Alice Munro in her short story Dear Life, which she tells her readers is largely autobiographical, unlike the rest of her so-called fiction, describes how when she is four years old her mother produces a baby, seemingly out of nowhere. She then tells Alice, the baby is a gift to her, something Alice had wanted. And then, a year later, another baby, this time a girl and again her mother insists Alice wants this gift.
At which point it occurs to the young Alice, her mother has notions about her which do not coincide with her notions about herself.
I shared a similar sense of my mother who gave me her name at birth. The moment I was baptised under the weight of my mother’s full name, Elisabeth Margaretha Maria I felt the pressure of her projections.
She imagined from then on I would be good like her. She could not believe when the shop keeper caught me stealing chocolate bars from the counter it could have been me. It must have been a younger sister, not me.
The weight of such expectations creates a tendency in a person, , to develop a quality of deceptiveness to hide all my sins. And there were many even into adulthood when my mother could not believe I might reject the Catholic Church or indulge in extra marital sex with a boyfriend or two.
Alice Munro tries to accommodate her mother’s fantasies about the child she is and travels along as if her mother’s expectations are correct until in her early teens she finds she cannot sleep at night and takes to getting out of bed early even before the sun rises to walk around outside the otherwise sleeping household.
On one such morning when she crawls out of bed ready for her morning stroll into the oblivion of mindless walking, she notices her sister, younger by five years, asleep in her bed.
The impulse flashes through Alice she could strangle this sister then and there. The thought horrifies the young Alice who scuttles into the early morning and much to her surprise encounters her father who is also up in his day clothes and seemingly ready for the day.
The two exchange a good morning greeting in a way her family never acknowledges to one another, and she finds herself talking to her father.
He asks if she’s having trouble sleeping and she tells him about her unbidden thoughts. People sometimes have such thoughts, her father tells her unfazed, much to Alice’s relief.
The impulse to hurt another person sits alongside an impulse I experienced when I, too, was in my early teens.
One day I left our house on Warrigal Road, the house facing Cox Street which ends at Warrigal Road. My brother and I decided to walk together to six o’clock Saturday mass.
A revolutionary event soon after the church decreed it was okay to miss Sunday Mass and go instead on a Saturday evening allowing for greater flexibility in the lives of hard-core Catholics, those who believed if they so much as missed Sunday Mass through faults of their own were destined for hell.
My brother and I crossed the treacherous Warrigal Road ahead of the cars speeding by in clusters of two or three. We waited till both lanes, right and left, were clear before we dared step off the curb.
I wore a red muumuu in honour of the summer evening breeze, the sun still hot from a sticky day behind us and heating us up as we walked side by side along Cox Street turning the corner into Herald, then Robross, and upwards to Lorna and Silver Streets past the East Cheltenham Primary School and onto Centre Dandenong Road with the final stretch to Our Lady of Assumption church.
On one such side street whose name escapes me, past cream brick veneer look-alikes with their ordered gardens, so neat not a weed dared poke up its head, we fell into silence.
Left with my thoughts, a nasty one popped into my head. What if my brother pushed me into that clump of bushes and had his way with me.
I did not form the word rape, too fierce and dangerous a word and not part of the lexicon the nuns taught at school. I knew though about men having their way with women. Though I could not imagine them ripping off clothes, or of body parts shooting into other bodies in the jarring way my imagination forced upon me.
My brother was a reserved boy and did not often speak except to tell me things he learned at school. He was the smartest person in my family. This I knew because he was a year ahead of me, all seventeen months older, and unlike me, won prizes for almost every subject through physics and chemistry into languages, French, English and Latin. He studied history and geography, mathematics.
He told me the stories of Ulysses and his great Odyssey across the world, His encounters with the Cyclops, the one-eyed race of giants who keep sheep.
The stories merged in my imagination, and I could see the Greek Islands and the blue seas of the Aegean, the tall ships he sailed. The one where he ordered his sailors to tie him to the mast and plug their ears so they could not hear the alluring sirens sing and insist they sail towards them and so be dashed against the rocks. While he, tied to his pillar, could listen to the music without any danger.
My brother trotted on alongside me. His hands in his pockets, his eyes downwards as though he was contemplating a complex mathematical equation or studying the lines in the concrete with no thoughts for me his younger sister at his side.
Like Alice Munro my unbidden thoughts troubled me. I could not do a thing with them. Unlike Alice who had a father she could tell, I had no one. Not a soul. I tucked the thought into the back of my mind and from time to time, drag it out for re-examination.
Is this what happens between boys and girls, men, and women, or is it the stuff of our imaginations, only I know better now.
Have you seen Philomena Cunk on Netflix? This seemingly naive woman who interviews learned people of our day on many subjects.
She asks one cultural commentator to name his favourite literary romantic hero.
He chooses Lord Byron.
Why Byron? she asks.
Byron was a bad boy, our commentator replies. He had sex with his sister, and with most other women in England. But he wrote the masterpiece Don Juan, among other brilliant pieces.
Philomena Cunk cannot get past the idea Byron had sex with his sister. She cannot see how this can make anyone a literary hero.
She has a point.
It’s his writing, our interviewee tells Cunk, but she won’t let it go.
How well I know that feeling.
