In the end they concluded it was not worth the struggle. Ruth even voiced her conviction that speculum parties were an urban myth and that Wonder Woman never really said “With my speculum I am strong!” Sometimes she was disposed to speculate about how the plague of homo saps would eventually destroy the earth, which was not always by nuclear annihilation. Eleanor was not so keen on that topic, for it was too much like the dispiriting dinner-table conversation at her mother’s house.
On this Saturday morning, however, Eleanor was reading to Ruth from a letter on blue airmail paper. She fancied she was holding a segment of autumn sky, delivered by the westerly wind that had swept the smog out to sea. Outside, in the tiny rectangle of front garden, the furled bark that hung in untidy strips from the lemon-scented gum trembled in the wind. Both of them were fond of their only tree, but today Eleanor would have betrayed it for a silver birch.
“Prolétaire?” said Ruth.
“Prolétaire,” said Eleanor, with the correct arc of intonation, a ‘p’ that would not flutter a candle flame, and an ‘r’ that purred. She was vain about her accent.
“Say it again slowly and try to sound less French.”
“Rien ne vaut le naturel si excitant de ma ravissante australienne prolétaire.”
“Nothing beats the exciting – or does that mean sexy? – umm … naturalness or unaffectedness or something like that of my ravishing proletarian Australian, or ravishing Australian proletarian, or …”
“Okay, okay. Not bad for a biologist.”
“But are you really?”
“Am I what? Ravishing? Sexy?”
“A prole, you dope.”
Eleanor knew better than to read to Ruth from the breathless letters on the squared paper because of her habit of lifting up words and poking around underneath them to see what would crawl out. In the blue letters Julien did something similar when he dissected love; it was unnecessary, and unsettling as a hot, dry wind. Sometimes in those analytical passages he would attribute to her a simplicity that flowed into innocence. It was not a version of herself that she recognised. Perhaps because she had taught him a thing or two about sex, those bits amused her, and she would read them to Ruth, who usually found them funny too. They would squawk like schoolgirls over their cups of tea, and once Ruth said that for an apprentice philosopher, Julien was easily duped. But today she was in her probing mood, itching to shine her torch into the eyes of something.
“Do I own property?” said Eleanor. “Do I own the means of production? Do I own anything much at all?”
“But what does he mean? Does the proletariat include part of the middle class? Are teachers in it because they’re on salaries? Let’s look it up in Keywords.”
“It’s probably a Marxist term of endearment, for heaven’s sake. Or it’s because I took him to Wollongong-euh and he saw the steelworks. Anyway, he’s not talking about the great unwashed. That’s the lumpenproletariat.”
“But I still want to know …”
Ruth’s family lived in a book-filled house in an expensive suburb overlooking Middle Cove. Eleanor had spent a good few Friday evenings in their company, and had even stayed the night while she and Ruth were looking for a place to rent, by the time she got around to taking her friend home with her to Wollongong. In the end, Ruth had had to insist quite firmly, after they had shared the terrace house in Dartmoor Street for nearly half a year, that it was unfair that Eleanor should know the Sonnenberg family foibles and not let her experience Mavis at first hand. She said it as if an equal exchange were not only desirable but possible, but also as if she had begun to suspect Eleanor of keeping something from her.
When Ruth spoke of her parents’ foibles she meant, affectionately, her father’s Hasidic jokes and his jazz and klezmer collection, some of it on authentic 78s; but also, somewhat less affectionately, her mother’s preoccupation, now that her son was settled, with Ruth’s finding a suitable husband. Eleanor laughed at the jokes, even if she sometimes had to ask Ruth to explain them later, and loved the records, delighting the father by asking in German to hear the 78s. (“You’ve got the musical tastes of a Central European Jew,” Ruth said. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” replied Eleanor.)
And when Anna Sonnenberg happened to mention marriage as if it were a normal event in a young person’s future, Eleanor was charmed. Her own mother frowned on anything that might lure a woman into the marriage trap. For Eleanor, the Sonnenbergs – their music, their conversation, their grace – glowed like the challah loaf on the Sabbath table. The stark Hebrew words of the ritual moved her like a melody, all the more because the family professed no religious beliefs. It was a long and sorrowful history they honoured, a belonging, a continuum. She had nothing like it to offer in return.
“You can’t mean it,” said Eleanor. “You’re just being perverse.”
A cold July wind was blowing from the south-west and the beach was empty, save for the gulls and the two young women heading north. Even as she dreamed of escape, Eleanor had always claimed this stretch of yellow sand as her own.
“Isn’t Mt Keira an interesting shape?” Ruth said. “And the light! It’s as if you could see each leaf. Yes, I do mean it. She’s tough and smart and entertaining. My mother, on the other hand, probably thinks the phosphorus cycle is a setting on her washing-machine. When I try to make her understand that we’re teetering on the brink of ecological catastrophe, she says she doesn’t want to know, it’s all too depressing. Mavis isn’t weak-minded like that. Anyway, at least you had chooks. I always wanted chooks.”
Perhaps this was what Eleanor had feared all along: not that Ruth would find Mavis dull or gauche, but that she would think too well of her, be swayed by half a dozen domestic fowl and become less willing to see things Eleanor’s way.
“Entertaining! What do you think it was like for me to grow up with all that ranting, especially after my grandmother died? Talk about oppression. And you wonder why I’ve got no ambition!”
“Okay, maybe it was too much too soon, but she’s not wrong. I agree with everything she said.”
“And I think you should marry a nice Jewish anaesthetist, and the sooner the better.”
Stopping in her tracks, Eleanor turned her back on the escarpment to face the choppy ocean. A tanker perched like a doom-laden toy on the horizon. High above the shore, three pelicans glided in circles, giving themselves up to the air currents – out of necessity or indolent pleasure, who could tell? As a child she had been drawn to pelicans; they had made her want to sing to the sea. If she couldn’t fly with those magnificent wings, singing had to be the next best thing. Now she dug her feet into the sand, twisted her body into an operatic pose and filled her lungs with salt air. What followed was part clunky recitative, part crazy Mozartian aria. The words mocked, but her voice shed its bitterness as it soared above the ostinato hiss and rumble of the waves.
“Yours is the luckiest generation in history! No major war, no depression, no polio, plenty of food, contraception, abortion, free education. You don’t have to be a nurse or a secretary or a teacher; you’re not forced to marry or to breed. Such freedom, such opportunities as we never knew. And when the superphosphate runs out and the topsoil is all gone and the hungry billions can’t be fed and the seas are radioactive and the forests have vanished and the pollution is killing everything, you at least will have had your lives, unlike your children