True Stories by Helen Garner Page B

dancing for the rest of the evening.’
    â€˜I went in to bat for you, Two,’ says One, ‘at Ocean Grove State School in the 1940s, when someone had swindled you out of your best swopcard. I marched over and forced her to swop it back.’
    â€˜I don’t remember that,’ says Two.
    â€˜Three took me on a secret trip to Sydney,’ says Four, ‘so I could meet my boyfriend when he’d gone interstate to university. We went on the train. We walked around Kings Cross.’
    â€˜One took me to Bright and Hitchcock in Geelong to help me buy my first bra,’ says Three. ‘She protected me from those thin ladies in black with the tape measures round their necks. Because I didn’t really have much to put in a bra. I needed one for other reasons.’
    â€˜When I came back from Sydney to live,’ says One, ‘Two arrived at my front door with a huge picnic basket full of wonderful food.’
    â€˜I was responsible for Five,’ says Two, ‘when Mum and Dad put her into boarding school so they could go overseas. Mum said to me, “You were wonderful to Five.” I was, too. I liked doing it—but sometimes I get this narky feeling that I’d like to send in an account.’
    â€˜Three had dared to come to my first wedding,’ says One, ‘when Dad forbade everyone to go. And she took it right up to Dad when he called my husband a conman.’
    â€˜Wait till your father dies,’ says somebody’s husband. ‘You’ll be like the Baltic states at the collapse of the Soviet Union. You’ve been formed and bound together in opposition to him. When he goes there’ll be hell to pay.’
    â€˜Let’s try to keep it on sisters,’ says One. ‘Don’t let’s talk too much about our parents.’
    â€˜But aren’t they sort of the point?’ says Five.
    â€˜Yes, but it’s obsessive. We all swerve and swerve back to our parents. I want us to talk about being sisters, not daughters.’
    Other People’s Sisters
    I mention to a friend that I am trying to write this. She remarks, ‘The best way for sisters to get on is to talk about their parents.’
    Some sisters are sisters with a tremendous, conscious, public conviction. I remember a woman I knew, years ago, who would get up from the lunch table and retire to her room for the afternoon, saying, ‘I’m going to write a letter to my sister.’ We felt respectful, and tiptoed round so as not to disturb her. She would emerge, hours later, looking purged, satisfied, and slightly smug.
    Another friend, one of whose sisters recently died in a freak accident, says to me, ‘I’ve lost our shared childhood. I depended on her memory. I loved going out with her. When we walked down the street together with our youngest sister, the three of us, I used to be so proud and happy. I used to feel we were invincible—that nothing could touch us.’
    This is the kind of story I think of as sisterly: once a woman was driving along a street in West Melbourne when she was attacked by severe abdominal pains. She tried to ignore them and drove on, but they became so violent that she was obliged to park her car outside a friend’s house and stagger in, doubled over, to lie on a bed. Gradually the pains abated. When she was able to go home, she phoned her mother for a chat and learnt that, the same day, her sister had given birth to her third child in Geelong, and had had to agree to a hysterectomy because of unstoppable bleeding.
    A striking example of telepathic contact, yes; and it happened, in our family. But the story is rarely told, sixteen years later, because this gut empathy had no practical application. The flaw is that when Three needed help, after that hysterectomy, none of the rest of us thought of offering any; she did not feel able to ask for it, and thus got none. The spirit of our family is ‘Pick up your lip before you