And suddenly, there’s a story
Helen Garner discovers the joys of being a grandmother.
One day in 1999, when I was rattling along with my broken heart on a Sydney suburban train, re-reading Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair for the comfort of its racy sentimentality and sly laughter, I turned a page and saw this sentence: “A woman, until she is a grandmother, does not often really know what to be a mother is.”
I got out my notebook and copied it down. I didn’t know why. I was not a grandmother. I didn’t know whether or when I could hope to become one. I would have killed for my daughter — it was through her that I’d learnt what love is — but I’d never thought I was much chop as a mother: selfish, revved up, distracted by sex and romance, working like a maniac. Twenty years later, though, I understand that deep in the wreckage of my last marriage, in a corner of it still invisible to me, Thackeray’s insight had lit a tiny spark. The gods were about to offer me another chance.
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“We’re having a baby,” wrote my daughter in Melbourne. “You can come home now.”
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The child slid into the world with ease. Her eyes were closed, her mouth curved in an expression of optimistic calm. I crouched against the wall of the birth suite, thunderstruck.
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I must have driven them crazy. I was always rushing across town from my big empty house, bustling in and out, bringing things they didn’t need, giving advice, staying too long. I battled to discipline myself, to ration my visits, to hide my jealousy of every other blow-in who held her. What I wanted was to be of use, but I didn’t know how to conduct myself. The baby’s parents were patient with me. I hope I washed up as often as I think I did.
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Yet the baby as she grew seemed to like me. She smiled when she heard my voice. Her existence, my acquaintance with her, began to change my relationship with the world. How driven and ridiculous my former life now appeared to me! When I was near her I lost all sense of haste. Around her hummed a benign aura, a timeless atmosphere in which my harried spirit relaxed and expanded.
Soon after she got here I was offered a weekly newspaper column. Write anything you like! I would need to collect material. I got out a Manila folder and labelled it, “Ideas”. My first deadline approached. I opened the file and looked inside. The lofty, important topics upon which I had planned to expatiate had shrivelled and died.
I cast my eyes around the room in a panic. And there she lay behind me, on her little lambswool rug: my saviour.
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They bought a house in the inner west. They said it would take my son-in-law six months to make a proper kitchen and bathroom. They asked if the three of them could come and live at my place for the duration. They wanted to live with me? I held my breath in case they changed their minds.
In my big, bare kitchen certain patterns established themselves. She liked to crawl under a wooden chair and wedge herself there in a cage of legs and struts, peeping out like a cheerful bus driver. Or she sat on her father’s lap in front of the TV, brightly erect against his chest, with her right thumb in her mouth and her left arm thrust out in a rigid line from shoulder to forefinger, pointing tirelessly at the screen where cartoon characters capered or David Attenborough murmured about silt on the River Nile.
Or she sat on the lino and gestured for me to sit behind her like a pillion passenger. She wrenched open a cupboard door, pulled out packets of pasta and slung them over her shoulder at me, one by one, without a glance. I caught with my right hand, and with my left slipped each packet back into the cupboard to replenish her supply. Now and then she turned and placed a packet precisely into my hand, as if we were working together in a shop.
Or she hauled the clean tea towels out of their drawer and spread them on the floor. I folded and stacked them. She scrunched them up and stuffed them back into the drawer, then began again her precise, rhythmic removals.
We never tired of these strange games she devised, so absorbing and repetitive, with their mysterious, pre-verbal meaning, demanding powerful concentration, seamless co-operation and complete silence.
When she got big enough, I would strap her into the seat on the back of my bike, early in the morning so her parents could catch up on sleep, and we’d pedal away along the bike track, across Royal Park and past the zoo as the sun came up. One morning she was silent behind me for so long that I put my foot on the ground and turned to check. Her helmet had slid right forward and down her nose, completely covering her eyes. Twin worms of creamy snot had reached her top lip. She was just poking her tongue out to staunch the flow. She couldn’t see a thing. She had nothing to say and no language to say it in. She trusted me. She was content.
Her gift to me, apart from the joy of her presence, was the fact that the world around her sprang into sharp focus. Boredom ceased to exist. Everything I looked at throbbed with meaning. My attention was drawn to and gratified by trivial matters I would once have trudged straight past: rain pattering on a stretched umbrella, a broken bead bangle, a high rose window shining in a dark church, a foul-mouthed junkie on a train, mud-caked boys slogging after a slimy football.
Never before had I got such pleasure from writing, or from working to such a tight and inflexible word count. I turned in a column every week about a suburban world whose unexpected beauty refreshed my soul. The smaller the subject, the more intensely it rewarded me. At a family party, a distant in-law said she’d been reading me in the paper. I flinched. She hit me with a comment that I took at first for a backhander, then recognised as the best compliment I’d ever received — an articulation, in fact, of an unconscious artistic credo.
“A little bit of nothing,” she said, “and suddenly, there’s a story.”
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I know how tedious grandparents can be, with our mushy boasting and besotted smiles, so I tried to keep the child as subject to a minimum — as if it were indecent to reveal such primal, unreasoning, undeserved happiness before strangers.
But sometimes I couldn’t help myself; every time I let my guard down I would sense again my membership of an obscure and incredulous sisterhood. One night, in the lobby of the concert hall, a woman I’d never met, but whose husband, so I’d heard, had left her for someone younger, came up to me and said in a very soft voice, “Thank you for your column. I’m a grandmother too, now. I didn’t know there was another love.”
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It took nearly two years for them to make their house right. We never had a quarrel. But on the day they drove away, the little girl wouldn’t kiss me goodbye. From her point of view, I was leaving her. She wouldn’t look at me or speak to me for a week.
A year or so later, their next-door neighbour stuck her head over their fence and said she was putting her house on the market. It was the same as their house, except that it had the one thing my son-in-law craved: a shed.
The day I got possession, I called them to say I had the key and was on my way. By the time I got there, 20 minutes later, my son-in-law was out in the yard with his chainsaw, slicing a hole in the side fence. I stood outside my new back door and watched. The saw screamed. The grey timber parted and fell. And through the gap came parading a small colourful figure, arrayed in trailing draperies, tap shoes, and an enormous broadbrimmed hat with nodding ostrich feathers. She clicked and clacked across the brick paving to the bottom step of my veranda. “This,” she said, “is the happiest day of my life.”
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Then, somehow, everything speeded up. Soon there came a boy, who looked like an owl, then another, who was chunkier, more like a boxer. The world stretched again and exploded into new configurations. The owlish one loved to dress in tutus, horror masks and huge wigs. The boxer stumped about in an ankle-length overcoat with big brown lapels.
The girl learned the pleasures of being older and bossier. She went to school. From our station platform, on my way to the city, I could see the window of her upstairs classroom, where between jobs I sometimes helped with reading practice, jammed into a narrow couch beside some earnestly stumbling little boy. I longed to lift the slow readers into my lap, to ease their struggles, but it was not permitted, and anyway they had their own nannas at home, so my finger moved along the lines and we laboured away together, shoulder to shoulder, murmuring and pausing and trying again. Then the teacher would clap, and get out his guitar and play a song he’d written especially for his class: “We are the children of Prep 1A, Prep 1A, Prep 1A …” Proudly they sang, beaming up at him from the floor.
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At home we got a red heeler, two cats, and four chickens. If you didn’t count the livestock, we had gender equality, not that anyone cared. Foxes killed some of the chickens and we bought new ones from the feed shop near the racecourse. We knocked down the whole fence and the yard was wide. We put in rainwater tanks. We pulled down the termite-ridden shed and built a better one. We planted fruit trees and grew big crops of broad beans and tomatoes.
It became clear to us that this was a natural way for a family to live. Adults were not outnumbered by kids. Childcare could bounce between us, according to circumstance.
I worked freelance and could be flexible. My daughter could go back to university and become a high school teacher. Her husband could work at night in his bands, and paint in his shed by day, and hang out washing, and prune his trees, and build chook pens, and cook up a storm. No one was ever bored or lonely. There was always something happening.
I might have been a flop at marriage, and scrappy as a mother, but as a grandmother I didn’t need to fight for a place to stand. I knew my place. I could serve. I was useful, and free, and fed, and endlessly entertained.
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I had four sisters and one brother, and my only child was a daughter. I’d known a lot of men, but I had never raised a boy. I didn’t know how different they were, the particular tone of their concentration, their delicacy, the needs they had and the kinds of games that answered to those needs.
The owl-boy, for example, instituted a cowboy empire that he invited me into a hundred times. Its rules and customs were unchanging, its boundaries firmly enforced. I learned my part and performed it faithfully on demand, never suggesting fresh developments or asking literal-minded questions. It gratified both of us deeply, in ways we never thought to articulate.
“Nanny,” he would say in a voice of yearning, “do you know where they sell spurs?” The answer to this was always no. But one day, mooching through a hardware store in Geelong, I came across a shiny, clanking pair. I bought them and rushed home. “Hey, hey! Guess what I got you!” He glanced at them with an expression of aggrieved incredulity, and walked out into the backyard. We never played that game again.
The game called Hotels lasted juicily, with parts for all three of them and me, for a good year, until one day the girl got impatient and set up the ironing-board reception desk and old red telephone too fast, without observing the niceties of preparation. The owl-boy burst into wild sobs of rage and sorrow, and dashed out of the room.
That one, too, he would never play again. I still miss it: the room service orders laboriously taken down by phone, the checking out, the “arguments” over the fairness of bills … we would go on for hours, running up and down “stairs”, serving each other, “losing our tempers”, being a posh lady or a rude guest or an overworked supervisor. Privately I link it with the time my father made a fuss over a restaurant bill; when it was over and he had won, he sat back happily and said, “I’ve never seen such a deflated manager!”
The boxer is an easygoing guy. His needs are simple. He enjoys a thrash on the ukes and then a game of Snap. I put on a Frank Sinatra CD and we sit there slapping down the cards, shouting and shuffling, and singing along: “Moon shining down / on some little town …” In their own house these kids have been authoritatively exposed since early childhood to the full power of Midnight Special and Soul Train. They are experts on James Brown. I fill in the gaps with Tubby the Tuba, or sneak in a track from Die Schone Mullerin.
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They bring their class photos home and I examine the faces one by one, asking for names and character sketches. The girl is brilliant at this but the boys are hopeless. They have only one word to describe a girl classmate. Me: “She looks nice. What’s she like?” Grandson: “Annoying.” “And this one here — what a clever face. What sort of person is she?” “Annoying.” “How about this tiny one with the grin?” “Annoying.”
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It’s a grandmother’s prerogative to run a tight ship. I remember my father’s stepmother, when I went to stay with them, putting a strip of old towel under my bed to stand the potty on, “lest you soil the carpet”. At my place, boys may not tilt their chairs. One evening, when they were being oafish at the table, I hustled them out on to the back veranda, slammed and locked the door, and shouted, “you can stay out there all night”.
I disposed myself on the couch and self-righteously leafed through a magazine. Night was falling. On the other side of the wall the boxer snivelled and the owl-boy whispered at great length. After a while they fell silent. I went on pretending to read. It was a chilly evening and I was starting to wonder how I could back down before their parents got home.
I opened the door. There they sat on the step in the dark, like two foundlings. They looked up at me. I said stiffly, “You can come in now.”
They followed me in, and took their seats at the table before their plates of congealed food. They pulled in their chairs and wielded their cutlery with decorum. “Where were you planning to sleep?” I asked. “He wanted to sleep with the dog,” replied the owl-boy, “so we’d be warm. But I said there’d be fleas.” “And,” said the boxer, on whose cheeks the tears had left long, dirty streaks, “he said we’d have to make a little nest. Under a bush.” That was when we all started to laugh.
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When it’s my turn I drive them to footy training and sometimes to their matches. I knew I needed cataract surgery when I ceased to be able to pick them out of the pack on the other side of the ground. Not by their numbers. I don’t need numbers. I know them by the shape of their skulls and the set of their shoulders, the way their hair swings or sticks up, the length of their strides.
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“Will you watch something on TV with me?” says the boxer after school.
“Why do you want me to watch with you?” “Because,” he says without missing a beat, “you make witty comments and smart cracks.”
I forget whether it was Rochefoucauld or Richelieu who said, “Tu me flattes; mais continue.”
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Meanwhile the girl sings, swots, cooks, surfs, plays AFL: the fearless filth of her, the bouncing ponytail! The black armband! The tackles, the falls! The ambulance that comes for her teammate who’s knocked out cold! Is this the same child who at six came home from her first flamenco lesson? Who, when her mother and I asked how it had gone, did not speak but straightened her spine, lowered her brow, and flung up one arm in a posture of such dignified command that our smiles slid off our faces?
When she needed a teenage bedroom we knocked the two houses into one and she moved across into my spare room. The owl-boy surveyed the new arrangement and said, “I’ve always wanted to live in a mansion.”
And now she’s gone to Europe. She worked four part-time jobs, got on a plane with her friends and flew away. How will we live without her singing round the house? I keep her bedroom door closed. I don’t want to see the bedraggled grey velvet shark lying on the stripped bed, the line of shoes, the chair facing the bare desktop, the guitar.
The day after she left, her mother and I came home from our respective workplaces and met by chance in their kitchen. We stopped and stared. Each of us had gone out that morning without a word and had her hair cut. We hardly knew whether we were living in a fairytale or a myth.
“How are you without her?” she said. “Oh, it’s empty. And quiet.” We’ve never been the sort of mother and daughter who hug a lot. We stood there looking out the window at the winter yard.
“Maybe I should send over one of the boys,” she said. “As a replacement.”
We bowed over her kitchen bench on our elbows, in a helpless convulsion.
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This is Helen Garner’s contribution to Grandmothers: Essays by 21st-Century Grandmothers, edited by Helen Elliot (Text Publishing, 288pp, $34.99).