When we want to find Joe, we go looking in the garden because he’s bound to be there. This from Joe’s daughter, Stella.
Joe grows a variety of vegetables in the backyard: okra, silver beet with leaves the size of elephant’s ears, beans (on precisely erected trellises for the creepers), aubergine (both the white variety apparently known as ‘Casper’ as well as the large segmented purple kind, and now in the process of cultivating the rare green aubergine that Joe will tell you is known as Matti gulla, its name derived from a village in the Indian state of Karnataka.)
“Over here, no one calls it a brinjal,” laments Joe, “It’s either egg plant or aubergine, which is a bit incorrect technically speaking especially when referring to the white species which is not purple, for the dictionary defines aubergine as a deep purple.”
Come season time, the family, the extended family and the neighbours are treated to liberal vegetable handouts.
“Mum makes this yum baingan bharta dish, with yoghurt and roti. It reminds them of home and reminds me afterwards that I need to start exercising seriously. I always go home thoroughly filled and loaded with guilt,” says Stella, who characteristically adorns nearly everything she says with a thin garment of humour.
Joe and Myrtle came to Australia in the eighties, worked hard, worked overtime (filling in for Aussies who preferred their weekends labouring industriously over a tan on a striped towel at the beach, and not too far from a box of iced beverages), built their house, raised two children (Stella being one) and paid the mortgage thus achieving the classic Immigrant Dream.
And where’s Myrtle today?
“She’s at my brother’s place, babysitting the children. Gives her a break.”
A break?
“Yeah, a change of scene. A bit of ‘you time’.”
How does a person get a bit of ‘you time’ tending to two toddlers is a question that’s on the tip of the tongue but doesn’t get asked because Stella volunteers, “It’s good for dad as well, gives him his own space.”
They — Myrtle and Joe — have taken to bickering, actually. Quite a lot. This is revealed rather obliquely (not as if one were telling tales out of turn) when on entering the backyard one happens upon Joe in serious, animated discussion with one of the silver beets.
“Ah, there’s dad, having one of his ‘moments’,” observes Stella, in a whisper.
Moments?
“Letting off steam,” she says, with a good-natured giggle. “Telling the plants his thoughts, his little unhappinesses, the times he’s been thwarted by ‘that woman’ who rules his life.”
One is tempted to smile watching Joe, unaware that he is under scrutiny, so earnestly in ‘discussion’ (or confession) is he.
“It’s all usually trivial things. Like, ‘Joe, why did you wash the dishes? I told you I’ll come back and do them!’ Or ‘Myrtle, did you water the plants? I told you not to, it’s summer, I do the watering in the evening after the sun’s gone down.’
And from there of course it escalates until one of them walks away. Joe will slink off into the garden and look mopingly at the plants. If it’s Myrtle she’ll stride into the bedroom, slam the door and put on the headphones (and usually listen to the recorded voice of Richard Burton reading a collection of poems, a different male voice, far less annoyed, infinitely more soothing.) Later one of them will make an attempt at rapprochement. A cup of coffee or tea will be made and set down silently on the nearest table. A packet of chips will be held out, silently, during the World News with its high ratio of global deaths.
Stella says, “Once they used to laugh together. Now they do it separately. Still, the nice thing is they will tell everybody one thing: ‘We are happily married.”
At around that time, as if on cue, Joe turns from his silver beet discourse and calls out, “Hi.”
Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney,Australia.
