The Last Anniversary

Stop talking about me as if I’m a retarded child, she wanted to scream. His mother was so nice! He was so nice! He’d cooked dinner (microwaved some leftovers and made a salad with a great deal of stirring and clattering and leaping around the kitchen as if he was cooking a three-course meal, but still) and even packed the dishwasher and wiped bench tops without being asked while she breastfed the baby. It had all made Grace feel unreasonably aggravated. He seemed so happy, he was doing everything right and he hadn’t even been the one who particularly wanted children! It was Grace who had pushed for the baby.

Why had she done that? It seemed to be more to do with the fact that she didn’t see herself as the sort of person who would choose not to have children than the fact that she actually wanted to be a mother herself. She didn’t identify with those people who talked about not having children as a ‘lifestyle choice’. There was something suspicious about people who seemed so proud of going against convention. Grace saw nothing wrong with convention. That’s why when she turned thirty-three she decided it was about time she and Callum had children.

Not the best reason for having a child, she thinks now. Surely a reprehensible reason, to have a child just because you didn’t want to be the sort of person who didn’t have one.

Oh, her head, her poor papier-mâché head.

The meat spatters oil on the white tiles behind the cook top and Grace immediately wipes them clean with a paper towel, as though her mother isn’t thousands of miles away on the other side of the world (Turkey, according to the typed fifteen-page itinerary hanging on the cork noticeboard next to the fridge) but could walk back into the room at any moment.

She wipes her eyes with the paper towel and thinks how repulsed her mother would be by this excessive crying. ‘Don’t be a drama queen, Grace,’ her mother used to say when she cried as a child.

She goes to the pantry for the spices and stops to look out the window with watery eyes. Her mother’s house, like all the houses on the island, is built up high on a block of land sloping gently to the waterfront. All the windows along the front of the house have views of the river. It is twilight and the sunset is turning the river bronze. All their friends turn into real-estate agents the first time they see this view: ‘Stunning.’ ‘Panoramic.’ ‘Breathtaking.’

‘You grew up with this view!’ they say to Grace. ‘I bet you just took it for granted. I bet you never even looked at it, huh?’ Actually, she did used to look at it, sometimes for hours at a time, sitting at the window and imagining a boat appearing at the house jetty with her father in it. ‘I’m back!’ he’d say cheerily. ‘Sorry I took so long.’ Her father had left when Grace was a baby. ‘A lot of abandoning of babies in my family,’ she’d told Callum when they were sharing family histories. Except there was no mystery about Grace’s father. He was a dentist who fell in love with his dental nurse and moved to Perth.

When Grace was a child she assumed that the first thing her father would look at when he came back to collect her would be the state of her teeth, so she brushed them so rigorously that her dentist told her she was wearing away the enamel. She still thinks of her father whenever she flosses. She flosses religiously, twice a day. Her teeth are perfect.

As she watches the river, she hears the putt-putt of an engine and a boat does appear, trailing a wide curve of whitewash. It is Callum, sitting very straight, one hand behind him on the tiller, the sky all fluffy orange and pink, like something in a religious poster. She can’t see his face but she knows he’ll be smiling.

Shit, shit, shit. He’s early. She can’t even complain about her husband working long hours and not being supportive, for Christ’s sake. She doesn’t want him home just yet. The lasagne is not in the oven. She is still crying. She turns around from the window and her elbow knocks against the bowl she’s been using to mix up the tomatoes and spices. It falls in slow motion to the floor. There is time to catch it but she just stands there stupidly, as if she wants her mother’s good china mixing bowl to shatter violently on her flawless white kitchen tiles.

With comic timing, the baby begins to cry, louder than she’s ever heard him cry, as if he’s been crying for hours.

‘Please don’t say anything,’ says Grace without turning around when she hears Callum come into the kitchen behind her. She stands looking at the mess in front of her.

He silently tiptoes past her to get the broom.

Later that night, after they’ve eaten the lasagne and watched TV and packed the dishwasher and given Jake his ten p.m. feed, Grace’s mother calls from Istanbul.

Grace sits down on the hallway floor with her legs straight out in front of her and drums her fingers against her thigh. Callum says he can tell whenever she is talking to her mother. ‘You become very still and alert,’ he says. ‘Like a commando.’

She carefully tries to sound like a daughter, not a commando. ‘Hi, Mum!’

‘Oh my word!’ Her mother’s voice is clear and sharp in her ear. ‘It’s a very good line, you sound like you’re next door!’

‘Oh my word’ is a favourite phrase of Laura’s own mother, Grandma Enigma. It is the first time Grace has ever heard her mother use it. Perhaps everyone is turning into their mothers.

‘So, Istanbul…are you having fun?’ she asks.

Her mother answers in a rush of words. She sounds slightly manic.

‘Well, yes and no. The food, for example, is quite inedible. It’s swimming in oil. I’m eating nothing but tomato. The tomatoes are all I can stomach. Still, that’s a good thing. I ate far too many carbohydrates in France. How is your weight, by the way? It took me six months to get back to my pre-pregnancy weight after you.’

‘I haven’t weighed myself.’

‘Well, the scales are right there in my bathroom. You need to be vigilant about your weight. Look what happened to Margie. She blew up like a balloon while she was pregnant with Veronika and stayed that way. She wore a size twenty to your wedding. I checked the label on the jacket when she went to the bathroom and I nearly had a fit. Size twenty.’

‘She looked fine to me,’ says Grace.

‘Oh don’t be ridiculous. She’s monstrous.’

Poor, cuddly Aunt Margie. Grace thought she’d looked quite uncomfortable in that blue suit. She probably should have had a size twenty-two.