Kippers and cake

On my fourteenth
birthday I woke up in a strange bed in an even stranger room surrounded by
cakes.  They lined the top of the
wardrobe and sat cheek by jowl on the dressing table and across the chairs.  There was not a surface that did not hold at
least two cakes and even in spaces on the floor Mrs K had stashed a plate
filled with iced meringues. 
     My
brother had driven me to Moe the night before so that I might be bridesmaid the
next day when he and his already pregnant wife to be walked up the altar in the
Newtown Catholic church to take their vows. 
There was to be a reception in the church hall nearby.              
     It
did not take me long to recognise that the cakes in this room were not in
honour of my birthday but for the wedding. 
Mrs K must have cooked for days. I climbed out of bed.  The floor was covered with a circular coiled
rug whose ridges rubbed against my soles. I lifted the covering from one of the
cakes. Surely no one would notice one missing flower.  
    One was not enough.  I looked around for more, from cake to cake,
undressing each from its wrapper and scratching at the raised chunks of
icing.  Then I flopped back onto the bed,
guilty.  I wanted someone to find me?  It was my birthday.  I did not want to eat cake alone.
  Finally, I braved the outside
corridor where Mrs K greeted me.  She waved
a ten shilling note in front of her.
  “For you. Happy birthday.” 
 I took the money and thanked her.
  “Come now.  Breakfast.” 
Mrs K led me down the hallway to the stink of fish.
  “We have kippers.”
I had never heard of kippers before but the smell told me I
would hate to eat them, more so with a stomach full of icing.  I stared at my plate. 
  My brother arrived, clattering through the back door.  He took one look at my face, another at the
plate and accused his mother-in-law to be,
     “Mutti. 
Don’t force her.”
Mrs K lifted my plate and passed it over to my brother.  He emptied it onto his and then reached for
more.
As part of a course in beginning poetry, Earl Livings instructed us to rote learn a poem.  It’s good for you, he said.  Poets do it all the time. 
 The poems I learned as a child, even as late as a fourteen year old, I can still remember with ease, but these days it’s so much harder to rote learn.  
To commit Emily Dickinson’s words to memory.  Words I enjoy reading but remembering them is almost impossible. 
‘I cannot dance upon my toes/no man instructed me…’
How I wish I could have the rote learning capacity of my fourteen year old self, but not her predilection to cakes, her aversion to kippers and her timidity.  

Amputated nipples

‘Speak for yourself.’
Do you ever have the urge to say these
words when someone makes a universal pronouncement with which you disagree? 
I wanted to say it the other night
to a man whom I met via friends, who had insisted that people in England were concerned
that the face of England, its population, will be completely unrecognisable in
twenty years time.  Completely taken over
by foreigners, he wanted to say but did not, and not foreigners of Greek or European
extraction, but mostly from the Middle East.  
You can guess the rest. 
I wanted to say, look at your self.  When your parents arrived in Australia some fifty years ago they
would have suffered the same derision for being different, for coming from the
Mediterranean.
Why’s it so terrible to be
different? Why the pressure to be the same?
I feel the impulse run through me, too.
Take for instance, my latest
preoccupation with the female body and why we women do things to ourselves to
conform to some perfect ideal, even if it kills us.
In my tenth year of school I spent time as a boarder, which meant for months on end my body barely saw the light of day. 
We boarders dressed in almost
darkness with a pitcher of water on our side table and a face cloth with which we swabbed down
our more sensitive parts before covering ourselves from top to toe.
In those circumstances it mattered not to me
that I could not shave my legs or my underarms, though I had started the practice
a year earlier when, at fifteen, I decided to follow in my older sister’s footsteps
and turn my legs into the supple, shining silk-like radiant things I had seen in the new
advertisements directed at women in ‘need of ‘ shavers for the fairer
sex. 
At boarding school no one worried about shaving legs
or underarms, until it came time for the school dance.  
My older sister who had left home
by then and was studying at teacher’s training college picked me up after
school one day and we travelled into the city to Adele Formal Hire where we
were able to select a gown for me to wear. 
It was in polka dot black chiffon over a satin lining.  The dress covered my legs to the ankles, but was sleeveless
in a respectable manner.  The nuns would
not tolerate anything less.  No visible
cleavage, no plunging back lines, nothing suggestive of the female body
underneath, only arms, legs and head visible. 
You could not see my legs,
but after five months in boarding school, my underarms had sprouted a fine black layer of growth.  I  took to them with fingernail scissors during the
three days each week when it was my turn to take a bath.   Boarders were rostered for separate bath times three times a week, and once a week hair washing on Saturday mornings, lined up at the basins.  
In the bathroom there was daylight
or in the early evening an overhead light that enabled me to see my body, at least in bits.  There were no mirrors.  Mirrors were not allowed in the bathrooms, too
likely to tempt the bodies that travelled through. 
One of the older nuns had told us that in
her day, girls had to bathe in mid ankle length petticoats so that they could not see
their naked bodies while bathing so as to resist temptation.  
The things women must do/did to resist,
not only their own desires, but the desires of others. 
So my preoccupation at the moment with
the nature of women’s bodies – how we preen them, how we attack them, how we strip
them of excess, how we try to whittle them into an acceptable and universal
shape, how we try to hide them, how we cover them to make them look the way we
imagine others might want, the way we want ourselves  – hit me hard when I saw a YouTubeclip of women who had undergone mastectomies, nipplectomies or other forms of surgery that have left massive scars on their otherwise ordinary bodies. 
To see these images is confronting and most
of all for me the thought that some of these women may have elected to have their nipples removed.  
Why would they do this?  For health
reasons, in the case of cancer I can understand, but the other reasons, I’m at a
loss to understand.