Blog 14 - Saturday January 13th - Finishing School

Mum pops in at 7:25. She is bright in herself, although she’s still wearing the yellow creamy-green housecoat, which prevents radiance from shining beneath her skin like a weed mat.

She is on a mission this morning, and there is a scent of purpose in the air — like Bella catching a whiff of a duck. Mum’s duck is the garage.

“Today Cathy and I will clean the garage and vacuum the storeroom,” she announces.

I think of Cathy, her laborious breathing, and the antique vacuum cleaner. Mum, now able to read my thoughts, says, “The vacuum cleaner is a burden for me, but we will not go there.”

Sometimes there is a suppressed crossness between us — a competition to have the last word, in this case, on vacuuming.

I am frustrated I can’t lift more than one kilo, and Cathy has been sick, so we haven’t been vacuuming. I’ve noticed Mum bending over many times to pick up the old vacuum’s dietary needs. I ask helpfully, “Why don’t you get a new vacuum?”

“Do you think I need to vacuum? Are you not happy with the state of the house?”

“No, it’s not that. I just don’t like to see you bending over, picking up fluff and crumbs.”

“It’s very good for me to bend over… I have bought porridge — or do you want to finish the cornflakes first? I’ll go and get the paper.”

I hear Mum chattering in the garden like an old Chinese woman in the hot baths at the Olympic pool.

“Who were you chatting to in the garden?” I ask when she comes back.

“That was John. He cleans up the front. He comes at 6:30 every two weeks and is very obliging — he brings the empty rubbish bins in and takes my future compost out.”

We have decided on porridge.

Mum says the garage gives her peace of mind, and when it is higgledy-piggledy she is robbed of this state of grace. While she and Cathy are busy working on Mum’s peace of mind in the garage, I text Gus to ask if he’s managed to fix my wardrobe — which I know he hasn’t, as Lynnie has texted me to say, “Gus hasn’t fixed your wardrobe.”

After a while, Foreman Mum comes to my room. “Early coffee today,” she announces.

We look at the progress in the garage on our way to smoko. I exclaim in my best Taurean fashion, “Oh, it’s so beautiful — it makes me feel like dancing!”

Mum says, “Not until the floor is done; then we can crow.”

Cathy joins us. in the kitchen. She has Nescafé, not plunger — which most smokers, current and past, seem to prefer. Cathy laughs a lot like my brother-in-law Boydie and people from Polynesia — as a form of communication designed not to cause offence and to produce a positive reaction.

Mum subsides into a chair with specks of grass on her top. She reads a long article about a COVID vaccine being developed in New Zealand, and Cathy sighs, “Some people are so intelligent.” A headline screams “Beyond Grief,” and I think someone’s misery would probably indulge my vacuous sentiment and make me feel better about my own life than intelligent medical achievements.

When I eventually get the paper, it is a sad story about a rugby coach whose first child died in hospital with severe spina bifida. Mum avoids these human-interest stories like a violin might a ukulele — which I suspect might be our instrumental personalities.

Today I am going to learn to make egg sandwiches in cooking class at Mum’s finishing school.

I walk into the kitchen, where my teacher explains,

“You will get a few tricks to put up your sleeve, but I can’t offer you a full education.”

Recipe for the apprentice

Put cold eggs in a pot with half a finger of water covering them.

Bring to the boil.

Take off the stove.

Put the lid on for twelve minutes.

While the eggs are cooling, I go to buy the bread.

I take a photo of an exotic bird in the forest of Remuera.

She is clad in lycra, not tattoos, and her hair is a scrappy blue knot, not a bobbing golden bob. I often wonder if those runners with golden ponytails swish their hair deliberately as if pretending to be real ponies.

“Can I take a photo of you?” I ask her

“Why?”

“You’re like an exotic bird that has landed in a foreign field .”

“What for?”

“I’m writing a book because I’ve been sick.”

“Oh, okay then — I hope you get better.”

“Well, you took your time,” my teacher scolds me when I get home.

“You’re just in time to do the eggs!”

Maryse , an accomplished graduate and teacher of cooking, rings to say she is going to come over.

“Aselee,” she says in her good teacher’s voice, using my Māori name, “making a good egg sandwich is a useful skill.”

Mum holds up the bulb of garlic I bought and says, “Child, it is simply grotesque,” as if I intentionally went into Jack Lum’s and said, Hello, do you have a grotesque bulb of garlic?

She cuts a tiny sliver from one clove on a small tile specially reserved for garlic.

“It’s all about the hint of taste,” she says.

We then squash the sliver using the side of a small silver fork.

We add free-range egg mayonnaise so the squashed egg is just soft enough to spread.

Mum says, “The cook is the only person who must taste — otherwise the only person you are fooling is yourself. It is your egg sandwich; the only question is: does your egg sandwich please you?”

Mum is slicing the crusts off the Molenberg bread with the bread knife — address original box, bottom drawer , kitchen— while I am attempting to apply the mixture.

“The art of hospitality,” she says, “is to present your afternoon tea in such a way that it is ready and easy to eat, so the hostess can give her full attention to her guests. You’re being very mean — you must spread right to the corners.”

The doorbell rings.

“Time waits for no man,” Mum sings, with such a productive day providing music for her soul.

She pops off to touch herself up, and I open the door. Maryse has arrived with Jo and Phil, who are behind some large sunflowers.

As Mum joins us in the kitchen, Jo says, “A lot of my friends are looking after their mothers, and here is yours looking after you. Your poor mum — I bet you’re keeping her on her toes! I hope you are learning to be more like your mum, Ash — not her like you.”

She laughs. Phil laughs. Mum laughs. Maryse laughs. They all laugh.

As we all sit around the egg sandwiches, Jo asks Mum if her mother gave her a paintbrush.

“No, Jo,” Mum replies. “My mother believed children should learn to grow free and have wonderful birthday parties. I remember one of my parties was themed garlands and lanterns. After my party, each child guest came to say thank you and goodbye, and get a Chinese lantern to take home — until, when it came to my turn, there wasn’t one left for me. I ran upstairs and cried under the bed in grief. My mother came up the stairs and stood in the doorway and said, ‘Whatever are you doing, child? We can get more Chinese lanterns. You are ridiculous.’

My mother didn’t tolerate the irrational behaviour of children, and my grandparents made me eat pumpkin soup every lunchtime when I came home from school. As an only child, rebellion would have been a lonely exercise.”

Maryse gets up to get more coffee.

Mum says, “Yes, dear, make a fresh pot. ” Oh no,” says Maryse, “I’ll just pop what’s left in the microwave.”

Mum is dumbfounded at this new twist to her afternoon tea parties.

“I simply don’t know what to say,” she murmurs.

Maryse asks Mum if she’s been doing her computer homework.

Mum expostulates, “Darling, I’ve been too busy to even open my computer!”

I support her protestations, saying it is a full-time job looking after me, and she’s been doing an excellent job — with her only demerit being not sending me off with a packed lunch to the hairdresser. I had to buy some chicken-flavoured kumara chips, although my hairdresser did give me a banana.

“Mum”, says Maryse “you are temperamentally unsuited to a computer, although you show a willingness to learn.”

She defends herself quoting from her Stoicism 101 course — “problems must be faced with positivity!”

Our guests and Maryse leave, and Mum and I sit down in our small armchairs. We are companionable. We watch The Repair Shop, whose motto is perseverance is everything.

They repair a birdcage and put little false birds in it.

Mum says, “It needs real ones.”

I don’t argue. I am learning what you can say and what you can’t. She can’t bear me to ask if the meat is free-range.

I close my eyes. The neighbour’s dog is barking right beside my ear. I go to share my outrage with Mum, but she is fast asleep.

I pop a sleeping pill and move further indoors to sleep on the couch and think of Billy Collins’s poem “Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House,”

and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra, his head raised confidently as if Beethoven has included a part for a barking dog.