Three Wishes, Page 27

  Gemma looked down at her own magazine and wondered what relationship advice she would give Kara.

  She saw Kara swirling a new dress for her boyfriend, flushed and silly, saying "I love you" for the first time. She saw the boyfriend suddenly slamming kitchen drawers, his face ugly with rage. She saw herself striding into the kitchen, ignoring the boyfriend (just a boy after all, a gigantic little boy throwing a tantrum, there was nothing complex or mysterious about it), and taking Kara firmly by the elbow and marching her right on out of the kitchen. No, it's not normal. No, it's not your fault. Walk away now, young lady.

  "But I'm wearing a new dress!" Kara would whine. "I want to drink champagne!"

  He's going to do it again, you silly little girl! He's going to do it again, again, and again until there's nothing left of you.

  "Are you all right?" Cat waved a hand in front of Gemma's face. "What's the matter? You've gone all red." She lowered her voice. "You haven't wet your pants, have you?"

  Gemma gave a yelp of laughter and Cat stood up decisively. "Right. I'm going to see how long this is going to take."

  A few minutes later, thanks to Cat's stand-over tactics, Gemma was lying on her back, while a cheerful, blue-uniformed girl called Nicki rubbed a gooey cold gel across her stomach.

  "It's my sister's baby," she explained to Nicki, so she'd treat Cat like someone important. "She's adopting it for me."

  Nicki didn't even blink at that, which was nice of her. "O.K. then, Mum," she said to Cat. She gestured up at the TV monitor on the wall. "Keep your eye on that screen."

  Cat smiled stiffly and crossed her arms awkwardly across her chest. She'll be wishing it was her and Dan here, thought Gemma, making their cool little jokes, holding hands while they watched their baby. Perhaps she should try and hold Cat's hand? Except Cat would be aghast, of course.

  Nicki began to rub a little instrument back and forth over Gemma's stomach as if she were giving it a gentle polish. "In just a minute your baby will make his or her first public appearance!"

  "We don't want to know the sex," said Cat sharply.

  "My lips are sealed," said Nicki.

  Cat dropped her arms by her side as a grainy, alien landscape emerged on the screen. "Oh look!"

  "It looks like the moon," said Gemma, not really believing this picture had anything to do with her body; they probably showed the same picture to everyone. It probably was the moon.

  "Let me give you the guided tour," said Nicki and she began to point out parts of the baby. The spine. The legs. The feet. The heart. Gemma smiled and nodded politely, fraudulently. It was nothing but fuzzy static. Change the channel, she imagined saying. Put something more interesting on. Cat on the other hand, seemed to genuinely believe she was looking at a baby. "Oh yes, I see," she kept saying, and her voice was all shaky and full of some lovely maternal emotion that Gemma definitely was not feeling.

  "Only one baby," observed Nicki. "No twins."

  "Or triplets," said Gemma.

  "Heaven forbid!" chuckled Nicki.

  That night, while Gemma did her house-sitting duties--chatting with the Violets, dusting dozens of tiny ornaments, listening to Mary Penthurst's unappealing older sister, Frances, deliver her weekly phone lecture--another layer of her consciousness continued to consider the suddenly very urgent relationship advice for Kara.

  "I was only saying to my friend today," said Frances in her thin querulous voice, as if she were making this observation for the first time, "what an incredible amount of rent you must be saving!" It was a common complaint from the relatives of house-sitting clients, and Gemma knew exactly the right response--excessive gratitude.

  "I know! I am solucky! Every morning I think, I am solucky!"

  Frances grunted but was mollified and moved on to the garden. "You did plant Mary's sweet peas on St. Patrick's Day? She's been doing that religiously for the last twenty years, you know! It's a funny little ritual of hers." Gemma said, "I certainly did!" and imagined Kara cowering on a lounge, while her boyfriend raged about the way she'd flirted with one of his friends. Everyone saw it, said the boyfriend. Everyone was so embarrassed for me. You acted like such a dumb, stupid slut.

  Gemma felt a white-hot flame of rage ignite like a blowtorch. No, it's not proof of how much he loves you! Please, sweetie, I know it seems hard, but just leave. It's easy really. Stand up and walk out the door. But Kara just sat there, in a stupor of fear and shame and apathy, and Gemma understood.

  "You've been remembering to air that musty back room?" asked Frances.

  "Absolutely," said Gemma.

  When Frances finally wilted and hung up, Gemma called Kara.

  "Have you got a new boyfriend?"

  "No. Why are you asking that? Did Cat say something? She promised!"

  "No, no! I just wondered. Look, Kara, it's really important if you do get a boyfriend, that he's really nice to you. O.K.? All the time. Not just some of the time. All the time."

  There was silence. "O.K.," said Kara slowly. "Thanks, Gemma. Um. Friends is about to start."

  "Oh! Sorry. Bye then."

  She put down the phone and laughed out loud, imagining the condescending, "What a loony!" expression on Kara's face. She would have plunked herself in front of the television and not given her step-auntie's weird advice another thought.

  Gemma sat down on the Penthursts' soft floral sofa, which made her knees slide up to her chin, and stopped pretending to talk to Kara.

  You were nineteen. You didn't imagine it. You didn't deserve it. You didn't secretly like it. When he died, it was weird and confusing. Of course it was. You loved him as much as you hated him. I'm sorry for being so nasty about it for all this time.

  "I forgive you," she said out loud. Who, Marcus? the Violets called out nosily from the windowsill.

  No! I never stopped forgiving him! Me. I forgive me for staying with him. A pressure she didn't know she was feeling suddenly released. It felt like she was unclenching her fists for the first time in a decade.

  Someone did a ladylike little fart during "Beginner Yoga for Mums-to-Be."

  At the time everyone was lying flat on their backs, eyes shut, pinned to blue foam mats. The lights were dimmed and the cross-legged teacher was delivering gentle, melodic instructions: "Breathe in...one, two, three...and out...one, two, three."

  Gemma's pupils danced behind her eyelids. That was not the slightest bit funny, she told herself sternly. You are not a schoolboy.

  "Excuse me!" The frothy hint of a giggle in the culprit's voice was irresistible. All around her Gemma sensed the quivering vibrations of chortling, pregnant women.

  "Breathe in..." continued the teacher reprovingly, but it was too late, the class united in a gale of warm laughter.

  And at that moment, as Gemma laughed with them, she felt a small but unmistakable movement in her belly, like the delicate flutter of a butterfly's wings. It wasn't like those other peculiar tummy rumbles she'd been experiencing; this was separate from her, yet part of her. Well, hello there, little butterfly baby! So, you really are in there! Do you think it's funny too?

  As the class pulled themselves together and the teacher resumed her chanting, a single tear slid down Gemma's cheek and straight into her ear, where it tickled.

  Hello, sweetie! I'm your Auntie Gemma.

  "It's absolutely gorgeous." Gemma stood in Cat's spare room surveying the exquisite nursery that was emerging. "You're so clever!"

  "Yes, I am." Cat looked content in her yellow paint-splattered overalls, a glass of red wine, a bag of pretzels, and a portable stereo on the floor next to her. "I didn't realize home improvement could be so therapeutic. And check this out, I've been stocking up!" She opened the linen cupboard to reveal neatly stacked shelves of baby stuff--bibs, booties, disposable nappies, fluffy blankets. "Lyn's been giving me things."

  "Oh, good! She must be coming around to the idea."

  "I don't think so. Every time she hands something over, she says, "Don't think this means I approve!"
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br />   "She might need that stuff for herself if she gets pregnant."

  "She told me yesterday they've revised the five-year plan. They're going to wait until Maddie is three. She wants to expand the business this year, set up a franchise operation."

  "Gosh. She's so driven."

  "Michael told her he was leaving her if she didn't hire an assistant."

  "Oh, that's so lovely of him!"

  "Yes, I was pleased with him. What's your five-year plan, by the way? What are you going to do once the baby is born?" Cat gave her a sudden keen look.

  "I work on five-minute plans," said Gemma. "But lately, I have been thinking about getting a real job. Maybe I'll go back to teaching. Or study again. Or maybe I'll travel for a bit!"

  "Gosh, Gemma," Cat picked up her wineglass and grinned at her. "You're so driven."

  In August, when Gemma was seven months pregnant, Frank moved back into the family home at Turramurra.

  A few weeks after, Maxine--not fooling anyone with her lighthearted tone--organized a "casual" family dinner. At the last minute Michael had to work, Nana got a better offer, and Kara offered to stay home and mind Maddie. So, for the first time in twenty-seven years, Frank, Maxine, and their three daughters found themselves sitting self-consciously around the dinner table.

  "Well, I hope you girls all eat your vegetables these days!" Frank joked heartily, and then quickly jammed a huge forkful of food into his mouth, as if he'd heard his own words and realized how inappropriate they were, because the long-ago battles over vegetables hadn't really been that funny.

  When they were in kindergarten, Cat developed a psychotic aversion to "green-colored food." "No green!" she'd cry passionately, as if it were a religious belief. In Gemma's memory there wasn't a dinnertime where Maxine hadn't raged, "You're not leaving the table until you've finished every scrap on that plate!" They'd argue violently back and forth until Frank would suddenly explode, "Oh for Christ's sake, leave the child alone!" and then it was no longer about Cat eating her vegetables, it was about Mum and Dad and hard, hating words and silent, vicious chewing and the cross clatter and scrape of cutlery across plates. "I'll eat them!" Gemma would offer desperately. "I love green!" Lyn, her plate cleared, would say in a tired, grown-up voice, "May I be excused?"

  There was a moment's loaded silence around the table. "Of course they like their vegetables now. They all became vegetarians when they were teenagers," observed Maxine, who had never forgiven Cat for being the one to instigate that "ludicrous little phase."

  "Can someone pass the broccoli?" asked Cat gravely.

  "Will you make the baby eat vegetables?" Gemma asked Cat.

  "Of course."

  "Oh, of course, she says!" Maxine snorted. "As if it's easy! Tell her, Lyn!"

  Lyn said, "Let her discover it for herself."

  Gemma watched Cat's shoulders relax at this apparent acceptance of her soon-to-be-mother status.

  "Cat will be a wonderful mum," said Frank, reaching down the table to refill wineglasses, "just like my beautiful Max."

  Maxine rolled her eyes. "I'm sure I'm not her choice of role model."

  "Of course you are, Mum," said Cat. "Look how brilliantly we all turned out!"

  "Hear, hear!" said Frank while Maxine smiled a little dubiously and said, "I was just a silly young kid. So were you, Frank. Good Lord! Two kids trying to bring up three little girls."

  That night Gemma put the headphones onto her stomach for the baby's nightly Mozart concert.

  "Hello, there! How's life in the float tank?" she asked. Over the last few months, she'd been neglecting the Violets while she talked to the baby, but they didn't seem to be suffering. In fact they were fat and flourishing, as if they were enjoying the fertile atmosphere.

  "Your mum's going to make you eat all your vegetables, you know," Gemma said. "I hope you don't mind the color green. Anyway, if you do, we can have a talk about it. There are other colored vegetables after all!"

  She switched on the tape and began to compile a list of useful things to tell the baby--little tips for a happier life that Cat might forget, or might not know.

  Never laugh when you don't really get the joke.

  Stay right away from fireworks. Oh my goodness, stay right away from them!

  TV sucks out your brain cells. Don't be a couch potato! Use the ad breaks productively for homework, housework, and other administrative tasks.

  Avoid the lethal combination of bourbon and salt-and-vinegar chips.

  Look both ways before you cross the road. Bothways.

  Try not to saddle yourself with too distinct a personality too early in life. It might not suit you later on.

  Say thank you to toll collectors. Your mum collected tolls once. Toll collectors are human beings.

  She meant your Auntie Gemma, of course. Not your mum. Auntie Gemma.

  CHAPTER 23

  The birthday dinners had started in their mid-twenties. They were Lyn's idea. "No partners," she had said. "Just the three of us. Seeing as we never give each other presents, it could be our present to ourselves."

  "How very sisterly," said Cat. "How very triplety."

  "It's a wonderful idea. I second it!" Gemma interrupted, as Lyn began to pinch her nose. "I know! We can each have our own birthday cake!"

  And so the annual drunken Birthday Bash became an institution.

  So you could say it was all Lyn's fault really.

  This year they went to a new seafood restaurant in Cockle Bay, with shiny wooden floorboards, disdainful white walls, and sleek chrome chairs. The kitchen was a square box in the center of the room with narrow, horizontal windows revealing bobbing chefs' hats and occasional, rather alarming, fiery explosions.

  "I hate it when you can see the kitchen staff," said Lyn. "It makes me feel stressed."

  "You love feeling stressed," said Cat.

  "You don't know me at all."

  "Oh no. You're just a casual acquaintance."

  A waitress with a blue-and-white-striped apron and a distressing row of silver studs under her bottom lip appeared at their table, her arms stretched wide around a giant blackboard. "Tonight's specials," she said, plunking down the board and flexing her fingers. "We're out of oysters and scallops, blue-eyed cod, and trout."

  "Why don't you just rub out what you don't have?" asked Cat. "Is it just to torture us?"

  The waitress shrugged, and her eyes flickered. "Ha-ha."

  "Let's share the seafood fondue," interrupted Gemma.

  "Could we get this opened soon, do you think?" asked Lyn pointedly, nodding her head at Michael's contribution to the evening--a bottle of Bollinger.

  "What's the occasion, ladies?" sighed the waitress, sounding like a jaded hooker, as she lifted an expert elbow, popped the cork, and began to pour their glasses.

  "It's our birthday," said Gemma. "We're triplets!"

  "Yeah? Oh, yeah?" The hand holding the bottle hovered precariously off course as she looked at them. Lyn reached over and navigated the glass under the liquid.

  "How cool!" The waitress grinned. "Hey! You two are the same, right!"

  "Five bucks and you can get your photo taken with us," said Cat.

  After their first sips of champagne, their moods became fizzy and frivolous. Lyn suddenly revealed a bizarre phobia about parking lots, at which Cat and Gemma howled with delight. "Thanks for your sensitivity," she said.

  "All parking lots?" asked Cat. "Do they have to be like, I don't know, twenty-four-hour parking lots to be scary?"

  "Actually, I'm sure I've got that phobia too," said Gemma.

  "You do not," said Lyn. "I'm the interesting one."

  "O.K., if we're doing secrets," said Cat and revealed that a few months after breaking up with Dan she'd gotten drunk and slept with her boss.

  Gemma was genuinely shocked. "But I met him at your office. He was a gray-haired man in a suit and tie! I can't believe you slept with such a grown-up!"

  "I sleep with a forty-year-old every night," commented Lyn.


  "Oh, don't worry, Michael's not a grown-up."

  "He'll be relieved to hear that."

  "So what secrets have you got, Gemma?" asked Cat. "As if we wouldn't already know them."

  Gemma, her mouth full of bread roll, considered sharing the secret she'd been lugging around for the last twelve years: My dead fiance was...problematic.

  "Look at her! Trying to look mysterious," giggled Lyn.

  She was never going to tell them. It was too complicated and at the same time too simple.

  She said, "Once I stole ten dollars from Mum's purse to buy cigarettes."

  "That was me, you idiot!" said Cat.

  "How are we doing? We ready to move on to that second bottle yet?" The waitress had become their good mate, Olivia, who lived at Padstow and was taking a massage course and had a pregnant sister-in-law and had never met triplets, although her best friend in primary school was a twin.

  Olivia had clearly decided they were lovable freaks of nature, adorable madcaps. As a result, the three of them were starting to behave like, in Nana Kettle's words, "real characters!"

  A waiter laden with seafood platters struggled by. "Triplets!" called Olivia proudly, pointing downward fingers at their heads. Obligingly, they all beamed and gave quirky waves.

  The waiter smiled cautiously.

  "Retard," said Olivia. "By the way, don't look now, but that man over there--I said don't look!"

  They all turned back to look at her guiltily. "He asked if you could keep the noise down. I'm like, Take a chill pill, wanker! So, I reckon, crank up the volume! He needs to get a life."

  They promised her they'd do their best to be even noisier.

  She disappeared. "She's sort of cool, that Olivia," said Lyn. "I think I'm going to start being cooler now I'm thirty-four."

  "Cool people, like Olivia, like me, are born cool," said Cat. "You can't change your fundamental dorky personality."

  "That's not true!" cried Lyn. "You can be whoever you want to be!"

  "Don't give me that self-help psychobabble bullshit."

  "No fighting, please," said Gemma. "It's bad for the baby."

  With the baby due in just three weeks, she was feeling superior and ladylike in her sobriety, carefully monitoring her first glass of champagne while Lyn and Cat were draining their third.