We layer the present on the past.
As Ann Patchett writes through her character Maeve in The Dutch House, ‘I see the past as it actually was, but we overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we’re not seeing it as the people we were, we’re seeing it as the people we were. And that means the past has been radically altered.’
Reading an essay on the significance of laundry in our lives, I’m pitched back to a time when my sister and I boarded with a Dutch family on top of the hill in Pleasant Road Camberwell.
I was fifteen years old, and pitifully self-conscious. The ugliness of my adolescence had hit complete with pimples and weight gain. My incisors were yellowing, which led me to cover my mouth with my hand when speaking. And the Dutch family with whom we boarded headed by the formidable Mrs F, her face as wide as a plate, her hair wispy blond/grey curls around her bulbous ears, tall and angular, with might have been arthritis in her gnarled joints, spoke with the familiar accent of the Dutch but with an added bass to add to her authority over and above her husband. Dwarfed by comparison.
Mr F was a mild-mannered accountant who wore dark spectacles and reminded me of our kind uncles on my mother’s side. Only he seemed more downtrodden. All of this I describe in retrospect. At the time I formed almost no opinion about this family other than to fall in love with the third eldest boy who had blue eyes as deep as oceans and was studying medicine. By contrast, I disliked the youngest boy who was a year ahead of me at school and maintained his sanity in this large Catholic family by insisting he live in the backyard in the family caravan. At the time this seemed reasonable but looking back I marvel that Mrs F tolerated it.
This family now related to me by marriage – that’s a whole other story – have melded into my memory like characters from a fairy tale. The house, quaint in the manner of Dutch houses in my imagination with high pitched roof, double story, tiny rooms with low ceilings and a spinning wheel just near the front door, remains today. The spinning wheel, an ornament perhaps, as I never saw it in use, tipped the house back to a previous century.
My sister and I shared a double bed at the top of the stairs, a bed replete with white bedspread cover and coarse sheets. So white it troubled me to sleep in it. And the agony of the blood when my sister unexpectedly copped her first period while sitting on the edge of the bed in conversation with one of those brothers. The mortification.
Reading Arithra van Herk’s essay, ‘Invisibled Laundry’ I find myself thinking of Beatrice Potter’s Mrs Tiggy-Winkel, the delightful hedgehog laundry woman who takes in the washing of the local animals and finds little Lucie’s lost kerchiefs and pinafore.
Lily-white and clean, oh!
With little frills between, o!
Smooth and hot, red rusty spot
Never here be seen, oh!
AArithra van Hernd she battles a rust spot that reminds me of the blood we tried to remove from Mrs F’s bedspread never once thinking to tell her.
She disapproved, I discovered later, of our habit of washing our underwear each night and hanging it to dry at the end of the bed. From memory we did this for two reasons. One we had only three or four sets of underpants and socks and could not leave them in the laundry for too long and secondly because they had seen better days.
We were ashamed in every facet of our lives. Ashamed to be living with this well-heeled and ordinary good Catholic family while ours had fallen apart and the inkling that Mrs F had wanted to take on two new daughters to help her around the house. She had five sons and only one daughter, her youngest, far younger than my sister and me and she was of little use in the cooking and cleaning.
I did not understand this at the time and although we might have offered to help with the washing up after dinner, we did little else to help Mrs F with household chores. It seems she resented us.
This was a time when I decided I should concentrate on my schoolwork if I was to get anywhere in my life. So, I took off after school each day and walked to Anderson Park several blocks away. Then I sat on the swing trying to learn my Latin declensions and French vocab. Determined to impress the nuns with my intellect, which felt forced and came to me only through rote learning. I could not understand much of what I absorbed at school other than that I must cram facts in. Languages were okay but numbers defied me.
Numbers on a page swam in front of my eyes like pea soup and I was relieved to escape them when mathematics was no longer a compulsory subject.
In the park, this day I struggled with the verb to be and to have, both in French and in Latin, to get the tenses right, to understand those aspects of Latin grammar, the dative, ablative, and genitive. These words still in my head and still as elusive even as I went on to study Latin at university. How can you study something at such a high level and still not understand?
I mistook all the foundations locked inside a bubble of tortured feelings, including on this day, given my erupting passion for the third son. Earlier he had invited me and my sister to open our mouths so he could study our tongues, throats and teeth as part of his medical studies.
My sister, unashamed of her teeth obliged, but I high tailed it down to the park red with shame. I could not let him see inside my mouth for fear of what he’d find. My crumbling back molars over which I rode my tongue. Cracked like tree bark. The holes in the back of my incisors. My mouth like a decaying city.
For this reason, I was relieved my mother could not afford the dentist and since the dental hospital would no longer take our family under its roof because my father earned too much money in his accountancy work, we were stymied. I was glad even as a big part of me knew my teeth needed attention.
Shame makes you want to hide. Shame leaves you cowering behind your books. Picture me a gawky young girl, long lanky hair pulled into pig tails, a splotchy face and grubby uniform seated on a swing, trying to divide her thoughts between the blue eyes of Mrs F’s third son and French words for the everyday, the birds, the clouds, the grass. Rote learning a poem by Baudrillard. Une grenouille vit un boeuf qui sembla de belle taille. Writing it hear I can hear the sounds in my head but cannot remember their exact spelling or order. The writer tells the story of a frog who wanted to be as big as a cow so he blew himself up until he exploded, very apt for my state of mind that day only I could not inflate myself. I was so deflated I could only go home to Mrs F’s house and hide.