Cody, searching for something to say, happened to look toward Prima Street and see his family rounding the corner, opening like a fan.
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
What tugs us home? A memory of a garden with an overgrown lawn sprinkled with constellations of daisies where children tumble barefoot. White sand edged with a woven mat of marram grass, the sea treacherous with sudden holes, a tangle of driftwood at a river-mouth and men like dry sticks standing guard over yellow plastic buckets where there is the silvery flitter of whitebait trying to find their way through to the undisturbed, dark reaches. Hillsides covered with houses the colour of boiled lollies, every one being its own place and bugger civic coherence. A constant wind stirring everything up: newspapers on a city corner, dust on a white road, a wind capable of forcing itself through every crack so that the wallpaper bellies like a sail and joists creak and houses sound like boats at a tenuous mooring. The intensity of life lived personally, where every single issue is the work of your cousin’s best friend’s husband or your next-door neighbour’s nephew’s girlfriend and there is no possibility of anonymity. We come home: eels drawn back by the scent of water across thousands of kilometres, birds flying back to the nest from beyond the equator, guided by memories of light down the bare tracks sketched on magnetic fields.
So here they are. Kate’s mother is holding her grandchild in her arms and Kate feels as if she has given her a gift and she is saying, ‘She’s got the Falconer hair, hasn’t she?’
It was true. After that initial mop of baby black, Hannah’s hair had grown thick and wavy and red. All the time Kate had been away being herself, thinking herself so free and independent, she had been carrying that gene, nested like a little bird somewhere on some chromosome or other. She had been carrying her entire family, generations of them, within the dark pockets of her body.
‘And look, Hannah,’ said her mother, holding up a whole box of Cadbury’s Milk Tray. ‘I’ve got something for you.’
‘She doesn’t eat chocolate,’ said Kate.
Her mother was surprised.
‘Why not?’ she said. ‘She’s not diabetic is she? That’s a terrible thing. It’s on the increase, too …’ She looked alarmed.
‘No,’ said Kate, ‘she’s fine, but we don’t give her junk food.’ When they had left Canada someone have given her a recipe book: Laurel’s Kitchen. Chard Pie, Yeast Butter and careful tables showing the precise amount of thiamine in a cup of rolled oats. There was a photo of Laurel and her friends in LA: long skirts, hair pulled back in demure buns, the keepers of the keys to the health and well-being of their families, their neighbourhoods and ultimately the planet. Junk food had no place in Laurel’s kitchen. Nor would it stand a chance in Kate’s.
‘Och,’ said her mother, relieved, and selecting a strawberry fondant. ‘One little chocolate isn’t going to do her any harm.’
‘It’ll rot her teeth,’ said Kate.
‘But your teeth are fine,’ said her mother, stripping off the silver foil. ‘And you used to love chocolate. She did,’ she said, turning to Steve, enlisting his support. ‘She took money out of my purse and spent it on chocolate at the shop. She made herself sick.’
‘I didn’t know you knew about that,’ said Kate.
‘Of course I knew,’ said her mother. ‘It was those darn Creeches. They were a bad influence.’ Hannah had the chocolate in her mouth already. ‘There, darling. Is that nice?’
‘Yum,’ said Hannah, holding out a sticky hand. ‘More cho’lit.’
‘She won’t eat her tea,’ said Kate.
Her mother took Hannah off for rides in the Morris. Tollie perched on one cushion so she could reach the pedals and Hannah perched on another so she could see out the window. They arrived home hours later, cheerful and chatty, for they seemed to understand each other effortlessly and enjoyed long and involved conversations. Hannah generally returned bearing some treat: an ice cream, or a packet of yellow Styrofoam bits.
‘They’re cheese,’ said her mother. ‘Not chocolate. They’re a new thing. The girl at the supermarket tells me they’re very popular.’
Her father had struggled to his feet when they had first arrived back, as if they were visitors. Eight years she had been gone, and the house still smelled of fried onions and Sunlight soap and tobacco smoke and old timber. The back door still rattled. The fridge handle still pinched unwary fingers. Some things had grown in the time they had been away. The ribbonwood by the bedroom window overtopped the roof and knocked at the walls. Some things had shrunk. This old man, for instance, struggling to his feet with the aid of his stick. His head reaches only to her shoulder and when she hugs him he seems all bone.
‘So, how was it over there?’ he says, and she tries to explain, but he’s tired and there’s too much to say, and anyway, The Two Ronnies will be on at eight o’clock. He likes that, her mother says. He gets up for that specially. Normally he stays in bed and when he wants something he calls out.
‘Oi!’ he calls from the front bedroom. ‘Oi!’
And she goes through to see what he wants. They seem to have arrived at some accommodation now that they are on their own. Her mother occupies the kitchen during the day and has moved back into Kate’s old bedroom now that it is no longer needed to facilitate swot. Her father stays in bed. They live at opposite ends of the house, meeting when he requires washing, or a bedpan.
‘So you see,’ says her mother, ‘all my training didn’t go to waste after all. It was meant to be. I’m still a nurse. No one else would put up with him.’ She butters a scone and puts it on a plate, glances over at what Kate is doing. ‘He likes a spoonful of sugar in his tea,’ she says. ‘Since when?’ says Kate. ‘Since always,’ says her mother. ‘He’s always taken a spoonful of sugar in his tea.’ ‘No he hasn’t,’ says Kate. She’s sure she would remember such a thing. ‘Yes he has,’ said her mother. ‘Always.’ She would know, of course.
Kate feels foreign, as if she might never have lived here, in this house with these people. She feels a little lost. She sounds different, evidently. ‘You’ve got an accent,’ said her cousin Graham when she went to visit him at Millerhill. He had taken over the farm and leaned back against the fence, arms folded, in swannie and woolly hat, while she told him about Toronto: forty-five different nationalities in the city, the tallest tower in the world, five months of winter. ‘Izzat right?’ he said. ‘Jeeze, you sound just like an American.’
The whole country had taken on a dreamlike quality. The place she had imagined had subtly altered. Shops had sprouted new fronts, houses had disappeared, leaving gaps in which flats had been inserted like false teeth. Friends had children already old enough to ride about on little bicycles; marriages that she had left in the first flush of confetti and optimism had already plunged into divorce and reassembly. There had been a Labour prime minister, there had been bands and outdoor music festivals, and friends had gone off to grow sweetcorn in communes in the Hokianga and returned to the city where they had bought their former student flats and were scouring the demolition yards for stained glass and kauri doors. They spent hours now scraping paint from crevices around dados and taking their children to Playcentre.
Steve had a job at Massey, and Kate, pregnant again, settled into being a mother. Motherhood would be a New Zealand synthesis of whole-food Californian with a dash of Margaret Drabble. There would be a long wooden table with a white jug filled with daisies, and around the table on a variety of Windsor chairs discarded by some rural church in favour of padding and stackable plastic would be children with names like Octavia and Ben, and they would eat homemade yoghurt and homemade muesli and wear little denim Oshkosh overalls and home-knitted sweaters — homespun if she could possibly manage it, home-dyed with onion skins — and Clarks sandals on their feet so that their bones would grow properly. They would go to Playcentre where the mothers sat on the steps in embroidered muslin shirts and jeans or long skirts, drinking coffee and breast-feeding the youngest while the older children learned about quantity by filling up plastic bottles with water, or learned about unbridled power by pushing one another off the tyre swing. They would go to the library on Saturday mornings and they would choose two story books and two non-fiction; they would go to music appreciation classes on Monday afternoons to develop their aesthetic sense and to Tiny Y’s to build physical confidence.
I walked out of the house this morning and stretched my arms out wide. Look, I said to myself. Because I was alone except for you.
Between Earth and Sky by Patricia Grace
A tall dark woman with her hair in a thick plait was attempting to spread plastic sheeting on the playdough table one-handed while balancing a two-year-old on a hip that had vanished more or less beneath the swelling of an ample late pregnancy.
‘Here,’ said Kate. ‘Let me … my God! Caro!’
‘Kate!’ said Caro Williams. ‘What are you doing here?’ They held either end of the plastic and unfolded it and it was simple once there were two of them, to spread it evenly over the table and peg it in place and distribute lumps of pink playdough and the ice-cream cartons full of rolling pins and cookie cutters. Then they stopped Caro’s two-year-old from eating a purple felt-tip and washed some coffee cups and found Hannah’s bankie, a scrap of satin ribbon that was all that remained of her baby blanket and that wriggled off constantly with snake-like cunning down the backs of sofas and into impossible crevices, and then they sat, idly molding scraps of playdough, and Kate told Caro the record of her adventures and Caro recounted the narrative of her life thus far. It was a broken narrative, as such conversations always are, making allowance for what had to be done. Not the unbroken meditative prose of the study, but a jumpy, fractured tale, moving from past to present, from here to there.
‘The worst year was Theo’s intern year,’ said Caro. ‘I didn’t think we’d survive, no, Harata, don’t put it in Hannah’s hair, it’ll stick, it’s terrible stuff to get out, we nearly divorced, truly, it was awful, he was working twelve-hour shifts, longer sometimes, and we’d only just arrived here, so I didn’t know anyone and we already had Harata, she was, what’s that sweetie? Yes, it’s beautiful cake, mmmm, mmm, yes it’s delicious … she didn’t sleep, she had colic and I didn’t expect it to be like that, you know? I thought it would be all Laura Ashley rosebud curtains and after six months I would be going back to varsity and it was all going to be sweet and she did this … mmmm, mmm, yummy, thank you, that is the best cake ever. Oh, it’s not cake? It’s a rabbit? Oh, sorry, sorry, I’ve just eaten your rabbit, well, never mind, look, we’ll make another one. But she did this projectile vomiting, and it really did project, everywhere, it was amazing, and we had about two hours’ sleep a night and I truly thought I was going mad.’
‘Me too,’ said Kate. She was rolling bits of playdough into sausages for Hannah’s playdough fry-up. ‘Not the vomiting, Hannah didn’t have colic or anything but she just liked being awake, Hannah you need to blow your nose, here you are, big blow, that’s a good girl, so we’d be dead and she was ready to party, you don’t want to do playdough any more? Yes, we can do drawing instead, let’s get some felt-tips. And we were both trying to do theses and then we ran out of money and I got this job and was commuting an hour and a half each way and it was hell, it truly was …’
She was able to hint to Caro about the panic. She could make a joke of the terror. She could turn it all into a story and when Caro laughed, it was all right again.
It was a bitterly cold day, with snow falling. Just after nine o’clock the Maori, numbering about a hundred and fifty men, women and children, marched slowly out into the snow. Turning their backs on the little village they had raised in the tussock, they began the long trek back down the Waitaki valley to the coast. Thompson counted 30 drays and wagons, 100 horses and about a hundred dogs in the sad procession. As the people marched, a column of smoke rose in the sky behind them: the police were burning their homes. Only the house in which Te Maiharoa lay sick was left standing in a field of ashes, and Duncan Sutherland made brisk arrangements to buy up the abandoned firewood.
Te Maiharoa and the Promised Land by Buddy Mikaere
Twice a week Kate left Hannah with Caro, who minded her while Kate taught drama at the teachers’ college. Just four hours a week but it meant changing, from jeans and a saggy sweatshirt with play-dough glued to the sleeves, into skirt and lipstick; it meant that The Opportunity had not been entirely wasted on her. It was a small gesture of propitiation to her father’s mother coughing and scrubbing, to the jingling of the foldaway bed in the front room.
And twice a week Kate minded Harata while Caro went to lectures at the university. She was studying sociology. She was going to write a thesis on Maori health. Her father had died at 52 from a heart attack, both her grandmothers from TB.
‘But I thought one of your grandmothers was Italian?’ said Kate. ‘The one who was an opera singer, who rescued the wounded soldier?’
‘Good story, wasn’t it?’ said Caro, stretching comfortably on the worn-out sofa on the verandah. ‘English and Nga Puhi on one side, Irish and Ngai Tahu on the other. It was just more glamorous to be Italian in 1959.’
The children were playing house under a table. The garden was sprinkled with plum blossom. It was the garden Kate had imagined when she was away, with the daisy lawns and the barefoot children, though her imagination had not allowed for the hens. Where the vision had included lush rows of nourishing vegetables there stood some bedraggled silverbeet and a few devastated cabbages. Everything else had been tugged up by Mrs Tooky and her little flock. They could not be contained. She and Steve had tried high fences and clipped wings but the birds simply flew like eagles over the wire, landing where they fancied. Their eggs were perfect and golden-yolked, but they were never laid in the special straw-filled boxes in the hen-house. They could be found only in nesting places of the hens’ own choosing, beneath the roses in the hedge. Gathering their eggs left a tracery of scratches and scars. Hens, Kate had discovered, are deeply subversive of any imposed order. They pecked about the verandah-edge now, looking deceptively peaceable, as Hannah and Harata wheeled their dolls’ prams up and down the overgrown gravel paths.
Kate and Steve had tried giving Hannah cars and trucks to play with. She had wrapped the little red tip-truck up in a blanket and called it Charlene.
‘It’s nature, I guess,’ said Caro, arranging a cushion under her back and reaching for her coffee mug. Fistfuls of stuffing burst from the sofa’s shabby crimson velvet. ‘I don’t suppose it really matters. So long as we draw the line at those Barbies with the big boobs.’
‘Too late,’ said Kate. ‘My mother’s already given her a Barbie: Ballerina Barbie. She’s all dressed in pink. Hannah adores her.’
Kate had not known about Maori health. She had not known about Maori anything really, other than a pa built with burnt matchsticks, some stories in black and white of sky fathers and earth mothers, a charcoal outline of a creature with spread wings painted on the roof of a limestone shelter. How could she have grown up in this country and known so little? She hadn’t even known, it seemed, the lives of her closest friends. Caro and her Italian opera singer grandmother kneeling in the snow to bind the soldier’s wounds with her petticoats had been like Maddie’s widowed mother and the father who had died so tragically on the railway track. Just a story.