Kari was home from special school, peering down through white net and roll-up blinds to Boolaroo main road. Staring across at the Catholic church, at the zebra crossing, at the round rock garden in the front yard of the Boolaroo house. Sitting up high above it all. There were red spots on her back, on her cheeks, on her chin. The pox. The chicken pox. Sarah was over her dose (had lain pathetically in bed, begging lemonade and Archie comics) and had run from the room that morning calling, ‘Spastics got the po-ox, spastics got the po-ox.’ Sarah was back at school, miserably lining up for milk and playing kiss-chasies behind the wooden weather shed. Kari watched dust float on the edges of the air, felt the quiet of sick days fold around her. She saw specks of dust swirling in a strip of light coming from a high window and settling on her callipers, rested against the wardrobe door. This was the secret daytime world.
The air, the day, was thick with Ruth padding about doing this, doing that, important chores which mattered. Ironing sheets (sprinkling water from a Tupperware cup onto the white crinkle, smoothing it into straightness with the smell of the crisp heat), making mayonnaise (the trick is to use two eggs and a hint of sugar), planning table settings. Ruth was endlessly, numbly busy, her feet muted on thick green carpet, her hands moving over things, her eyes skimming past, thinking what next what’s left to do. Keeping the best for last, the polishing of windows.
Ruth Sweet polished and cleaned windows, always wanting to see through, to get more. Her arms fierce, moving side to side and side to side, squeaking clean. On both sides she would go, blowing and spitting and rubbing on marks. She used two bottles of Windex every week, had three special window chamois cloths. Ruth Sweet’s windows were immaculate. Kari could hear her squeaking at the window of the lounge, soft TV voices filtering in and out, while the light, the dust, the specks, danced, while Kari’s eyes watched and lay down. Watched and lay down. Watched and lay down. When she woke, it was to a new Ruth, a new sharp Ruth standing on the bed of Kari, on the top bunk and making noises in her nose as she pulled and tore at the gauze of the curtains, falling back with them in her arms, stumbling to the floor. Kari watched as Ruth scooped the curtains up and whooshed out of the room, tearing a corner of the gauze on the metal door hinge. Kari could hear her stampeding about, catching curtains on doors, tearing them from windows.
Ruth loved to see clearly, could not bear the scarring of a window by dirt or grime or marks. Her face shone with the satisfaction of the clean, of the seeing surface. She tore curtains down with the passion of rage, her arms and cheeks mad shining. Kitchen, lounge, three bedrooms, bathroom: all gauze and net, then the white calico in the outside toilet. She was panting in the laundry (uncurtained) with the mound of gauze and net and calico at her feet, the bottle of Dr White’s Miracle Bleach in her hand, when Kari called for lemonade. Ruth brought one bottle of lemonade and one of Windex, stomping up the stairs. She scrubbed again at the square window, triumphant in its bareness. Kari touched the face of Ruth, saying, ‘you’re shining Mummy.’ They pressed their faces together at the naked shining of the window. Ruth felt words bubble up inside her, then swallowed them back.
The house, every window in it, was clear now, clear and shining, with light banging in, banging in, welcome as Larry was happy. Ruth glowed with the welcome of it, her face pressed, she was light herself, opened her mouth, said, ‘would you like the story of the ice-queen, Bloss?’ Kari squirmed beneath the pink chenille bedspread, squirmed in the light coming from her mother. Ruth told the story of the glass caught in the little boy’s eye, while she breathed in the window. Happy as Larry.
Ruth Sweet, before she was Sweet, before she was bitter, before, when she was Ruth Cregg, everything had been in dark rooms. Might as well have been a lean-to, the house in Tabulum where Larry Cregg had buried his wife with a rusted shovel and cooked fried eggs for his daughter, Ruth. There was a wooden cross outside, marking the spot where Ruth’s mother rotted. She’d begun to rot before she died, that was true enough, cancer cells eating through her stomach and intestine. Ruth had learnt not to breathe in the pantry-sized rooms, keeping a silence for her mother to be ill in. That house, who’d have believed it? Two rooms, both dark and windowless, but for a small slit at the upper edge of each wall – no wider than an inch. The air was thin and tight while that woman, Ruth’s mother, lay being eaten alive, her mouth a straight pale line.
After she died, it got thinner in there, harder to breathe. In the nights when Larry Cregg’s shoulder heaved over the girl, his chest fur rubbing against her mouth while he pushed, Ruth took small gasps of big air through the gap between his shoulder and arm, swallowing air and staring hard at the slits at the top of the wall, thinking, my mouth is at that slit and that slit is a window and my face can see the window and can see through the window into the fresh green and flower field fields beyond I can see the sunshine shining I can see the flowers through I can see the window I can I can see I cannot hear this grunting feel this pushing I can see the wind. She also learnt to count the bricks in the wall. There were one hundred and twelve bricks in the wall above the only bed.
When she moved to Sydney, forgetting her father’s name, Ruth Cregg rented a room in Bondi with a whole wall full of windows, the room was full of light. She’d asked for the flywires to be taken off the windows when she took the room, and what the heck, she seemed a nice enough girl. So Mrs D’Arcy (widow) had a man take the screens away and Ruth Cregg let air and light in, discovered Windex and the joy of polishing windows. She polished twice a day in those first months, it took the place of words or friends, even acquaintances. Oh, there was Maureen, from her job at the Pavilion. They’d had an ice-cream together once and sang ‘We’ll Meet Again’ in fake vibrato. Maureen had co-ordinating lips and nails and a crowd. Maureen did things with the crowd, while Ruth waited on the edges to be invited in: drifted back to her light-filled room and polished windows.
Mal Sweet had been like a dream, of course, in his policeman’s uniform. A protector, pacing up and down Bondi Beach, with lifeguard shoulders and golden hair and a long brown face. She noticed his hands the first time he came to the Pavilion. Ruth showed people in, took coats and bags and smiled, dressed in green stripes and a skirt above the knee. He had huge hands, long and broad, both, with fair fine hairs winking on his raised knuckles. Brown hands, with neat nails, clean nails. Clean. He smelt of Palmolive soap and Brylcreem, oh god, she could really really have swooned. Ruth Cregg’s hands were tiny, like her waist (eighteen inches, only an inch above Jayne Mansfield, how about that). He could fit his hands around her like a piece of wire. She was tiny, too, only five foot one, like a child or a doll with a round face, she needed someone to protect her. The stripes, the policeman, the hand around the waist – Ruth Cregg felt like a cloud, a white one, fresh and ready.
Mrs D’Arcy sewed the dress for her, spreading white satin and tulle across the downstairs lounge while Ruth danced with pins in her mouth. Mal paid for the cake, Maureen and the whole crowd showed, Mrs Ruth Sweet nee Cregg, thought she would fly away to the moon on tulle and satin wings.
They had a honeymoon. Five days in Noosa. The windows there were enormous, ceiling to floor, and ran right across the hotel room. You could open them like doors and step through them, French they were, but a single pane glass, like normal windows. Ruth pulled the curtains down on the second day of the honeymoon, and used a bottle of methylated spirits to polish the windows. She rubbed inside and out, with newspaper, meths and elbow grease, while Mal lazed about on Noosa beach. When she finished, you wouldn’t have known there was a window there.
The Boolaroo house windows gleamed and were invisible in their brightness. These were the happiest days, the days of curtain washing and drying, when nothing but light came in through the panes. Kari caught the edges of the glow from her mother, asked for Lolli Gobble Bliss Bombs and was not refused. She was tucked in light and gentleness, sleeping, waking, sleeping. She slept past Adventure Island on the ABC, past Sarah banging in through the back door, woke to the smell of savoury mince and something moving under her chin. A scratchy something.
‘Hey, Blossom, who’s come to visit you? She was lonely, I found her on the street.’ Mal’s whisper did not rustle her hair, soft as for the horses. She was a pink raffia doll, with long plaited legs, a cork-ball head, a sparkling pink-gold-blue dress. Mal’s hand floated over Kari’s hair, touched her cheek, kitten-soft. ‘Up for a bath now, ay, Bloss?’
Kari held the raffia doll tight to herself. ‘She needs a bath too, Daddy.’
You could ride a canoe down Mal Sweet’s laugh. ‘Yair, she does, I reckon she does, but she’ll have to sit just on the edge, ay?’ Then calling downstairs, over his shoulder, ‘Garn runna bath for ya daughter.’
Ruth let the bath run, while she set the table with the grey cloth and the placemats from Nimbin. She was careful in the laying of the knives and forks and spoons, superstitious about knives pointing inwards and spoons touching forks. She finished setting and ran to the bathroom, reaching the tap as Mal carried Kari through the white door. He sat her on the edge of the bath, slipping her pyjamas over her arms and off her legs, while Kari held the raffia doll in one hand. His hands slid under her arms to lift her up and in, her feet hitting the water, the rest of her folding into it. The raffia doll dropped, floated, bits of pink oozed out from the raffia strands unfolding from the cork-ball head. Kari turned to white and pink and burnt shrieking, with steam rising from the water. Mal sent words like pus to Ruth across the enamel: ‘you stupid friggin cow, you careless friggin COW,’ while Kari stayed in the bath, pink and screaming. Till Mal remembered and lifted her out like a bit of salted garden slug. Put her down carefully before he knocked Ruth for six across the tiles. She didn’t say anything, Ruth, just lay there looking at Mal while Kari tried to cry in a whisper.
‘Come on, Bloss, no bath tonight.’ Mal wrapped the blue bear towel around her, rubbed it side to side, up her back, on her legs, her arms. He dried her fingers and toes carefully, covered her in baby powder, slipped her pyjamas back on (bottoms first, then tops), lifted her over his shoulder, carried her back to the room she shared with Sarah. The room with the shining windows. He kissed her hair before he closed the door. Ruth closed the bathroom door, let the water out, watched it spiral down, left her hands dangling in the water. Touched the water to her face. She pulled the glugged up raffia strands one by one from the drain, the pink staining her fingers. The edges of the bath had pink streaks. Ruth rubbed at them with her hands until they were gone.