AN UNPERFECT ACTOR
December 1956
Sonnet could not comprehend how they were marking their second Christmas in the valley. Where was time going? Down the gurgler, with the best of her hopes and ambitions.
It was Sunday morning, which for Sonnet meant a few rare hours of solitude while the girls were at church with their aunt and uncle. Sonnet sat on the cottage stoop, perspiring profusely, lacing her sandshoes to go running.
Running, Olive had intimated recently, was a man’s sport, and there could be no benefit to it over the much more ladylike option of walking.
Sonnet had tallied an extra benefit there and then: shocking Olive.
But today’s run was going to hurt – it didn’t get any easier to move in the insufferable tropics. The saturated air was a thick blanket under which she moved in a torpid haze. Sweat stuck her heavy ponytail against her neck, moustached her lip, pooled in her cleavage, and ran in great rivulets down her back and limbs. The previous summer, everyone swore she’d be ‘acclimatised’ by the next, but she was in the same seething mood as last summer. Gav said she’d ‘gone troppo’. Sonnet suspected she was just born that way.
Sure, the tropics were stunning in summer: indecent exposure of green; rumbling cumulonimbus cloud formations piling up; mango trees hung in baubled glory; festive flame-tree blooms floating on the creek; red and pink and yellow poinciana trees blinking on like beacons across the vale. Yet who could enjoy any of it with the humidity-induced rage?
But today, even if it made her spontaneously combust, Sonnet would run! She watched Fable tramp off into the rainforest daily, while she was left holding the fort. Now it was Sonnet’s turn.
Sonnet began to run – with vexation hot on her heels. Ahead, the rainforest was an electric fence, humming.
Nineteen fifty-six had been a humbling year for this sister-mother. Full-time guardianship was so much harder than she had anticipated. After the child-rearing and housekeeping responsibilities she’d borne from such a young age, Sonnet had assumed she, of all people, had been equipped for the job.
Oh sweet hubris!
What was the grimmest testament to her incompetence? The sister with the cordoned-off heart and unnerving passivity; or the one with more issues than you could poke a stick at?
The obvious answer was Plum, what with her pants soiling, screaming nightmares, sporadic periods of muteness, and that humiliating fiasco with kindergarten at the beginning of the year. Honestly, who gets expelled from kindergarten?
She’d come so close this year to crying defeat over that troubled, stubborn girl. It was only the unspoken tug-of-war with Olive which had spurred her on. She couldn’t deny Plum’s loyalties were transferring evermore quickly to Olive and Gav now. In lieu of kindergarten, she spent several days a week with Olive, and asked nightly to sleep over at Heartwood. Allowing Plum set days with Olive and Gav had been the first, Sonnet suspected, of many grudging concessions. Olive now had a bedroom permanently prepared for Plum, replete with every luxury of her heart’s desire.
That Olive wanted it so badly only made Sonnet more ungenerous.
Olive, for her part, was a model of such persistent charity, Sonnet could hardly stomach it. Take the church thing. Olive got it in her head, months ago, that Plummy wanted to join them at church, and she’d been wearing Sonnet down, drip by persevering drip, ever since. Sonnet wasn’t dead set against the idea; the structure and routine of the Sunday School program Olive described actually sounded good for Plummy. She might have wormed her way out of kindergarten, but she couldn’t evade Olive’s God! Still, Sonnet had made her objections clearly known. She didn’t want any of the girls copping damnation and judgement! The Hamilton girls had never stepped foot in a church – come to think of it, they might burst into flames if they tried.
Olive had listened quietly, but answered with surprising firmness: ‘I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think Plummy would feel loved and accepted there. It’s a different world to what it was twenty years ago, and besides, wasn’t I the one who insisted on pulling Plummy out of kindergarten when she was so unhappy?’
Sonnet finally had agreed, with a rigid caveat: ‘Your church cronies only get one chance. If Plummy comes home talking hellfire, if someone mentions Mama, if anyone as much as looks at her wrong, we’re done!’
Unexpectedly, Fable had volunteered herself for church, too. Olive merely had rattled off a list of neighbours who attended, and Fable had leapt at the opportunity. Sonnet could discern why – Fable, still yearning to fit in, didn’t want to be the only kid in the valley left out of church. And fair enough, the safety of group identification was important for adolescent girls.
The next Sunday morning, Sonnet brought Plum up to Heartwood dressed in the sweetest pink seersucker smock and patent leather Mary Janes – proud as if she’d made the girl herself! Fable, will wonders never cease, readied herself willingly, prettily and on time for once. Then Sonnet knew she’d pegged Fable’s motives correctly.
And any victory over Fable’s barricades, no matter how small, was one to celebrate. Acting as Fable’s guardian was an infuriating exercise in futility. Fable was attached to no one, and unknowable to all. She drifted untethered through the days; if not traipsing through the forest, disappearing into daydreams and scribbles. And the more Sonnet grabbed at her, the further and faster away Fable slipped. Maybe it was just being fourteen, and Sonnet had never experienced a normal adolescence herself, so what would she know? Fable had every excuse to embrace angst, especially in this town with their family background.
In the space of a year, Fable had become a long-limbed, lissom young lady, though she would not reach Sonnet’s statuesque height. The commencement of puberty had only strengthened Fable’s quiet poise. And by poise, Sonnet meant obliviousness. The girl didn’t even seem to care about her changing body. Sonnet rushed out and bought several training bras for Fable once her development became apparent. Looser blouses were hastily sewn up next. Fable had taken both with nary a word, perhaps the faintest smile – then left them in her drawers. Sonnet was flummoxed. Did this constitute rebellion? A sign that Fable didn’t want to leave her childhood behind? Was she grieving for her real mother’s influence?
Sonnet had agonised over how to broach talk of puberty and sexuality with Fable. Enflamed with poetry, giggling confession and graphic themes as Mama had with her? No, that had been an overstep. Esther had teased Sonnet for being the ‘puritan daughter of a floozy’ when Sonnet had demurred from such talk – but it wasn’t that, not at all. Sonnet simply wanted a mother, not a girlfriend. Better to be plain, factual with this Hamilton daughter – including discussion of female agency.
But Fable had closed away, indeed run away, the moment Sonnet began her spiel. Sonnet couldn’t seem to clear that first hurdle. She refused to think of herself as either unqualified, or a novice; though both were true.
Olive disagreed that it was rebellion, reticence or grief. ‘She’s doing fine. She just doesn’t want to talk about it. Maybe you’re coming on too forcefully. I can chat to her.’
Over my dead body, Sonnet thought.
Nevertheless, Olive arrived home one day with a hardcover book and pressed it into Sonnet’s hands: ‘Essential Facts for Young Women. Written by a doctor, with lots of diagrams.’
Sonnet perused the book judiciously first. Well, Olive wasn’t exactly fibbing. The book was penned by a doctor, and all the relevant facts were certainly there, with beautifully scientific diagrams. Yet, Sonnet’s gut twisted at the book’s prescriptions for female modesty and its stern coaxing against premarital sex, and the ‘monstrous problem’ of babies born out of wedlock. What poppycock! The book had been sponsored by a church – Olive had neglected to mention that, hadn’t she?
Moralising aside, the book did offer solid medical information plus some helpful info on deportment and dating, and might have to do until Sonnet could source another one – the market for puberty books in Australia was thin. She had no intention of passing it on, however, until she’d annotated it thoroughly.
One night, Sonnet sat down with a notepad and did just that, hectoring the doctor, throughout his tome. As Sonnet inserted her modern knowledge in between the pages of the book, she imagined the discussions her efforts might finally open up between the sisters. They could jeer the doctor’s archaic opinions together! They would be united by a common enemy: traditionalists.
Fable, however, immediately tossed the book, and all Sonnet’s accrued wisdom with it, onto her pile of ‘Things I’ll Never Use Because Sonnet Provided Them’. There all hope of discussion had ended. Being a proxy mother stank!
Sonnet doubled over now to catch her breath. She was going to give herself a heart attack at this rate. She drew in a deep mouthful of pungent rainforest rot, lifting her face to a cooling breeze. Psithurism, she told herself, whisper of wind in the trees. A smile, only small, tugged at her cheeks. At least she still had her own aptitudes.
In fact, the only area of Sonnet’s life at which she excelled anymore was her work. She was now doing three days a week with Alfred in his bookstore, and loving every minute. She had, Alfred said, ‘the bookseller’s touch’. She still helped Olive out with a full day in Emerson’s Fashion and Fabrics, leaving the rest of the week for Delia Bloody Hull to pick up her quilting fabrics without the indignity of being served by that Hamilton.
By all accounts, Sonnet’s alterations were the finest in town. A few customers had even suggested Sonnet should branch out into her own dressmaking business. She was getting a big head with all the feedback, but thank goodness she still had those outlets in her life for success and accolades. It offset the near constant urge to scream.
Speaking of which, right now was as good a time as any. And in the humming forest basilica, lungs burning with the worshipful joy of running, Sonnet raised her arms to the canopied heavens and let an almighty bellow go.