When Everything Changed: 2.

Continued from this post.

When my father remarried, he moved my brother and me far from sparkling rivers, hilly streets, craggy mountains and the surrounding sea – to the flat, dry Mallee where his new wife had house, business, and her own children older than us.

The river there was wide and sluggish. The few trees were small and squat. My stepmother lived near an expanse of grape vines, the primary industry there. We could walk into the village by crossing an irrigation channel spanned by a wide plank. I was terrified, but I learned to walk it confidently and alone. 

My new stepsister held my hand and showed me how to place my steps. She was 18 months older than me; we’d met when Dad brought his ‘new friend’ to our home town and introduced her around. They clearly wanted their daughters to chum up. With a love of reading in common, we did. But it was puzzling. When they married, it became instantly clear.

Merrie was often away long weeks at boarding school. When she was home, we lounged on her bed talking, sneakily smoking cigarettes she pinched from her mother’s stash. She taught me how to smoke. I was 16 by then; I wanted to be sophisticated.

Navigating my stepmother’s strange moods, strict edicts, bizarre accusations and weirder punishments, and my much older step-brother’s silent, glowering resentment, was even scarier when Merrie was away. 

Our father never defended us. The only time I asked, he said, ‘I’ve had one marriage break up and I won’t let you kids wreck another!’

When I told new friends at my new school what was happening at home, they frankly disbelieved me. I was already known as a writer, a dreamer. I must be making it up.

On holidays at home with Mum and our kind, fun stepfather, I said nothing. I wanted to escape from all thoughts of that. And I believed the court ruling – term time with Dad, holidays with Mum – couldn’t be changed.  

My brother said plenty, I learned years later; but without my corroboration they thought he must be exaggerating.

It took me months to realise my stepmother was drinking heavily. She masked the smell with strong perfume, sickly-sweet.

Written for Weekly Scribblings #81 at Poets and Storytellers United: Change and Renewal, where the invitation is to write of either or both.

When Everything Changed

The thing we never saw coming, my brother and I, was our parents’ divorce. It was in 1955. I was 15. My little brother was 11. 

They called me into my brother’s bedroom where he was playing, and said they had something to tell us both. We sat down on my brother’s bed, mystified at the sudden air of solemnity. 

It’s hard now to remember that room. It was the new house they’d built, not the one we grew up in. (‘When a marriage is breaking apart,’ someone told me years later, ‘People try and glue it back together with a new baby or a new house. It never works.’) There must have been chairs; I see them sitting across from us while Dad explained that people don’t always stay married and it didn’t mean they didn’t love us any more. 

Mum would move out, and live with ‘Uncle Jack’, a family friend, after he too got divorced. We could spend as much time as we liked with both parents.

I don’t remember us crying, or even asking questions. We went numb, I think.

I do remember feeling a surge of protectiveness towards my brother – genuine, but also in a strange, ‘this is what Good Girls do’ kind of way: a role I could take on, because I didn’t know how else to react. I always wanted to do what I thought was expected of me, what was right and good behaviour in my parents’ and the world’s eyes. I worked to be seen as normal, not the oddity I secretly feared I was.

But I didn’t know what would be expected of a normal girl in this situation. Being the protective big sister (whether he actually wanted that or not) was something I could get right.

Also it was a way of quietly punishing my parents, who were doing this dreadful, disrupting thing to us. ‘You are failing your duty,’ my secret self told them silently. ‘What you’ve abandoned is my job now; I won’t fail.’

I did, though. 

Dad, rebounding, suddenly married a widow from interstate, where we went to live during school terms – our real-life Wicked Stepmother, against whom, at 15, I had little power. 

Written for Weekly Scribblings #80: Sudden Moments, at Poets and Storytellers United. 

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