Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.
Kath’s upstairs neighbour Marge was celestial in both size and age. Decades of self-indulgence had left her fleshy and diabetic but high-spirited in a manner that reflected a life of having one’s cake and eating it. Her enormous laugh echoed regularly through the rooms of the small house she moved to once Terry died, although her eyes no longer twinkled like stars ablaze in the country sky.
So generous was her body that she claimed to find clothes constricting and regularly tossed them aside in favour of celebrating fresh air. It was often that we would find her cooking up a storm in her small kitchen wearing nothing but an apron, her white, naked bum wobbling as the wooden spoon clanged around the bowl. Kath was mortified the first time it happened but it soon became our joke: full moon Marge was out again. We stopped knocking on her door when we ambled upstairs to visit. She didn’t give a fuck and neither did we. We would all shimmy through the kitchen, singing Nina Simone and pinching morsels of high-fat, high-carb high-sugar treats as quickly as Marge could whip them up.
It was in this same state of undress that Marge first dropped the wooden spoon, first clutched at her shoulder, first collapsed to the floor in a moaning heap. While I called for help, Kath tried in vain to force Marge’s mass into a dress. But Marge, in pain and fear, was unyielding. As the paramedics arrived we looped another apron, Terry’s before he’d died, over her neck and down her back to cover that majestic moon and match the one obscuring her front.
Marge never quite understood how I came to live with Kath. “But where do you sleep?” she asked again and again. Again and again I explained, “I sleep in her bed, Marge”. I was intermittently patient and irritated with her old-fashioned question, “We sleep together.” No matter how I responded, with gentleness or annoyance it did not change the frequency of the question; she never moved beyond her amused befuddlement. “You girls must be very good friends,” she would say and laugh her enormous laugh, her jowls and breasts and arms shaking. Sometimes she would scold us, “if you don’t find a man soon you’ll have to marry each other”. “That’s the plan,” Kath would respond cheekily, kissing me on the head. Marge loved that one, slapping her legs and roaring with glee at the idea – the idea! – of two girls in white dresses and veils meeting at the alter and exchanging surnames.
The second time her heart stopped it stopped forever. We saw the stretcher pass our window and wondered if they’d found her in a dignified position. It was doubtful, we decided. She wasn’t a very dignified woman. A few days later, Marge’s middle-aged son rapped on the door. “These are for you,” he told us, pushing a plastic bag into Kath’s hands, “Mum always said she wanted you girls to have them.” We chatted for a moment or two, said our sorries and shut the door. When we untied the plastic handles we saw the folded aprons, neatly embroidered, Margery and Terrence. We hung them on a hook in our kitchen and wondered why.
When we married, we played Nina Simone as we walked, hand-in-hand, down the grassy patch between the lawn chairs. We both wore colour and we kept our last names.