Chapter 15 Lottie
LOTTIE
NOW, NSW SOUTHERN HIGHLANDS, AUSTRALIA
I park the van in front of Miriam’s house.
At the far end of the driveway, my mother is standing with a hose in her hand, watering her beloved flowerbeds.
She is wearing an enormous straw hat, a black bikini and her gardening slides.
This is the Miriam of old. In the last ten years she began covering up with a sarong or a summer dress, but lately she seems prepared to show her ageing body.
I think it’s something to do with her new therapist.
I remember the first time Miriam’s penchant for getting around in her bikini struck me as unusual.
I was fourteen and had brought a friend home from school to work on a group project for history.
As we came through the front gate, there was Miriam, sunning herself on the deck.
She insisted on being introduced to my friend—Wendy, I think it was, one of those friends who came and went with the seasons—and she had then stood in her pink string bikini, quizzing Wendy on what her father did for a living, whether she had a boyfriend yet, and advising her on all the reasons she should consider getting a bob cut to frame her pixie-like features to best effect.
Then my mother had lain back down and begun reading her book again.
Normal mothers would have offered us afternoon tea or enquired about our homework. Normal mothers would have worn clothes.
Miriam’s figure back then, at nearly fifty, had still been fabulous.
Her first breast enhancement had balanced her out perfectly.
And compared to my chunky, flat-chested figure, which elicited nothing but teenage disgust when I stood in front of the mirror, she was all the things my peers aspired to be.
Still, I remember burning with shame at Wendy’s sideways glance of disbelief.
These days, Miriam’s skin has lost its bounce. I sometimes see her twisting in front of the glass doors, trying to assess the ravages so grievously inflicted on her dearest asset by the ageing process. I feel sad that it upsets her.
I need to take some clothes down to Phyllida’s house if I’m going to stay there, but I have no energy to talk to my mother.
With the air conditioning off, the van is becoming an oven.
I open the door but can’t seem to move. Phyllida has always urged patience whenever I express frustration at my mother.
Every one of us has a cross to bear. Your mother is doing her best. It’s annoying how my grandmother sees the good in everyone.
She knows Miriam is a self-absorbed meddler, so why I am the one who has to make allowances?
But when I look up at my mother again, I wonder if I’m looking at it the wrong way.
Miriam is taking steps to own her body and its place in the world.
I should be proud of her. But I worry that beneath the brittle exterior she is lonely and scared.
She’s been reading articles out to me about body positivity lately, which her therapist probably recommended.
But as she still constantly mentions the ways my body and my clothes are letting me down, I don’t think she’s really got the gist of the whole thing yet.
Years ago, I found letters Miriam had received from David.
Love letters so heartfelt and poetic they made me flush with the shame of delving into her private past. Young David was besotted with my thirty-something mother, it seems. I assume the feeling was mutual, because the letters were wrapped so carefully and stored with a pressed flower in a pink cardboard box.
Miriam sometimes talks about David as if he was the second coming of the Lord.
I used to hang on every word about my father.
Handsome, strong, kind, devoted. There was never much substance to the stories, though.
She only knew him for a few months and for only a couple of those was he healthy.
David was six foot four and my mother six foot one, and both were strikingly beautiful.
From photographs, I can’t see that I share any features with David.
Nor do I have my mother’s perfect features, apart from our unusually arched eyebrows and the shape of our ears.
It perplexed me as a teenager—how could I have the world’s best-looking parents and come out looking so odd?
When I asked Phyllida about it she would get this strange, distant expression.
She would just talk about how David and I shared a beautiful soul and then she would change the subject.
So, in my world, David is simply the handsome ghost who fathered me.
A saint taken before his time. And Miriam is the only parent I have ever known.
I sit in the heat of the van weighed down by indecision, scrolling on my phone.
I open my email inbox and read a chain of emails involving the upcoming open garden at our place.
Each month, someone in the village opens their garden and the garden club puts on sandwiches.
This month it is Miriam’s turn to host, and, by virtue of the fact that I am now back living in a household that is a member of the club, Miriam or Judy or whoever runs the club has added my email to their general distribution list. But I see this particular email is to the garden club organising committee, and for some reason, Miriam has copied me in.
From: Miriam Peters
To: Garden Club Committee
Cc: Charlotte Peters-Banks
Subject: Open Garden on the 20th at our place
Friends,
I am busily weeding and pruning and getting the garden ready for our opening before Christmas.
Given it’s the festive season, I will be providing sparkling wine on the day.
I am thinking of obtaining some from Belton’s Estate—we should support local.
Perhaps the committee will contribute to the cost?
As well as your sandwiches, I will provide other, more Christmassy finger food. I see from the RSVPs that Rupert Bingham is coming. I suggest someone tell him he is unwelcome after his poor behaviour at the Christmas in July party.
Best, Miriam
From: Patty Prince
To: Garden Club Committee
Cc: Charlotte Peters-Banks
Subject: Re: Open Garden on the 20th at our place
Hello Miriam,
About the cost of the bubbles, we don’t have a treasurer at the moment due to Ian being on that seven-seas winter cruise through Europe (it looks extremely nice from the photo he sent to the bush regeneration WhatsApp group. There are chandeliers in the bathroom!).
Just to let you and Lottie know, we are praying for Phyllida.
I am not sure how we can tell Rupert not to come to your open garden.
I know his behaviour at Christmas in July was politically incorrect, but there isn’t much we can do, is there?
I was a bit offended, actually, that he only touches the skinny minnies with the nice bottoms!
And telling him he couldn’t come would be offensive to poor Dervla. I would hate to upset her.
Love Patty xxx
From: Judy Dingle
To: Garden Club Committee
Cc: Charlotte Peters-Banks
Subject: Re: Open Garden on the 20th at our place
Patty,
Touching women’s bottoms is not ‘politically incorrect’. It’s sexual harassment. And you’re not meant to comment about someone’s bottom being nice. You can’t comment on bodies anymore. That’s politically incorrect. Even if it’s a nice comment, according to my granddaughters.
But yes, I agree banning Rupert would be tricky, given Dervla is in the garden club too.
I’ll add a vegan sandwich option for the new member, Freya, who apparently has a spectacular collection of orchids.
I’ll probably do honey and margarine for her.
I’ll put them in the same container as the ham and egg, but she’ll just have to cope.
I am baking cupcakes to take into Phyllida when she wakes up. Any word from the doctors?
Regards, Judy
From: Mary Penhallidon
To: Garden Club Committee
Cc: Charlotte Peters-Banks
Subject: Re: Open Garden on the 20th at our place
We will know more about Phyllida from the doctor tomorrow.
Rupert has always been a handsy bugger. Not sure what good it does to start arcing up now.
From Mary
I sigh. Sometimes I think the social changes of the last two decades are treated like internet glitches around here; unfathomable annoyances, better left to the young.
I want to shout at ex-captain of industry Mr Rupert Bingham, with his fancy blazers and open-necked linen shirts and his inappropriate habit of winking at all females: Rupert, men like you have ruined the world for too long and the patriarchy is unravelling!
Your casual disrespect for women will no longer be tolerated! But I can’t put this in an email.
I think of his wife, Dervla, who jumps at shadows.
Every Monday Phyllida slips a couple of second-hand romance novels into the street library that sits across the road.
Take a book, leave a book. Monday is when Dervla checks.
She never has money to spend, despite Rupert driving the latest model BMW.
Dervla can never quite believe her luck at what appears in the street library.
For Dervla’s sake, nobody takes her husband to task.
I wonder what Phyllida would say about this issue, and something makes me stop and really think.
If my mother copied me on this email, maybe she wants my input. I need to step up.
From: Charlotte Peters-Banks
To: Garden Club Committee
Subject: Re: Open Garden on the 20th at our place
Judy, honey is not vegan.
And I agree with Mum. Rupert is a lecherous fuck-knuckle who should be banned.
Lottie x
I press send. Miriam is right. Sometimes you have to be prepared to stand up and be counted. I walk down the driveway, squaring myself for whatever confrontation my mother wants to have this time, but also feeling oddly proud of her.
She looks up, then turns away and points the hose at her lavender beds. I stare at the startling prominence of her skeletal back; the crepey gathering of skin below her scapula; the quiet, soft fall of her buttocks below the line of the bikini, where once they had been taut and shapely.
My mother remained devoted to the memory of David.
She had plenty of lovers over the years, but nobody she would allow into the stifled world she created for the two of us.
I was David’s precious daughter; the only thing he left on this Earth.
Miriam still kisses his photo at night before she gets into bed.
The delicacy of my mother; the fragile sagging of her beautiful, tanned buttocks makes me ache with sadness for all the joy she has missed.
The privations. David, food, life. The efforts of keeping herself beautiful—the image of the person she was when she was loved by him.
I have an urge to place my fingers under those soft beautiful flaps of atrophied muscle; to return Miriam’s buttocks back to the shape they once were.
To make her happy, the way she only ever was with David, when she and he were a perfect pair.
I close my eyes and think of my grandmother taking the pills, knowing she would be leaving me alone with Miriam, who has always struggled with motherhood.
My mother’s own childhood was spent in boarding school while her bohemian parents travelled the world.
They had parties, she once told me, never caring where she was, what she was drinking, who of the forty- and fifty-year-old men in their crowd was ogling her.
My heart broke when she told me of being cornered by one of their artist friends one night when she was fifteen; him telling her she should be a model, that he’d help her if she helped him back.
I want to go back to that teenage Miriam and say, ‘You never needed him. You should have slapped him. Your parents should have cared!’ When I once voiced a version of this, she gave a brittle laugh and raised her wine glass.
I decide it is good, Miriam wearing her bikini in public again.
Completely fine. I just wish she could be happy and let go of whatever resentment she seems to have towards me.
It’s almost as if she blames me for the death of David; because although he left part of himself with her, she sees nothing of David in me.
Sometimes I wonder who he even really was.
I walk inside, knowing I am unlikely to get answers from my mother. It’s as if she gave up when David died, and all the rest, including me, is a poor consolation prize.