A few weeks after, Maxine—not fooling anyone with her lighthearted tone—organized a “casual” family dinner. At the last minute Michael had to work, Nana got a better offer, and Kara offered to stay home and mind Maddie. So, for the first time in twenty-seven years, Frank, Maxine, and their three daughters found themselves sitting self-consciously around the dinner table.
“Well, I hope you girls all eat your vegetables these days!” Frank joked heartily, and then quickly jammed a huge forkful of food into his mouth, as if he’d heard his own words and realized how inappropriate they were, because the long-ago battles over vegetables hadn’t really been that funny.
When they were in kindergarten, Cat developed a psychotic aversion to “green-colored food.” “No green!” she’d cry passionately, as if it were a religious belief. In Gemma’s memory there wasn’t a dinnertime where Maxine hadn’t raged, “You’re not leaving the table until you’ve finished every scrap on that plate!” They’d argue violently back and forth until Frank would suddenly explode, “Oh for Christ’s sake, leave the child alone!” and then it was no longer about Cat eating her vegetables, it was about Mum and Dad and hard, hating words and silent, vicious chewing and the cross clatter and scrape of cutlery across plates. “I’ll eat them!” Gemma would offer desperately. “I love green!” Lyn, her plate cleared, would say in a tired, grown-up voice, “May I be excused?”
There was a moment’s loaded silence around the table. “Of course they like their vegetables now. They all became vegetarians when they were teenagers,” observed Maxine, who had never forgiven Cat for being the one to instigate that “ludicrous little phase.”
“Can someone pass the broccoli?” asked Cat gravely.
“Will you make the baby eat vegetables?” Gemma asked Cat.
“Of course.”
“Oh, of course, she says!” Maxine snorted. “As if it’s easy! Tell her, Lyn!”
Lyn said, “Let her discover it for herself.”
Gemma watched Cat’s shoulders relax at this apparent acceptance of her soon-to-be-mother status.
“Cat will be a wonderful mum,” said Frank, reaching down the table to refill wineglasses, “just like my beautiful Max.”
Maxine rolled her eyes. “I’m sure I’m not her choice of role model.”
“Of course you are, Mum,” said Cat. “Look how brilliantly we all turned out!”
“Hear, hear!” said Frank while Maxine smiled a little dubiously and said, “I was just a silly young kid. So were you, Frank. Good Lord! Two kids trying to bring up three little girls.”
That night Gemma put the headphones onto her stomach for the baby’s nightly Mozart concert.
“Hello, there! How’s life in the float tank?” she asked. Over the last few months, she’d been neglecting the Violets while she talked to the baby, but they didn’t seem to be suffering. In fact they were fat and flourishing, as if they were enjoying the fertile atmosphere.
“Your mum’s going to make you eat all your vegetables, you know,” Gemma said. “I hope you don’t mind the color green. Anyway, if you do, we can have a talk about it. There are other colored vegetables after all!”
She switched on the tape and began to compile a list of useful things to tell the baby—little tips for a happier life that Cat might forget, or might not know.
Never laugh when you don’t really get the joke.
Stay right away from fireworks. Oh my goodness, stay right away from them!
TV sucks out your brain cells. Don’t be a couch potato! Use the ad breaks productively for homework, housework, and other administrative tasks.
Avoid the lethal combination of bourbon and salt-and-vinegar chips.
Look both ways before you cross the road. Bothways.
Try not to saddle yourself with too distinct a personality too early in life. It might not suit you later on.
Say thank you to toll collectors. Your mum collected tolls once. Toll collectors are human beings.
She meant your Auntie Gemma, of course. Not your mum. Auntie Gemma.
CHAPTER 23
The birthday dinners had started in their mid-twenties. They were Lyn’s idea. “No partners,” she had said. “Just the three of us. Seeing as we never give each other presents, it could be our present to ourselves.”
“How very sisterly,” said Cat. “How very triplety.”
“It’s a wonderful idea. I second it!” Gemma interrupted, as Lyn began to pinch her nose. “I know! We can each have our own birthday cake!”
And so the annual drunken Birthday Bash became an institution.
So you could say it was all Lyn’s fault really.
This year they went to a new seafood restaurant in Cockle Bay, with shiny wooden floorboards, disdainful white walls, and sleek chrome chairs. The kitchen was a square box in the center of the room with narrow, horizontal windows revealing bobbing chefs’ hats and occasional, rather alarming, fiery explosions.
“I hate it when you can see the kitchen staff,” said Lyn. “It makes me feel stressed.”
“You love feeling stressed,” said Cat.
“You don’t know me at all.”
“Oh no. You’re just a casual acquaintance.”
A waitress with a blue-and-white-striped apron and a distressing row of silver studs under her bottom lip appeared at their table, her arms stretched wide around a giant blackboard. “Tonight’s specials,” she said, plunking down the board and flexing her fingers. “We’re out of oysters and scallops, blue-eyed cod, and trout.”
“Why don’t you just rub out what you don’t have?” asked Cat. “Is it just to torture us?”
The waitress shrugged, and her eyes flickered. “Ha-ha.”
“Let’s share the seafood fondue,” interrupted Gemma.
“Could we get this opened soon, do you think?” asked Lyn pointedly, nodding her head at Michael’s contribution to the evening—a bottle of Bollinger.
“What’s the occasion, ladies?” sighed the waitress, sounding like a jaded hooker, as she lifted an expert elbow, popped the cork, and began to pour their glasses.
“It’s our birthday,” said Gemma. “We’re triplets!”
“Yeah? Oh, yeah?” The hand holding the bottle hovered precariously off course as she looked at them. Lyn reached over and navigated the glass under the liquid.