The Sisters Antipodes Read online

  THE SISTERS

  ANTIPODES

  Also by JANE ALISON

  The Love-Artist

  The Marriage of the Sea

  Natives and Exotics

  JANE ALISON

  THE SISTERS

  ANTIPODES

  First published in Australia and New Zealand in 2009

  Copyright © Jane Alison, 2009

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

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  Australia

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  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Alison, Jane

  The sisters antipodes / Jane Alison.

  ISBN: 978 1 74175 788 0 (pbk.)

  Subjects: Alison, Jane--Family.

  Alison, Jane--Childhood and youth.

  Novelists, American--21st century Biography

  813.54

  Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  THE SISTERS

  ANTIPODES

  In 1965, when I was four, my parents met another couple, got along well, and before long traded partners. This was in Canberra, where my father, an Australian diplomat, had just brought us home from a posting in Washington. The other couple were American but diplomats, too, finishing a post in Canberra before returning to the United States. Both men were in their early thirties, tall, slim, and ambitious; both women were smart and good-looking. Both couples had two little girls the same ages, and the younger girls shared a birthday and almost the same name. This was my counterpart, Jenny, and me. The two families had so much in common, people said: They must meet.

  The couples fascinated each other at once, I am told, and for the next months we were together constantly for picnics, outings, dinners. My father’s and Paul’s cars raced from Canberra, and we’d park in glades of eucalypts and spread out big plaid blankets. After lunch my sister and I and the other two girls would be sent to play, to find a koala or kangaroo, and we’d wander into the heat and buzzing stillness with sticks, hitting peeled trunks, prodding for snakes, as our parents murmured and laughed and lounged on blankets and clinked their beers or glasses of wine.

  Later, I’d be put in a bath with Jenny. We had the same birthday, but she was a year older, and we looked alike enough to be sisters — little girls with wavy hair and bright staring eyes, although mine were blue and hers were brown. I see us in the bath gazing at each other over sudsy water, our wrinkled pink feet pressed together and pushing, as music and smoke drift under the door. We don’t know that soon she’ll live with my father and I’ll live with hers, that for seven years we’ll shadow each other around the globe, that the split will form everything about us: that we will grow up as each other’s antipode.

  The literal meaning of antipodes: two bodies pressed together, foot to foot.

  In less than a year the split was done. My mother, sister, and I would follow Paul to Washington, and my father would soon resume his diplomatic path with Helen and her girls: like continents splitting and sliding apart, each with its own living creatures. Pictures show the last hours Maggy and I spent with our father. The three of us pose by Lake Burley Griffin, where he kneels like a suitor and clasps one of us in each arm, earnest hope straining his thin face, while I cover my mouth and giggle. Then we left and flew to Washington. We didn’t see or speak to him for seven years. Letters traveled over the oceans.

  In 1973, we all landed on the same continent for the first time since the split. We were back in Washington, and the other family had been posted to New York, so Maggy and I could take the Amtrak north to see our father, and Patricia and Jenny could take it south to see theirs. Most often we went to my father’s Upper East Side apartment when the girls were there. Jenny and I slept in twin beds in her pink room; Maggy and Patricia, in her yellow room beside us. Daddy and Helen slept at the other end of the apartment in the master bedroom, which was silken and civilized and looked over Fifth Avenue with its leashed poodles and gated trees. Between that master bedroom and us ran a very long, narrow carpeted hallway through which you could pace silently, stealthy. Photos show its wallpaper patterned like a garden trellis, but I remember it as bamboo, a jungle, and am sure that outside the photos’ frames the wallpaper twines and transforms.

  One of the first nights at our deep end of the hall, Jenny and I lay side by side in the dark, hot after handstands and wrestling. Her window opened onto a sooty space between buildings, and faint sounds of cars and distant voices floated in, her radio playing between us. She was twelve, I was eleven.

  When you were young and your heart was an open book …

  She sighed and stretched her arms, lifted a leg free of the sheets, and pointed her toes into the darkness. Then she turned to me and whispered, “So, who do you think did it first?”

  Because this was the point. The split could not have been simultaneous and fair; things like that can’t happen. One of our fathers had been ready to leave his own girls if he had to, and the other must have had less choice. One of our mothers had chosen a new man and won him, and the other woman must have lost. And whoever had won, whoever had lost, whoever had been easily left: That would determine who Jenny and I were, what each of us was worth.

  1

  Sometimes I think we all have embedded in the brain a personal place like a home we’ve lost that lingers in our skulls, and a pantheon of people who so imprinted us when we were young that we see everyone after in contrast. This place and these people — they’re like elements or primary colors, forming and haunting our lives. She was the original green, and this woman is like her but a touch more blue. He was first red, and this man is like him, but darker.

  The original place I’ve lost is Australia. A gum’s peeling bark, a kangaroo’s tail as it belts into the trees, the screams of a kookaburra hacking the air — the original place isn’t ideal, just primary, saturating your child sensibility like the first exposure of film; if that place is then lost it settles in the brain rare and fantastic. Australia inspires fantasy, anyway, the great southern continent having been imagined and sought by Europe for so long, and this one so weird when found. From miles out at sea as English ships drew near, I have read, even over the pounding Pacific surf the racket of birds in this new world was incredible. I wish I could hear it and see it as early sailors did, squinting dazed across the foam: a riot of birds, untouched and shrieking, so innocent they could be hit with a stone. Lorikeets, white cockatoos, galahs, rosellas; and in the waters, enormous oysters, mussels, cockles, giant stingrays to be seized. So much that was unknowing and, to Europe, unknown: Terra Nullius.

  The animals and plants resisted categories: Marsupials, which don’t lay eggs or give birth to live young but release occult fetuses into daylight. The platypus, a mammal that lays eggs and lives in water. Flying squirrels. Trees that shed not leaves but bark, can be swallowed in flames, but spring up green from charred stumps. Captain Ja
mes Cook and Joseph Banks and the others moved through this new world like Shakespeare’s Miranda, although unlike her they sought possibilities, reasons to poke in a flag and lay claim. In New Zealand and Australia they gathered specimens: a small kangaroo they stuffed and mounted; flowers that looked like feathers or barnacles that they dried and dubbed names like Banksia; the skull of a Maori. After carving their ship’s name on a eucalypt, they sailed back to the other side of the world, and two decades later British fleets returned with convicts, sheep, saplings, and seeds.

  The Australia bobbing in my skull when I flew away at four is almost the one Cook and Banks saw. Climbing, squatting, poking, tasting, as a child you’re close to the ground and all that wriggles on it, you can feel sensibility breathing everywhere, feel akin to small things: a gumnut, an echidna trembling in the grass. I still feel in my palm the papery bark of the eucalypt in front of our house, and how it peeled away, and the fairy gardens Maggy and I made, lying dreamy on our stomachs, arranging feathers and bottlebrush blossoms in the twisting roots of trees. And I see the garden made by our grandparents: Slight and white-maned in a cardigan, my grandfather Albert tends a philodendron as Maggy and I wander in nightgowns along pebble paths, among spiked palms, yellow wattle, blue gums. A place that came into being with each step you took through the shadows and sunlight, a place dangerously like paradise before we even knew the word.

  When we flew away in 1966, we clutched things we’d been given to remember home: a stuffed kangaroo and koala, boomerangs, ink drawings of Aboriginal girls — the same things Cook and Banks took. We had books, too, so we wouldn’t forget, the watercolor pictures conjuring a landscape of banksias and kookaburras as animate as Arcadia. I didn’t go back to Australia for twenty years, and that country seemed to disappear from the world and slip into my head. But the place pulled as strongly as the mythical southern continent once had pulled those Englishmen two centuries earlier.

  As for the pantheon: Maybe parents, brothers, sisters, are always the primary figures painted on your brain. The first examples of character — beauty or primness or a black comic bent — they swell into archetype before your eyes, become the hues and tissue from which you’ll be made or through which you’ll see others. My mother and Helen, my father and Paul, my sister and Patricia; Jenny. It wasn’t just their colorings that lit them inside my skull but their doublings. A bicameral group to match the bihemisphered world we traveled after the split, and the bilateral brain and bichambered heart that slowly grew inside.

  _______

  How it was before the split, how the split actually happened: There are a few simple facts, photos, and the shards I remember, but mostly the fragments of stories my four parents have told. Some of what’s given as fact is plain, but not all, and pictures are partial. The pieces of memory from when you’re four are like spots on a dirty window rubbed clear enough for light, color, an image to show through. You can rub these places, hoping to see more in the murk, willing that lost time to reappear, but it won’t. And you can listen to the stories, sift them for truth, but one thing I know is that for my four parents, the truths are not the same.

  My mother has told me the oldest fragments, pieces of the story I was too young to remember. Although I look for cracks in what she’s said to find traces of different stories the others would tell, I know that I can’t peel her words from my vision. Still, what she’s told me is more tinged with wistfulness or rue than with the dark poison I think the others fear.

  My father and mother grew up in South Australia in families that had been settled there just a few generations. The first had sailed from the British Isles and Nova Scotia in the 1800s: a gold miner, a shearer, an apothecary, a grocer. No convicts: These people came to the new world as pioneers. I don’t want to know about the earlier generations. When the lines are traced back to England or Scotland, the pursuit becomes dark, muddy, heavy with clouds. Instead I see those settlers stepping onto Australia’s shores like the first men and women stepping into the sun, and life and light begin.

  I try to imagine those Anglo and Celtic settlers in Australia. How sharply etched they must have felt, their pale bodies standing alien against the alien landscape, casting different shadows in the new light, their thin pinkish skins stretched between their selves and the blistering sun. And what made those “selves”: a language coursing in the blood; their names and the knowledge of where they’d come from; the ideas they’d brought of how things were done, how clothes were worn or a house was made or what green things should be pulled from the land, a land not yet packed with ancestral bones so all the more alien; a way of regarding through squinting eyes that would have to grow fierce in sheer opposition to all that lay threatening beyond, the self in its skin being so slight.

  They struggled with the ground at their feet, prying up stones, ringbarking trees. A great-great uncle named Tom, a bushman, slept in mud in the rain and stood waist deep in a stream from morning to night helping sheep through the water. A great-grandfather Richmond arrived in Glenelg as the town was just forming and wrote dry letters about the state of the sidewalks. These first comers were literate, resourceful. One wrote letters aboard the Clifton as he crossed the Atlantic and Indian oceans, another published letters in the local paper, others wrote memoirs that glow with pride at each step closer to an anglicised world in the bush. A generation later, both my grandfathers were headmasters who looked out keenly as the place rose around them, annotating its progress. A great-aunt built her house from mallee roots and pulverized limestone and reported how grand was the day when a road came, then plumbing, and then electricity. The importance of the house, of making themselves home: My mother’s mother, Dora, practiced shrewd domestic arts, reusing rinse water from the white laundry for the colors, keeping a cloth wet on the safe to chill milk. Whatever else their endeavor meant, these people transformed the foreign place to known, managed to make themselves home in it. My parents were the first to leave this new place, to look for something newer.

  I have just five photographs of my parents together, along with a box of slides from the years of their marriage and a few pictures my father took of my mother while courting. The two met at university, and my father’s first photos of my mother reveal both how she looked and how he must have looked at her, and to me this is the magic current: the current that invests what is seen with value. She stands laughing on a wide, bare beach at the bottom of Australia, the sand white and the water cold blue, her bare legs shapely and slender and her most beautiful feature, together with her sparkling eyes. She played tennis and field hockey and golf; on my desk I have a round silver box she won in a putting contest and a silver pencil cup as runner-up. Her nose is strong and Mediterranean, although there’s no such blood in our line, and her mouth can seem either bawdy and wide or a small prim plum; herein lie her trickiness and potential. In photos of my mother and father they do not look well suited. In a newspaper picture at a party, his face seems alarmingly young and long, while beside him her eyes are lidded in a Cleopatra smile that seems knowing, although I doubt she knew much, was just restless and wanting to go, not sit potted at home. My father might have been restless, too — why else the diplomatic service? — but has always seemed concerned about propriety, how things are done. In the university library one evening, as the two were slipping on their jackets to leave, my mother tells me, she saw that her gloves were dirty. She leaned toward him over the table and whispered, What’ll it be? Dirty gloves or no gloves?

  He considered a moment and said, Dirty gloves.

  Courting, he gave her a silver brush and mirror and a pair of sunglasses with tiny shutters like jalousies instead of tinted lenses. I would love to have those, to see what you saw through them, what sort of shuttered world you could make. My father is color blind. His mother, Maisie, became truly blind and wore a glass eye; my mother’s father, Herbert, was deaf. My sister has one blue eye, one green eye. My mother has webbing between several toes.

  In college my father and moth
er were called, she tells me, the Gruesome Twosome. Both have always had a weakness for puns.

  In the wedding pictures taken outside the Anglican church, a pert white flower sits in my father’s lapel, his hair is neatly combed back, and he grins like an excited schoolboy. White satin cuts my mother into voluptuous triangles, a cap sprays a pale shower of veil, and her sidelong smile is dangerous. They sailed for his first posting soon after. On deck in the blazing sun, she waves at the place she’s abandoning, the new world their forebears had only just begun making, while he clasps her by the green-silk waist as if she needs anchoring already.

  Then my mother dances the cancan at the British Cricket Club, flings her skirts above her head, but otherwise works to be a diplomat’s wife. She makes curries and scones, cuts her own dresses from batik prints, haplessly freezes lettuce for a tropical picnic, gives birth to Maggy, and wears a white angel collar as she cradles her baby, her mouth the prim little plum. Then the young family moves to Canberra, home base, and I am born. Canberra was still fairly young for a city, and our house was a small bungalow in the hills, in a neighborhood being carved from the scrub, the trees and rocks around it ancient. I have one picture of my father holding me: A shadow falls upon his tilted face, and behind him spread the thin leaves of a bottlebrush or banksia. It’s 1962.

  At this point we move to Washington, and although my mother teaches, as she’d always do, something about her in the pictures grows wild. She’s not suited for the diplomatic service, it seems; she’s not happy. Her hair becomes tousled, and her expression, even her skin, seems darker. She wears sleeveless shifts that show her long limbs gleaming. As her hair grows, she looks less a neat concoction of the 1950s, more a reckless girl.

  In 1965, she suns in the garden in a green bikini with her head thrown back and the book she’s propped against her legs forgotten. I see my father pause at the window of our brick house and spy her — her legs liquid, face all light, troubling unsatisfied mouth sealed shut — and need to take this picture. The image appears in a sequence that begins with her as a slight figure in the green, then moves closer, snap by snap, until we stand above her as she sleeps, or thinks, or longs, or despairs, her eyes shut to the world and the sun. My father took many pictures in June and July 1965. Because she was beautiful and he wished to record her? There’s no clue of what’s to come. But she was going through a depression, she’s told me, and did not seem made to be a diplomat’s wife. In April her father had written, Dearest Rosemary, we are troubled not to have heard from you in so long. She was the one who had abandoned home and sailed into glamour and peril. The morning after writing this letter, grandfather Herbert had a heart attack in the silence of his deafness, as he stood at the bathroom mirror, shaving.