The JRB presents new short fiction by Wamuwi Mbao.
Runs in the Family
Things started to go wrong the summer we congregated at our family bolthole, for what turned out to be the last holiday we spent together. We had always been very close, because we were three sisters, and our mother used to say that we would never again encounter others in the world so predisposed to hold us in their favour. I don’t think of that time too often, now that we are older and too preoccupied to speak to one another, but I am occasionally moved to something like nostalgia for having been part of a family like mine.
We were not one of those families who were pleased to trace themselves back to eighteen-twenty, or one of the many families who buried stories of escape and suffering beneath new prosperities. Nevertheless, we retained a sense of ourselves as unique, and we liked to feel this sense together. The holiday home was part of that, like the family farm had been for my parents’ generation. My mother used to joke that she had made an executive decision to swap veldt for surf, and that all we had to do was maintain things for the next batch.
Like many families with children well into adulthood, we didn’t see each other as often as when we were in our twenties, levitating hopefully before the inevitable dive into the things we were meant to do, marriages and careers. I live far from my sisters now, with my husband Peter and our three children. I teach in one of the girls’ schools, and Peter is over at the boys’ school on the hill. The passage of years has eased the anxiety that used to accompany our visits to the holiday house. It was originally a modest cottage, before being demolished and remodelled by a Johannesburg architect who lived next door. The fashion in those days was for upside-down houses, where the living arrangements favoured the kind of sociality you see in brochures. This meant that the bedrooms were on the ground floor, while the upper level was given over to an open-plan kitchen and lounge, and a patio that looked out onto the sea and the strip of sandy beach. We were not the first house on the strip to be refurbished in this fashion, but in those early days there were still grey, dry clapboard cottages that served as a reminder of how things used to be.
I mention the bedrooms for a reason. The master bedroom had always been my mother’s. As a child I had been placed in the one alongside it, because I was prone to night terrors. These bedrooms were of similar size, as wide as they were long, with large pivot windows looking out on the garden, and they took up half the floorplan. The rest of the downstairs consisted of a cluster of bedrooms with meaner dimensions and fewer amenities. For the years that we went there together, our stays took on a pleasant repetitiveness, which we began to look forward to. We all remembered our mother telling us that constancy was the staff of life, and our shared holiday filled us up with fortifying togetherness for the year ahead.
In adulthood, the matter of who occupied which room was a matter of quiet tension. Our sister Laurika and her husband Wynand always took my mother’s room, reasoning that they were the oldest, and they were able to monopolize it because it was accepted among us that they would be the first to have children. I would have my old room, sometimes sharing with Romy and sometimes not, and anyone else we invited down with us would sleep in one of the other rooms, or crash on something improvised.
I would like to say a few things about my sisters, so that you might understand what happened. When Laurika graduated from university, there was a great deal of hope attached to her and what she would go on to become. You can imagine, then, the dismay when she announced that she was marrying an accountant and moving away to some terrible place in the North.
My mother said she was being unaccountably ludicrous. That was the sort of thing she would say, just like that. I remember the morning Laurika made her big announcement. It would, of course, go on to be known as Laurika’s big announcement. It was a sunny morning, and we were all gathered around the breakfast table. I was halfway through my piece of toast when the argument began. My mother stood and waved her arms at Laurika, who looked defiant and unmoveable. Old disappointments and unresolved hurts were flung at the ceiling and drifted down on Romy and me, the stunned onlookers. My mother said, ‘I thought you were a feminist?’ and she said, ‘Why would you do this to me?’
Laurika said, ‘It has nothing to do with you. Nothing at all.’
So off Laurika went, and we were relieved. Romy, the youngest, was relieved because it meant that our mother would have more time for her. They could go for a stroll and a coffee without my mother diverting to pick up something for Laurika. She was relieved because it meant that Laurika would no longer be an inevitability against which to be found wanting. It didn’t turn out like that, unfortunately. Our mother’s sadness over her eldest daughter’s leaving morphed into a shapeless anger that flared out at random moments and made Romy cry.
Romy is quiet, very quiet. As a child, she had the unnerving habit of standing silently in a doorway in the dark, until some combination of awarenesses shook us from sleep and we noticed her. As a teen, she had the nervous watchfulness of certain cats. She learned this from having come along last of all and found that there wasn’t quite enough attention to go around. When she was sixteen, she started wearing a lot of make-up, dyeing her hair orange and cutting it into a style that displeased my mother. Having so recently felt the loss of her eldest daughter, our mother decided that all that she had worked to bring out of us would be in jeopardy of disappearing forever. She said things to Romy, and Romy stood there clicking just beneath the surface like a pinball machine, saying nothing, seeing a part of my mother that was threatening to her.
One by one, we left home, and at different times we came back, or stayed away, or picked fights and mended bridges. My mother took to spending more time at the bolthole: she said it was good for her writing. We would find her with her glass of wine, face to the breeze, her comfort smoothing over the sharp and pointy edges between us. She looked forward, she said, to there being new young people to make use of the house and fill it with their voices and their summer happiness.
In the years after our mother’s passing, I tried my best to mend what had been broken by inviting my sisters down to the coast for Christmas and New Year. It wasn’t easy for me, because I feared them. At some point unknown to me, they had begun speaking to me in the same way, that is to say, differently. I hadn’t realised that my status as the middle child meant that both of them confided in me without me having to try very hard at all. By the time I realised that things were different, the change was complete.
Being free of their feelings did not bring me the relief I thought it would. I had come to expect them, and the desertion of routine was unwelcome to me. It was this desire to recover contact that led me to push my sisters to re-establish the old holiday ritual. For some years in our twenties, we each made the effort to connect. I thought that my enthusiasm, although a poor substitute for my mother’s, would supply the necessary restitutive atmosphere to bring things back to what they had once been.
I rehearsed what we would say, and the things we would do. Each of us would have a job—Laurika would sweep the outside areas and Wynand would oil the woodwork. Romy would vacuum up the dust that had settled while we were away, and I would fill the pantry and ensure that everyone had supplies of the things they liked to eat and drink. This was the formula.
The picture changed the year when Romy arrived late in the evening and not in the morning when she had been expected. Not only did she arrive after all of us were in and settled, which robbed us of the polite scuffle over bedrooms and bed throws and favourite armchairs, but she was not alone when she finally showed up.
‘Hello!’ she said, as though nothing at all was strange.
Hello yourself,’ we said in unison, even Wynand, who had learned that this was something our mother had said whenever we returned from school.
‘I’ve brought a guest,’ she said, and we greeted the guest in turn. Although we had never met her before, we knew her from the cover of this and the back of that. We could see from Romy’s talkative banter that she was smitten, and that filled us with concern. The guest was pretty and invulnerable, and with her friendly demeanour she seemed to confront us with the fact of ourselves.
‘I’m Lorna,’ she said, flashing a brilliant smile at each of us in turn. We introduced ourselves and we tried out long-disused conversation starters. It had only been us for so long that the conversation seemed to just continue where it left off the year before. Lorna was full of conversation.
Over that first unusual holiday we composed ourselves to accommodate this new arrangement. Lorna only drank champagne. Lorna had been a professional ballet dancer in France. Lorna would be sharing Romy’s room. Lorna had taught our quiet sister to be confident. Lorna said things that shocked. Lorna arranged our mother’s books, which were in no particular order and had remained so as they were of no interest to any of us.
We probably knew then that she would play a pivotal role in what happened to us. We couldn’t be sure, but Lourika later said that knew that Lorna would reroute things, divert things, challenge us and force us from one another. Her arrival, in that sense, was not as random as it seemed at the time. It would take more visits, three in total, before we began to see what had changed.
It began one evening. Wynand made a remark, harmless we felt, about the couple who had bought the cottage next door. We felt ourselves by that point one of the old established families, and we liked to remind ourselves of this. We sat around on the patio drinking aesthetically as the sun began to go down. We had been behaving well before Wynand said the thing. Lourika produced slivers of cheese and meat. I shut my eyes, and the tension dissipated.
Later, a fuse blew. Lorna declared that her and Romy would be departing early to continue their holidaying on a yacht in Croatia. Lourika told Romy that it was unfair to break up the family holiday. Lorna saw that I was watching, and she kept her eyes on me as we began to ask the questions we felt we were supposed to.
‘Lorna is my family, Lourika,’ Romy replied. She narrowed her eyes. I know an argument brewing when I see one.
We weren’t moved by her talk of chosen families, and what she had been through as the youngest, and we told her so. Lorna and Romy went to their room and packed their bags, and then they came back onto the patio and told us some things we weren’t happy to hear. Lourika sobbed and yelled at them. She wanted to know why Romy hated our family so much, and Romy got angry and lost her temper.
I dislike scenes, and so I fled to the kitchen, where I could give myself a consoling talking-to without the intrusions of the others. I opened my eyes, and Lorna was leaning against the wall, watching me through the frame of the door.
‘How long have you been standing there?’ I asked, dismayed.
She looked at me plainly and said, ‘Have you always been a nervous person?’
In my own voice, I said ‘Don’t misunderstand. It’s not that we don’t like you.’
She seemed to understand something about us, but I’m not sure it was what I had intended.
‘How do you live in this house?’ She asked, trying to dredge something from me. ‘Are you worried about the future?’
‘Wine helps. Wine definitely helps,’ I said. I waited for her to become tired of standing there.
Lourika would later tell me that Romy had come to her room and told her things about her unhappiness with us, with our mother, with Wynand and with everything we stood for. I washed cups and pans and listened to the sound of the rooms down below, feeling overtly generous.
The rest of that holiday passed uneventfully. Romy and Lorna left, and it was an unhappily unresolved parting of ways. We shut the door and they were gone from us. We who were left devoted our energies to rebuilding the mood. We tried out stronger opinions. We were clinging to the feeling, and the feeling was going, leaking from the corner of each room.
‘Remember,’ Lourika said, as the last day dawned, ‘mother always said, allow yourself mistakes.’
I didn’t remember that.
~~~
- Editorial Advisory Panel member Wamuwi Mbao is an essayist, cultural critic and academic at Stellenbosch University.
