Reading Madame Bovary Read online

  And he does.

  One weekend he comes back from the DVD store with an old copy of The Ten Commandments.

  ‘These kids, Kay, know nothing.’

  ‘Charlton Heston?’

  ‘At least it’s something.’

  So we all sit down on a Saturday evening and watch The Ten Commandments. The dialogue is impossibly stilted and portentous and the Pharaoh given to crossing his arms and scowling: ‘I’ll have you torn into so many pieces even the vultures won’t find them.’ Bec’s friend, Jessica, is staying over for the weekend and the girls watch it in fits and starts, staggering around in parodic imitation of the Pharaoh and droning: ‘So it is written, so it shall be done.’

  I am struck by something I missed when I watched this movie as a student. Then I had found it hysterically and deliciously camp. Now I am aware of something else: the whole epic is a saga of slaughtered children.

  A vengeful God. Not mine.

  The doll

  Did I mention the chest pains? Lately I’ve begun to feel a painful, squeezing tightness in my chest. I hold my breath, I assume it’s indigestion (another hasty meal), I try to burp discreetly, there is no relief, the pain squeezes and I’m afraid. Not me, I think, not me.

  I mention the pains to Frank. He frowns. ‘Have a check-up,’ he says.

  I mention the pains to Diana. ‘I’m not surprised!’ She almost spits in disgust. ‘You’re always rushing around like a mad thing. You do too much. You’re stressed, you need to do relaxation. You should take up yoga or something.’

  Yoga. It’s not a bad idea. But where would I fit it in? On some days I am so tired I lose the desire to please anyone. I am on the edge of martyrdom.

  I remember a friend saying of his children: ‘You forget you’ve got them. You come into the kitchen in the morning to make toast and you’re pottering around and suddenly there they are and you have this small moment of shock. Like: Oh, yes, of course, the kids.’

  I looked at him incredulously. Only a man could think this way. ‘I never forget I’ve got them,’ I said. Not adding, ‘They inhabit my dreams like wild, surreal flowers.’

  Tonight the pain in my chest is bad – scary – and I can’t sleep.

  I get up and I go into the spare room and I lie with the doll.

  The doll is my shameful secret. I am forty years old and I have a doll. The doll is one of those soft ones, made of cloth. It lies on the bed in the spare room. At the window of this room there are lace curtains so that it is never pitch dark in here, not even around three in the morning when I push open the door and look in. I’ve been lying on my bed in the humid dark of our room, my feet hot and tense so that I push them out from under the doona into the cool air. I can’t sleep, and after that long space of passing beyond resistance, I ease out from under the doona and creep from the room. It’s important that Frank doesn’t hear me, that he doesn’t get up, come encroaching on me, even in the dark, breathing his hostile fatigue and saying, ‘What’s up? Why are you up again?’ as if he must have a sleeping eye, a sleeping ear in radar mode; some control over my being, in the house, even in his sleep.

  I push open the door of the spare room and it makes its scuffing swish noise of wood scraping against carpet. I wait for Frank to stir. He doesn’t.

  In the spare room, on the bed, is the doll.

  When I first looked at these dolls, one Christmas in Myer, stacked in a boxed and cellophaned pile, I was shocked at their ugliness, their boofheadedness, their daring deviation from a century of sweet doll faces. I searched for several minutes for one that was less offensive; appealing if not pretty (none of them were pretty). Eventually I chose her, in the blood-red cotton dress with the white flowers, her woolly tufts of hair, oatmeal blonde, and her absurdly puckered-in, tucked-in, sucked-in mouth, a deep fold beneath her tiny nose; and painted green eyes, round like road signs. Potato face, and a soft, unresistant cloth body and big white plastic shoes. She came with a birth certificate and a name. I opened the envelope. ‘Aurora’. Potato head Aurora! Rebecca wouldn’t be able even to say it.

  She grew on me. Her chubby, undemanding plainness, her soft body, were no reproach. The palms of her hands are streaked with pink where Rebecca painted them with nail polish (not content to stop at the nails). Her toes are grubby. Here she lies, on the bed, in the spare room, the way dolls lie; wide-eyed, stiff-backed and expectant; not lying at all but somehow in a horizontal standing-up state.

  Ben stirs. I hear him coughing, the rattle in his chest. ‘Mum!’ he cries, a sharp, loud, commanding cry. I leave the door of the spare room and tip-toe to his bed. He’s asleep, twitching his nose, rubbing it urgently, something in the humid room invading his mucous membranes, the dust mites dancing in his nostrils, his wide-open but barred window letting in the gases from the late-night traffic. Ben hears me in the night; even in his sleep he senses my presence near his bed, which is why I have learned not to go into his room, late, after he is asleep, but to trust in fate (though it’s not in my nature to) or to look in briefly from the door.

  In the middle of the night I must occupy my territory warily, caught between two male colonisers. I am a scout treading a stealthy path between two poles of fierce demanding energy.

  Night after night Ben has woken like this. I begin to resent it. That anyone should claim my nights now is unbearable. I feel estranged from him and his restlessness. His insistent possession of me seems akin to Frank’s petulance; their unspoken resentment, their desire for that something more I’m not giving – all this has made me feel lonely. Un-nourished. I could say ‘uncared’ for, but no, since ‘care’ is a form of possession (he had ‘care’ of the land). No special moments for me lately, other than the ones I give myself.

  I return to Aurora. She is propped up on the bed, arms splayed out, painted eyes wide. I lift the thin cotton bedspread and climb under it. I hold her to me, high against my chest, the mild prickle of her woolly hair against my chin, my hand on her padded arm that lays across my breast, my other arm resting against her small padded bottom (stuffed and sewn). How full she feels, a soft, full firmness that nestles into the sadness around my heart.

  How comforting it is to have a soft, inanimate object in my arms; a cushion even, but this, better still. I know I ought to feel silly but I don’t: the desire for comfort needs no defence. I wouldn’t care who surprised me here with this doll, though defiance is not what I feel. What I feel is sadness.

  Sadness isn’t a word I would have used once. Too pedestrian, too worn with mundane use. I’d have waited for a special word.

  In the hospital I lay for hours and hours, and slept, floating in an anaesthetised daze. An old, shabby hospital, it seemed to be gummed together with glue and cardboard. It was intimate, informal; they left me alone. I lay in my bed with a sensation of smiling, drifting sleep; effortless benign sleep that went on and on. And I didn’t want to go home.

  Frank drove me home. My mother was waiting for me, looking for signs, waiting for tears. Finally, just before bed, holding her glass of warm milk in one hand, her knitting in the other, she asked me if I was upset about the abortion.

  I thought about my great-grandmother, opening her womb with a crochet hook, not once but seventeen times. On the seventeenth time and at the age of thirty-six she got septicaemia and was close to death. Her mother made her promise never to do it again.

  The gynaecologist had silver hair, was handsome in a soft way, usually called distinguished. His rooms were brown and dull. It was a very male room. Drear, unadorned, spare.

  Spare: kept in reserve, being in excess of present need; frugal, meagre, scanty or scant as in the amount of fullness.

  I remember saying, ‘I’m very tired. Often my husband’s work takes him away during the week. I couldn’t face another one (so soon),’ and thinking, I couldn’t bear to spend my days in this room. Is he such a dull man? How does he bear to come into this brown room every day? From the plain green operating theatre to this dull brown room.

&nbs
p; In the spare room I think about my lost, aborted daughter (I had an intuition it would be another girl). She would be two and a half now, she would sleep in Ben’s room in the second of the twin beds. She would run alongside me on the cracked path, catch the toe of her shoes, trip, and bawl, ungainly with outrage. This is sentimental, as is my sadness, as is the doughy-headed doll I lie with under the bedspread.

  Sentimental: mawkishly tender.

  My grandmother, Audrey, used to say: ‘I am a sentimental person and I’m not ashamed of it.’

  Mawkish: sickly, nauseating.

  Morning sickness: the first pre-emptive strike, the warning that things will never be the same again, that the mother must get used to her body belonging to another …

  How to describe that sudden transformation of the moment when you learn that, once again, you have life within you? I was appalled; surprised at myself; and yet I felt as if a light had come on inside my body. I walked to the station, looking in shop windows, and everything seemed vibrant and humming. I walked home, it was winter, there was hardly anything in the garden and I searched intently for something to put into a vase; three blue hydrangeas and a red leafy shrub and some piebald creeper, and I cut them and arranged them in a pewter vase and sat them on the kitchen table and felt my body triumphant again.

  This is a musty house, there is mould in the corner of this room, I can smell it, soon I will sneeze, Frank will hear me. I press my nose into her grubby nylon arm.

  I am forty, and my fertility is dying.

  How can I tell you about the feeling of loneliness that a woman can have in a house with a man and two children sleeping around her? In other rooms. They are pre-occupied, on their own stubborn trajectory; they are dreaming their own dreams. That’s why I’m here, with the doll. The doll has no dreams.

  The doll is for me.

  I can cuddle her now and in the morning I can put her aside. I paid for her. I own her. I bought her for Rebecca but Rebecca never took to her. Other dolls, but not this one.

  I want a man who’s a doll. Without memory, without motivation.

  That’s what men have. They have prostitutes who don’t speak or tell of their dreams or oppress them with their yearning.

  My darling little one. Why did I abort you? I aborted you because your father didn’t want you (‘Honestly, Kay, two children is enough’) and I wasn’t strong enough to raise you on my own.

  On nights like this I could kill Frank.

  Frank’s strong points

  I must concentrate on Frank’s strong points.

  Like his surly and sharp-tongued mother, Frank is a good gardener. It pains him to have only a small courtyard at the rear of the house. He wants to retire to the south coast and plant a large native garden; hakea and bottlebrush, she-oak and the feathery silver-blue of the Cootamundra wattle (his favourite tree). He says that when work is getting him down and he can’t sleep at night he lies in the dark and plans this garden in his head. It is the secret map of his desire: lush and spiky, blossoming with red and golden hues and overt with flagrant and noisy birds. Frank is carrying this little Garden of Eden around in his head.

  Frank’s father died when he was eleven, in a car accident. Sometimes I think this may not have been altogether a bad thing since his mother says his father was a tyrant (she, on the other hand, is not a reliable source). Still, I have observed other men and their fraught relationship with Oedipus, and for once I wonder if she might not be right.

  This reminds me of a brief relationship I had with a young soldier, an electrifying encounter of the kind you read about in silly romance novels. At the airport, in the crush, he walked up to me and said: ‘Remember me? We queued together at the city terminal when we booked our tickets’ (this was before online booking). I looked up and barely recognised him: he was in jeans then and now he was in the uniform of an officer in the army. He could only have been my age, twenty-three. He took me firmly by the elbow and ushered me to the counter: ‘Can you put this young lady in a seat next to me?’ he said. Not bad for a second lieutenant. Lots of front.

  On the plane he held my hand possessively, as if he’d known me for a long time, as if he had plans for me. We drank whiskey and looked away from the cellophane sandwiches. Neither of us could eat. After we’d talked for a while I realised I knew his brother. ‘You know my brother?’ he asked, and something black flickered across his face. ‘My father always preferred my brother to me,’ he said. His eyes were angry and hurt. ‘When I finished my degree I joined the public service but that didn’t work out and now …’ he looked down at his khaki lapels and smiled. I hadn’t realised how attractive a uniform was, in all its subtle greens. The tie was especially nice, a soft smoky rainforest green. He ordered another two whiskeys and ice.

  I was hot, sweaty. My head was dizzy. I had a dim awareness of being swept off my feet. I tried half-heartedly to armour myself with irony; he’s practising at being masterful I told myself. But this didn’t work. He gave off voltage like a human powerhouse, exuding a force-field of sensual pain. I was in a daze. His wounded, urgent need was overwhelming. ‘My father is supposed to be meeting me at the airport,’ he said, his eyes hot and cloudy. ‘I’ll bet he doesn’t come.’

  He knew I wasn’t stopping over for more than an hour and would be taking up a connecting flight. He called the flight attendant and asked her to book me onto a later one. He was being masterful. I didn’t argue, I was still in a daze.

  We spent an hour in the pale-blue airport lounge talking in senseless, unmemorable phrases, broken off from time to time as he jumped up and strode away, in his authoritative peaked cap, to look for his father. I was by this time erotically lost to him. After several sorties his eyes had blackened and his skin was flushed. ‘I knew it,’ he said. ‘I knew he wouldn’t come.’ Something heavy in my chest thudded and fell away into space. We altered my flight yet again. Limply I stood by a line of phone booths while he rang his father. The phone didn’t answer. He waited for it to ring out and then he rang a hotel in the city and booked a room. We took a cab, saying almost nothing to one another by now. In our hotel room, it was the old Southern Cross, we made love all afternoon. We took no precautions. I thought he might cry after he came the first time but he didn’t. His briefcase stood propped absurdly by the door, his soldier’s jacket draped across a chair. My chest felt as if a leaden rose had grown within it to fill a cavity I had until then been unaware of. It anchored me to the bed; only my hips were light and floated above me.

  In a limbo of dim light and buckled sheets he lay on his back, his pink chest rising and falling. ‘You’re beautiful,’ he said. He held my hand. ‘I knew he wouldn’t come,’ he said. ‘In a minute, now, I’ll ring his number again …’

  One thing I had learned by the time I was thirty: men never get over their fathers.

  Some of us live, some of us die

  When I was twenty-six, I was hospitalised with pneumonia. It was a ghastly time in my life and I’ve never been as unhappy since. I was in a destructive love affair and it was killing me. That’s why I got sick. For a brief time, propped up in my hospital bed, I thought: Let me die.

  How pathetic. Not long after, something happened that made me ashamed of this morbidity.

  It began with a bout of pleurisy. My GP examined me and said it would go away. There were too many antibiotics dispensed now and he did not think they were called for in this instance. Not that I blame him, Dr. Richard Wesley-Cameron: tall, slim, handsome, English, mellifluous vowels, a certain edgy manner. Always a little hurried, harassed even, but willing to make home visits, he had come to my flat at around seven on a very dark mid-winter’s evening, and found me scarcely able to move from the pain in my chest.

  I was in a destructive love affair and it was killing me.

  I heard him drive up the long avenue of dark elms that lined the driveway and it was an effort for me to get up from the bed and open the door. A double door, a double lock. I sat tentatively on the edge of the bed in my p
ink cotton nightdress and black shawl while he examined me. ‘You have pneumonia,’ he said. ‘You live alone here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  It was late when the taxi delivered me to the private hospital on the hill overlooking the city. Inside there was an institutional hush. The lights had been dimmed, the corridors were empty. In the front office I registered with a young nurse; the receptionist had long gone home. Then I was led to a room on the second floor, a single room with a high bed. It was after midnight. My suitcase stood unpacked in the corner. I hoisted myself, gasping with pain, onto the high bed and sat upright, my back against four firm pillows, and I sat like this for a long time. No-one came. Outside I could hear the distant traffic, the wind in the trees.

  Finally a nurse arrived, stocky and middle-aged. ‘You should be lying down,’ she snapped.

  ‘I can’t lie down,’ I snapped back. ‘That’s why I’m here.’

  When I awoke from the warm, drifting sleep brought on by sedatives, a man was standing by my bed. He introduced himself to me as Victor Parish, a cardiac physician, and then he sat on the chair beside my bed. ‘The type of pneumonia you have,’ he said, ‘is called pericarditis. The pericardium is a membranous sac enveloping the heart. It’s the covering of the heart, the heart’s capsule. When it becomes inflamed, usually through a bacterial infection, friction arises and that’s the pain you are experiencing now. When I listen to your heart I can hear these friction sounds.’

  How clear he is, I thought, how lucid.

  ‘It’s nothing to worry about,’ he said. ‘All you need to do is rest.’

  For three days I slept through the afternoons in a sleep I have never experienced before or since, a blissful, restorative trance. Dozing in and out of consciousness, floating, light. For three days I slept like this and it seemed as if, each time I awoke, Dr. Parish was sitting by my bed. One afternoon I dreamed that the sac around my heart had swelled up like a balloon and was carrying me off up into the sky. It was not an alarming dream. No danger. Only the sensation of flight, of drifting upwards.