drawn-out massage of her shoulder, and then a smile lovingly lasered from his eyes to hers. She manages a smile back and nestles into him a little before they come to the table.

  We sit down to eat, Dad brushing past me with a gentle squeeze of my shoulder and a warm kiss into my hair. I flinch, twist my head away and shrug him off. He just smiles patiently, putting it down to my usual teenage angst.

  There’s some minor chitchat between the two of them in between food being served and glasses poured. I don’t listen. I’m trying to get Dad’s pesto pasta down my choked throat so I gulp some water. I usually love his pastas but this one’s dry and sticky. Maybe the only good thing that’ll come out of this is that I’ll stop eating and lose weight.

  Then Dad says, ‘Leo’s had a tough practice this afternoon. I’ve told him he should give it up if he’s not enjoying it. And I don’t like the way some of the other guys push you around out there, Leo. I might have a word to the coach. They’re supposed to stop that kind of thing.’

  Leo shakes his head and makes patterns with his pasta instead of eating it. That’s why he’s a skinny runt. ‘No, Dad, don’t. I want to play. The other guys are just … mucking around.’

  Mum looks worried and tries to meet his eyes. She leans forward in that ‘I’m all yours’ kind of way that I actually used to like. ‘Are you sure, bellino?’

  I say nothing. Leo casts one quick glance at me, scared I’ll tell them he’s been getting hassled at school. It’s kind of embarrassing that Leo’s a target, since my boyfriend’s little brother is the number one bully. Leo’s taken to hanging out in the library with the other nerds. I thought having a wimpy brother was enough, but that’s nothing compared to my mother the bigamist.

  ‘Well, it’s up to you, Leo,’ Mum says. ‘But make your decisions carefully, and do what’s important to you. You don’t have to prove anything to anybody. You’re just fine!’ Oh, how nauseating. I want to tell her to shut up
but she’s still rambling on in perfect TV-mum style: ‘Some of those boys in the team don’t seem very nice anyway.’

  Dad starts going on about work in the bank he manages, and how Nonna called needing a gate fixed because Nonno hasn’t done it yet after three weeks of nagging. He and Mum talk about going over on the weekend. Mum says any time suits her, she’s got nothing else planned, and I catch the look between her and Dad.

  ‘Maybe we can talk about plans for Christmas while we’re there,’ Dad says.

  She shrugs. ‘Whatever, Ren. Christmas has been the same for a long, long time.’

  Then they remember I’m there and Dad says, ‘You seeing Scott on the weekend?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  Dad’s laughing, a little too obviously hoping that I’m not. ‘Don’t know? Your feelings cooling for him or something?’

  Why haven’t your feelings cooled for this nympho you’re married to, Dad? What does a person need to do before you tell them to get lost? ‘No, sorry about that. Far from it. But I’m not getting him to Nonna’s just to have to put up with her fits every time he touches me!’

  They’re silent for a moment, the pasta suddenly needing their attention. Mum speaks after swallowing, ‘Nonna’s got attitudes that are out of date but there are things you can love about her too. She does love you so much. No need to talk to her about Scott, bella, or have him visit her. It’s your life away from her.’

  Is that how she does it – parcels up different parts of her life for her mother’s and everyone’s easy digestion?

  ‘Can I just get on with my own life, thanks, without all your questions and advice? You’re so not relationship experts.’

  Even Leo looks up.

  Dad and Mum exchange a look, so fleeting I now realise I would’ve missed it unless I was poised, ready to pounce on it.

  Then Dad grins and tries to joke the tension away. ‘Oh, I think your mum and I have been doing very well all these years.’