Page 24 of Thursdays at Orange Blossom House
‘No,’ he says.
‘Why not?’
‘I didn’t know they’d be shut.’
He sounds miffed, as if she’s somehow let him down. But, of course, the reason he doesn’t know that they’re shut is because he doesn’t do the shopping. Never has, never will.
Patricia sighs, because that’s the only form of protest she can lodge. ‘Okay, Dad. I’ll talk to her.’
She finds her mother sitting on the couch in the living room, knees and ankles pressed together, shoulders back, spine straight, handbag on her lap. In the time Patricia has taken to do the ironing her mother has managed to dress herself in a twin set that’s more suited to a colder climate but which she’s had in her wardrobe for aeons. Her eyes are sharp, alert, and staring at her daughter.
Patricia never knows which version of her mother she’ll get but it looks like this morning’s is more present than usual.
‘I hear you want to go out, Mum,’ she says.
‘Don’t talk to me as if I’m a child,’ comes the rebuke.
Patricia flinches. This is her real mother, and she hasn’t encountered her for a while. Immediately she is on guard, even though she knows she doesn’t have the same weapons as those in the arsenal her mother’s been drawing from all these years.
‘Sorry, Mum, I didn’t mean to.’
‘Of course you did, you stupid girl.’ Now her mother’s eyes are flint, the dark grey colour of her rage that Patricia recalls so well. ‘You always mean the ridiculous things you do.’
Patricia feels her breath leave her, and can’t breathe in again because her lungs are full of fear and memories and a desperate desire to escape. She is fifteen again. Or nine. Or seventeen. Every age from birth to the time when she moved out to get away from this.
But she’s forty-six now and shouldn’t be so affected by an elderly woman who is no longer in control of her faculties. This version of her mother will disappear soon. Patricia just has to wait, and try to not condescend lest she provoke a similar response. She’ll go with appeasement instead.
‘I suppose I have done some ridiculous things,’ she says mildly, glancing up to see her father watching from the doorway.
He never used to see his wife treating her youngest child differently to the others; never understood why Patricia didn’t want to spend much time at the house. So he probably thinks this current performance is an aberration instead of a glimpse into who his wife really used to be.
Her mother sniffs and pulls her handbag closer. Almost as if she thinks Patricia is going to try to take it. ‘Letting Bradley go – that was the most ridiculous,’ she says snippily. ‘A perfectly nice young man. All the prospects in the world. Wanted to marry you. But ohno, he wasn’t good enough for you. You had to go to Sydney.’
Her mother’s stare is cold, as it was the first time Patricia heard this speech over twenty years ago. Versions of it have been uttered since, but none since she moved back into the house. She knows that the best thing to do is let her mother say her piece, then change the subject. Her high-school boyfriend, Bradley, is the only boyfriend her parents know about so he’s the one her mother fixates on as the man Patricia should have married. Bradley was sweet and dull; perfect in high school but not for adulthood. He married the girlfriend he took up with after Patricia and was a father by twenty-three. As far as Patricia knows, they’re still married. Good for them.
‘Bradley and I weren’t well suited enough for marriage, Mum,’ she says gently, as she always does.
‘Suited?’ Her mother purses her lips. ‘All this nonsense people go on with. You don’t wait for anyone whosuits you. You take the first person who asks you or youmiss out. And you havemissed out.’
Patricia again glances at her father. He seems unbothered, even though her mother has basically admitted to marrying him because he was the first person who asked. Perhaps it works both ways. Perhaps her mother was the first woman to accept him.
Patricia didn’t want to marry someone just because he was there, or be proposed to just because she happened to be there. Yes, she’s missed out. And yes, she is reminded of that constantly when she sees women younger than her with their husbands and babies. She had chances with men who pursued her, men who promised the world, but the world never materialised. She’s been told she’s too picky. That her standards are too high. That’s why she’s committed the cardinal sin of ending up alone.
Her standards are hers, though, and she doesn’t believe she has to explain them to anyone else. Being alone isn’t the worst thing in the world. Being lonely is far more unbearable, and that can happen just as well inside a marriage as out of it.
‘I guess I have, Mum,’ she says. ‘I can drive you past the shops to see if anything’s open, but I can’t guarantee that anything will be.’
Her mother’s eyes shift focus, her brow furrows, and she looks down at her handbag as if she’s never seen it before.
‘Shops? Why are we going to the shops?’
Patricia hears a noise of dismay from her father and wants to make one herself. But she won’t because it will achieve nothing.
‘I just thought it would be nice to take a drive,’ she says, because she doesn’t want to confuse things further. The story her mother knows is ever changing but Patricia likes to keep it on some sort of track.
‘All right.’ Her mother puts her handbag aside and slowly gets to her feet. ‘Let’s go and visit Annette.’
If only they could. If only Patricia could drive her mother all the way to New South Wales and let her sister take care of things for a change.
