Affection

We are not a family who works at remembering. There are my grandmother’s childhood stories and these are more complete and vivid than any of our own. We remember her father who liked to make shoes and tell her stories. We remember her aunt who dropped a heavy tray on her cousin’s head from a great height. We remember her train ride to safety, alone and frightened and chilled by icy winds. Collectively, our family remembers the heat of Egypt, the grit of sand in our teeth, the little boys with flies sipping from their sweaty eyelids.

In my grandmother’s kitchen we ate fulmedames and vegetables stuffed with rice. Gnocchi that she had painstakingly rolled out on a folding card table in front of daytime movies filmed in Italian and badly dubbed into English. I watched her lips move as she followed them and wondered what language she was hearing inside her head. My grandmother’s cooking was a haphazard mix of Egyptian meals and European dishes. When pressed, she was always cryptic about her heritage.

“There is a war and this bit,” her hands portioning out the air like the dough she kneaded and tore into little buns each morning, “this bit goes to one side of this argument. This bit goes to the other.” She indicated the space between the invisible territories that had been separated. “This is the no man’s land. This is where I come from. Where you have to sneak things across this land that everyone is arguing about.”

My mother and my aunt were born in Egypt and they sometimes talked of pyramids and the desert and the English school where they learned to speak as if they were living with the Queen. Clear crisp sentences. Exact language. I recognized this kind of studied English in the mouths of the Indian kids at school. More English than the English. In Blacktown it was an accent that could get your turban torn from your head, your head flushed down the toilet, your schoolbooks ripped into fragments and scattered down Flushcombe Road.

Of my own childhood, there is barely anything left. I remember moments of it with photographic clarity, events that stand out from the general ravage of years, but the rest is all old bone, barely recognizable. In the void I reach for fragments. Scraps of abandoned play: jumping over an obstacle course in a pony-canter, rolling in mud till there is nothing left of my skin, peppering my clothing with the slow lumber and drag of snails, watching a silver lacework form in their slimy paths. I smell gardenia and orange blossom and honeysuckle and every memory is infused with a postcoital languidness. Childhood is fat and lazy with the pleasures of the flesh. Everything tasted, everything held to my nose, everything rubbed against my upper lip.

In the evenings we made models together. Models that would be displayed in the museum or in libraries. This was the family trade, and I was born to be apprenticed to it. We sat out on the patio and the women smoked, lighting one cigarette off the next, their cigarette holders caked with sticky white glue. It was my job to tear the paper into even strips. Newspaper and thick slabs of telephone directories, gleaned from the post office or from neighboring houses. We needed a great deal of paper because the things we made were large.

We were working on dinosaurs at that time. They were life-sized, destined to sit in the museum when they were done, but for now they were in pieces. There were heads and torsos and clawed dinosaur arms on every chair. The dogs paced distractedly around them, trying to find enough floor space to coil their bodies into. There were dinosaur books spread out on every flat surface and the women kept checking back, coating their pages with what they called “the horrible glue.”

I listened to the stories and tore paper until the boxes were filled with uniformly sized strips. The next job was to roll some of the strips into little balls, dimples that would be stuck to the surface of the brontosaurus. There was a plan for this. Dimples first, then the spongy packing foam torn into rough strips to hide the hard line of the edges, overlapping so that the dinosaur skin would look soft and pliable. My aunt was making teeth out of papier-mâché, a wire trailing out of each one so that it could easily be fixed into the toothless jaw when it was done. She dipped each tooth into a smooth plaster mix and hung it on a rack to dry.

There was intense seriousness in the detail. They took time over the faces in particular. The creases in the surface around the eyes. If the creature’s expression was unconvincing my grandmother would take its whole head apart, slip the papier-mâché eyeball out and reshape it before assembling the head and reattaching it.

I recognized this kind of monofocus from my own experiences with paint. I wondered if the three of them experienced the same kind of physical rush when they were carefully moulding the papier-mâché strips onto their wire-and-wood armatures.

The smell of the glue was intoxicating. The glue and smooth skin of plaster or latex, the cans of spray paint that would be the first layer of color, the little pots of enamel paint for fine work. There were plastic bags filled with human hair waiting for the next project—Sleeping Beauty, the Little Match Girl, fairy tale princesses with each delicate eyelash cut to size and glued in place.

The women dipped their strips of paper into jars of paste, smoothed and placed them, reached inside the boxes for more paper. They never once looked up or around. They could work for hours, finally stretching up to stand in the early hours of the morning, their backs cracking.

“Enough for now,” my grandmother would say in her thick Slavic accent. “For now, enough.” And, as if a signal had been sounded, the rest of us would scurry to pack up the debris, lifting the dinosaur by its sturdy legs and maneuvering it into the lounge room, putting lids on the bottles of wood glue, stuffing fur fabric back into garbage bags. My family would be exhausted from long hours of complete focus but they would be happy, serenely happy. No hugs goodnight. Never a hug goodnight. Just a quick slap on the rump from my grandmother to let us know that we had done well, worked hard, achieved what she expected of us. She would never praise our work. She would nod and say, “You are my granddaughter. You will be the best. Not second place, not almost best. Top of the class.”

The days were warm. There was school, but when we were not at school there was play or there was a disappearing into fiction. I remember characters in novels I was reading as if they were friends. I pick up a children’s book and read a paragraph, and I smell coffee brewed in a pot on the stove and eaten with chunks of buttery homemade bread.

In my first year of school they did IQ testing. They tallied the results of the test and offered me a special sponsored place in a school for smart kids in the northern suburbs. My grandmother would not have me put in a special school like a performing monkey, she raged; I would have no social skills, locked away with the smart kids. But really I knew it was because there was already talk of me becoming a boarder. The commute from Blacktown to the North Shore would be too arduous; I could not do it alone. And there would be boys at the school. I would be alone with boys, and perhaps male teachers. We were taught to distrust men. I wasn’t quite sure why, but I did distrust them. The dogs would bark and my grandmother would nod. They do not like men. She would hold the collar of the angry dog as it jumped and snapped at the screen door when the man came to read the gas meter.

“I’m not very good at this subject. I was only average,” I would tell her, even if I had scored better than everyone else. She was disappointed, but soon the pattern of my invented failures became apparent.

My grandmother looms large in my memory, but we were a close-knit crew and my mother hugged me. I remember the pleasure of her lap, warm and comforting, and sometimes her hugs were harder than they should be. Sometimes they were for her own comfort and not for mine. I struggled free of her grasp and felt guilty when she seemed so lost and lonely. Once she told me that she would run away if she could, but I wasn’t sure why. I was happy in the safe little nest and I knew nothing of the world beyond the boundaries of our garden.

I learned about sex in the schoolyard. I learned that it was something to do with whatever a man had in his pants and that special place in my body where the colors lived. I learned that this kind of thing made babies happen. I tried to imagine the shape of this man-thing, but I couldn’t.

My grandmother and aunt were making a jazz band, a miniature orchestra of players each with a different instrument. My grandmother was tailoring clothes for them, vests and suit pants and pork-pie hats. I saw my grandmother pull the trousers out from one of the figures and peer inside them. She showed it to my aunt and they giggled together like girls in the playground giggle. I had never seen them behave like this before. I wanted to sneak up and pull the trumpet player’s pants down and see how a man was made but when I tried, she had glued the waistband of his trousers to his hips. I couldn’t even feel anything hidden when I pressed my fingers into the papier-mâché crotch.