Mother’s trips to the tree stopped that night – squashed like a jack-in-a-box waiting to have its lid lifted, she waited inside the house. I could hear her pacing in her room and I knew she felt trapped there by the eyes of the old women of the suburb. I had continued to eavesdrop on the old women’s conversation from the cold tile floor as they left the house that evening, clopping down the front steps with their bunioned hoofs stuffed into mis-shapen sandals.
‘We all have dead husbands,’ I heard Gladys hiss into the ear of another of the old girls.
‘She may have been a bit younger when she lost him, but so what,’ another one said.
My mother heard them too and she was furious. Then I saw her decide not to brew on it and she broadened her thoughts. The next afternoon I discovered why. She must have decided that the only way to beat the enemy was to employ them. So during the cicadas five o’clock chorus I was marched across the road with my first communion dress that had sat for weeks in a paper bag crushed behind the door of my mother’s bedroom. My mother called to warn Gladys that I was on my way over with the dress and a bag of beads that had been passed on from a cousin in far north Queensland. She asked Gladys if, as a favour, she could alter the dress to fit me and do something with the beads that had originally been intended to decorate the bodice, and as Gladys was such a wonderful embroiderer . . . I wondered as she continued to flatter her, if Gladys was aware of the ploy. Which, I assumed, was that Gladys, by doing this favour for my mother, would be seen not only by God, but also by most of the congregation to be helping a needy young widow. And if they didn’t see it, they would hear about it, as her needlework was legendary throughout the suburb. In the process of completing the task she would gain some empathy for the family and soften her attitude towards my mother and the tree. That was the plan, I think.
As I crossed the road the sun blazed down from above a row of unchanging suburban pines growing along Gladys’s side fence. Her house was in the middle of the block of land, surrounded on all sides by grass burnt brown in the mid-summer scorch. It was a perfect square, Gladys’s house, and every window was closed, locked, barred and bolted. The Neighbourhood Watch sign on her front gate rattled as I closed the gate behind me.
Gladys opened her security door and I felt the cold air from inside rush about my ankles. Unfortunately only the front room was air-conditioned, and standing in Gladys’s sewing room at the back of the house was like being torched with a hairdryer. The stiff white fabric of the dress prickled and the chunky homegrown seam where the bodice joined the skirt itched like mad. A line of pins holding up the hem around the sleeve dug into me and the caramel carpet at my feet was like dirty sand clotted with occasional brown boulders of old lady furniture. It made me feel faint. I longed to escape. I looked around, desperate to find a way out of the over-tidied house full of glass cases crammed with crystal and china.
‘When’s the big day?’ Gladys asked me.
‘Not until next year,’ I admitted, wondering if Gladys would suddenly see through my mother’s strategy.
I could see her wondering why my mother was so anxious to have the dress done when my first communion wasn’t for another six months and Gladys knew my mother wasn’t the type to be over-organized.
‘I can’t promise anything,’ she finally said, picking up the bag of beads. ‘I’m better with thread.’
She tutted then left the room.
‘That’s old, that dress,’ she called from the hall. I could hear her digging around in a cupboard in the hallway.
‘All my cousins made their communion in it,’ I answered.
She returned with a square of folded white silk and I knew immediately the material had been meant for her own wedding. Gladys’s fiancé, we’d all heard about him, had been left to rot in the corner of a prisoner-of-war camp in Changi, Singapore.
She never married and she never got over it, that was how the story went, and once a year she met a thin man who had shared the cell with her fiancé. To pass the time in the camp they had bet on a dice they made out of paper. He was so old now, the thin man, that he had stopped coming and Gladys had to go and visit him in an old people’s home.
The sheet of white silk landed on the Formica and she started cutting, the scissors grating across the table top. She was going to make me a new communion dress from the fabric that should have been used for her own wedding dress. It gave me the creeps.
There was no way I was going to wear a dress made out of old lady material. I ran across the road to tell my mother. When I got there I was appalled to find her circling the base of the tree. Edward was in the kitchen trying to ignore her, the tell-tale film of flour covering the kitchen as he attempted to thicken the stew he was making with a cup of flour and water. James, Gerard and I sat on the top step watching her desperately tramping around the base of the tree like Pooh searching for the Heffalump. Eventually I couldn’t stand it any longer and I started down the stairs, imagining I would think up an excuse on the way to stop her and bring her inside.
‘Dawn!’ I heard someone say. The voice was deep and penetrated the wall of surging cicadas.
My mother froze. I stopped too, halfway down the garden, wondering where the voice had come from. For a moment I thought it was Dad, fed up with waiting for Mum to climb the tree to come and see him. Then I saw Vonnie at the bottom corner of the garden, leaning on a single grey fence post where the Kings’, the Johnsons’ and our back yards met.
‘Leave him for a while, Dawn.’ Mum was with Vonnie now by the back fence and I was on the grass between her legs my hands reaching up and grabbing at her calf muscles.
‘You’ve got to let the dead get on with it,’ said Vonnie.
My mother was instantly accepting that Vonnie knew what was going on.
‘I can’t leave him alone,’ she said.
‘Don’t let him rule your life.’
From the ground where I was lying the tree appeared to have grown larger than our house.
‘Go mad if I do,’ said Mum. ‘And mad if I don’t.’
Vonnie shook her head, I wasn’t sure if she was agreeing or disagreeing. ‘You can’t live with the dead,’ she finished.
‘Can’t live without them either.’ My mother’s addendum.
Vonnie hauled a box of paw-paws on to the grey stump. ‘From the Lus.’ She flicked her head in the direction of the Vietnamese family who lived next to her.
‘The fruit bats had a party last night.’ She pointed to a clump of paw-paw trees in the Lus’ garden. In the failing light they resembled a row of women wearing great circular hats and carrying buckets on poles balanced across their shoulders. Mr Lu’s shovel rose and fell and a pad of dirt hit the pile he had already scooped into his wheelbarrow. If I crawled through the hole in the Johnsons’ fence I could see the Buddha that sat under the macadamia nut tree on a plinth raised up on four bricks.
The tree blew up behind us revealing the veined underside of its branches. I felt as if it could grab me and lift me to the sky.
‘I talk to Tom most days,’ Vonnie said, passing the paw-paws over the fence. ‘When I’ve got a minute, but not the other way round. I don’t let him interrupt me. Unless its important.’
My mother nodded keeping her back to the tree. A new resolve seemed to be spreading through her body, the arches of her feet rose to greet some new possibility.
‘I’ve only lived for him these past few weeks,’ she admitted. ‘I’ve not cooked. I’ve not talked to them.’ I knew she was referring to us. ‘I’m sorry, love.’ I lay my head against her thigh and allowed her to smooth my hair, pulling at bits and straightening them between her melancholy fingers.
‘They understand that,’ said Vonnie. ‘But now give them some time. And be careful. Talking to the dead isn’t something everyone understands.’
‘Vonnie, I’m that grateful to you,’ my mother was crying. ‘I needed to be told. I’m sorry, I’ve lost it a bit these past few weeks.’
With fresh determination we traipsed up the back yard and closed the door on the spreading arms of the poincianna tree and Vonnie’s clothes trolley rumbled back down her path.
Inside the kitchen Mum whipped the serving spoon from Edward’s confused hand and hugged him. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, pushing him into a chair and serving the gluggy rice and burnt stew he had made. ‘It’s going to be okay now. I’m back, I’m here again.’
We watched her as she stood at the kitchen counter serving the food, the back that was so familiar to us, that never lied. We wanted to believe her because she was our mother and we needed to believe her, but something about her tone and the forced straightness in her spine made us fear the worst. She wanted to be with us, but she wasn’t, not really.