Vic slows his bicycle and hops off at his front gate. He wheels the bicycle through, his Gladstone bag carrying his tea and soap and swabs propped neatly between the handlebars, and removes the clips from his trousers. Inside, Rita sits and waits, her round body bearing the weight of the child who will become Michael. And even though she doesn’t know it yet (nobody will for some years to come), when the child does arrive and opens its eyes upon the world, she will not just be giving birth to the child alone; she will also, she will later discover, be giving birth to a generation. For just as the world that they are all stepping into will become the post-war world, and just as the phrase itself does not yet come so easily to her mind and to everyday talk, so too the name of this generation, like the child, has not yet been born and not yet been uttered. Eventually, economists and historians, or whoever it is who puts other people’s lives in order and in perspective, will inform her that she was actually part of something much larger than she knew at the time, and that when she saw round women with bodies that had memories that went back a million years all around her wherever she looked, it wasn’t just her imagination. She will not just be giving birth to a child: she will be giving birth to a generation, the Baby Boom. Just as economies have booms (and busts), when the noise of production is everywhere, so too do populations. And sometimes those generations are given a name, as this one will. It will not simply be because their prams and faces will be everywhere; it will also be because of the confidence with which this generation will stride into life, for Michael and his kind will inherit a world of plenty that their parents only ever dreamt about. And the swagger they will adopt will be the swagger that comes with the assumption of plenty. The assumption of a future. The assumption, in short, of eternal Progress. Baby Boomers: a strange phrase, both Rita and Vic will think when they finally hear it, the sort of phrase invented by people who work in suits, in their spare moments when they put their feet up, to amuse themselves.
Of course, Rita doesn’t know any of this: that her roundness not only contains a child but a generation that will come as close as any generation in History to getting exactly what it wants. Or that its anthem will be Progress, and it will make History its own because it will write it.
At the moment, Rita is both waiting to give birth to all of this and waiting for Vic. As the front door opens she looks up the hallway, not enough energy to rise. And as Vic enters the kitchen, the memory of the stick-figure soldiers and the fate that might have been his is still in his mind as he gazes upon Rita’s round body, containing the child that might never have been made had that fate been his.
Without speaking she points to the newspaper, spread out over the kitchen table, and watches while Vic studies the photograph and quickly reads the article. She smiles inwardly as he finishes, his face turning to the ceiling, his eyes rolling and his eyebrows rising, as she knew they would. He shakes his head quietly as he sits and asks Rita how it feels today, the roundness and the weight.
‘I’m walking like a duck,’ she says, then adds that she is too tired to stand and demonstrate the nature of this newly acquired duck walk. But there is just enough for a quack, which she delivers slumped in her chair, observing Vic’s grin and registering the boom of his big laugh that Aunt Katherine had so emphatically, and with that look in her eyes, warned her against. In the years to come, in the place they will go to live, that has open spaces so that the child’s long legs will have paddocks and fields to run across and so that the child will grow as naturally as a tree, one night in those not-too-distant years, she will hear Vic’s laugh in a crowd at a party and note that the boom has gone from it. Note that it is loud but not big any more. And this, and the fact that he will be drunk and saying silly drunken things, will make her sad. And it will not be a passing sadness but the kind of sadness that comes to stay when you finally recognise that something is over, that it never lived up to what it could have been, that Aunt Katherine may well have been right, and that the question she posed to herself just before, whether she would do it all again, will be answered with more of a ‘no’ than a ‘yes’.
But tonight the boom is there in his laugh and his laugh is still big. Tonight she holds on to the hope that this roundness and its weight will bring laughter to the kitchen and, despite her tiredness, laughter rises from her too as her quack subsides. It is, she notes, the laughter of a happy room, laughter with the boom and the life still in it, and perhaps this is what her roundness and weight will bring more of. Laughter with the boom still in it, even if, at this moment, the only boom she knows about is the boom in Vic’s laugh, not the one to which she is about to give birth.
And it is then that she looks up to see Vic standing in front of her. With the sound of fading laughter still in the room, he takes both her hands, raises her tired frame, lifts her to her feet, puts his arms around her, starts to hum a tune that seems both familiar and new, and begins to dance. What’s this, she almost says. What’s this? And she can feel that there’s a light in her eyes. A hint of the light that was in her eyes when they first met, and which she was convinced everybody could see. The light that announced to the world that she’d met someone, without need of saying a word. That she was in love. That she had finally passed over the burden of her impossible innocence and was entering the world of experience. Everybody knows, she thought back then. Everybody.
And she was right. They’d have to have been blind to miss it. Love is a light. And with that light back in her eyes now, she also finds energy that wasn’t there a minute ago. Suddenly she’s dancing. Slowly, smoothly (for Vic, and how could she have possibly forgotten, is a born dancer), they move around the kitchen, circling the table with the newspaper and Katherine’s photograph open on it, swaying to this new tune that Vic half hums, half whistles, all of which swells in her ears until it seems as if there’s a band in the room. Vic, in fact, heard the tune only that day. It was a foreign-sounding song and when it was finished the wireless announcer said the name of it, in a foreign language, but it meant nothing to Vic. And that’s all Vic knows about the song. Although he’s only heard it once, it has stuck with him the way some songs do. So much so that he can hum and whistle it, note perfect. And he always will. Although he will occasionally hear the song again, he will not need to hear it in order to remember it. It will simply stay with him and he will find himself whistling it from time to time through the years, and one day Michael will ask him what that song is and all Vic will be able to say is that it’s a foreign thing about the waves dancing on the sea and that he doesn’t know anything more about it. This song will stay with Vic for different reasons. He’s good with melodies. He can hear something once and repeat it. Note for note. But most of all this song will stay with Vic (and he doesn’t need the words to tell him this) because it is a song about longing. Or that’s how he hears it, for Vic is at heart a sentimentalist and he brings all his longing to the tune when he whistles and hums it, as he is now. And so he and Rita move, swaying and shuffling slowly, until the song fades and he returns her to the kitchen chair from which he had lifted her a few moments ago.
And with the fading of the music and the end of the dancing they both turn back to the newspaper and the image of Aunt Katherine marching across the sodden grass of her land, arm raised, as if she were, for all the world, about to march right off the page, through the door, down the hallway and into the kitchen.