All bagged up and dispatched to Oxfam, to be adored by someone who did Cute. ‘Cute fades.’ That was her comment as Tiaré, in tears, stood at the bedroom door wailing about her mother’s cruelty. ‘It’s up here that counts, sweetheart,’ she'd said, tapping her forehead. ‘Up here.’ Two weeks with her father and his foetal bride, and the child’s innocence was being corrupted. And apparently darling Daddy was insisting on being ‘Larry’ to his daughter.
Cool. Whatever. Was all of it the ditzy dame’s influence, the names, the outfit? The creature had nothing between her ears but expensive hairdos.
The dust-up with Tiaré had upset her. Angry words flying around the room. But the important thing to come out of all the angst had been her daughter’s accusation that Jude wasn’t entitled to tell her how she could dress because she wasn’t around enough.
From out of the mouths of babes. It had stung hard, packed a wallop because there was truth in the charge. She was absent most days when her daughter came in from school but Tiaré seemed to get on famously with her sitters and she was certainly keen enough to hear the latest on the UNY riots and sit-ins over their long suppers.
Tiaré punched above her weight with her grasp of politics. Nixon sending troops into Cambodia had triggered a brilliant essay, as insightful as anything her students produced. She was a cluey kid. And artistically gifted, she thought, recalling the devotion her daughter brought to those journals of hers, the lovely stories she wrote. The drawings, too. There was an imagination at work in that beautiful little head that was special. Miki would love her.
But the charge of neglect was a wake-up call. Even if Tiaré was cluey and gifted, she was still a little twelve-year-old girl who needed plenty of mothering at this stage of her life. A faculty Mom caught up in campus politics wasn’t a good look. Tiaré was right. More home time. Less Washington Square. And that’s what she promised at the end of the screaming match. It had been the extra push she needed to go to Zuckerman with her sabbatical plans. The Birthday Lottery business had got her thinking about Australia in a serious way. She had writing to do and some mother/daughter good loving to catch up on.
She stamped out what was left of the cigarette burning in the ashtray and ditched her cold tea in the sink. The letter and the press clippings were open on the table, the TDT palaver Poppy mailed her months ago. It had been enough to make her want to jump on a plane and fly home, but once she’d stopped applauding Miki’s chutzpah, reality kicked in and any thought of a kiss-and-make-up evaporated.
Clutching a glass of lemon ice water, she returned to her post at the window and stared down at the pavement below, at the steady flow of rugged-up New York break-of-dawn commuters scurrying down into the subway. Like bandicoots. Like rabbits darting into their warrens. The wide yellow green paddocks of home, alive and crawling with bunnies and kangaroos. Especially at sunset, which is about what it would be, over there now, she reminded herself, checking her watch, yet again.
The phone rang. She stubbed out her third cigarette of the day and walked into the hallway sucking ash from her fingertips, promising herself she was definitely giving up the filthy habit tomorrow.
‘Yes. I accept,’ she assured the operator and waited for her aunt to come on the line.
She could see the blisters forming on the tips as she held her fingers to the light. Maybe it was a good luck sign. And that was bullshit because she didn’t believe in luck. Or fate. Or any other Neanderthal nonsense. She believed in taking control, being in control of your destiny by being smart, clued up, on top of your game. Fate was too random. Like this God-Almighty Birthday Lottery business, she cursed as she waited.
They used the phone rarely, she and Poppy; a couple of calls a year, and mostly because Poppy felt sure her niece would want to be kept informed, first-hand, of the goings on of everyone she had ever known back in Australia.
They'd had their battle royals over the years, she and Aunt Poppy, but they had always maintained their own kind of family affection. The car crash that had taken the lives of Adele and Monty Brenner and left their small daughter an orphan had robbed Monty’s eldest sister of a fuller life, and it was only as she grew up and became a parent herself, that she appreciated her aunt’s sacrifice; to move to another continent, another hemisphere to rear her dead brother’s child. Her aunt had been in her forties when she became Jude’s guardian. Poppy never married. Had she left a lover in America? A married man? Someone who died in the war? It was weird that she knew so little of the woman who had loved her so well. She pondered this sad state of things as she waited for her aunt to come on the line.
‘Hello, Poppy Mom.’ She hadn’t always added the ‘Mom’ but more and more she found herself doing so these days as Poppy grew on in years. ‘How are you, darling?’
The old lady, knowing what calls between the States and Australia cost her niece, seemed compelled to want to give Jude value for her money with this one, and launched straight in with a running commentary about what the Channel Nine weatherman was saying, right down to the movement of isobars and fluctuating tide levels. The United Nations would do well to have Poppy Brenner on board. She could relay to the floor of the UN in real time. But talking of personal discomforts was where her aunt’s true strengths lay, and so the weather conversation segued into what was Poppy’s Hell on Earth; Brisbane’s humidity. And apparently Brisbane was still sweating and sweltering tonight under the heat of a scorcher, even at this hour on a spring evening.
‘Poppy Mom? I know it’s shit, the humidity… you poor darling … imagine what summer’s going to be like … but we have to hurry now. When I ring back, can you make very sure you’re on the ABC, and put the receiver right up close to the speakers, sweetheart. I’ll hear it first-hand then. Okay?
She couldn't handle the idea of the draw being relayed, marble by marble via Poppy's mouth.
'Then we’ll chat, darling. Hang up now, and I'll call straight back. Okay? Okay.’
She went into the kitchen, emptied the glass of iced water and returned to the hall to put in the call to Australia.
With the receiver to her ear, she waited patiently as Poppy came back on line and carried on about her local politician in particular, and Australian Members of Parliament in general. All the while, she kept her eye on the time, listening to her aunt but concentrating some of her attention on the patterns in the Sarouk rug at her feet. Anything to calm her nerves.
And then, all too soon, the ABC anchorman said goodnight and foreshadowed the all-important televised recording of the Birthday Lottery to be shown immediately after their station break. She lit her fourth cigarette, this time a Camel. Numerals were running through her head, numerals corresponding with birth dates.
We couldn’t be that unlucky, she thought as she exhaled several smoke rings in quick succession and watched them climb in slow, fading circles to the high ceiling where they joined with all those that had gone before. It was a wonder her ceiling wasn't showing nicotine stains, she reasoned.
As she stood, tapping her fingers on the phone table, waiting for the government official to announce the commencement of the draw, she tried to keep the ‘If only’ mantra at bay.
If only Naomi's mustard bath had worked. If only they hadn't washed up in that vile outback town. If only she had pinched the bottle of milk from the cafe's fridge that day. If only she hadn’t hopped on the motorbike. If only she hadn’t gone out that night. If only...
But the biggest "if only" of all––the one that had been up to Miki and not her––she kept in check.
That way, lay too much bitterness.
Best left behind.