A crescent shaped moon

 

In the days when we were still young, before children, my husband and I delighted in holding ‘dinner parties’. These included an invitation to four or six friends, all of whom were ‘foodies’ like us, to offer friendship and fine dining. 

My husband likes to cook. To him it is an art, one he first cultivated in the kitchen of his mother’s house, but did not practise there so much as he observed her strictions and restrictions and decided what might be a better approach to vegetables drowned to death in boiling water or to meat drained of all juice. 

To this day he jokes that I led him to believe I, too, was a good cook. For the two or three years before I met him when I was with another partner, this man and I held what we called Gourmet Dinners This during the early seventies. 

People don’t write about the seventies much, not that I’ve noticed, but in these years, restaurant eating seemed to arrive in Melbourne and many elaborate establishments sprang up.

My specialty was Coquille St Jacques; scallops seated in the base of a cup and stewed in the oven under a thick covering of cream cheese and milk. Such a crucifixion of the humble scallop but I thought the dish magnificent. Only it was not. 

It’s not that I can’t cook. Or that I don’t care too much about the basics of cooking. It’s more my heart is not in it. Any more than I can speak for the effort required first in chopping – boring – and then the slow process of cooking one vegetable after another, in layers, as does my husband, according to which foodstuff needs more time under the flame.

We have long given up gourmet dinners and dinner parties but still the desire to eat well continues, especially for the evening meal which remains sacrosanct in my household. 

Lunch and breakfast more of a free fall. Whatever you fancy and usually eaten in front of a newspaper, computer screen or book, often alone. But dinner is sacred. 

When he’s not here, I revert to smoked salmon and avocado on rice cakes or some such, easy and tasty with lashings of taramasalata. And boiled eggs mashed in with mayonnaise. I love a boiled egg or poached. Something I could live on.

What is it about food that causes people to write about it ad nauseum? Travel writers who write for a living about their adventures elsewhere and food critics who write about their encounters with restaurants and other people’s cuisines.

In those early days in the happy dinner parties with beloved friends, one of whom is now dead, my husband was particular in his choice of wines. He and this friend joked about the quality of red wine, detectable if it there was a brown rim around the meniscus. The first time I learned this word. 

The meniscus a crescent shaped descriptor like the crescent moon.

And I have loved the notion ever since. My life feels to me to be a meniscus these days. Waning but still vibrant around the edges.

Letter to self

‘My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see.’ Joseph Conrad

To see things, you have not seen before. Of if you have noticed them before, to see them anew, with fresh eyes. To open your mind to other possibilities. The possibilities of hope. Not so much optimism which as Rebecca Solnit writes is a position from which people believing it will all be fine can kick back and wait for it all to be fine, as hope full of possibility. And as Solnit writes, ‘we have a responsibility to try to realise them, and not to realise the worst possibilities.’

Even as Sometimes it looks as though we’re headed there.

On this rain drenched day when  the drips on the plastic covering that protects the newspaper which waits out front for collection for the people in this house who love to read their news at the start of each day, is a beginning.

How about a letter?

You take a leaf from Adrienne Rich’s book of poems and try to write letters to yourself to flush out the secrets that hide there in the back of your mind refusing to dislodge, so concealed by the detritus of the present moment of the day ahead.

And if you can’t get to them, you dig back further into the dusty corners and drag out an old memory that leads you into the past, that foreign country which you once remembered with a child’s clear eye. But now it grows hazy.

You long for the days to come where memories of the past will creep on you with all the clarity of the moment they first happened. You can see this happening with your husband.

This man who has locked away so many cruel secrets of the things done to him, we could only detect them in his occasional outbursts of rage. Now they come thick and fast and they threaten to overwhelm him.

He hears the falling apart of Yeats poem. When the falcon cannot hear the falconer. He can no longer hoodwink himself that those events are gone. They trickle back with all the ferocity of what I imagine the falcon sees without its hood. A rabbit scurrying across a field.

Food for survival. But for my husband these memories turn him into the rabbit not the falcon and he cowers under bushes fearing for his life.

The terror of the abused child.

Why then in my dreams did three posh looking schoolboys ring my doorbell while I was home alone and insist they be allowed to move into my house? They stalked down to the kitchen living area and made themselves comfortable, while I ran out to the street and tried to find someone in a passing car who might stop and dial triple zero. 

Cars stopped, seemed concerned for me, but no one could manage the simple task of calling the police. So often in dreams I’m calling the police. The police to recuse me from these intruders. Who were in some ways harmless enough.

This dream the last of the morning morphed into another when the schoolboys finally left and were replaced by another group of older men and a woman who were like the mafia in their accents and appearance.

They parked their cars in my front garden and also talked about moving into my house for a time. And again, I’m out on the street trying to attract help from someone who might call the police.

I long for the sound of the police siren. Someone who will come along and arrest these intruders who have taken over my space such I do not feel safe in my own house. And I am terrified once more until I wake up.

This dream to me is a prelude to next week when my husband is away for two nights and I will be alone in this big house, a thing which rarely happens. Something I dread much as I try to remain stoical and not let others know of my fears.

I tell myself they are a residue of childhood. Those times of terror with my father. He still stalks my mind when I am all alone at night. When every sound, every creak of every floorboard, the hiss of wind in the trees, the screech of night bats can terrify me into the fear I am not after all alone, but some malevolent something or someone is present who wants to hurt me. Who wants to take over my body. Insert his penis into my delicate insides and I cannot sleep for fear of the glint of a knife blade in the dark, a hand across my mouth to silence my screams which can never come out in my dreams. And I run for the front door and out onto the street where I try to flag down passing cars desperate for help.

This is a recurring dream. The need to get out of my house to escape the intruder who is most often a man who wants to take me over in some way. Or rob me of what few valuables I own, or defile my space with his stench. To make my place no longer a haven.

Already I anticipate these nights, when I will leave on the lights that spill out into the back garden and the front so that the house is not shrouded in darkness which I prefer when I feel safe.

When I feel unsafe my preference is for darkness turned off into light everywhere so I can see what I am up against.

Like a child who fears the dark. And I marvel at the people I know, men and women alike, who live alone and do not hold the fears I carry. Who can spend each night in the solitude and comfort of their beds who do not fear every night for their lives against some unseen menace that visits me in dreams. The residue of a child spent in terror. 

And so, I imagine a life to come living in a community of like-minded souls, where we each might have separate rooms, but we are all close by to one another. Where we are safe and no one will venture past the front doors because the place is kept secure and there is no reason for any of the figures in my dreams to slip through my front door and invade my body and space.