I think things got worse when I started at St. Martha’s because I began to understand what the absence of a father meant. Also there were no Europeans like me. No Europeans who didn’t have money to back them up. The ones like me didn’t belong in the eastern and northern suburbs.
Even though the girls at St. Martha’s don’t mention it, I bet you they’re talking about me behind my back. I can feel it in my bones. It makes me feel I will never be a part of their society and I hate that because I’m just as smart as they are.
“Our circumstances are different, Josephine. I’ve never got on with her. When I was young she used to keep me at such a distance that I used to wonder what I could possibly have done wrong. My father was much worse and it was only after he died that she took a step toward me. By then I kept my distance. With you, it’s different. She’s always wanted to be close to you.”
We weren’t on the news that night. Poison Ivy was, because she was in the group that threw questions at the Premier. As usual she was there in Technicolor, sitting on top of the world. No matter how much I hate Poison Ivy, I want to belong to her world. The world of sleek haircuts and upper-class privileges. People who know famous people and lead educated lives. A world where I can be accepted.
Illegitimacy isn’t a big deal anymore. But it was back then and I remember the lies my grandmother would tell me. That I did have a father who died. My mother never lied to me that way. Maybe that’s what I dislike about Nonna. That she couldn’t accept things as they were. That she probably would have been spitting out some girl’s name and saying “They don’t even know who he is” if it weren’t her daughter.
Sometimes I feel really sorry for her. I think that my birth must have cut her like a knife and I feel as if she’s never forgiven Mama. But she loves us, even if it is in a suffocating way, and that makes me feel very guilty.
“It’s not the youth of today, Nonna,” I said angrily. “It’s you and people like you. Always worrying about what other people think. Always talking about other people. Well, we get spoken about as well, Nonna, and that’s your fault because you have no respect for other people’s privacy, including your daughter’s and granddaughter’s.”
I could picture [Ivy’s] parents at dinner with [John’s]. They’d talk about politics, the arts and world affairs. Then I tried to picture them at dinner with Nonna and Mama. Not that I have ever been ashamed of them, by any means. But what would they talk about? The best way of making lasagna? Our families had nothing in common.
“It’s different for you,” he sighed. “You haven’t got any pressures in life. I’ve always had to be the best because it’s been expected of me. […]”
I was surprised at his bitterness and tried to cut the mood.
“I haven’t got any pressures?” I asked, grabbing his sleeves dramatically. “I could write a book about them.”
“You always seem so in control.”
“And you don’t?”
“Well, I’d run and run and run so I couldn’t think.”
“And when you’d finished running you’d be thousands of miles away from people who love you and your problem would still be there except you’d have nobody to help you,” he said with a shrug.
“The Australians knew nuting about us. We were ignorant. They were ignorant. Jozzie, you wonder why some people my age cannot speak English well. It is because nobody would talk to them, and worse still, they did not want to talk to anyone.”
[…]
She went on, telling me more, and as I lay back I thought it was ironic that the same ignorance that was around that back then is still here now. An ignorance that will live on in this country for many years to come, I think.
The first time I saw a nun without a habit, I prayed for her, thinking that she’d go to hell. But I think Sister Louise made me change my mind. I’ve never met a more liberated woman in my life and I realize now that these women do not live in cloistered worlds far away from reality. They know reality better than we do. I just wonder whether she was ever boy-crazy.
“He’s attracted to me and for once someone found me interesting, not because I was Josie’s mother or Katia’s daughter but because I was me, and there is nothing, Josie, nothing you can do to take that away from me.”
She slammed my door and I wanted to cry. Because I didn’t want to take that feeling away from Mama. I just didn’t want him to give it to her.
I felt guilty in a way. Because I go on so much about my problems, but compared to John and all the other lonely people out there, I’m the luckiest person in the world.
I just ignored her. I’m getting good that way. Things that worried me a few months ago no longer worry me as much. I can’t say that I’m completely oblivious. The gossiping of the Italian community might not matter to some, but I belong to that community.
Sometimes I feel that no matter how smart or how beautiful I could be they would still remember me for the wrong things.
That’s why I want to be rich and influential. I want to flaunt my status in front of those people and say, “See, look who I can become.”
“But what’s the big deal? Everyone has babies without being married these days. Everyone lives together and gets remarried,” he said, turning on his side.
I shook my head. “I can’t explain it to you. I can’t even explain it to myself. We live in the same country, but we’re different. What’s taboo for Italians isn’t taboo for Australians. People just talk, and if it doesn’t hurt you, it hurts your mother or your grandmother or someone you care about.”
Tomato Day.
Oh God, if anyone ever found out about it I’d die. There we sat last Saturday in my grandmother’s backyard cutting the bd bits off overripe tomatoes and squeezing them.
[…]
I can’t understand why we can’t go to Franklin’s and buy Leggo’s or Paul Newman’s special sauce. Nonna had heart failure at this suggestion and looked at Mama.
“Where is the culture?” she asked in dismay. “She’s going to grow up, marry an Australian and her children will eat fish-and-chips.”
Robert and I call this annual event “Wog Day” or “National Wog Day.” We sat around wondering how many other poor unfortunates our age were doing the same, but we were sure we’d never find out because nobody would admit to it.
Like all tomato days we had spaghetti that night. Made by our own hands. A tradition that we’ll never let go. A tradition that I probably will never let go of either, simply because like religion, culture is nailed into you so deep you can’t escape it. No matter how far you run.
“[Zio Ricardo] couldn’t take me in when I was pregnant with you. My father wouldn’t have let my mother see her sister again if he did. But he let Robert’s mother take me in, saying that he couldn’t govern who his daughter let into her house.” She looked pensive. “My father practically spat at me. Called me every name under the sun. A tramp, a slut. He hit me across the face and even hit my mother. Worse still, he never saw you, Josie. Never saw his own granddaughter. Tell me, what comes first? What other people think of your family, or love?”
I think my family has come a long way. The sad thing is that so many haven’t. So many have stayed in their own little world. Some because they don’t want to leave it, others because the world around them won’t let them in.
All this information I’ve gathered from Nonna and Mama, who was a child of the sixties, I’m going to try to remember it.
So one day I can tell my children. And so that one day my granddaughter can try to understand me, like I’m trying to understand Nonna.
I wonder about life if Nonna had married Marcus Sandford. If Mama had been Christina Sandford, daughter of Marcus Sandford, and not Christina Alibrandi, daughter of an Italian immigrant. Would life have been different for her? Would she have depended on Michael so much and would she have slept with him like she did, which was more out of loneliness caused by her parents than pressured sex?
But I think I cried more out of relief than self-pity. Relief because I was beginning to feel free.
From whom?
Myself, I think.
“Oh, Jozzie, you still do not understand,” she sighed. “Could you imagine how life would be for me if I married Marcus? Could you imagine what life would be for my sister? People are cruel. They would make our lives hell. But mostly, Jozzie, tink of Christina. Back then, tink of the way my darling Christina would be treated. It is not like these times, Jozzie. She would have no one. No Australians, no Italians. People would spit at her and say she was nuting.”
“How dare he kill himself when he’s never had any worries! He’s not a wog. People don’t get offended when they see him and his friends. He had wealth and breeding. No one ever spoke about his family. Nobody ever needed to because everyone knew that his father was the man they wanted down in Canberra. Nobody ever told their kids they weren’t allowed to play over at his place. Yet he killed himself. How could somebody with so much going for him do that?”
Ivy was valedictorian, but then I never doubted that. Simply because I guess she deserved it more than me.
I met her at one stage in the ladies’ and I realized that she wasn’t Poison Ivy anymore. She was just Ivy. As scared as I was of what it meant to be out of our uniform. She smiled hesitantly and I smiled back, and I saw tears in her eyes.
I’ve figured out that it doesn’t matter whether I’m Josephine Andretti who was never an Alibrandi, who should have been a Sandford and who may never be a Coote. It matters who I feel like I am—and I feel like Michael and Christina’s daughter and Katia’s granddaughter; Sera, Anna, and Lee’s friend, and Robert’s cousin.
