It’s not the first time she’s had crippling pain that she pushes into a tight little marble and drops down through the grates of her mind, somewhere deep below. It’s also not the first time she has had to instantly change everything. But that doesn’t make it easier.
After the rape she is unable to work at all. Then, when she recovers physically, she finds that she is unable to do the sex work that has constituted her income for the last decade. She has Rick, and Rick has work, but that doesn’t mean much; Rick’s money is Rick’s money and her money is Rick’s money. In addition to food, shelter and transport, her needs include the drugs and alcohol she requires to deaden her mind enough to live and to sleep, the ability to supplement Rick’s lifestyle so that he hangs around, and the cosmetics and hormones which are not merely aesthetic but vital to her dignity. She has few savings, no one to ask for help; no safety net.
Heavily made up and fizzing with self-doubt, she goes out each morning to apply for work. She picks up some hours behind the counter at Shield’s Drycleaners, her ‘very first straight job’ as a woman. The money is abysmal compared with what she is used to earning and it is anaesthetically boring, but it is a stepping stone. Soon she looks elsewhere and when she gets a call in response to her application to Black Cabs, she wilts with relief; it’s her ‘very first break’.
Sandra works the radio at the taxi company. She doesn’t mind the nightshift—she’s worked nights for a decade—and she tolerates the awful salary, but the restrictions on what she can say to the drivers over the radio are unbearable. ‘Mac one, mac two, fucking rah rah rah,’ she jokes quietly in a robot voice to the other girls, after the first time she is disciplined by management. She is only supposed to pass on information about pick-ups and traffic, using a formal and impersonal tone.
Instead, she knows all the drivers’ names, tells them jokes, discusses the day’s news with them, flirts, gives them shit, gives them nicknames, asks about their wives. The drivers like it because she keeps them awake, keeps them entertained and, in these days before mobile phones, keeps them safe. She calls the police a few times for drivers in trouble, and they send her flowers which she displays on her small desk. ‘The drivers love me, but you’ve gotta conform all the time,’ she protests as she packs up her things on the day she is fired. ‘Not everything fits into a box, though.’
To be honest, she’s not too cut up about it. The experience has built up her confidence about holding down a straight job. Which is good—she’ll need to find another one pretty soon, because Rick’s not going to be any bloody help.
She moves into a smaller flat to save money. Spends long days driving around the city, filling out job applications with a smile on her face. Weeks pass and she hears nothing back. She starts taking the bus to save petrol money. Then she starts walking, to save bus fare. She returns home in the early evening, her feet beating with fatigue, to sit alone at the table and stare at, and then through, the job classifieds. Waits for the phone to ring or for Rick to come home, maybe. The power bill is overdue, the rent is overdue. Her throat feels too tight, her chest too small; she starts yawning frequently just to feel like she’s getting enough air. She is aware, every second, that she could solve everything on the street or at any of the brothels where she still has connections, but that work is simply no longer possible for her. So she turns up the radio and drinks in the dark and when she starts thinking about ways to kill herself, she gets up and she walks. She spends whole nights pacing around her coffee table like a lion in a cage, this tall woman in a tiny flat too full of old furniture.
Hungover, she yanks the local paper out of the mailbox and flips automatically to the back pages as she climbs the concrete stairs back to her flat. Something inside her stands to attention. Funeral conductor/arranger. She spends the day doing her hair and putting together her outfit and only has three drinks that night. She gets up early the next morning to do her make-up and go down to the WD Rose & Son Funeral Home to apply in person.
There, in the soft breeze of the air-conditioning, her desperation is masked under her charm and small talk and knowing nods and cute one-liners; she pushes down the hunger inside her and gives only the impression of sweet proficiency. She shakes hands and smiles goodbye and then returns to the sarcophagus of her flat to wait with a hope that sinks and dies slowly over the next two weeks. So when the telegram finally arrives, it soars in as if it were the Annunciation itself: congratulations on becoming one of the first female funeral conductors in the state.
The funeral home will give her self-confidence, a legitimate and ample salary, friends, a husband, a lover and the contacts she will use to start over, a decade later, when everything falls apart again.
They dress like bruises, the old women clutching felted balls of moist tissue; the old dears with their interchangeable hats and griefs and polyester-clad elbows. Sandra crosses her legs under her desk, quickly yanks her skirt back down to her knees, taps a silver pen on a blank pad of paper, and begins: ‘As your funeral conductor, I make every member of the funeral party become involved in it so that they become very emotional.’
Perplexed, the women on the other side of her desk remain silent.
‘A funeral should be like a play. You get it up to a crescendo,’ she explains, drawing a hill in the air. ‘You get everyone’s emotions there,’ she pokes the top of the hill with a long red nail, ‘they bubble over, then they boil down, and they get on with their life. Otherwise they’re up and down trying to deal with it for years. So, it’s just like conducting a play and getting everyone involved in the scenario.’
The women nod, then smile.
‘I’ll ask everyone to take a flower as they walk in and then they can go put it on the coffin. They become involved like that,’ she says, pouring out two glasses of water, urging the women to take them. She explains the running order and asks a few questions about music and flower preferences. ‘I think Pachelbel instead of Bach—more soothing, don’t you think?’ she says. ‘But if you have a song that was special to him, you just let me know and I’ll work it right in.’
Rising now, her bangles crash as she readjusts her shoulder pads and holds out her hand to help the widow up. ‘I know you’ll do a wonderful job, dear,’ the old woman says. Her daughter nods as Sandra herds them gently towards the reception area.
Despite the implications of the name, an undertaker’s skill does not reside principally in the physical business of putting a body in the ground—although competence in that regard is non-negotiable—but rather in the satisfaction with which the living remember the experience. In the words of Mr Eric G. Walters, manager of the Milne Funeral Group and for the past few months Sandra’s big boss: ‘We should all feel proud of our association with an industry which holds an essential place in the lofty pattern of human loyalty, dignity and high ideals.’ No one has ever spoken to Sandra like this before. Of course she comes alive in this house of death.
The funeral homes of Joseph Allison, Drayton & Garson, WD Rose & Son and Graham O. Crawley were united under the Milne Funeral Group umbrella through the corporate colours of magenta and light grey, a penchant for ‘coloured flood-lighting’ and a morbid strain of the sense of humour best characterised as Office Ecstatic.
The cover of the 1987 newsletter in Sandra’s hands informs employees:
• Joseph Allison’s convincingly beat Drayton & Garson’s in the inaugural table-tennis tournament
• More than 500 attend memorial service for still births at Fawkner Cemetery
• Odd spot—five wives and two stepdaughters do not know each other!!
• Eric’s World, Keith’s Book Reviews, Birthdays, Grave Humour and more…
And there she is, one of the featured employees in the section called ‘Around the Branches: New Faces and Old’, elegantly resting her chin on the back of her right hand, smiling slightly, lips closed and looking into the camera with a steady gaze under a hairstyle that would have sat comfortably on the head of Princess Di. She lingers on the page while finishing her lunch, licks the crumbs from her fingers with gusto and then carefully tucks the newsletter in her bag to show Rick.
Standing in her kitchen that evening, she reads aloud from the page, even though she knows it by heart now: Sandra’s previous work experience included supervising Black Cab Taxi schedules and supervising tourists in holiday resorts. She looks up to check that he’s listening. Her energy and enthusiasm have quickly endeared her to the team. Her interests lie in all musical forms, dress and house designing and interior decorating. Sandra has two teenage children.
Though her previous work experience ‘supervising tourists in holiday resorts’ is a euphemism worthy of veneration and the ‘two teenage children’ are in fact Rick’s kids and not her own teenage sons, this is—more or less—an accurate portrait of Sandra Vaughan, funeral arranger/conductor, four months old. And she has already started to thrive, in this quirky environment of light and shade where death is the daily business of life and where her air of kindly authority is so appreciated by the mourners who pass through the doors.
A celebrant performs the funeral, but Sandra produces it, creates it, puts all the oddly shaped pieces into place. She helps prepare the body, blending make-up into cold skin until it resembles the face in the photo provided by the family. She shepherds the mourners through every stage of the funeral’s organisation and execution; keeps a watchful eye from the back of the room where she solemnly stands by the door like a lighthouse; leads the procession over soft grass to the new-cut grave. She brings the full force of her perfectionism to every detail of the funerals she conducts like symphonies. With the money she is earning, she pays for Rick’s daughter to go to a private school.
Carefully placing the newsletter in a drawer, she turns to open a bottle of wine and tells Rick, ‘I adore this job, love it with a passion.’
‘Good on you, darl,’ Rick says as he grabs her car keys off the table and goes out for the night.
When making small talk with her mourners, Sandra will mention that she started this job ‘later in life’, which is true in its own way. She is only in her mid-thirties but she has lived and grown old and died in her previous, secret lives. Now, in these ‘later’ years, she starts changing to become more authentically herself. Her make-up is toned down, her clothes are toned down, her voice is turned up, her concerns are broadened and the road spools out before her. She breezes into work each day in a power suit looking impossibly gorgeous. She is slim and willowy and so golden blonde that she appears, in photos from this time, to have a halo. By the time Rick finally leaves her for one of the women he has been cheating with, a woman in a wheelchair who is about to come into some money, Sandra has set her sights higher.
Craig comes up to the office from the mortuary down the road to help carry a coffin or speak to the boss but lately it seems that he’s there more than usual and stays longer than necessary. Craig is skinny but strong, his freckled face is perpetually tanned and his thin lips hover above his perfect teeth in a cynical sneer. It was months before she had any reason to say more than a few words to him but she catches him staring at her all the time and she can tell when he’s doing it because it feels like a burning arrow. Lately, she’s started staring right back; it’s become sort of a game. One Friday evening, when everyone stays back for beers and then fish and chips, he laughs, watching her sip white wine on the boss’s knee, admiring the way she teases the old man whom everyone else defers to. Later he strolls into her office, where she is tipsily packing up her bag to go home.
‘It doesn’t quite match,’ he muses, walking too slowly around the room, pretending to admire the framed print she recently hung on the wall. He stops at her desk and squints at her through his dark blonde fringe. ‘Something’s not quite right. A beautiful blonde like this, flirting with an old cunt like that. What’s not right here?’ he wonders. She smiles, says nothing. She shoulders her bag, pushes her chair in and, just before she walks out to her car with her heart racing, she plucks her silver pen out from between the vases on her desk and writes her phone number on the palm of his hand.
When Sandra tells me about ‘The Hot-Friggen-Dog’ or ‘Johnny Hotcock from the Funeral Home Who Was Absolutely Gorgeous’, she is referring to Craig. Craig looms large in the Pantheon of Pankhurst; saying his name still gives her a visible boost. Even now, tonight, if her sleeping pills allowed her to dream, she would dream of Craig. He remained the love of her life long after she married George.
She met her husband when she buried his wife. That was the one-liner she gleefully tossed out like a black streamer over the course of their fourteen-year marriage. Alfred George Pankhurst was a grandfather in his early sixties when he arrived at the funeral home, his shirt as grey and as wrinkled as his last image of his wife’s hands. An image that haunted him less and less the more he looked at the golden goddess showing his friends to their seats as Pachelbel’s Canon played in the background. He had believed his life was over on that day when, really, it was beginning again.
George starts ringing Sandra, seeking her good counsel. Could she, possibly, help him with this or that? He’s so new to life as a widower. At his request, she drops in to see him at Mackay Rubber, where he is an export manager, and soon he asks her out and it starts to feel like she’s walked into a movie: the chairs pulled out and the doors opened, the champagne and the cocktails, the wine and ‘fine dining’, the managers who come over to shake George’s hand, his ‘first class manners’, the way he walks, always, on the outside of the kerb, keeping her protectively tucked in.
Sure, he’s a little overweight and balding and red from drink and far too eager. Sure, his thirty-year marriage just ended and she is only six years older than his son and eight years older than his daughter. But he is also a sweetheart and a gentleman and safe and competent and respectable. He even looks handsome in his suit with his remaining hair slicked back. And each time she gazes into his eyes she falls in love. Not with him per se, although she will remain loyal to him in her own way until his death. She falls in love with the idealised image of herself reflected back at her: the blonde bombshell; the career woman; the perfect homemaker; the good mother; the equal partner; the loved wife. She falls in love, finally, and over and over again, with herself.
When George asks Sandra to marry him, her reaction is to freeze. Fuck. I’ve got in over my head. What am I going to do? I’ve got to tell him what the story is here.
‘Look,’ she says. ‘I’ve got something I have to tell you but I don’t know how to tell you.’
‘OK,’ George replies, confused, then crestfallen, then terrified. But Sandra can’t find the words. At first it feels like she lost them, as if they rolled away like a coin on the floor. But then she realises that she never had them to begin with. ‘We’ll go to the doctor’s, OK? And I’ll talk to the doctor about how to explain it,’ she says.
George’s stomach seizes up and he struggles to even get the question out. ‘Have you got cancer?’ he whispers.
‘No no no no,’ Sandra says with reassuring dismissiveness. ‘I just need to talk to my doctor.’
She makes an appointment for that afternoon. George drives her there and drops her off and though it’s still pretty early he probably goes for a quick drink before he circles back to wait for her in the car out the front, newspaper on his lap, unopened.
Inside, after Sandra waves away the doctor’s concern about what might be the matter, he sits back in his chair and listens while she explains about George. ‘So how am I going to tell this dude? He’s got no idea at all what’s going on,’ she says urgently.
The doctor thinks for a moment. ‘Well, just tell him that you’re transgender, that you’ve undergone “gender transformation” or “reassignment”. That’s a bit softer than saying you’ve had a sex change.’
As she gets back in the passenger seat, George searches her face and pleads with her to just tell him what’s going on. But Sandra asks him to drive to her thinking spot at the beach. She says she’ll tell him there.
When she is older than George is on this day, she will still remember precisely how to get to this small spot on Beach Road, right at the end of Charman Road, where she sat so many times and let her mind churn like the water.
George parks and they sit in the cocoon of the car, and he looks at her looking at the horizon.
‘George,’ she says finally. ‘I’ve had gender reassignment.’ She braces for whatever comes next, which she’s pretty sure will be a punch in the mouth because that’s what has happened before, with others. But there is only silence.
‘Well, George, what do you think about that?’ she prompts, turning cautiously to look at him.
‘So,’ he says, clearing his throat and pushing his palms onto his thighs, thick fingers spread wide on the dark material of his trousers. ‘You’re…ah…tellin’ me you want to be a, ah, a lesbian now?’ he asks uncertainly.
‘No, not quite,’ Sandra replies with a small smile. She tries again. ‘As I appear is not how I was born, you see?’
‘Huh,’ George nods, genuinely trying but absolutely failing to understand.
Sandra takes a deep breath. ‘George, I weren’t born the way I look. I was born in a different form, OK?’
Now she braces again, expecting that punch. Steeled, she squints at the water for what feels like ‘a fucking eternity’, listening for movement. But still, nothing.
‘Well?’ she demands, tight with tension, twisting towards him now with raised eyebrows.
But George is only quiet. He looks very small in that moment and, despite the stubble and the wrinkles, despite the jowls and the wiry white hairs in his eyebrows, she could have seen with perfect clarity, had she been looking for it, the baby boy born to a farmer and his wife over half a century before. He sits very still with his hands hanging from the wheel of his hot car parked at the edge of a deep sea. He smells of alcohol and cologne and soap and sweat. He smells familiar now. And she knows that however he cuts her she will miss him.
‘Well,’ he says, clearing his throat and starting the car. ‘I met Sandra. And I fell in love with Sandra. And that’s all right by me.’
Mrs Pankhurst. Long after they eventually separate, long after George passes away and their marriage is bureaucratically ‘cancelled’ on the grounds of her sex, unamended on her birth certificate, Sandra will keep a photo from their wedding displayed on the small table by her front door. She will also keep her married name. That is who she was for well over a decade and also who she was always meant to be: not George’s wife, necessarily, but sufficiently normal, as a woman and as a person, to be deserving of love.
‘I’ve got a new lease on life!’ George brags to his colleagues around the table at the restaurant after introducing them to his beautiful new wife. ‘We’re thinking about buying a pram!’ And though she laughs lightly and smiles through the meal and the cheese platter and the brandies, Sandra explodes once they are alone in the car.
‘A pram, for fuck’s sake?! GEORGE! Fuckin’ stop this circus! You’re making it worse, you know! Don’t do this,’ she yells.
‘What?’ he says, tipsily tapping the key around the ignition. ‘You’re getting upset over nothing.’ She takes a big breath and lights a cigarette. It’s the same thing he did before they were engaged, when he took her to the picnic at Ballam Park to meet his family. His kids were there, some cousins as well. George kept parading her around like a show pony and mock-complaining to everyone about Sandra pushing him down the aisle. Even after she took him aside and said gently, ‘Now George, don’t do that, that’ll come back to bite me. Tell them the truth. You’re the one who’s hassling to marry me!’ But he kept it up and kept it up until she downed the rest of her drink and stormed off to the car with him running after her like a puppy.
‘Don’t you ever do that to me again, George. Don’t you ever fuckin’ insult me. You’re the one who’s pushing to get married. I don’t give a fuckin’ rat’s arse whether you want to marry or not. I don’t need to be fuckin’ married!’ she spat, her face bright pink from anger and fear and humiliation.
That had all sorted itself out, but here he was again tonight, exuberantly running his mouth, embarrassing her while intending only the opposite. She stares through the windshield, focusing on the road home, fading from bright to black and back again as they speed between streetlamps and the headlights of oncoming cars. Of course, she thinks with an audible snort, he’d have to be a little bizarre to be with someone like her anyhow.
But it’s much more familiar than that. George, too, loves gazing at himself in the mirror of their marriage. There he is young again. But unlike the first time he has the career and the house and the financial security of a lifetime of work behind him. There he is powerful, virile, attractive; his drinking is celebratory, his health is fine, his wife is gorgeous, she desires him and he is worthy of her desire. So while George knows that Sandra was assigned male at birth, that she fathered and then had to leave two children, that she worked as a prostitute for a decade and that she survived a brutal rape, he also un-knows each of these things.
Her past does not simply go unmentioned, it is erased entirely through the allusions to their putative babies. And while her deep anxiety is triggered by such comments, she also craves the suspension of knowledge that underlies them. It is, she thinks, her best chance at a normal life. Though it is lonely and crazy-making and unsustainable, the redemptive power of magical thinking is, also, an offer of sanctuary: a gift each gives the other. ‘I met Sandra. And I fell in love with Sandra. And that’s all right by me.’
When she agreed to move in to George’s triple-fronted brick veneer family home her terms were straightforward. ‘Your furniture has to go. I’m moving in with my furniture and we’ll rearrange the joint, we’ll change it,’ she told him. She has a wall knocked down to open up the lounge area and spends ‘more than the house is fucking worth’ on drapes for the large picture windows that look out onto the street. She spends hours landscaping the lawn, kneeling in the front garden. The old lady next door, who was so unwelcoming towards her at first, finally comes around; tells her with a soft smile that she has transformed the house, so dark and dormant during the drinking that dominated the final years of George’s first marriage, into ‘a real home’.
These are the days when she sits at the breakfast bar where the late afternoon sun hits the fruit bowl and the immaculately cleaned bench, flipping though the local paper while listening out for the sound of George’s car; when she hears the deep purr of his engine pulling up outside and runs out to open the gate for him to drive through; when she closes the gate behind him and runs up to kiss him and then runs back inside to fix him a Scotch before they sit down to the meal she prepared. These are the days when she regularly throws lavish dinner parties for his work colleagues and the clients he entertains from overseas. These are the days when they don’t need her money, so George asks her to quit the funeral home and travel with him on his frequent business trips.
Sandra applied for her first passport at the age of thirty-six, eight months before she was married. This required her first to change the name on her birth certificate to Sandra Anne Vaughan, although the sex said (and, when I met her, still said) male. The fact that a passport was issued to ‘Sandra Anne Vaughan, F’ is, therefore, not to be underestimated.
Repeating this process less than a year later in order to have her documents changed into her married name was fraught. It was complicated by the lack of consistency in relation to her name and her sex across the rest of her identifying documents. It was also complicated by the fact that marriage was (and is) legally understood to mean the union of an opposite-sex couple. It required hiring an expensive lawyer who wrote elaborately to the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages brandishing Sandra’s successfully registered marriage certificate, hoping that the bureaucrats would not look too closely at the birth certificate underlying it. Again, she was successful.
Still, she is extremely nervous and self-conscious on her first flight overseas; she is ‘paranoid’, unsure how ‘convincing’ she looks to the officials who stamp her passport, terrified of being an embarrassment to George. That’s the problem with being put on a pedestal, she thinks to herself as they start the descent into Hong Kong. You’re too frightened to fucking move or you’ll fall off.
There are never any problems at the airports or at any of the hotels when they travel to Asia and America. But though she tries her best to unfurl and be a lady of leisure, she is bored and restless, crackling with unspent energy.
She meets George in the freezing lobby of their hotel in Bangkok where he leaps up from his martini to help her with her shopping bags. He signals for the waiter: ‘Two more, please. Good man,’ and then he gives his wife his full attention, smiling wetly at her with his thick lips. ‘New dress? Let’s see.’
She waves the request away. Then she leans forward, rests her elbows on her knees and clasps her hands together. ‘There’s only so much travel I can do, George,’ she sighs, exasperated. ‘There’s only so much shopping I can do, so many lunches I can do.’ His forehead pleats. ‘We need to buy a business,’ she concludes. She has been thinking of a boutique, picturing herself as a lady in a shop.
George remembers seeing an ad in the local paper before they left; the thought that had pecked through his mind like a bird crossing a road. ‘Let’s buy a hardware store.’
‘Huh.’ Sandra is nonplussed. Then she is intrigued.
North Brighton Paint & Hardware on Bay Street, the main shopping strip in Brighton, would become Sandra’s launch pad. As co-owner she was instantly embedded in the daily life of one of Australia’s wealthiest suburbs. Though she lived at the edges in a neighbouring suburb, Brighton was where she spent her time. These customers were her community, their concerns were her concerns, their values were her values, their legitimacy was her legitimacy.
‘Sandra Pankhurst became the credible person. George made me credible,’ Sandra explains. ‘George treated me like I was a princess, like I was somebody, someone to respect, someone to treat nicely. He gave me belief in myself and the strength in myself to realise that I could have a better path in life. He was there at that time to make me realise that I could be whatever I wanted.’
The executive director of Transgender Victoria, Sally Goldner, once told me about speaking with ‘a trans woman who survived the St Kilda street scene from the 1970s and she said that you had two choices for work: the parlours or the drag shows. The chances of getting any other job were virtually zero. There was that instant limitation of potential’.
In this context, the self-propelled rise of Ms Sandra Anne Vaughan is so remarkable that, despite Sandra’s belief that George ‘made her credible’, I have to be extremely cautious about overestimating the impact of her marriage. It is true that upper-middle-class Australia in the late 1980s would not have automatically opened up to Ms Vaughan. However, before she even met George she had already secured, thanks to her own skill and intellect, an adequately paid and profoundly satisfying ‘straight’ job. Had she never met him, Sandra could have worked at the funeral home long term and made a future for herself. Or her deeply restless and ambitious nature could have propelled her towards bigger opportunities. But the perceived impact of her marriage on her subsequent choices is not in doubt: ‘I was important for the first time in my life.’
Welcome to the world, Sandra Pankhurst, President of the North Brighton Chamber of Commerce! Newsprint from October 1992 shows Sandra dressed up for a Halloween street party: a ringmaster in striped Lycra tights, bowtie and tails, arms raised triumphantly like Nadia Comăneci. In clippings, quotes and photos from that period President Pankhurst, placard in hand, leads the resistance of local traders to the expansion of the retail behemoths. She appears at charity balls and promotional events. She is chairwoman of the Brighton Police Community Consultative Committee: launching a new register for senior citizens to discourage their social isolation; pictured at a fundraiser for at-risk youth. In 1996 Oprah Winfrey comes into possession of Sandra’s résumé as Sandra writes to her exuberantly proposing a series of fundraising shows Down Under.
Disappointingly, Oprah fails to respond but still, these are the years when, for the most part, whatever Sandra wants to do or be is limited only by her own energy—and that feels boundless, only increased by everything she takes on. You can see it happening in the pages of the Sandringham-Brighton Advertiser and the Bayside Times and the Bayside Shopper and the Moorabbin Standard, among the ads for private schools and custom-built wardrobes.
From this local news archive Sandra emerges gradually and then fully as from a chrysalis. Sandra is Small Business Owner, then Leader of the Small Business Owners. She is Chairperson, Spokeswoman, Hostess, President, Politician, Philanthropist. She is interviewed, photographed, quoted. She is. She tells people that owning the hardware store is teaching her about the technical side of things, ‘how things work and how they fit together’. But what she is really learning is how well she fits into the Order of Things.
It is always hot in December but this year the heat is unbearable. Still, she smacks open the screen door to leave the air-conditioned house and sit alone on the burning bricks of the back steps, pumping her damp silk blouse to cool herself down. Convinced, these last weeks, that she must be going through ‘an early change of life’, she is overwhelmed with heat and dizziness and her growing resentment about the fact that no one ever helps her cook or clean.
She has always tried to make sure that Christmas each year is ‘like Disneyland’ for George and his children and their children, who rush in from the car calling out to her, ‘Nana!’ She invites his friends and his cousins. For the first few years, she spent days planning and shopping and cooking a meal for thirty people.
But this year, something is different; a switch has been tripped. She’s having trouble keeping her mouth shut about the disrespect shown by Neil and Anita towards her and their father, who now pokes his head through the door.
‘You all right, love?’ George asks, perspiration glistening on his upper lip.
She turns and gives him a hard look. Closing the door behind him, he smooths down a cowlick that no longer exists, waits for her to explain.
‘They live the life of Riley,’ she hisses, whipping her head back to stare straight ahead. They let themselves into the house and take paintings off the walls, take whatever they want, and the way in which George handles this has become a point of tension in their marriage. She turns around again and looks at him in warning. ‘George, respect begets respect. These kids do not respect you. You can’t keep trying to please them all the time. I’m your wife, you put me first.’
‘You know what?’ George says. ‘We’re not going to celebrate Christmas in this house anymore. You go to so much trouble and they won’t even lift up a plate and put it on the sink. We’re not doing it anymore.’ Shrieks from the grandchildren playing with their new toys in the living room float outside.
From then on, they go away each year to somewhere new, starting with Lake Como. This solves the immediate tension around the holidays but does little to promote family accord.
George is many things to her: husband, friend, lover, business partner, drinking partner, father, child, teacher, companion, consultant, co-worker, supporter and, truly, a love of her life, though it cannot be said that he is the love of her life, because Craig is. So while she has no plans to leave George, she does tell him with some regularity that an emergency committee meeting has been called, what a bother, but to eat the leftovers in the fridge and no need to wait up, it’s no use both of them being tired, OK? Then she drives over to Craig’s place. Other times, Craig rides over on his motorbike when George is at the hardware store.
They are lying on the couch early one afternoon when she hears George’s car pull up outside.
‘Shit,’ she spits, twisting off the couch and grabbing Craig’s shoes. ‘Hide! Hide!’ she urges, as though the force of her voice could pick him up and deposit him in the closet with the vacuum and the winter coats.
‘I’m fuckin’ not hiding for anybody,’ Craig says, sitting up on the couch and crossing his arms over his bare chest with exaggerated insouciance. Down the hall, a key crunches in the lock and the front door opens. George pads heavily towards them on his way to the kitchen. Instantly, Sandra fills the living room doorway, arms reaching upward, bottom poking to the side for maximum coverage.
‘Ah, you’re home early, love,’ she yawns to George standing in front of her and directly facing, though he can’t see it, the back of Craig’s head resting against his formal sofa. ‘I was just having a little nap before I do the shopping.’ She takes his arm and gently leads him towards the kitchen where he locates the papers he forgot to take to the shop that morning. ‘Now what would you like for dinner? I was thinking a nice beef bourguignon to go with that red you bought…’ She keeps his eyes focused on her as they retrace his steps down the hallway. She gives him a kiss goodbye for the first time in months, waves, shuts the door and returns to the living room.
‘Remind me never to trust you,’ Craig grins, lying back down again. ‘You’re too convincing a liar.’ Her hands are still shaking as she pours herself a Scotch.