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Overview
“A wrenching, luminous memoir” of how betrayal and divorce transformed two families and the lives of two young women (People).
When Jane Alison was a child, her family met another that seemed like its mirror. Each had a father in the Foreign Service, a beautiful mother, and two little girls. The younger two—one of them Jane—even shared a birthday.
With so much in common, the two families quickly became inseparable. Within months, affairs had ignited between the adults, and before long the pairs had exchanged partners—divorced, remarried, and moved on. As if in a cataclysm of nature, two families were ripped asunder, and two new ones were formed. Two pairs of girls were left in shock, a “silent, numb shock, like a crack inside stone, not enough to split it but inside, quietly fissuring.” And Jane and her stepsister were thrown into a state of wordless combat for the love of their fathers.
This true story of their rivalry, and the tragic loss that ultimately followed, is a fascinating record of how adult behavior can shape, or shatter, a childhood. Spanning from Australia to the United States, it is “enormously compelling . . . [A] harrowing journey of identity” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780547488653 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Sometimes I think we all have embedded in the brain a personal place like a home we've lost that lingers in our skulls, and a pantheon of people who so imprinted us when we were young that we see everyone after in contrast. This place and these people — they're like elements or primary colors, forming and haunting our lives. She was the original green, and this woman is like her but a touch more blue. He was first red, and this man is like him, but darker.
The original place I've lost is Australia. A gum's peeling bark, a kangaroo's tail as it belts into the trees, the screams of a kookaburra hacking the air — the original place isn't ideal, just primary, saturating your child sensibility like the first exposure of film; if that place is then lost it settles in the brain rare and fantastic. Australia inspires fantasy, anyway, the great southern continent having been imagined and sought by Europe for so long, and this one so weird when found. From miles out at sea as English ships drew near, I have read, even over the pounding Pacific surf the racket of birds in this new world was incredible. I wish I could hear it and see it as early sailors did, squinting dazed across the foam: a riot of birds, untouched and shrieking, so innocent they could be hit with a stone. Lorikeets, white cockatoos, galahs, rosellas; and in the waters, enormous oysters, mussels, cockles, giant stingrays to be seized. So much that was unknowing and, to Europe, unknown: Terra Nullius.
The animals and plants resisted categories: Marsupials, which don't lay eggs or give birth to live young but release occult fetuses into daylight. The platypus, a mammal that lays eggs and lives in water. Flying squirrels. Trees that shed not leaves but bark, can be swallowed in flames, but spring up green from charred stumps. Captain James Cook and Joseph Banks and the others moved through this new world like Shakespeare's Miranda, although unlike her they sought possibilities, reasons to poke in a flag and lay claim. In New Zealand and Australia they gathered specimens: a small kangaroo they stuffed and mounted; flowers that looked like feathers or barnacles that they dried and dubbed names like Banksia; the skull of a Maori. After carving their ship's name on a eucalypt, they sailed back to the other side of the world, and two decades later British fleets returned with convicts, sheep, saplings, and seeds.
The Australia bobbing in my skull when I flew away at four is almost the one Cook and Banks saw. Climbing, squatting, poking, tasting, as a child you're close to the ground and all that wriggles on it, you can feel sensibility breathing everywhere, feel akin to small things: a gumnut, an echidna trembling in the grass. I still feel in my palm the papery bark of the eucalypt in front of our house, and how it peeled away, and the fairy gardens Maggy and I made, lying dreamy on our stomachs, arranging feathers and bottlebrush blossoms in the twisting roots of trees. And I see the garden made by our grandparents: Slight and white-maned in a cardigan, my grandfather Albert tends a philodendron as Maggy and I wander in nightgowns along pebble paths, among spiked palms, yellow wattle, blue gums. A place that came into being with each step you took through the shadows and sunlight, a place dangerously like paradise before we even knew the word.
When we flew away in 1966, we clutched things we'd been given to remember home: a stuffed kangaroo and koala, boomerangs, ink drawings of Aboriginal girls — the same things Cook and Banks took. We had books, too, so we wouldn't forget, the watercolor pictures conjuring a landscape of banksias and kookaburras as animate as Arcadia. I didn't go back to Australia for twenty years, and that country seemed to disappear from the world and slip into my head. But the place pulled as strongly as the mythical southern continent once had pulled those Englishmen two centuries earlier.
As for the pantheon: Maybe parents, brothers, sisters, are always the primary figures painted on your brain. The first examples of character — beauty or primness or a black comic bent — they swell into archetype before your eyes, become the hues and tissue from which you'll be made or through which you'll see others. My mother and Helen, my father and Paul, my sister and Patricia; Jenny. It wasn't just their colorings that lit them inside my skull but their doublings. A bicameral group to match the bihemisphered world we traveled after the split, and the bilateral brain and bichambered heart that slowly grew inside.
How it was before the split, how the split actually happened: There are a few simple facts, photos, and the shards I remember, but mostly the fragments of stories my four parents have told. Some of what's given as fact is plain, but not all, and pictures are partial. The pieces of memory from when you're four are like spots on a dirty window rubbed clear enough for light, color, an image to show through. You can rub these places, hoping to see more in the murk, willing that lost time to reappear, but it won't. And you can listen to the stories, sift them for truth, but one thing I know is that for my four parents, the truths are not the same.
My mother has told me the oldest fragments, pieces of the story I was too young to remember. Although I look for cracks in what she's said to find traces of different stories the others would tell, I know that I can't peel her words from my vision. Still, what she's told me is more tinged with wistfulness or rue than with the dark poison I think the others fear.
My father and mother grew up in South Australia in families that had been settled there just a few generations. The first had sailed from the British Isles and Nova Scotia in the 1800s: a gold miner, a shearer, an apothecary, a grocer. No convicts: These people came to the new world as pioneers. I don't want to know about the earlier generations. When the lines are traced back to England or Scotland, the pursuit becomes dark, muddy, heavy with clouds. Instead I see those settlers stepping onto Australia's shores like the first men and women stepping into the sun, and life and light begin.
I try to imagine those Anglo and Celtic settlers in Australia. How sharply etched they must have felt, their pale bodies standing alien against the alien landscape, casting different shadows in the new light, their thin pinkish skins stretched between their selves and the blistering sun. And what made those "selves": a language coursing in the blood; their names and the knowledge of where they'd come from; the ideas they'd brought of how things were done, how clothes were worn or a house was made or what green things should be pulled from the land, a land not yet packed with ancestral bones so all the more alien; a way of regarding through squinting eyes that would have to grow fierce in sheer opposition to all that lay threatening beyond, the self in its skin being so slight.
They struggled with the ground at their feet, prying up stones, ringbarking trees. A great-great uncle named Tom, a bushman, slept in mud in the rain and stood waist deep in a stream from morning to night helping sheep through the water. A great-grandfather Richmond arrived in Glenelg as the town was just forming and wrote dry letters about the state of the sidewalks. These first comers were literate, resourceful. One wrote letters aboard the Clifton as he crossed the Atlantic and Indian oceans, another published letters in the local paper, others wrote memoirs that glow with pride at each step closer to an anglicised world in the bush. A generation later, both my grandfathers were headmasters who looked out keenly as the place rose around them, annotating its progress. A great-aunt built her house from mallee roots and pulverized limestone and reported how grand was the day when a road came, then plumbing, and then electricity. The importance of the house, of making themselves home: My mother's mother, Dora, practiced shrewd domestic arts, reusing rinse water from the white laundry for the colors, keeping a cloth wet on the safe to chill milk. Whatever else their endeavor meant, these people transformed the foreign place to known, managed to make themselves home in it. My parents were the first to leave this new place, to look for something newer.
I have just five photographs of my parents together, along with a box of slides from the years of their marriage and a few pictures my father took of my mother while courting. The two met at university, and my father's first photos of my mother reveal both how she looked and how he must have looked at her, and to me this is the magic current: the current that invests what is seen with value. She stands laughing on a wide, bare beach at the bottom of Australia, the sand white and the water cold blue, her bare legs shapely and slender and her most beautiful feature, together with her sparkling eyes. She played tennis and field hockey and golf; on my desk I have a round silver box she won in a putting contest and a silver pencil cup as runner-up. Her nose is strong and Mediterranean, although there's no such blood in our line, and her mouth can seem either bawdy and wide or a small prim plum; herein lie her trickiness and potential. In photos of my mother and father they do not look well suited. In a newspaper picture at a party, his face seems alarmingly young and long, while beside him her eyes are lidded in a Cleopatra smile that seems knowing, although I doubt she knew much, was just restless and wanting to go, not sit potted at home. My father might have been restless, too — why else the diplomatic service? — but has always seemed concerned about propriety, how things are done. In the university library one evening, as the two were slipping on their jackets to leave, my mother tells me, she saw that her gloves were dirty. She leaned toward him over the table and whispered, What'll it be? Dirty gloves or no gloves?
He considered a moment and said, Dirty gloves.
Courting, he gave her a silver brush and mirror and a pair of sunglasses with tiny shutters like jalousies instead of tinted lenses. I would love to have those, to see what you saw through them, what sort of shuttered world you could make. My father is color blind. His mother, Maisie, became truly blind and wore a glass eye; my mother's father, Herbert, was deaf. My sister has one blue eye, one green eye. My mother has webbing between several toes.
In college my father and mother were called, she tells me, the Gruesome Twosome. Both have always had a weakness for puns.
In the wedding pictures taken outside the Anglican church, a pert white flower sits in my father's lapel, his hair is neatly combed back, and he grins like an excited schoolboy. White satin cuts my mother into voluptuous triangles, a cap sprays a pale shower of veil, and her sidelong smile is dangerous. They sailed for his first posting soon after. On deck in the blazing sun, she waves at the place she's abandoning, the new world their forebears had only just begun making, while he clasps her by the green-silk waist as if she needs anchoring already.
Then my mother dances the cancan at the British Cricket Club, flings her skirts above her head, but otherwise works to be a diplomat's wife. She makes curries and scones, cuts her own dresses from batik prints, haplessly freezes lettuce for a tropical picnic, gives birth to Maggy, and wears a white angel collar as she cradles her baby, her mouth the prim little plum. Then the young family moves to Canberra, home base, and I am born. Canberra was still fairly young for a city, and our house was a small bungalow in the hills, in a neighborhood being carved from the scrub, the trees and rocks around it ancient. I have one picture of my father holding me: A shadow falls upon his tilted face, and behind him spread the thin leaves of a bottlebrush or banksia. It's 1962.
At this point we move to Washington, and although my mother teaches, as she'd always do, something about her in the pictures grows wild. She's not suited for the diplomatic service, it seems; she's not happy. Her hair becomes tousled, and her expression, even her skin, seems darker. She wears sleeveless shifts that show her long limbs gleaming. As her hair grows, she looks less a neat concoction of the 1950s, more a reckless girl.
In 1965, she suns in the garden in a green bikini with her head thrown back and the book she's propped against her legs forgotten. I see my father pause at the window of our brick house and spy her — her legs liquid, face all light, troubling unsatisfied mouth sealed shut — and need to take this picture. The image appears in a sequence that begins with her as a slight figure in the green, then moves closer, snap by snap, until we stand above her as she sleeps, or thinks, or longs, or despairs, her eyes shut to the world and the sun. My father took many pictures in June and July 1965. Because she was beautiful and he wished to record her? There's no clue of what's to come. But she was going through a depression, she's told me, and did not seem made to be a diplomat's wife. In April her father had written, Dearest Rosemary, we are troubled not to have heard from you in so long. She was the one who had abandoned home and sailed into glamour and peril. The morning after writing this letter, grandfather Herbert had a heart attack in the silence of his deafness, as he stood at the bathroom mirror, shaving.
What I remember: my grandmother Dora coming to stay soon after; standing with Maggy on the hot front walk and sucking a sweet blue popsicle; swinging in Candy Cane City; racing Maggy in slippery new shoes until Maggy skidded into the staircase and split her head open, then the butterfly bandage on her forehead; eating toast buttered with Vegemite while my mother carried drinks to guests at a party; being bundled into a car in the dark as she cried, "We're packing up and leaving!" although she insists that this last is not true. I have no memory of my parents together, which may be why they look so unlikely a pair in those three slides and two photos, which an aunt showed me when I was twenty-three and first went back to Australia.
My husband and I sit in the dark in Germany and gaze at these images, cast upon a bedsheet we've hung over the kitchen's sliding glass doors. This story of my family: It's always felt like my most personal attribute, my worst and best secret, and whenever I meet anyone I might know awhile I need to tell it again. This story was the first I wrote, without even planning to. I was living in New Orleans, trying to be an illustrator while writing grant proposals at Tulane for a living, but found myself one weekend walking to my office, turning on the computer, and trying to push this family out of my ribs all at once as a simple story. That story was too short; it barely began. So I tried turning it into more stories and then a novel, but failed; I tried writing that novel again and again, but each version could not tell this. So I let the octopal story sink into my ribs and wished it would dissolve there, stop climbing into my throat. But it wouldn't, it doesn't, it keeps poking and pushing, and only now that the story seems to have ended can I try again to be free of it, even though my family will not welcome this.
In Germany, when I found the old slides in their metal box and brought them out to show my husband, I was trying to push out the story a new way, by drawing. A color-pencil portrait of my mother as she sits upon a huge whelk on a beach, like a forsaken Venus, surrounded by palms and bottle-brush, the Southern Cross faint in the dark sky behind her. I wanted to draw her young, and to get her nose and mouth right I chose three of my father's 1965 slides and projected the images in the dark bedroom upon sheets of paper taped to the wall. Her slender olive arms, her bright batik dress, her hair, fell as colored light on my hands as I traced her.
With Alex, now, I click through the slides: Maggy laughing in a red snowsuit, me staring at ducks in the Reflecting Pool, my mother at night in that batik shift, and again in her green bikini. She glows on the bedsheet in our cold German kitchen, larger than we are, the sheet wavering in the window's draft. We gaze up at her and sip our wine. But there's something else in the room as we look at her lit, because you can't sit in the space formed by projector and bright image and not sense the man who took that picture, the man who would be standing with his camera where you now sit with your hand at the carousel. I almost see the current that ran from my father to her as he focused, the energy of his watching like the beam of light that makes her flare to life on the sheet: This stream of watching made what was watched wanted. I stare at my glowing mother, her beautiful legs, her neck stretched bare, and imagine my father looking at her even more intently than I do. And then I can only imagine, or fail to imagine, what made him turn away.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Sisters Antipodes"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Jane Alison.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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