Five-Dollar Family

by

Cate Kennedy

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Five-Dollar Family Quotes

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Five-Dollar Family Quotes

She’s not tired now, though. She’s burning with bright energy, like someone’s flicked a light switch on.

You’ve got little hands, I’ve got big hands, let’s put our hands together,’ she sings to him in a whisper. She invents heaps of songs, in the middle of the night, songs that definitely sound as good as The Wiggles. She lies curled with her tiny oblivious son, hearing his moth breaths, singing softly to him until she has to put him back in the crib before the midwife does her rounds again. They’ve tried to be strict about it, but she bets they wouldn’t push their luck if she told them to mind their own business. Her wakefulness seems tinged, now, with a private, freshly minted exhilaration.

Related Characters: Michelle (speaker), Jason (Michelle’s Baby)
Page Number: 94
Explanation and Analysis:

‘Let Baby find his own way there,’ says the midwife […]. Baby. She hates the way they call him that, like he hasn’t even got a name, And the way they talk about you as if you weren’t there in the room, like the obstetrician who called the trainee midwife over after the birth, when they were weighing and measuring her baby and Michelle was lying there stunned, like a casualty thrown against a wall after a bomb blast […].

Related Characters: Michelle (speaker), Jason (Michelle’s Baby)
Page Number: 97
Explanation and Analysis:

She’d browse mistily through those cards at the newsagent that showed guys with their shirts off holding little vulnerable babies, expressions of adoration on their faces; guys who looked like models, but still. All the time she was pregnant, she thought that that adoration would kick in once Des saw the baby and she saw Des with the baby. She’d had some vague idea that she’d be able to rest and Des would take over and look after them both, hold his son unashamedly in the crook of his arm like the men on the cards.

Related Characters: Michelle (speaker), Des, Jason (Michelle’s Baby)
Page Number: 98-99
Explanation and Analysis:

God knows what she’d hoped he’d do—rub her back like on the video in the antenatal class, maybe, or sponge her forehead with a face washer; she couldn’t put her finger on what she’d expected, but whatever it was, this wasn’t it. Not this wordless hanging back like it was all beyond him, folding and unfolding his arms. Not switching off the TV just when things were starting to get really rough, and going to get himself a drink.

Related Characters: Michelle (speaker), Des
Page Number: 99-100
Explanation and Analysis:

[…] Des wasn’t even next to her when she turned her head to look for him.

When they handed her Jason, though, it was like she finally stopped thinking about Des. Stopped worrying about him. She leaned over and smelled her son’s head, fresh as newly turned earth, then glanced over at her boyfriend, who was back now, bashing an empty Gatorade bottle mindlessly against his thigh and jiggling his leg in his stretched tracksuit pants as he sprawled in the chair in the corner, so freaked out that he couldn’t even meet her eye. Useless, she’d thought, feeling a startling surge of impatient, adrenaline-fuelled scorn. She was suddenly way beyond him now. She couldn’t believe she’d ever needed him for anything.

Related Characters: Michelle (speaker), Des, Jason (Michelle’s Baby)
Page Number: 100-101
Explanation and Analysis:

He’s said nothing to her about it. Not a thing. Even though the court date is this Thursday, and even though he’s got a girlfriend with a newborn baby. That’ll be the first thing he’ll mention, though, you can bet on that. He’ll get his solicitor to stand up there and use her and Jason to try and duck the sentence. But no more probations means he’ll go straight to the jail from court. Not a word to her. It’s like he thinks that if he ignores it it’s all going to go away.

Related Characters: Michelle (speaker), Des, Jason (Michelle’s Baby)
Page Number: 102
Explanation and Analysis:

[…] [S]he remembered that night too, the way he’d bought those chips and dip to take home to his eight-months-pregnant girlfriend, then gone out alone. And how she’d believed he’d been thoughtful that night, buying snacks and renting her those DVDs to shut her up and keep her fat and dumb and happy. Thoughtful.

Related Characters: Michelle (speaker), Des
Page Number: 103
Explanation and Analysis:

‘You’ll have to watch this one, love,’ he said, smiling. ‘He can be a bit of a naughty boy.’

She’d smiled back at the time, she remembers. Felt herself as indulgent and forgiving and tolerant as his mother, like it was a club women belonged to. Staring at Des now, Michelle thinks that’s exactly what he looks like: a naughty boy. She pauses to make him look at her, refusing to smile.

Related Characters: Michelle (speaker), Des’s Father (speaker), Des
Page Number: 104
Explanation and Analysis:

Jason might grow out of it, she thinks, but Des never will, and there’s nothing she can do about that now. The let-down reflex, she thinks fleetingly as she holds out her arms to take her son. Let-down is right. The story of her life: numb on the outside, and a burning ache inside.

Related Characters: Michelle (speaker), Des, Jason (Michelle’s Baby)
Related Symbols: Motorcycle Jacket
Page Number: 106
Explanation and Analysis:

‘The five-dollar family,’ says Michelle. ‘The portrait.’

He gets straight away at the tone in her voice, folding his paper with a snap. She can hear it too, the new hint of steel there.

[…] The stitches are killing her and she eases herself gingerly onto the chair, sitting them the way she’s planned it: Jason on her lap, Des with his arm around her. Dragging pain makes her face damp with perspiration; it’s like a flush of heat goes through her, a tensed fist tightening.

Related Characters: Michelle (speaker), Des, The Photographer, Jason (Michelle’s Baby)
Related Symbols: Family Portrait
Page Number: 107
Explanation and Analysis:

Some women describe the let-down reflex as a tightening or tingling sensation, the brochure had said. It’s not, though—not for her. It’s like a shiver rippling out of your control; the way tears will start when something makes you forget, for a minute, what you’re supposed to be holding them back for.

Related Characters: Michelle (speaker), Jason (Michelle’s Baby)
Page Number: 109
Explanation and Analysis:
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