Page 4 of Thursdays at Orange Blossom House
‘That’s what you get for being too smart,’ her mother once told her. ‘It never does a woman good to be too smart for a man.’
Not that Patricia’s resentful about that. It’s life. She knows it. A person just has to make the best of their lot. That’s what she tells herself every day, and she tries to do it with love. Her parents are her lot, and she loves them. They don’t necessarily understand her, or she them. They’re not her friends. But they’re the only set of parents she has and she’s not ungrateful for them.
As she turns to put her key in her car door she feels that twinge in her neck again, and gasps.
‘Bye, Marjorie,’ she says quickly, wanting to get in the car and hide her pain. Except Marjorie is looking at her with sympathy, so clearly that didn’t work.
‘I think you should come to that yoga class with me,’ she says, and this time her tone is firm. ‘Seriously.’
‘Okay,’ Patricia says, still wincing with pain, because in that moment she can’t think of an excuse and maybe, just maybe, it will help her with that twinge.
Marjorie nods slowly. ‘Good. I’ll give you the details tomorrow.’
‘Thanks, bye.’ Patricia hops into the car, closes the door and immediately winds down the window to let the heat escape.
Knowing she can’t touch the steering wheel for a few minutes, she sits and waves to Marjorie as she departs. Then, gingerly, she puts the key in the ignition, lightly touches the steering wheel, and drives off to deal with whatever is waiting for her at home.
CHAPTER THREE
The café door is shut after the last of the customers and Dorothy wants nothing more than to pull out one of the chairs and collapse into it. Maybe Frederick could bring her a nice glass of wine. Or not. She’s not meant to be drinking alcohol. The doctor told her that if she wants to give herself the best chance of holding a pregnancy she should eliminate a few things. Like wine. And coffee. And cigarettes. All the things she likes.
‘Will that really help?’ she’d asked him, wondering how she was meant to manage the stress of all this without her indulgences to fall back on.
‘It won’t harm,’ he’d said, peering over half-moon glasses. ‘And given that you’ve had three miscarriages it’s advisable to do something different, don’t you think? You’re old to be trying to have a baby. Thirty-four is, well …’ More peering. ‘Not youn-g.’ He enunciated the ‘g’ as if it was a separate syllable. For emphasis, of course.
What would you know?she’d wanted to say to him.You’ll never get pregnant. You don’t know what this feels like.
Nobody knows what this feels like. Dorothy hasn’t met any woman who’s had one miscarriage, let alone three. When she enquired – as gently as possible – if it’d ever happened to any of the women she knows well enough to ask, they all said, ‘Of course not!’ So she’s the defective breeder. Four years of trying, three babies lost.
She feels Frederick’s hands on her shoulders, kneading the knots that have been there for longer than she’s been trying to become a mother. His willingness to massage her shoulders wasn’t the main reason she married him, but it was a factor.
‘You carry the weight of the world here,’ he had told her once, and she couldn’t disagree. Dorothy tends to worry about things – worrying is, as her mother says, her natural habitat – and the worries take up residence in her body, to make room for new worries in her mind. If she understood better how all that works, she might be inclined to think that because she’s so full of worries there’s no room for a baby. But that’s nonsense.
‘You’re being irrational, Dorothy.’ That’s what the same doctor had told her when she mentioned that she was feeling overwhelmed by her life: running the café, paying the bills, managing the housework, all the things she has to do as well as trying to get a pregnancy to last longer than a few weeks. So overwhelmed that she felt like she could never be a good mother, so maybe it was just as well that she wasn’t any kind of mother.
And that’s what she tells herself every day now, when the worries start:You’re being irrational, Dorothy. It doesn’t really work, though.
‘That was a busy day, my darling,’ Frederick says as he continues to massage her shoulders, his strong fingers causing pain, just the way she likes it. She wants to feel that something has moved. Changed.
‘Mmm,’ she says, closing her eyes and leaning back towards him. ‘Where did all those people come from?’
A large tour group had appeared just before midday, saying they’d heard there was proper German food to be had here. They’d asked her name and immediately said, ‘But you must be a Dorothea, not a Dorothy.’
She’d wondered how they knew. Her family had moved to Cairns from Germany when she was a child and she was sure there were no traces of her German accent left. Of course, her thick blonde plait makes her look like a poster child for the Third Reich – something she has wrestled with – but it’s her natural hair colour so she is loath to change it. Maybe the tourists were just guessing. It made her feel uneasy, though.
Dorothy likes to think of herself as a proper Aussie. Her parents left their country and their past and the Second World War behind when they came here, wanting their children to be Australians, not Germans. Australia had its problems, but they didn’t include two wars being fought on its soil. Then she had to go and marry a German.
Frederick had been travelling around Australia, a backpacker with strong, tanned German legs and a rough beard. He’d stopped in Cairns because he wanted to see the Daintree Rainforest. Instead, he’d seen Dorothy wiping tables in a little café with a view of the water and, he told her later, he knew he wasn’t going to travel any further. ‘I found home,’ he’d said.
She hadn’t understood that, really, because she didn’t know how a person could feel like home. But once they married she did. Frederick belongs with her, and she belongs with him. In the whole wide world, they managed to find each other. He is the one thing she doesn’t worry about, because she knows she loves him and he loves her.
‘You haven’t been sleeping very well, have you?’ he murmurs as he digs his thumb into the persistent knot near her right shoulder blade.
‘How do you know?’
‘I know,’ he says. ‘I can feel it when you wake.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, because she doesn’t want to inconvenience him.
