The Sisters Antipodes Read online

  What I remember: my grandmother Dora coming to stay soon after; standing with Maggy on the hot front walk and sucking a sweet blue popsicle; swinging in Candy Cane City; racing Maggy in slippery new shoes until Maggy skidded into the staircase and split her head open, then the butterfly bandage on her forehead; eating toast buttered with Vegemite while my mother carried drinks to guests at a party; being bundled into a car in the dark as she cried, “We’re packing up and leaving!” although she insists that this last is not true. I have no memory of my parents together, which may be why they look so unlikely a pair in those three slides and two photos, which an aunt showed me when I was twenty-three and first went back to Australia.

  My husband and I sit in the dark in Germany and gaze at these images, cast upon a bedsheet we’ve hung over the kitchen’s sliding glass doors. This story of my family: It’s always felt like my most personal attribute, my worst and best secret, and whenever I meet anyone I might know awhile I need to tell it again. This story was the first I wrote, without even planning to. I was living in New Orleans, trying to be an illustrator while writing grant proposals at Tulane for a living, but found myself one weekend walking to my office, turning on the computer, and trying to push this family out of my ribs all at once as a simple story. That story was too short; it barely began. So I tried turning it into more stories and then a novel, but failed; I tried writing that novel again and again, but each version could not tell this. So I let the octopal story sink into my ribs and wished it would dissolve there, stop climbing into my throat. But it wouldn’t, it doesn’t, it keeps poking and pushing, and only now that the story seems to have ended can I try again to be free of it, even though my family will not welcome this.

  In Germany, when I found the old slides in their metal box and brought them out to show my husband, I was trying to push out the story a new way, by drawing. A color- pencil portrait of my mother as she sits upon a huge whelk on a beach, like a forsaken Venus, surrounded by palms and bottle-brush, the Southern Cross faint in the dark sky behind her. I wanted to draw her young, and to get her nose and mouth right I chose three of my father’s 1965 slides and projected the images in the dark bedroom upon sheets of paper taped to the wall. Her slender olive arms, her bright batik dress, her hair, fell as colored light on my hands as I traced her.

  With Alex, now, I click through the slides: Maggy laughing in a red snowsuit, me staring at ducks in the Reflecting Pool, my mother at night in that batik shift, and again in her green bikini. She glows on the bedsheet in our cold German kitchen, larger than we are, the sheet wavering in the window’s draft. We gaze up at her and sip our wine. But there’s something else in the room as we look at her lit, because you can’t sit in the space formed by projector and bright image and not sense the man who took that picture, the man who would be standing with his camera where you now sit with your hand at the carousel. I almost see the current that ran from my father to her as he focused, the energy of his watching like the beam of light that makes her flare to life on the sheet: This stream of watching made what was watched wanted. I stare at my glowing mother, her beautiful legs, her neck stretched bare, and imagine my father looking at her even more intently than I do. And then I can only imagine, or fail to imagine, what made him turn away.

  The slides spanning my parents’ marriage are kept in a flat steel box the size of a board game, where they have been erratically placed in slots, half missing. All are numbered and labeled in my father’s hand: Rosemary, Rosemary and Maggy, Maggy and Jane. In my mother’s hand sometimes, upside down, are more descriptive titles like Girls on swings or Girls in snow or Birthday party: before! Among them is no Edward, just one or two Edward and Maggy. He took the slides that included him, while my mother kept those of her; they divided the slides of Maggy and me.

  The last slide in the box is the final shot of my mother in that marriage. I click to the end of the carousel, and there she is. She stands in her kitchen at night in a yellow swimsuit, hands fisted at hips, chin thrust up, eyes narrowed and smile wide and lurid. She looks Italian or Egyptian, and it seems lascivious to wear a swimsuit in the kitchen at night among half-empty bottles of wine and port. Maybe she’d been dancing the cancan or Charleston, her feet bare on the gritty floor. This picture — not the one with the angel collar and Maggy, and not even the one in the garden, because there she is unconscious — this picture caught her live. But soon it was another part of her my father evidently did not want. It remained in the steel box after he’d taken what he wanted, snapped the clasps shut, moved on.

  She wears a brilliant peacock patchwork robe over her swimsuit, shoved back by her fists. Dora had made the robe, sewed each bright piece to the backing with neat black stitches. My mother and I wondered recently what had become of this robe. On the phone, we disagreed about the color of the lining; she said it was red, I said it wasn’t, until I said, “Well, I’ve got it in a picture, hold on.”

  She said, “Oh, you mean that one of me in my swimsuit vamping for Paul?”

  So this picture, the last in the steel box, was taken not in Washington but a few months later in Canberra, one night when the four adults were together. It was not my father who took it, but Paul. And it may catch the first moment of interest, the first fissure before the split. Unless you ponder another small fact: that my parents first met Paul in Washington.

  _______

  In 1965 we returned to Australia, where my father, I am told, was to switch to another department, for my mother. She, Dora, Maggy, and I traveled by train to San Francisco, where we boarded the Oronsay. My father flew from Washington shortly after.

  As we steamed to Honolulu and Fiji, fashion shows and costume balls filled the time, and for one of these my mother put Maggy and me in a bath of hot cocoa to make our skin brown like South Pacific girls. Maggy was six and I was three. We slipped on grass skirts whose strands tasted bitter, had leis hung around our necks and hibiscus blossoms fixed to our ears and ankles, and went out hand in hand on the shining dance floor. But aside from that chocolate bath and the taste of the skirt, I remember little of this Pacific voyage and wish I did, wish I’d been older, because then I’d imagine it was the first time and I was Cook or Banks looking for the famous southern continent. I’d stand on deck to watch for albatross and see how the stars changed when we crossed the equator, and how the currents changed as well, and when my shadow crept to the other side of my feet, and when water began swirling the other way down the drain: when one pole lost its pull and the other strengthened. To be from the “antipodes” but to have lived on the other side of the world fixes home, the point of orientation, as perpetually elsewhere. The center is never where you are.

  When the English first settled Australia, I wonder if it felt to those back home like a parallel world, brimming with light while they slept in darkness, its greenery steaming when frost broke the soles of their boots: an eerie sense of otherness to which they were now yoked, a shadow self. You could stand at Land’s End in Cornwall and stare into the Atlantic haze and know that if you sailed straight you’d reach America. But to imagine Australia or New Zealand, you’d have to stare into the grass between your feet and picture someone far down there, staring into the dirt between her own feet, picturing someone like you.

  The Maori skull Joseph Banks took back to England he had gotten for a pair of linen drawers, a weird trade — skinned head for empty bottoms — that seems to describe the relations between England and the antipodes: a cynical relation between a smart, old culture and one that’s rough, unknowing, like Henry James’s great “international theme,” although for James the old culture was Europe but the new and naive was America; Australia and New Zealand didn’t even come into the picture. But I wonder if it’s part of the idea of antipodes that one of the two poles is more powerful, because only one of the two has thought about, imagined, and sought out the other.

  In Canberra we returned to the bungalow, which seemed small, even in memory, where houses often swell large. The eucalyp
t whose pale mottled bark came off in strips stood in the front yard, and at the bottom of the street was a rock where I remember sitting and waiting for my father to come home. Across from the house, a park called Rocky Knob rose up the hill and dropped down the other side, with boulders jutting like dinosaur bones from the dusty grass, magpies shrieking in the cloudy sky.

  I turned four in October and went to the Girls’ Grammar, to a small shed of a classroom where we colored and napped on mats. When the Queen Mum came to Canberra, the girls at the Grammar tumbled down the hill to wave at her in the motorcade, a plump woman beneath a blue feathered cap. Among the girls who waved were the Stuarts, and I keep trying to see them for the first time. I remember a single moment, struggling with Jenny at the top of the hill, pushing her or being pushed down, but I don’t remember when. One day they became relevant: The Stuart girls are at the Grammar, too. Know them? Patricia and Jenny.

  My parents met the Stuarts at a party they threw, and their parties were marvelous, my mother has told me, written up in Canberra social columns. This one featured white food, which sounds terrible, it sounds German, but knowing the hostess as I have come to, I am sure it was supremely elegant. My parents followed with dinner at our house, another couple along as well.

  Then evidently there was a third dinner with just the four, an evening that apparently went like a dream, the night it all must have begun, the first strands unraveling and entwining. The two new couples simply began forming: I see my father and Helen, my mother and Paul, one pair at this end of the table and one at the other, then one at the table and one in the living room, pulled apart and together by gentle currents, both new pairs murmuring and laughing, smoke curling under the bedroom door. It sounds so easy, so natural, these new combinations, everyone fascinated with the new other. It’s a strange moment when you look at a new man’s face the way you look at your husband’s. Orientation shifts: vertigo. Desire you did not even know you had suddenly envelops you, its object within your grasp. All at once you imagine yourself happy, without having realized how unhappy you’d been. I picture the four the morning after that dinner, dreamy, their ears still humming with the timbre and cadences of the new man or new woman, then looking over the coffee cups to see the wrong one there, and blinking, putting things back to rights.

  From then on: outings, always together. Whoever sees a kangaroo first wins! We drove into the countryside, cigarette smoke flying out the window. Maggy and I stuck our heads out, too, and opened our mouths to the parching tart wind. In glades of gums, the sun bright and ground baking, when we’d eaten our pasties on the hot wool blankets, one of those four might say to us, “Whoever finds a koala first — Whoever spots the first echidna—Whoever sees a kook.”

  And my mother would do her kookaburra laugh. She’d rock back on her haunches, shut her eyes, take a breath, and release from her throat a wild pulsing sound, a throbbing shriek that rose through the branches and thin dangling leaves and up into the ancient air, an animal noise that belonged with her platypus toes and made her part of Australia, primitive and wild, a noise that Helen might listen to with a smile, but one I doubt she would ever herself make.

  My mother was beautiful, with her strong features and slim limbs, but Helen had a more glamorous, refined beauty. In a 1960s picture of Helen that came up by mistake when my father showed slides years later, a picture that took my breath away, she already possessed what she still has, a style of beauty that seems consciously composed. Recently, on a summer evening in Germany when she and my father had come to visit, she and I went for a walk while our husbands watched the World Cup, and the soft air, the feel of gliding forward in darkness, seemed to make us both transparent and open, make us forget who we were. She told me how she and a girlfriend had traveled together to Europe when she was twenty or so. They sailed second class, but at night they would sneak up to the first-class deck. Well, Jane, she said, laughing; we were good-looking, it was easy to be offered drinks.

  She fell in love, she said, with Europe’s cultivated beauty, its art. And her own beauty she surely knew how to deploy: how to smile just a little with the pretty teeth and Piero della Francesca lips, how to glance and glance away with the lovely blue eyes, how to reveal modestly her body’s splendor.

  Not long after that evening walk, as we washed our hands in a restaurant bathroom, she told me that I did not make good use of my beauty. I felt stupid when she said it, sloppy and wrecked beside her in the mirror, and it took two weeks to realize what I think she’d meant: not, as I’d thought, that I dressed badly and had no idea what to do with my hair. But that I did not use my looks to get ahead.

  It’s awfully superficial, Jane, I know, she’d said, reaching for a towel as she glanced at my reflection with those blue eyes. But these things end up mattering in our world.

  My stepfather, her first husband, said to me once, Now there’s a woman who’s never lost her looks. He narrowed his eyes and almost whistled between his teeth, and I think he was seeing his first wife again, through those forty years since Canberra, since the day he left her, or she left him, or they left each other.

  After the eucalypt picnics we’d go back to the Stuarts’ house or ours. The four girls would be bathed, Jenny and me pushing at each other’s wet pink feet, and then we’d be tucked into bed together. On the other side of the door, Paul and Helen and my mother and father would drink, play music, laugh. At some point they’d come in to kiss us goodnight. I don’t know if only our respective parents kissed each of us, or if the others did, too, to be fair — if each of them sat a moment in the dark bedroom, in the quiet, away from the smoke and music and others, and rested a hand lightly on the wrong girl’s stomach, and indulged in a private glimpse of a future.

  There was a weekend, my mother’s told me, when we all drove down to the beach near Canberra and stayed together in a cottage. Another weekend the four adults went to Sydney and checked into a hotel, perhaps with not quite their right names. These points I’ve been told as facts, uninflected. But everything else bends when I try to get an idea of who did what when. My mother says she heard Helen say to another woman at a party, There’s a man at this party and his name is Edward Cummins and he’s mine, so hands off. Paul says that my father and Helen had a motto: Screw your courage to the sticking point. Which might have meant, as he believed, that they were already at it, but might have meant they weren’t; they were waiting. My father became furious one night twenty years later and kept saying, What she did on the bloody ship! — meaning my mother set the split in motion even before reaching Canberra, perhaps even in Washington. And Helen has said, Jane, you must understand: I had to get my girls away from Paul.

  I wish I could remember what my mother and Paul said to each other if I slept in the back of his car, or what my father and Helen whispered to each other if I tagged behind on a walk, anything I might have heard or seen, so that I could know something, be certain. If nothing more decisive had happened, if the four adults had just dallied and parted, Paul and Helen and Patricia and Jenny would never have remained in my mind, so little trace did they leave.

  What traces remain: the tangy hot air as I held my head out of the car window searching for kangaroos and koalas; the lights flashing on as my mother pulled Maggy and me from bed and rushed us outside. And my father as he sat on the edge of my bed with a cigarette and drew glowing orange pictures in the dark, bright circles and swirls like silent fireworks that lingered in the darkness and then slowly dissolved, but lingered still in my eyes after he’d kissed me goodnight, got up, and shut the door.

  My sister and I each have copies of the two pictures that record our last day with him. On the back of both of mine he has printed To Janey with love from Daddy. August 1966, and this is the start of his transmogrification into photographs and writing. In one photo, the three of us pose beside Lake Burley Griffin, my father kneeling between Maggy and me. I’m in a green-and-red-striped dress with trumpeters on the pockets; my sister’s in dark corduroy, black tights, a
head-band; my father wears a fawn sweater with a tie knotted inside. The wintry August sky is clear, pale blue, and all three of us look hopeful. We look like brave pioneers setting off into a new world. In the other picture, we pose on the verandah of a colonial house, and I giggle and press my hand to my mouth. Probably he’s pointed out something funny to make us smile. Soon after, he disappeared.

  I can’t offer a story to prove I loved him. Love describes a relation between one and an other and is only possible when the distinction between yourself and the other is clear, when there’s distance. Perhaps if you’re too young, love isn’t relevant. The other is simply crucial, like your own skin, your bones.

  Sometime before Maggy and I left Australia came the presents from grandparents and friends: the ink washes of Aboriginal girls, the stuffed kangaroo and koala with black rubber claws, wooden boomerangs to hang on a wall. There was a night in a hotel or at a friend’s when my mother dressed up and I’m guessing she was applying for our U.S. visas, although for a long time I understood it as the night she married Paul. But they didn’t marry until later, after we’d lived in Washington almost a year.