“He watches TV now,” Amy had pointed out. “He never used to watch TV.”
“I know,” said Brooke. “He told me this long, complicated story the other day about a family where the youngest son had died in a car accident. It turned out he was telling me the entire plot of a movie. I thought it was real.”
That was a few months ago now. Brooke was too busy to talk much these days, because she was starting her own physiotherapy practice, which was a big step, and knowing Brooke, it would turn out to be a proper, grown-up success, and Amy was proud of her little sister, although also mystified. Like, why do that to yourself? Had Brooke never noticed how the Delaney family business had controlled their lives? The paperwork, the stress, the requirement for all four children to “help out.”
Once, when Amy was a teenager and in the middle of studying for a history exam, an exam she was destined to fail because this was the first time she’d even cracked open the textbook, a kid had come into the house and imperiously demanded Amy make her a sandwich as if Amy were her servant, and Amy had very nearly got up and made the sandwich before she came to her senses and told the kid to get lost.
They could never escape it. When they were growing up there was a family they knew who had packed up their three kids and gone traveling around Australia for a year in a caravan. Amy had been temporarily obsessed with that family. She thought it sounded like a dream. “He’ll never catch up,” her father had said. He was speaking about the middle kid in that family, the only one who was any good at tennis and therefore the only one who existed. But her dad was wrong, the kid came back, he kept playing, he didn’t do that badly, ranked in the top two hundred at one point. “We should go traveling around Australia,” Amy had said to her mother, and her mother had burst out laughing as if she’d made a clever joke.
Now Brooke was doing exactly the same as their parents: filling her pockets with rocks before she waded out into life. Brooke was meant to avoid stress because of her migraines, not chase it, but she’d always been a martyr. Amy remembered Brooke as a little girl, high pigtails and reflective sunglasses.
“She’s got a headache,” Amy would say to her mother, watching her.
“What? No she doesn’t, she hasn’t said a word.”
But Amy could tell. There was something about the way Brooke walked when she had a headache, as if her head was in danger of rolling off and she had to keep it balanced on her neck, and Amy wanted to cry for the poor little kid walking out there with the weight of everyone’s expectations on her shoulders, as if she already knew she would end up as the last hopeless hope for the Delaneys. Amy’s parents could read their children’s games with perfect accuracy, they could predict their every shot, exploit their every weakness, but in other ways they were clueless, blinded by their love of the greatest sport ever invented.
Maybe it was the migraines that made Brooke so serious.
Amy wished she could take them away from her. She remembered Brooke when she was a baby, dark curly hair in a topknot, only two chipmunk teeth. She never crawled, she bum-shuffled. It was hilarious to watch. Now look at her: so serious, so married, her shoes so sensible, her bra strap so beige, you’d think she was fifty, not twenty-nine. Had Brooke ever danced all night? Had a one-night stand? Brooke would say these were not examples of a life well lived, and maybe she was right, but Amy blamed those cruel migraines for aging her sister beyond her years.
Amy threw her journal on the floor and lay back down in the cold flood of air from her open window. Her three flatmates were all out. She’d moved here six months ago, and she’d thought that with three flatmates she’d rarely have the place to herself, but, in fact, she often seemed to be the only one at home. It was cheap rent because the neon light from the sign lit up her room like a disco.
For the last year she’d been keeping herself afloat with a cobbled-together series of part-time jobs. She’d finally accepted that regular full-time work was not for her. It wasn’t a matter of finally settling on the right career path. The right job didn’t exist. Full-time work caused a kind of claustrophobic terror to build and build within her chest until one day there was a humiliating emotional spillage that resulted in her termination or resignation and her parents looking distressed when she said the new job hadn’t turned out to be so wonderful after all.
Now her most regular work was three three-hour shifts a week as a taste tester, or a “sensory evaluator” if she ever wanted to sound more impressive, which she never did. She joined a group of university students, young mothers, and retirees to taste and discuss food with immense seriousness. She wore no lipstick or perfume or hairspray. She drank no coffee nor chewed gum beforehand. She sat at a laptop, logged in, spun around on her chair, and waited for the kitchen staff, dressed in black, to bring out trays of labeled food. There was no right or wrong, there was no winning or losing. It was very important but also of no consequence whatsoever. No one got upset, except for the occasional roll of the eyes if someone went on and on making their impassioned point about lemongrass to the panel leader. There was also that one time an executive stormed out because none of the taste testers liked the Bolo
gnese sauce he’d spent a year developing, but that had been exciting.
In between taste-testing shifts she did market research and product-testing work. Today, for example, she’d spent an hour as part of a focus group discussing toilet paper. It was cash in hand, the sandwiches were excellent: that was lunch sorted. Everyone was extremely nice and polite when you did focus group work. She didn’t care that it was fake; it was soothing. She got to walk into a lovely plush office in the city like she was part of corporate Sydney and then walk right out again and go to the beach.
This afternoon she’d filled in a long questionnaire about her thoughts on deodorant and in return she’d received a department store voucher that she’d used to buy two bras on special.
It felt like she was getting away with something, like she was living by her wits picking pockets in Dickensian England.
She also had a theory that this sort of work was good for her mental health because it forced her to make multiple choices (Do you prefer spray or roll-on, with or without perfume?) and when she was sick she found choices impossible. She could stand in a grocery store staring at a shelf, paralyzed with indecision. She hadn’t yet found a therapist who fully endorsed this theory.
She would be forty next April.
She wasn’t sure how that had happened. She could remember when her mother turned forty, and it had seemed ancient. Amy had assumed there would be flying cars by the time she turned forty.
Forty was too old to be eating bad poetry for dinner, to be living in a share house with twenty-somethings, to have no savings or furniture or boyfriend. She and Brooke should swap lives, except that if Amy was married to a man as deeply enamored of his own supposed intellect and supposed wit as Grant Willis, she would have to answer yes to that ubiquitous question: “Have you been experiencing suicidal thoughts?”
She reminded herself to get herself a new boyfriend soon, so she wouldn’t wake up alone on her fortieth birthday.
Would this strange girl, this Savannah, still be living in Amy’s old bedroom by her fortieth birthday?
She listened to the panicked scuttle of a possum’s paws as it ran across the roof tiles above her head. Her heart raced within the cavity of her chest, and her thoughts scuttled as fast and as foolish as a hundred panicked possums.
It’s your fight-or-flight response, explained each new therapist, kindly and patronizingly, as if this were a brand-new concept for her. Often they spent precious expensive minutes of the session explaining how cavemen needed the fight-or-flight response, because of the saber-toothed tiger, but now there was no saber-toothed tiger, but still we responded as if there was one (they were always so excited by the tiger!), and Amy would drift off, thinking about how there could be occasions in the modern world where you could actually face a tiger, like if you were on safari, for example, or if one escaped from a zoo, or how a rapist could represent the tiger, and you needed to race off down the alley, and how she was fast, she was a fast runner, faster than most, she would get away from any rapist or tiger, but she could never get the fuck away from her thoughts, her crazy, stupid thoughts, and next thing, time was up, and that will be three squillion and fifty-six dollars, thank you, and our next available appointment is in three years’ time, shall we book you in?
She did the four–seven–eight breathing technique.
Breathe in for four. Hold for seven. Out for eight.
In for four. Hold for seven. Out for eight.
Her heart rate slowed from full-blown panic to an acceptable level of high alert, as if she were no longer running from the tiger but she’d climbed a tree and was watching it circle and snarl below. She hadn’t climbed a tree in a while but she used to be good at it.