The Wizardry of Jewish Women by Gillian Polack

Author:Gillian Polack [Polack, Gillian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Australia, fiction, Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, divorce, magic, Jewish, feminism, domestic violence, superpower, Nostradamus, bushfire, wildfire, unicorn, secrets, food, family, fantasy, urban fantasy, romance
ISBN: 9781611386851
Publisher: Book View Cafe
Published: 2017-08-01T07:00:00+00:00

2.

I’m magic at opening boxes. I know this because Zoë tells me so. She could not believe the way I just ripped on into them. Layers of paper and packing just thrown out onto the floor until they were so deep we were wading.

Those boxes were from Dad.

Zoë kept me company when I opened them. In fact, she was of major assistance for the initial unpacking. Nick just hung around in the background. Zoë loved it. She hadn’t realised I had a childhood, nor that the childhood had included a tutu just like hers.

She brought hers out and she measured them very carefully and showed me every single difference. The shade was particularly different. Mine was a yellowed pink, because it had sat in a Melbourne cupboard for a million years. She stuck her face right into it and then complained that it smelled funny.

The frills were in a box with a whole lot of other dress-up clothes. I used to love wearing Indian skirts and very Bohemian cotton prints. Peasant blouses. They all smelled funny — way too long in storage.

Zoë put each and every piece of clothing on and twirled round to show me them properly. Twice the skirts of my late teens fell from her, because these skirts were far too big. Twice she fell in a happily laughing heap.

Nick was totally startled by the thought of his frilly pink feminist mother. He hung around for ages, watching us closely and making occasional snide comments, but he never came through that doorway. Girl cooties.

Ten boxes of stuff. My whole childhood and teenagerhood. Belinda used to call it ‘teen-angerhood’, because so many of our friends were angry back then. I wasn’t one of them. I was happy being me. And hanging around Peter.

Linnie would say I’m imagining the past the way I want it to be. But me, I looked at my pink tutu and thought, “This is not the dance costume of an angry child.”

Peter and I moved out together the moment I turned eighteen. I hadn’t taken much with me. Peter never liked my clutter. And when I left Peter, a suitcase and a box tied with string was all I had.

Dad had not thrown a thing out. All my first eighteen years was in those boxes.

There were four batches of books. I hefted them to near the emptiest bookshelf. Zoë took several for reading immediately. I read science fiction when I was in my teens. Girls from science families do that. Nick had never read Doc Smith, and I had the whole Skylark series. And Cordwainer Smith. And Sylvia Engdahl. I forget what else he took, but there was a big hole in the collection before he left for work.

My diaries were there. Not with the other books, thank goodness. Imagine if Nick had got to them! I’d kept a diary from when I was twelve until when I moved out of home. I called my first diary Kitty, in honour of Ann Frank. ‘Dear Kitty,’ I read on page one of the very first one I was ever given, then closed it in a hurry.

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