Gracious Living by Andrea Goldsmith

about her meeting with the curator, Ginnie slumped into silence. She was tired, she explained, it had been a long day, and when they arrived home she went straight to her room. An hour later she joined Elizabeth in the lounge.
    ‘Better?’ Elizabeth asked, looking up from the newspaper.
    ‘Much.’
    ‘Good, because you still haven’t told me everything.’
    Ginnie raised her eyebrows, to her mind she had left nothing out.
    ‘The library, how did it go at the library?’
    ‘Perfectly.’ Ginnie flopped on to the couch. ‘Perfectly,’ she said again.
    ‘And you can manage everything?’
    ‘Everything – except the card catalogue.’ Anticipating Elizabeth’s next question, she continued, ‘There are plenty of people to help, in fact, I met one of them today – she’s one of the librarians and a graduate student of Vivienne’s.’
    ‘And so everything was all right?’
    ‘Absolutely. Will you please stop worrying, I’ll be fine. Perfectly fine.’
    Ginnie looked at her watch and stood up. ‘I feel like a walk, I’ll wander down to Kate’s and tell her about my day.’
    ‘I don’t think she’s home.’
    ‘Doesn’t matter, I’m happy for the walk. Won’t be long.’
    Elizabeth made herself a drink and went outside to the verandah. She sat down and gazed across the garden. Ginnie waswalking near the tennis court and Elizabeth watched her. She saw her daughter from a distance, saw her as a stranger, as if the space had somehow erased her familiarity. She saw a young woman for whom every step was toil, she saw the sticks and the stooped posture, she saw the disability before anything else. She saw her daughter in a way she had not for a long time and it caused a peculiar ache as if she were once again back in the wrenching, grinding days of the baby years. Then, Elizabeth had wondered whether her daughter would ever achieve anything. In those years as a young mother manacled to a handicapped baby in an empty kitchen at an empty table, with time and its passing the only movement in her young life, the child had been her bondage. She had spent a lifetime in that place with the baby who would not eat.
    At the kitchen table Elizabeth Dadswell watched the ant glide over the laminex to the bowl. Up the side it went, right to the rim. It paused, head raised, front limbs waving, sniffing. The creature smelled boiled vegetables, it smelled stale boiled water. The creature was not tempted, it slid down the bowl, across the table and out of sight.
    Intelligent little thing, Elizabeth thought as she entered the second hour of Ginnie’s lunchtime feed. She stared at the patch of table where the ant had disappeared, willing its return, but it was gone and the child slithered into view. The child and its clumsy mouth far too close. Elizabeth tried to escape, extricate herself, set her hands to automatic, spooning the slops and catching the mess, while she, a person after all, slipped away to a grassy knoll deep in the country, or to her old studio where a lump of fresh clay beckoned from the bench. But it was too late to save herself, her imagination was spoiled by the rusted smell of boiled cabbage: the grass would yellow and the clay would dry and Elizabeth and the child would remain together day after day and year after year from 1971 to the end of time.
    So this is how people go mad, she said aloud.
    The baby, startled by the noise, gagged, and a bolus of pureedvegetables doused in dark, dank stomach juices toppled over the tiny chin. Elizabeth began to cry, cold tears for the loss of the largest mouthful of the meal, resentful tears over boiled vegetables trapped forever in her nostrils, and all the while the spoon scoops more of the slops and carries them through the loose lips to the tongue snaking within. How Elizabeth hated the tongue, that writhing bunch of muscles with its taunts and tricks and jousts. The spoon must sneak around it, neatly, stealthily, the slightest hesitation and the tongue would thrust at