My Brilliant Sister by Amy Brown

Author:Amy Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Australia
Published: 2024-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

Grand Passions

My first year at home without you may have been the longest of my life, full of the pretence of occupation without real direction. I began to question the value of repeatedly dusting cobwebs from the corners of the bedrooms; if we were to let the daddy-long-legs be, they’d deter other pests. That belief was missing the principle of the thing, according to Mother; slovenliness led to ill-disciplined children & ungodly behaviour. Why live if you would not live tidily? She didn’t say this, of course – we wouldn’t speak so deeply to one another – but in my silent, imagined conversations with her, such opinions were shared.

Outdoors, the jobs I was assigned made more sense to me. If you dead-head the lavender and roses, there’s room for more flowers; if you prune the lower & crossing branches of the apricot & quince, green growth will be the reward. I wished I could trim off parts of myself and have fresh, waxy limbs. The best approximation I could devise involved culling my small collection of belongings. So, after the children had gone to bed & our parents were reading or sewing in the living room – after the mindless tasks of the day were done – I pulled old petticoats & dresses, knitted cardigans & hats out of my clothes chest. They smelt less of the muslin lavender bag than of stale soap. Most still fitted to a degree, due to my shrinking figure. I was growing up but not outward, which tended to necessitate letting down a hem rather than making a whole new outfit. The clothes were faded from repeated washing; faint stains of butter from baking, and the russet blush of old dirt around the edge of a skirt were permanent features now. Several buttons had the tight, jaunty appearance of being sewn on hurriedly by my own hand rather than with Mother’s precise stitches. Thinning material over my sharp elbows had been darned in a similar lumpy fashion. All of these old branches of myself were still wearable & so, in their way, necessary, due to our reduced circumstances. I couldn’t prune any of it.

A slightly different problem arose with my childhood toys. The cloth doll I kept sitting on the window ledge, where you’d once sat, was not worth culling; she took up so little space. I had named her Maria and she was not wanted by Laurel or the boys, who’d inherited our other outgrown toys – the bear called Whisky, the homemade hobby horse with a quizzical expression painted onto his chaff-sack head. Maria was doing no harm, so it seemed malicious to remove her. But perhaps that was the trick to gardening; although the dried lavender spears and unruly fruit branches appeared innocent, they prevented something better from taking their place. What might sit on that window ledge if Maria were gone? I decided to find out.

The doll, with her blond woollen hair and blackberry-coloured skirt, was lighter than I remembered.

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