Grace's Table by Sally Piper Page B

each carefully between two forks and dipping them in chocolate sauce before rolling each in coconut to become lamingtons.
    â€˜They’re the devil to make!’ Mother would cuss, but her cook’s face would look on pleased as they devoured them.
    Over time, her Christian name became lost, to Mother, The Boss and Cook. Even Pa would say, Better ask The Boss or What’s in the pot, Cook? Sometimes Grace had to stop and think what her mother’s real name had been. Then she’d remember – Mary – and feel relieved that not all of her mother had been lost to a role.
    Not only could Mother change her face three different ways, she could split her personality too. She had a personality for home and another for town. The damns, bloodys and belches that Joe got away with in the house provoked a twisted ear or a pinch if he let slip in the street. Her perpetually red and chaffed hands – from the old laundry copper, the kitchen sink, the sponge bucket used to wash the shit and mud from a cow’s udder – didn’t cause shame at home. But in town, she’d hide these working-class hands beneath pristine white gloves and wouldn’t take them off until the brown paper bags of groceries were sitting on the kitchen table. Then Mother whistled while she put those groceries in the pantry – though her town lips had been pressed together, except when she exchanged pleasantries with other women using her town accent.
    Grace never saw her parents kiss or embrace but with her own coming of age assumed they once had, and possibly still did long after she was an adult and had left home. The slim-spined romance novels Mother bought on mail order and kept hidden in a box at the back of her wardrobe were testimony to that. Grace would sneak into her parents’ bedroom and take one at a time, reading it on the sly in the bush or with her back against a sun-warmed barn wall. It seemed a brash thing for a girl to do, to read of snatched kisses and startled gasps by women who always got their man.
    In middle age Grace read them purely for the happy endings they offered and assumed her ageing mother did the same. Why else would one have been on Mother’s bedside table the night she forgot to wake up, a page marked somewhere near the end with an old shopping docket? At least her last thoughts that night she died would have been of the happy ending only pages away.
    So Grace grew into two different people as well. One who longed to coax some feminine camaraderie from her distant mother, and another who was more irreverent than a follower of the family party line. She could switch either on or off depending on what she hoped for. And Filip eventually provided her with the perfect arena in which to practise.
    â€˜You’re too young for a boyfriend,’ Mother said.
    â€˜But I’m seventeen.’
    â€˜Exactly. Too young. And he’s too old. And your teacher. It isn’t proper.’
    â€˜ Was my teacher. School’s finished now. Remember?’
    â€˜Don’t get smart with me, young lady. Besides I don’t care if you’ve finished school or not. It’s still not proper.’ Meaning tongues would wag, the country woman’s dread. ‘There are plenty of nice local boys for you to see. That man isn’t like us.’
    On that point her mother was right. He wasn’t bigoted.
    Grace didn’t want any of her mother’s nice local boys. She was attracted to Filip because he was different. He didn’t have farm stuck to the soles of his shoes or have a vision limited to his father’s boundary fence. He was dark, but not outdoors-swarthy like the boys who hung around the front of the picture theatre or dance halls on Saturday nights. His darkness ran ancestrally deep. He kept his hair cut short because that’s what suited his European legacy. He didn’t bother with the James Dean sideburns or the teddy boys’ ducktails the way the