Page 68 of Thursdays at Orange Blossom House
‘The lettuce will get soggy by the time everything else is ready,’ Patricia says exasperatedly.
Annette shoves the salad back into the fridge. ‘I’m just trying tohelp! Peter, why aren’t you doing something to help?’
‘You girls have it all worked out,’ he says, then salutes them with his beer and leaves.
Patricia catches the sharp glance Annette sends her way. When they were younger they’d occasionally be in agreement about one thing: that Peter was skating through life, mainly because their parents thought the sun shone out of him.
‘If you were really trying to help,’ Patricia tells her sister, ‘you’d come up here every now and again and give me a break.’
She stops and presses her hands on the kitchen bench. She hadn’t meant to say that, and she knows how it will be received. So there’s only one thing to do now.
‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m just tired.’
Annette looks mildly triumphant for a second, then something else settles on her face. Something that looks almost like care, if not concern.
‘It’s school holidays now,’ she says, ‘so you shouldn’t be as tired.’
Patricia keeps pressing her hands down to stop herself telling Annette that it isn’t school that makes her tired. That it actually energises her to be around the students, because while some of them will never be interested in learning, several of them are, and each year she has the chance to encourage a young person to open their mind and dream and discover. The tiredness she feels now is a tiredness of spirit, not of body. It’s the tiredness of defeat, of knowing that for all her efforts to look after her mother properly, she can’t do it on her own. It’s the tiredness of having no way out; of knowing that this is her life for the next however long.
The GP says her mother is in fine physical condition and could go on like this for years. Many years. But Patricia doesn’t know ifshecan. When the road only has one destination, being stuck on it in a car with no change in gear and no way to unlock the doors is a deeply unpleasant sensation, made worse by the knowledge that part of you doesn’t want to get off that road because it’s duty that put you on it in the first place, and wanting to get off means you’re failing in your commitment to the ones you love.
But there’s something else Patricia’s been learning: that she has to put herself first. Because she can’t take care of her parents properly if she can’t take care of herself. Yet so much in her life is preventing her from doing that. She can almost feel her breaking point coming, and desperately wants to stop herself before it does. Yet here are her sister and her brother, with no intention of helping her. And they will be the first to criticise if she can’t adequately care for their parents.
They are never going to see her point of view, though. That wouldn’t be in their interest. She’s here, doing the job they should all be sharing; they have no incentive to change things. So it’s up to her to work out how to look after herself while also continuing to take care of her responsibilities, and never mentioning the juggle to any of her siblings because they simply don’t care. For now, seeming to agree with Annette would feel not like surrender but safeguarding her own wellbeing.
‘You’re right,’ Patricia says. ‘I shouldn’t be tired.’
Annette gives a little nod of her head. ‘I’ll come back later to do the salad,’ she says, turning away.
‘Thank you.’
Alone again, Patricia puts her elbows on the counter and her head in her hands and lets herself cry for ten seconds, then goes back to what she was doing before she was interrupted.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Another trip south, another occasion to feel both wretched and hopeful. Except this time they drive the first stretch through torrential rain, thanks to the advent of the wet season in the far north. In the back seat, Dorothy clutches her abdomen and wishes she could fall into a hole instead of returning to a city that is still strange to her and will always be.
‘Ovarian hyperstimulation,’ her doctor in Cairns told her when she went to see him with a bloated belly and more pain than any period had ever given her. Apparently it’s a not uncommon side effect of the hormones she’s been injecting herself with to stimulate the follicles in her ovaries – as the name suggests.
Her doctor also told her that it can be quite dangerous and that perhaps she shouldn’t go to Brisbane. But Dorothy said that would be a waste of her overstimulated ovaries, because if she doesn’t go to Brisbane what point is there in taking all those hormones? The solution, her doctor said, was for Dorothy to lie on the back seat and to try not to ‘agitate’ herself.
However, being un-agitated isn’t really an option when she feels like this: not so much as if she’s a ripe watermelon as a fermenting one. She can almost feel her follicles popping out eggs – except the doctor said that was clearly a figment of her imagination and she could try being less fanciful.
Dorothy wanted to tell him to try being her for half an hour and see how much he likes it. Instead she smiled and thanked him and left. There was no prescription that could help her apart from ‘stop taking the hormones’, and having come this far that’s not advice she’s prepared to follow. This baby is a project now, and one she has to believe in.
Sandrine said the other day that if Dorothy couldn’t believe in the baby no one else was going to do it for her. ‘And you want thebébéto feel welcome,non?’
The simple way she said it – as if the baby’s arrival is a matter of time, not chance – made Dorothy feel more confident than she has since the process started. Sandrine would no doubt say that Dorothy has taken control of her own mind and that has made the difference in her attitude. Perhaps it has. But she didn’t arrive at this new awareness without doing all the work in yoga class, and trying to meditate outside it.
That’s why she’s brought some yoga books with her to keep her company while she’s in Brisbane. She ordered a couple at the local bookshop after Sandrine recommended them, and orderedYoga Journalfrom the newsagent, who seemed to think it was a magazine for nudists and ‘those bloody vegetarians’. Obviously he believes that nudists and vegetarians are of a piece. Dorothy hasn’t met a nudist and has barely met a vegetarian so she can’t really say.
‘How are you feeling,Liebling?’ Frederick asks.
Dorothy hates that he has to sit in the front alone, like a chauffeur. She isn’t very good company for him in her horizontal position across the back seat.
‘The same,’ she says, trying to make her voice sound strong. He’s probably sick of her sounding weak; she certainly is. ‘The doctor said it could last for a few days. I guess it will stop when they take the eggs.’
‘I suppose you can’t sleep lying like that,’ he says sympathetically.
