Free True Stories by Helen Garner Page A

and their customers. Once, on her night off, we were driving downtown to the movies and passed the van. She detoured in to say hullo, and came running back with a steaming bag of free donuts. Behind her back I brag about her: ‘Four can turn her hand to anything! She can pick fruit or pull cappuccinos. She’s got no vanity about work. The people she works with love her because she makes them laugh.’ But would I say these things to her face? That’s not the way we do things, in this family.
    â€˜Three was complaining to me,’ says Four, ‘that whenever she visits Mum and Dad they never ask about her work, but are always reporting about the others, and praising them. Doesn’t she realise that this is what happens to all of us? When I go out there, full of news, I have to sit in silence and be told in detail about One’s latest book, or Five’s new baby. I hate it, but I’ve got used to it.’
    We are furious with our parents for their withholding, but we all do it too.
    A Squad
    Because I am the eldest, my sisters have always been behind me. My face has always been turned away from them, towards the world. I don’t know what they looked like—that is, without photos I’d have no memory of what they looked like, though when I recently saw one of John Brack’s etchings from the 1940s, of a tiny, sulking schoolgirl, I recognised her at once as me or one of my sisters: the chunky stance, the shoulders high with dudgeon, the scowling brow, the tartan skirt and the hair brushed back and held to one side with a ribbon. And yet I also have no memory of a time when they weren’t all there— the first three, anyway. I have always been part of a squad. There are photos of me as a tiny baby, mad-eyed, box-headed, being held correctly positioned on the bent arm of my young, nervous mother, or bundled with my back against the chest of my grinning father, my blanket awry, my beady eyes popping with the force of his hug (see The Favourite , below); but now, when I look at these pictures, I am completely unable to believe that outside the frame my sisters aren’t hanging around, squinting in the sun, picking at their knee-scabs or twiddling their ribboned ‘bunches’, waiting for me to climb down and turn back into a kid and come outside to play.
    Laughter
    Whenever I try to live in another town, my phone bill rockets; and when I look carefully at the breakdown of the call times, I see that I make the largest number to my sisters between four and five o’clock—that is, after-school time. I am fifty but I still have this habit, this longing to hear their stories of the day. I want them to make me laugh.
    Two women are sitting in a fashionable cafe when their sister walks past, carrying a briefcase and looking cool and purposeful. She does not look in, but passes wearing the kind of expression one adopts when passing the grooviest cafe in town without looking in. The two sisters inside don’t speak, but lower their heads to the table in silent fits. But we don’t laugh at each other. We laugh about each other.
    They knew that Virginia Woolf was about to crack up again when she wrote in her diary that she and her sister ‘laughed so much that the spiders ran into the corners and strangled themselves in their webs’. Perhaps her case was extreme but I cannot say that such laughter is unknown to me and my sisters. There is something ecstatic, brakeless, about the way we laugh together. We laugh in spasms and paroxysms. Almost anything—a glance, a word, a mimicked grimace—can act as a trigger. When any (or all) of us are together we are quivering in readiness for the thing that will push us off the edge of rational discourse into freefall over a bottomless canyon of mirth; laughing together is a way of merging again into an inchoate feminine mass. (Again? When was this previously the case?)
    Perhaps ‘hysterical’ is the right