David Malouf - The Complete Stories

All this, she came to understand, was why so few girls were willing to do this work and why those who did the same work, but on a onetime or one-night basis, held them in contempt. They gave too much of themselves: it was indecent. And “widows,” they carried with them the taint of death.

She had thought this was ridiculous when she first heard it. Mere superstition. She thought she could outface it. But more and more now she had her doubts, especially in the last days of an engagement, when she had to deal with the ways — different in each case — in which these boys came to accept that their time was at an end. The war wasn't over. All they had done was step for a while out of the immediate line of it.

They paid the price then for their escape into make-believe, and she for having let herself, as she did at times, get too close. But how could she help it?

In a moment when her guard was down, when one of them was tickling her ear with some breathy story of the small town he came from, she would get a glimpse — that's all it took — into the odd, individual life of him; at the small naked creature in there, beyond the boastfulness and swagger, that was helpless and soft as a worm.

Often enough it was something physical that did it, the mother-of-pearl whiteness of an appendix scar, or some blemish she had not seen before, and which close up filled the whole of her view. Suddenly a body she had managed till now to touch without touching was there, heavy with its own meaty poundage, and hot, and real. It made their last moments together, if she did not deal sternly with herself, very nearly unbearable. As if, in allowing his body to lay itself bare to her, in her touching of it, there, and there, it was death itself that he had made himself open to, and what she was feeling out in him was the entry-place of a future wound.

As for the partings themselves, they too could take any form, and though they were final enough, were not always the end.

In some cases, the boy had already begun to leave a day or more beforehand, moving away in his head. All she had to do then was stay quiet and small while he got on with it. Others avoided the actual moment. Leaving her curled up in bed, they would pretend to be slipping out as usual to get the paper or a packet of cigarettes. She would lie there waiting to hear him lift his bags, which had been sitting all night in the hallway, then hold her breath for the last clicking of the latch.

But some wanted to believe that this was only the beginning. They would write, they would be back. She smiled and nodded, stirring her coffee with too much vigour. She hated to lie, but let herself cry a little, and her tears after a moment were real.

Then there were the ones who put on a turn. Like spoiled kids, toddlers. Big-shouldered in their freshly laundered shirts, they would sit beside their bags looking so plaintive, so stricken, that she had to pull the sheet over her head to save herself from the awfulness of it. You saw so nakedly what was being snatched away from them.

With the sheet pulled close over her head she would hear him deep-breathing out there, pumping himself up. Huh huh huh, on ten now!

She began to feel haunted. By so much that remained unfinished, unresolved in her relations with this or that one of them.

A phrase would come back to her, or a look, that was so sunny, so touched with ease and well-being, that she thought it must belong to some boy she had known back home. Then she would remember. It was one of them. Jake, or was it Walt, or Kent, or Jimmy? So this is what it means, she thought, to be a widow. She felt as if she had already, in just a few months, discovered things that made her older than the oldest woman alive. She had used up too many of her lives, that is what it was, in these phantom marriages.

At school last year their English teacher, Miss Drury, had given them a poem to crit. “To speak of the woe that is in marriage" it was called. It was American. Modern.

She was good at English. It was her best subject. “Woe,” she had argued, was old-fashioned and melodramatic, a poet's word. Now she saw that the feeling it carried, the weight in it of all that was human and hopeless, made it utterly right. She knew now what it meant. Pay a fine of one hundred dollars, she told herself, and return to Go! She considered writing to Miss Drury and telling her of this late enlightenment, though not the means by which she had come to it.

Perhaps it was a recollection of simpler days, of HSC English and Miss Drury, that made her decide to take time off and spend a week or two at home.

But by the second day she remembered again why she had left.

Her mother worked at a check-out counter in the one-storeyed main street of the little country town, where all the cars were angle-parked to the kerb and everyone knew one another and there was nothing to do.

Boys, as soon as they were old enough, congregated at the pub, spilling out barefoot in stubbies and football jerseys on to the pavement, which was lined with empty glasses. The girls, overdressed and with too much make-up, walked up and down from one of the two coffee-shops to the other, much preoccupied with their hair, too brightly on the lookout for occasions they feared might never occur. At home, after work, her mother took photographs of little kids in their school uniforms with slicked-down wetted hair or all decked out in white for their first communion, then, at the weekend, of wedding groups. She had a studio and dark-room on the closed-in back verandah and rented a window in the main street, full of examples of her work: smiling couples, good-looking boys in uniform, cute tots.

Her younger brother, Brian, who was fourteen, spent all his time in the camouflage battledress of his school cadet corps, including a khaki net that he wore round his shoulders like a shawl.

Sometimes he wrapped his head in it and stalked the corridors of the house in his big boots, moving warily through an atmosphere of damp heat and dripping bamboo while the boards under the linoleum creaked. He even wore the uniform when he was practising shots out in the yard at their basketball ring, and once, looking into his room, she saw him, his face swathed in the net, sitting crouched under the desk-lamp, doing his maths homework. Did he sleep in it?

Only once did she see him when he wasn't in full rig. He had taken the jacket off to chop wood in the yard. She was shocked by his thinness and by the whiteness of his hairless arms and chest.

At breakfast she asked, "Don't you ever take it off?”

He grunted, his face in a bowl of cornflakes.

“Does he ever wash?” she asked her mother.

Her mother looked at him and frowned, as if she were seeing this warrior who had seated himself at her kitchen table for the first time.

“Brian,” she said wearily, "a shower! Tomorrow, eh? Did you hear what I said?”

“Huh,” he grunted.

Her sister, Jess, who was two years younger but the same height, worshipped him. She longed for a uniform and was sometimes allowed to wrap her head in the camouflage net while they practised shots at the ring. They never stopped sniping at one another and appealing to her mother to adjudicate.

On the Saturday she went off with her mother to a wedding. In the yard of the reception hall at the School of Arts they ran into Mrs. Preston, who was a guest at the wedding and the mother of her oldest friend, Jodie. She and Jodie had been at school together.

“Oh, didn't you hear?” Mrs. Preston told her. “Jodie's married. They're living out at Parkes. Clive — her husband — is in the railways.”

“And Jodie?” Sally asked. She had been the wildest of their group. She was surprised to hear that Jodie was married.

Mrs. Preston looked beatific. “Jodie,” she told them, "is getting on with her cake decoration.”