The Happiness Glass Read online

  “When Dorrie came back from Sydney she went to work there. It was a rough old place, back then, and after a week or two she went and asked Mr Brickle for a job at the store.”

  “Why didn’t she ask her parents?” Lily said.

  “They weren’t on speaking terms,” Grace said, “because of the way she’d left. And besides, her father had a bad heart and never went near the store. Anyway, Dorrie demanded a sit-down job, and of course there were none, except for the cashier’s position, and that belonged to Edna Brickle.”

  Lily thought of the little cups of money, and the smooth wooden handles the assistants pulled to send them whizzing along the wires, and a little shiver of envy rippled through her. “Did Dorrie sit up in the glass box and count out the change?”

  Grace shook her head. “Mr Brickle put her in charge of the fitting rooms and she sat on a chair at the entrance, checking what people took in.”

  When she started grade seven, Lily’s parents moved from Wilcannia to Broken Hill. They rented a house not far from Grandma Brennan, and Lily went to live there with them, though she still spent much of her time at her grandmother’s. Since Grace had got married and moved out, and Grandfather Brennan had died, the old lady seemed diminished and somehow defenceless. Her house – previously a place of comings and goings – now felt empty, and at a standstill. Sylvie encouraged Lily to walk over in the afternoons after school.

  “Just until I get home from work,” she said.

  Lily would arrive to find her grandmother furiously pedalling the old treadle, and yards of piping waiting to be pulled through. One afternoon, Lily answered a knock at the door to a tall young man in a tan sports jacket and open-neck shirt. When Lily let him in he removed his hat to reveal a crop of curling golden-brown hair.

  “I’ve come to pick up my dog rug,” he said. “Desi Brickle.”

  Lily left him standing in the kitchen and went to find her grandmother. The rug was wrapped and waiting for him on the old chipped bookcase beside the sewing machine. Lily lingered in the doorway to watch him open it and run a thumb along a line of stitching.

  “If Sylvie decides to sell that chestnut mare,” Desi said, “I might be interested.”

  Grandma Brennan retied the parcel for him. “I’ll tell her you asked,” she said.

  Desi paid for his rug, peeling crisp notes from a wad he produced from an inside pocket of his jacket. Then, as he turned to go, he looked back over his shoulder and winked at Lily. It was only a wink, one eyelid lazily closing to conceal the eyeball, but heat surged up from Lily’s throat and flooded her cheeks. Around that time she would blush for the slightest reason. Grace had promised her that she would grow out of it, but Sylvie had shaken her head and laughed.

  “You’ll have to stop eating tomatoes,” she’d said.

  Her grandmother, who had intercepted the wink, ordered Lily to go inside and put the kettle on; she was anxious to get her away from Desi Brickle, Lily realised, and wondered what she thought could possibly happen.

  When Sylvie came home from work Grandmother Brennan told her that Desi had his eye on her mare.

  Sylvie was unimpressed. “As if I’m going to sell her now that she’s just coming good,” she said.

  Grandmother Brennan picked up the poker and opened the front of the old wood stove on which she was cooking dinner.

  “Desi Brickle is a chip off the old block if you ask me,” she said, stabbing at the coals.

  At school, Lily asked her friend Raelene whether she knew Desi.

  Raelene rolled her eyes. “Of course!” She leaned close to Lily and whispered. “He asked my sister to the drive-in and had his hand inside her pants even before the cartoons were finished.”

  Raelene’s older sister Margaret was now married with a baby boy. Raelene and Lily had begun to babysit. Lily absorbed this revelation in a silence that was charged with the memory of Desi’s wink. She saw again the triangle of smooth, tanned skin at the neck of his shirt, and the tawny hair at the nape of his neck where it tapered to a single curl.

  “Margie got out of the car and rang Mum from the kiosk to come and pick her up,” Raelene said. “But a few weeks later a friend of hers went with him and stayed through two feature films.”

  “What happened?” gasped Lily.

  Raelene’s voice was casual, but a tell-tale colour had begun to stain her cheeks. “She went to Adelaide,” she whispered. “You know, for an abortion.”

  Over time, Lily gathered more fragments of Dorrie’s story. From Sylvie she heard how one Monday morning, instead of going to her chair outside the changing rooms, Dorrie Flacker had approached the floor manager and demanded an audience with Mrs Brickle. She was shown upstairs to the cashier’s office, where she could be seen by staff and customers leaning over Mrs Brickle’s desk, staring down at her with those pale, alien eyes. Since Mrs Brickle was too busy to deal with receipts and change, the shop assistants paused the flying fox and business halted. Sylvie had been buying stockings.

  Dorrie had left the cashier’s office with her cheeks flaming. She snatched up her handbag from her locker, and left the store. No one knew what had passed between the two women, but that evening, after Mr Brickle’s usual detour to the pub, he arrived home to find that his wife had changed the locks on their house, front and back. He knocked and shouted to her to let him in, but Mrs Brickle had refused. Desi was a child at the time, and his anxious face was seen by a neighbour at one of the bedroom windows, before the curtain was whipped across. After walking all around the house, calling and knocking, Mr Brickle gave up and walked back to the store, but those locks, too, were different.

  Dazed, and a little drunk, he took a room at the pub. His wife would see sense in the morning, he told the barman. But Edna Brickle remained steadfast, and a day or two later he was seen driving out of town with Dorrie Flacker in the passenger seat of his old silver Jaguar.

  Wilcannia locals passed along the gossip. Mr Brickle had rented one of the rundown houses on Reid Street. It was quite a come-down for him, but there was worse: from being the proprietor of a prosperous business he had taken a job in the office of the stock and station agent. Dorrie kept house for him.

  After they moved away from Broken Hill, Lily’s family would make the long drive back to see Grandma Brennan and the aunts during the Christmas holidays. But by the time Lily had left school and started work, her visits had dwindled. As well as an office job, she had begun singing at night in a wine bar; there was barely time to eat, sleep, and shower, let alone make the long trip west. Besides, the desert town with its streets wide enough to turn a bullock dray, its tin houses and sparkling slag heaps, felt more like a dream than a memory. But there came a day when the bar job folded, and the bass player she’d been seeing ditched her for someone else. Furious, and desperate to get as far as possible from these disappointments, Lily quit her day job and bought a bus ticket.

  The night before she left Sydney she rang Raelene, and her old friend’s voice down the phone line, its flat country twang, jolted though her like an electric shock.

  “You’ll be here in time for the Paddy’s Day races,” Raelene squealed. “Let’s get scrubbed up and go.”

  Sylvie met her off the bus, slender in her tailored skirt and heels, her immaculate pageboy streaked with silver.

  The racecourse where Lily had spent so many afternoons trailing her aunts was populated by a new generation of racegoers. There were fewer old timers smoking roll-ups beside the horse floats, more young women teetering across the grass in platform shoes, though the heat and the dust were the same. From a seat in the grandstand, Lily spotted Desi Brickle. He was walking away from where the bookies traded, heading towards a marquee where an extra bar had been set up. As Lily followed the progress of his golden head through the crowd she felt the flutter of an old excitement.

  That day he came to pick up the dog rug and winked at her in front of her grandmother, she had wanted to say something to him, though she had not known what. Later, she had be
en haunted by the image of his darkened car with an unwatched film unfolding in its windscreen. At night, alone in the sleep-out, she had imagined being in the front seat of that car with Desi.

  Raelene had disappeared, and Lily scanned the crowd for her friend’s hot-pink fascinator. She would take a peep inside that marquee, just a quick look, and then she would walk down to the rails and watch the next race. Away from the shelter of the old grandstand, the warm wind lifted the skirt of her white dress and flapped it about her knees. Even from a dozen yards away, the bar smelled of sweat and spilled beer and women’s perfume, and Lily immediately felt conspicuous, the only woman on her own. She changed her mind, was turning to go, when a hand cupped her elbow.

  “You look as if you’ve just lost a week’s pay. Which horse was it?”

  It was Desi, taller up close. His features were not as sharply defined as they had once been, but he was attractive still in the knockabout style of country towns.

  “I don’t gamble,” she said.

  Desi grinned down at her, and suddenly the dress Raelene had talked her into seemed both virginal and too low cut.

  “Let me buy you a drink,” he said.

  “No, really, I have to get back to my friend.”

  “Raelene’s a sport,” he said. “She won’t leave without you.”

  Desi steered her to where an older couple were rising from their chairs. “Hang on to these seats. I’ll be back in a tick.”

  He headed for the bar, leaving her to guard the table. He hadn’t even asked what she wanted to drink. She could push through the crowd to the exit without him seeing her, Lily thought. She could disappear before he came back.

  He returned holding two plastic champagne flutes. In one of them a strawberry floated, a tiny pink parasol anchored in it with a toothpick.

  “Last time I saw you, you wouldn’t have been old enough to drink,” he said.

  As Lily took the glass from him she thought of that curl at the nape of his neck, how it might wind around a finger.

  “Cheers,” he touched his glass to hers. “Your auntie told me your family had gone to live in Sydney.”

  Lily wondered which of her aunts he had asked, and when.

  Desi did most of the talking, and later she would remember little of what was said. She thought of the night when she and Beth had counted stars – how Mr Brickle had been driven off in the back of the police wagon while Dorrie’s body must have still been in the house.

  Desi was telling her about a horse he was training, a pacer. There had been a rhyme that went around town about Desi’s father. Lily remembered Raelene chanting it and laughing.

  Willie Brickle felt a prickle

  Iris Flacker scratched it.

  His wife found out and locked him out

  And then went for the hatchet.

  After Mr Flacker’s death it had got around that Dorrie was Mr Brickle’s illegitimate daughter. Perhaps a doctor’s letter had come to light, Lily thought, or the results of some test confirming that Bob Flacker was unable to father children. The revelation had driven Dorrie Flacker mad. She had confronted her biological father, and later, when he refused to publicly acknowledge her as his child, she had blurted out the truth to his wife.

  There was a second champagne cocktail in front of Lily. Beneath the table she could feel Desi’s knees close to her own.

  “I once lived next door to your dad,” she said.

  Desi nodded. “I’ve always wanted to ask you about him, but never got the chance.” He added, “I barely saw my father after he left home.”

  “I was only a child,” Lily said. “I didn’t know much.”

  For the first time since they had sat down, Desi had nothing to say. Lily’s skirt, under her buttocks, felt crumpled and soiled. She wished she had not remembered that awful rhyme about his father.

  At last Desi broke the silence. “We should go for a drink one night in town, somewhere quiet.”

  Lily took the second pink umbrella from the rim of her glass and twirled it between her thumb and forefinger. It had come out at the inquest that Dorrie had never liked Bob Flacker. He was a mild and pleasant man, but she could not abide him. Then, after he died, Iris Flacker had told Dorrie about her affair with her husband’s business partner. Once Dorrie knew the truth there was no stopping her. She even changed her surname to Brickle.

  People had always known, Lily realised, that Dorrie was Brickle’s daughter. The town must have been buzzing with it; it was too small for a secret like that to remain hidden. But she had wanted too much, poor Dorrie, and she had not cared who or what she destroyed.

  “Pick you up around six on Friday?” Desi’s fingers brushed the back of her hand. “Are you staying with Sylvie or Grace?”

  They would not go to the old milk bar where she had sipped lime spiders. Desi waited, watching her as she twirled the little parasol. And Lily thought of their mother making them count stars, she thought of pink ice cream melting in a silver dish, those simple distractions that had once had the power to keep her safe.

  TWO

  Bearings

  I return again and again to the image of a busy highway, with a car pulled over onto the hard shoulder. Half-a-dozen men lean in close with their bodies pressed against the paintwork, heads under the raised bonnet. The female driver stands mutely to one side, and though outwardly calm, body language betrays her wretchedness. From time to time one of the men asks the woman to get into the driver’s seat, and to turn the key in the ignition when he gives her the nod. When she does this the stalled car momentarily stutters into life, although each time the engine sounds a little weaker. The men persist; they make further adjustments, all futile. The woman stares into the oncoming tide of cars, fortunate strangers getting on with their lives, until, with a final shake of the head, one of the men walks to his repair van and returns carrying a tow rope.

  Now she sits behind the steering wheel with the car in neutral, while it is dragged towards a place where mechanics will use special equipment to discover what is broken. With no view of the road ahead, the speed of the vehicle she is tethered to alarms her; when it brakes she must brake too, or else smash into its bumper. This becomes her only task, a life and death wrestle: grip the steering wheel and brake, steer and brake. Trapped inside the useless, good-for-nothing car, her helplessness is demoralising.

  This is as close as I have been able to come to writing about my infertility. While I was skidding along at the end of that rope I felt too raw to write, although I tried to keep a journal. Later, I thought that any account I gave might be marred by sentiment and self-pity; it would be too exposing and at the same time it would bore people. Even after thirty-odd years it still feels less risky to conjure up a broken-down car and a bunch of mechanics than to revisit the failure of my reproductive system, and the treatments administered by gynaecologists and IVF technicians. But what happened then with my body has become part of a longer personal narrative; it is also a small part of the narrative of women’s reproductive medicine.

  After six years of marriage, during most of which I was anxious to conceive, we started on the IVF program at Flinders Hospital in the winter of 1984; the date felt grimly apposite. In vitro fertilisation was a new and extreme form of treatment, the last chance saloon for couples who had tried everything else. I don’t remember whether I knew then that the first recorded birth from an in vitro fertilisation had occurred only six years earlier. In England, Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards had pioneered the technique that led to the birth of Louise Joy Brown on 25 July 1978 at Oldham General Hospital, Greater Manchester. Australia’s first ‘test tube baby’, Candice Reed, was born in Melbourne a little under two years later, on 23 June 1980.

  Like all radical advances that eventually become common practice, IVF was controversial at first; it polarised public opinion so fiercely that after Louise Brown’s birth her parents received hate mail. In the early days, Steptoe and Edwards worked without support from the Medical Research Council, which was
concerned about ethics. It was said that ‘The Establishment’ wanted contraception rather than fertility treatment, a response to the widespread view that the world was becoming overcrowded. Hapless couples who could not conceive were to be the brakes on the population explosion.

  People said cruel things to me about IVF, as they would later say cruel things about adoption. Unaware that we were on the program, a family friend, a woman of my mother’s generation, said in response to a newspaper article about a live birth from a frozen embryo that the in vitro program was wasteful and should be stopped.

  “Why would we want to reproduce these people we see being interviewed on television!”

  I had to remind myself that she was also in favour of involuntary euthanasia.

  “My husband would never have subjected me to that,” she said, her face contorted with disgust.

  She was widowed by then, but she and her husband had been childless, and I still wonder at the pain behind her condemnation.

  It is my second morning of rising in the dark, this time to drink a litre of water before 7.30 a.m. The water is chilly and unappetising, but I manage it, and we drive to the hospital. My blood test causes trouble; the veins shrink from the needle, but in the end they relinquish a decent sample. The ultrasound scan locates two eggs, dark round shadows within my right ovary. It is miraculous to be able to see these raw materials of life, and their very presence makes me feel positive, and hopeful.

  Day eleven: I am less buoyant. Hormone levels are not high enough, and an injection is needed to stimulate those tiny eggs. I have not yet started on the water treatment. They say they are holding off so as not to wear me out. In the early mornings, the same faces in the waiting room. By now we all have bruised arms from the blood tests. Tired from rising every three hours to pee, we clutch our boxes of urine samples, or sip water.