The right thing to do was to break up with him.
It would be a noble gesture of triplet solidarity.
It would be a sisterly sacrifice.
It would be like going on a hunger strike.
"Charlie, ask your sister why I can't see you anymore. Ask her why she doesn't look for wedding rings before she starts flirting and breaking my sister's heart."
Ah, but Charlie.
Charlie, Charlie, Charlie.
The night before they'd had their own special Christmas Eve dinner on Charlie's balcony. They cooked it together. "You've just got this mental block about cooking," said Charlie. "Anybody can cook." And it turned out when she was a little bit drunk and there was a good CD playing, so she was sort of dancing while she was cooking, with a wineglass in one hand and a wooden spoon in the other, well, she was in fact a spectacular cook! It was a wonderful discovery.
He gave her perfume and a book for Christmas.
The Kettle girls were allergic to perfume, but she bravely dabbed it on her wrist and only sneezed eleven times in a row, spluttering in between each sneeze things like, "Hay fev-er!" "Gosh!" "Must!" "Be!" "Pollen!" "In!" "The!" "Air!"
When she finally stopped sneezing, she examined the book. "I've been wanting to read this!" she said, which wasn't a complete lie as she had wanted to read it, before she did read it, a few months ago.
"Actually," said Charlie, tugging on his ear, which was what he did when he felt a bit awkward or shy. (She already knew that about him. She already adored that about him.) "I don't know anything about it. I just bought it because the picture of the girl on the front cover reminded me of you. I don't know why."
The girl on the front cover looked like a whimsical princess, and there was something about her expression that secretly reminded Gemma a little of herself too. It was her best self. The self she would be on a tropical island, on a perfect day, wearing a floaty dress and possibly a straw hat. A day when she didn't sneeze or drink too much and nobody got offended or had to rush off and everybody got everybody else's jokes. A day when Gemma had no memories except the good ones. A day when everything was funny and fascinating just the way it should be.
It delighted her that Charlie could recognize that self.
Wasn't there some rule that said you had to marry that sort of man--fast?
She walked downstairs in her swimsuit and found Maddie, still naked and in her floaties, banging away on her xylophone. She was sitting on the sofa next to Nana, who was sloshing her bare feet around in a bucket of water.
"Oh good, Gemma!" said Nana. "I was just thinking. If I die in this heat, make sure they don't have the funeral next Wednesday. That's bingo day at the club. Everybody would be put out. Tell them to have it on Thursday."
"You're not going to die."
Nana looked offended. "How would you know, Miss Smarty-pants?"
"Why don't you come swimming with Maddie and me?"
"Because I don't want to, thank you very much."
Maddie tossed aside her xylophone with a clatter and threw her arms around Gemma's leg. "Swim!" At least someone was in a good mood.
Lyn and Michael's swimming pool was magnificent, a curving turquoise shell with glittering views that made you feel like you were swimming in the harbor.
"Gem! Look!" demanded Maddie. She leaned forward with her bottom sticking out behind her in imitation of a grown-up's dive, her head squashed between upstretched arms. Then she launched herself into the pool, landing splat on her tummy. Her floaties kept her bobbing on the surface.
Gemma dived in next to her and swam along the bottom of the pool, feeling the voluptuous relief of immersion in a silent, cold, chlorinated world.
But it wasn't as if she were in love with Charlie or even in a relationship yet.
They didn't have nicknames, private jokes, photos of happier times, or joint friends who would be shocked and sad. No forthcoming social events. No joint purchases. It would be painless and clean. Just one sharp slice of the knife: "Charlie, I'm sure you understand. You're Italian after all. Family comes first."
"Look, Gem! Look!"
Maddie waded up the stairs and out of the pool, water dripping, and stood on the edge of the pool with her arms held high. She looked like a slippery little seal.
"Ooooh!" applauded Gemma as Maddie did a star jump into the pool and bobbed back up to the surface, gasping and choking, her hair flat across her face. She seemed to be under the impression that other people swam only for the pleasure of seeing her perform various awe-inspiring tricks.
"Maybe you could try and shut your mouth next time," suggested Gemma. "You'll swallow less water."
Maddie patted the surface of the water with flat palms, so that drops of water flew in her eyes, and gave a loud chuckle, to indicate she was being funny now.
"Ha!" cried Gemma, splashing herself in an equally hilarious manner, while she thought about what Cat had said in Lyn's office: "She'll break up with him eventually, anyway."
She wasn't joking or being sarcastic. She said it as if it were a fact. She thought it was inevitable. Of course, the two of them had been teasing her for years about her growing accumulation of ex-boyfriends. Lyn had even given her a book called Ten Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives and helpfully indicated with a Post-it note the chapter on the stupid thing she believed Gemma was doing. But still, Gemma had thought, rather idiotically she now realized, that they were as surprised as she was each time she broke up with another boyfriend.
Perhaps they already knew what Gemma secretly feared, that she wasn't actually capable of genuine, serious love. Sure, she was capable of an infatuation, like the one she was currently experiencing with Charlie, but they were right, it probably wouldn't last.
For weeks, sometimes months, she adored her men--and then one day, without warning, it hit her. Not only was she over the infatuation, she actively disliked the guy. She remembered sitting on a beach with the plumber who liked country music.
"Where's the bottle opener?" he said, frowning and scrabbling through their basket.
And that was it. I don't like you, she thought, and it was like an icy cold breeze whistling around her bones.
Some people lacked hand-eye coordination. Some people were tone-deaf.
Gemma lacked the ability to stay in love with somebody.
"Gem! Look!"
"Ooooh!"
They sat down to eat Christmas lunch at the long table on Lyn and Michael's balcony. The table was set beautifully with tasteful Christmas decorations, the harbor glinted beside them, and the sun reflected rainbows in the crystal of the glasses.
It seemed to Gemma that the setting called for another, more functional, better-dressed family--especially today, when everybody had red faces and there was a discernible bubbling of hysteria just below the surface.
There were loud pops and insults as people pulled at their Christmas crackers far too aggressively. Cat and Dan nearly wrenched each other's arms off. People began to read out the jokes inside their paper crowns in loud sarcastic voices. Nobody listened except for Michael, who genuinely found them funny, and Nana Kettle, who kept missing the punch lines. "Eh? What did the elephant say?"
Maxine and Frank sat next to each other, which was a disconcerting sight. In fact, Gemma couldn't remember the last time she'd seem them sitting together. They seemed to be overcompensating by being excessively animated and polite to each other.
Kara was tipsy.
Maddie sat in her high chair, singing a loud toneless song to herself. She had to tilt her head up because her green paper crown was too big for her and had fallen down over her nose.
Gemma herself had slipped into full-on giggly, girlish Gemma. She could hear herself talking nonstop. Chatter. Chatter. Ha, ha, ha. Shut up, she thought, shut up for God's sake, but it seemed she was trapped in her own inane party personality.
As food began to circulate around the table, Lyn and Maxine both hovered just slightly above their seats, ignoring their own empt
y plates, hands poised like frenzied conductors, ready to pounce triumphantly on any unmet requirement.
"Nana, have some salad dressing!" ordered Lyn.
"Cat, pass your father the turkey!" called out Maxine.
It was a mystery to Gemma why they cared so much. Nobody was hungry. It was too hot.
"More wine anybody?" asked Frank.
"Yes, please, just a little drop, thank you, Frank," slurred Kara in a fake elegant tone and dissolved into hysterical giggles, slumping across the table.
"Would someone take her glass away?" implored Michael.
Maxine said, "I warned you hours ago she was drinking too much."
"A little drop won't hurt her." Frank leaned over with the wine bottle.
Lyn snapped, "Dad! She's fifteen!"
"Well, you three could sure put away the booze when you were fifteen."
"You see, I've always had an interest in lepers," Nana Kettle told Dan.
"I beg your pardon?" Dan looked dazed. His paper crown was leaving a stain of red across his forehead.
"Lepers!" chimed in Gemma. "Nana has always had an interest in lepers. It means your present is probably a donation on your behalf to the Leper Foundation. That's what she gave Michael last year. Don't you remember, Dan? We couldn't stop laughing."
"Gemma! Now you've ruined the surprise!" said Nana Kettle crossly. "Goodness me! Don't listen to her, Michael."
"I'm Dan."
"I know perfectly well who you are, Dan, for goodness' sake."
Nana Kettle turned to Gemma." I told that new young man of yours you were a butterfingers! Did you hear me?"
"I did hear you, Nana."
"I think he agreed with me. He seemed a very sensible fellow, don't you think, Dan?"
Dan's hands clenched tight around his knife and fork. "Very sensible."
"His sister was a pretty girl," observed Nana Kettle. "Very pretty girl. All that lovely dark hair. Don't you think, Gemma?"
Silently Gemma shrieked, Shut up, Nana! I will have to break up with him, she thought, I will. Her eyes were drawn irresistibly to Cat.
"She was gorgeous, Nana." Cat's face was hard. "Absolutely gorgeous. Don't you think, Dan?"
"Oh, Christ." Dan put down his knife and fork and dropped his head in his hands.
"Headache, dear?" asked Nana sympathetically.
There was a noise down the end of the table. Frank stood up and carefully tapped his fork against his glass.
He grinned self-consciously, boyishly, as everyone turned to face him. "I've got an announcement to make. It's going to come as a bit of a surprise."
"Good news, I hope," said Michael with a hint of desperation. His purple crown was balanced precariously on his springy new haircut.
"Oh very good, Mike, mate. Very good."
Gemma was barely listening to her father. She was wondering whether Dan really was having an affair with Angela, and if he was, then what? The thought of lugging around a secret of that magnitude made her feel ill. She was in the middle of giving Dan a private, powerful death stare to convey, "If you are having an affair, I know you are and you'd better stop," when her father's words penetrated her consciousness.
"Maxine and I are dating again."
Maxine and I are dating again.
Nobody said a word. From the house, the saccharine sounds of Michael's Christmas CD became audible. Sleigh bells rang and somebody dreamed of a white Christmas.
Kara hiccuped.
"You're dating." Cat leaned forward to look down the length of the table at Frank and Maxine.
"We've been seeing each other socially for quite some time now of course," said Maxine in a voice that sounded bizarrely too young for her, like one she'd put on to imitate what a very rude young girl had said to her in the supermarket. "And a few months ago we began a--well, I guess you could call it, a relationship."
"I think I'm going to be sick." Cat pushed away her plate.
"We didn't want to tell you earlier, until we knew for sure." Frank placed a hearty, proprietary hand on Maxine's shoulder. Maxine looked up at him, her face flushed with girlish color.
"Sure of what?" asked Lyn faintly.
"Well. Sure that we were in love. Again, of course."
"I am going to be sick," said Cat.
"Excuse me," Lyn stood up. "Excuse me for a minute." She threw down her napkin and walked off the veranda, pulling on the glass sliding door unnecessarily hard.
"Goodness me, you girls are crotchety today!" said Nana Kettle.
"But this is good news!" Frank put his wineglass down and leaned forward with his hands clutching the sides of the table, a perplexed frown creasing his forehead. "You're happy for us, aren't you, Gemma?"
"I'm very happy for you," said Gemma truthfully, but she had that slightly off-balance feeling she used to get when she was at school and Cat or Lyn gave a teacher a different answer from the one she would have given. No, she'd think. I'm sure that's not right. But how could we have got it wrong?
When their father first moved out of the house at Killara and into his new flat in the city, six-year-old Gemma wasn't particularly concerned.
In her mind it was somehow vaguely linked to his blown-off finger from Cracker Night. It was like when she or one of her sisters got sick. They had to move into the little room next to Mum and Dad's with the sofa that turned into a bed. That was so your nasty germs didn't float up your sisters' nostrils.
Probably Daddy had to sleep somewhere else for a little while because he didn't want to infect anybody with his horrible sick finger.
"But Mum and Dad sat us down in the lounge room and told us they were getting a divorce," said Cat and Lyn, years afterward, when she told them her childhood theory. "How could you forget that? It was awful. Mum was doing this weird twisting thing with her hands, and Dad kept bouncing up from his seat and walking around the room and then sitting back down again. We were so mad at them."
"I was probably thinking about something else at the time," said Gemma.
It had happened at intervals throughout her life: a piece of news of major social, political, or personal significance somehow slipped right past her.
When she was aged around ten, she asked her sisters, "What's an 'abba'?" They were staggered.
"Abba is a band!" cried Lyn. "A really famous, cool band!"
"Be careful what you say in front of people," advised a shaken Cat. "You'd better check with us before you say anything."
The first time Gemma registered the "divorce" word was the day they found out they were going on the fastest water slide in the world. The whole family was in the kitchen and Maxine was bent down by the oven, lifting up the corner of the foil to check on a yummy roast chicken. There had been a complicated incident involving Cat and a Barbie doll, and Gemma was just about to launch into a detailed account when Frank announced, "Lyn's staying here with Mum for the holiday."
Gemma took one look at the secretive expression on Lyn's face and instantly grasped the situation. A similar event had occurred at school just the other day when she went to buy an Icy Pole at the tuck shop. When she came back, Gemma's best friend, Rosie, had recruited Melinda as her new best friend. In the space of two minutes alliances had shifted!
Quite obviously, Mum wanted Lyn to be her best friend! She always did have a noticeable preference for Lyn. It was because she tucked in the corners so tidily when she made the bed and didn't drop stuff. Now they were going to have their very own little holiday together. They'd probably start whispering and giggling together at the dinner table. It would be awful.
The only solution was to get Mum and Lyn to come on holidays too. Surely Mum didn't want to miss going on the fastest water slide in the world!
But no. No, that couldn't happen; that was a typical laughable Gemma idea because Mum and Dad were getting a "divorce"--an ugly-tasting word, very similar to "zucchini."
And that was when one of Gemma's worst secret fears came thumping to the surface.
Cat and Lyn had recent
ly decided to inform Gemma that she was adopted. They were a little surprised she hadn't worked it out for herself.
"If you were really our sister you'd look like us," said Cat with rock-solid logic. "Triplets are meant to all look the same."
"We still love you like a real sister," said Lyn kindly. "It's not your fault. But you have to do what we say."
"No, Gemma, you're not adopted, for heaven's sake," said Maxine as Gemma cried into her lap. "Your sisters are liars--they take after their father."
But she was never really quite convinced, and when she heard that ugly "divorce" word in the kitchen that day, the enormity of what was about to happen stunned her. It was like that movie The Parent Trap they'd seen at Nana's place, where the divorced parents each took one little blond girl. There was no little redheaded girl in the movie.
Clearly, Mum was going to take Lyn, and Dad was going to take Cat. Neither of them would want Gemma because she was adopted.
What would happen to her? Where would she live? What would she eat for dinner? She didn't know how to cook a chicken! She didn't even know how to buy a chicken. What did you say? One chicken, please? What if they laughed at her? How much did a chicken cost anyway? She only had $3.00 saved up. That would probably buy her only, say, ten chickens. After that, she would be so hungry!
Six-year-old Gemma felt dizzy as she struggled not to collapse under the weight of everything she didn't know. Her parents and sisters receded into the distance. She was a tiny penciled dot on a huge white sheet of paper. There was only her and she reached only as far as the tips of her fingers and the tips of her toes and beyond that there was nothing.
She didn't even notice Barbie's head roll out of her unclenched hand and onto the floor.
Diving like Dolphins
It drives me bananas the way women tiptoe into the surf, flinching each time another body part gets wet. Look at 'em. Flapping their hands, scrunching up their faces. It takes them three hours to get their hair wet. And when there's more than one of them, it's even worse. Squealing and bleating and backing up and inching forward and backing up again. I ask you, what is the bloody point?
When I was about fifteen, the age when I was just starting to worry if a girl would ever deign to sleep with me, I saw these three girls sun-baking down at Freshwater Beach. They were probably about eighteen, and they were gorgeous. Legs up to their armpits. Athletic-looking. I was giving them the surreptitious once-over from behind my reflective Miami Vice shades, when all of a sudden the three of them jumped up and ran down into the surf. They got to about their knees in the water and then they dived under at exactly the same moment. That's what got me. Their synchronicity. It was bloody sexy for some reason. Three bodies suspended in midair, like dolphins.