“You know Sarah and Amir are having a kid?” says Imogen, who is arranging the flowers Evelyn cut from the garden this morning.

“From youth group?” says Evelyn.

“Yeah.”

“What, on purpose?”

Maya makes a smiling chastisement.

“I don’t know, I guess so. They put it on Instagram. Their parents helped them buy a house.”

Evelyn, her mother, and Imogen are preparing the house for the party, which is tomorrow. Imogen is Evelyn’s closest friend from high school. Her best friend, maybe. Imogen feels like girlhood and home.

“Do you think they ever feel the crushing weight of responsibility?” says Evelyn.

“Everyone feels the crushing weight of responsibility,” says Imogen.

“And they’re older than you,” says Maya. “They’re out of university.”

“Well, technically, so is Evelyn.”

Evelyn makes a face and takes a slice of carrot from the cutting board. Maya tells her to stop that, it’s for tomorrow, and come check on the soup.

“Look at us, chained to the kitchen, and not a man in sight,” says Evelyn, obeying.

“We’re straight out of a Harrison Butker wet dream,” says Imogen.

Maya reproves them with a laugh.

“Where are Dave and Ollie, anyway?” (These are Evelyn’s father and brother, respectively.)

Maya reminds Imogen that it is a Thursday: Ollie is unfortunate enough to still attend high school, and Dave has a chronic case of the nine-to-five.

Evelyn thinks her mother is the hardest-working person she knows. Maya works three days a week as a legal assistant and casually as a researcher for a long-running government project on domestic tourism, and is writing her Masters thesis in Public Policy. Often, she works six or seven days together. Usually on Thursdays Maya is at the legal firm, but she got half the day off on account of working late the other two nights this week.

“Evelyn tells me you’re about to finish your traineeship,” says Maya.

“Yeah,” says Imogen, “they’ll put me on full-time in November.”

“That’s great, honey. Those kids will love you.”

Imogen has five younger siblings: four sisters and a brother, all equally loud and competitive and recalcitrant. Imogen has always said, In a set of six, it’s every woman for herself. She is, as a result, a contradictory amalgam of ruthless and generous, patient and caustic. Although her preferred method of consolation over a scraped knee is to say, “Brush it off, you’re working yourself into hysterics,” children flock to her. She has more sway over her siblings than their father does, and Imogen is the person appealed to for band-aids and comfort. In spite of her occasional coarseness, Imogen is fundamentally kind, and Evelyn thinks children understand this about her.

And so, it was entirely unsurprising when Imogen decided last year to go into childcare. Evelyn cannot think of anyone better suited.

“A grown-up job,” says Evelyn. “Scary.”

“That’s right. I’m officially entering the adult world. Ahead of me lies the attractive prospect of a long and draining career with almost no room for professional growth.”

Evelyn shudders.

“It’s not all bad. You’ll enjoy it, and if you don’t there are always other options,” says Maya. “People don’t have to spend their lives in one line of work anymore.”

“Maybe I’ll work in after-school care for a year or two and then throw it all in to follow my true calling in feng shui consultancy.”

“And I would applaud you for it,” says Maya. “But help me with this dough, you two. Kneed it until it’s completely smooth, like this. Here, sprinkle some flour on the bench so it doesn’t stick.”

The bread turns out flat and dense, so they have it for afternoon tea and start a new batch.

Later, Evelyn is laying on the couch with her head in her mother’s lap. The Office is playing on TV, and Evelyn is half-reading a well-thumbed copy of A Moveable Feast. Being home means access to all her books and the desk she used to study at and the bed she has had since she was eleven. It complains loudly at every movement, and she has begun to feel the spaces between springs in the mattress, but she has been sleeping better in it.

Her father is sitting at the other end of the couch, by her feet. He is in a doze, temple pressed to his fist. Occasionally he shifts and straightens, watches the TV for a minute, remarks on how the old advertisement for this or that was better than the ones they are making now.

The box of Jimi Hendrix records is open on the coffee table, framed by torn blue wrapping paper and the maroon ribbon. He was just as pleased as she’d expected on receiving them. He made loud, enthused, lightly disjointed comments on the songs and Hendrix’s life and influences, and played a side of one immediately. He sang at the top of his voice to Purple Haze and The Wind Cries Mary and hugged Evelyn when it finished.

Thanks, honey.

Glad you like them, Dad. 

Ollie is sprawled across the couch adjacent. He isn’t home so often as he used to be, Maya has said, but he is seventeen now, and it’s to be expected. Ollie is remarkably transparent for a boy his age, and under interrogation his frankness tempers his tendency toward impulsivity.

He has a new girlfriend, or something like it. Evelyn’s parents say girlfriend, but Ollie doesn’t call her anything at all, which Evelyn finds suspicious. Ollie is not by nature an asshole, and Evelyn is inclined to keep it this way. She decides to grill him about it sometime out of the way of their parents.

“You said those two kids from your class have their wedding next week?” says Dave, stirring.

“Yeah, Jess and Bailey,” says Evelyn. She feels a little sick.

“They’re very young,” says Maya. “Though I suppose I’ve known younger couples who’ve married, and it worked out for them.”

“True,” says Dave. “Bec and Rob were eighteen.” (These are old friends of Maya and Dave’s who Evelyn has met once or twice in her life.)

“Bec was eighteen. Rob was twenty-one or twenty-two, I think.”

“I say do whatever makes you happy, especially where money’s not an issue. Bailey’s family has a holiday house in Canada, don’t they? They’re loaded: he and Jess will be fine.”

“I think so,” Evelyn says. “I know they go, like, every second year.”

“Well, good for them. But I hope you don’t get married any time soon, Evelyn. Not least of all because it would break our bank account in half.”

She laughs and assures him she has no such plans.

“All right, bedtime for me.” Dave pulls himself up off the couch with a grunt. He kisses Evelyn’s forehead. “Glad you’re home, Evelyn.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

 

*

 

Her father’s birthday party is a moderately-sized affair consisting mostly of extended family and family friends and a few work colleagues. It is the middle of Spring, but the remnants of an unseasonably hot day cling to bodies and make drops of water fall at intervals down the side of the punch bowl. It is the lazy, cooling spot of late-afternoon when everything is golden and soothes like tap water over a burn, before the sun has met the tops of the trees and houses. That point which best suits cold drinks by the pool and Triple J playing from a Kmart speaker.

The outside of the house is hung with the strings of white lights which are usually reserved for Christmastime. Between these, the lingering heat, and the intermediate hum of several dozen people talking at once, on their way to the louder place of beer and nighttime, there is something festive and nostalgic about the party. It is as though she is years removed, reminiscing on a time that is already gone.

She looks around for Imogen but can’t find her immediately. She goes inside instead, and there is a harassed-looking Maya taking pastries out of the oven. The kitchen has five other people hoping to be or to appear helpful, and in both cases succeeding only in crowding it. Maya won’t ask help from any of them, partly because of her strict ideas about the roles of host and guest, and partly because, in situations like this, when one person is tasked with something menial, at least another three gather round as though looking on and making suggestions as to its execution are necessary contributions. Maya, Evelyn thinks, would prefer to take the tray of focaccia out of the oven with her bare hands than have a third of the kitchen taken up by a cluster of aimless aunts and grandmothers and godchildren.

“Darling, can I bring out any of these plates?” some relation which Evelyn can’t label—an aunt, or a cousin once removed, or something like that—is saying. “Oh, these smell delicious, darling.”

“No thanks, Moira. Evelyn, can you put these in a dish for me, and take them out with some sauce?”
Evelyn retrieves a wide, shallow ceramic bowl from the cupboard and begins arranging the pastries in it. Moira comes to lean against the stove beside her. Moira has very little intention of being helpful, Evelyn thinks: the kitchen is where you find the stressed women, and stressed women offer good material for gossip.

“Your poor mother is taking too much on herself. You should’ve heard her this last ten minutes, snapping at old Aunt Carol as though she were dreadful pestered.”

Evelyn is not inclined to answer, and smiles.

“Sure, she was not happy. She said, ‘Out the way, Carol,’ but all snappish, you know. Poor woman.”

Evelyn isn’t sure if the ‘poor woman’ referenced is her mother or Aunt Carol, but she asks Moira if she could please take the pastries outside while Evelyn acts as an extra pair of hands for the former.

“’Course, darling. Happy to help.”

Maya finally persuades the other lingerers to join the party; the food is almost done.

The oven is shouting about the focaccia being ready, and Evelyn takes it out using a pair of folded tea towels. They are the nice tea towels kept for special occasions which her mother brought back from a work trip to Brussels a few years ago. They are hand-painted with rows of quaint storefronts, mostly chocolatiers, mostly with names on signs above the doors in French cursive. Maya said Brussels looked just like this, and down the shopping streets the chocolatiers outnumbered everything.

This is the last of the hot food. Evelyn balances the tray against the oven door with one hand and turns the oven off with the other.

“Thanks, honey,” says Maya, who is making up a wide charcuterie board. “Can you slice that up and put it with a pot of olive oil? Use this plate, here. I was going to use it for the fruit, but there was space on the board.”

Ollie comes peeling in from outside, apparently bound for his room.

“Oliver. Where have you been?” says Maya. “How is it that you are nowhere to be found any time there’s work to be done?”

“Sorry, Mum.” He’s sheepish, and Evelyn is glad of it. “Do you need help with the food?”

“The food is all ready. You can do the cleaning up.”

Ollie makes a sound of complaint.

“Start with the dishwasher. Thank you.”

Evelyn takes the focaccia outside and puts it on a table. The tablecloth is bunched underneath the plate of pastries, and she straightens it.

“Evelyn,” says someone beside her, and there briefly is a light hand on her arm. “I haven’t seen you since February.”

She looks up into the round, gentle, austere face of her father’s oldest brother. He is the most like him in looks, and the least in temperament. Dave and James share creases at the eyes and mouth when they smile, and the same bright eyes. Evelyn’s paternal family in general can’t be said to be particularly aesthetically remarkable: mostly, they are of middling height, narrow-shouldered, long-limbed, and bear a hereditary curse of prematurely thinning hair. But they have beautiful eyes: the eyes are indisputably the Ryde family’s best feature.

Where Dave can be loud and occasionally impersonal, James is warm and contemplative. He is a quiet, academic character, and doesn’t speak unnecessarily, but in conversation he seems to invite you to fill in the empty space. Evelyn has never heard James raise his voice, even when she was five and woke him up from a nap by jumping on the couch and falling onto his stomach elbows-first. Maya once said it’s because he has never had children, but Evelyn can’t imagine him with a child that would need scolding. James could not produce something loud or obnoxious or misbehaving.

“Hi, Uncle James. It’s good to see you,” Evelyn says.

He asks how she has been.

She says she has been good, thank you. He smiles, mild and faintly disbelieving. Evelyn suddenly wonders if the entire extended family knows about university. Or the lack thereof. She suddenly feels exposed. Is it written on her chest? I was incapable, and now I am suspended in a middle-place, and I understand that I need to reach out and take hold of something solid, but everything around me is blurry with movement so that I can’t see what is fixed. And are fixed and solid the same? And if not, what is the difference?

The events of her life are objects which something else has set in motion, hurled at her, which she must grasp at or fend off as she will. It makes the distance between her body and her self feel greater; she is subject to motion, and she watches its effects from some removed floating-place.

Some people do make things happen; some people have the gift of setting things in motion. Charlie Davies sets things in motion, makes things happen: Charlie can create something out of nothing—or nothing substantial: a thought, an idea—and the something is so valuable that it is called ‘brilliant’ and wins them the authority to speak at conferences.

“You’re so young, Evelyn.” James looks like he might say something else, but there is a jovial shout of greeting and Johnny Wilcox is suddenly mouth-breathing in their space. He smells of sweat and beer, like he secretes both in equal parts through the follicles in his skin.

Johnny is Dave’s boss of twelve years, who happens to be both a conspiracy theorist and a misogynist. He is invited to events like this out of courtesy and, Evelyn suspects, fear of the thinly disguised pettiness on which he operates. Last year he made one of Dave’s colleagues redundant shortly after overhearing him complain to a coworker about having to be contactable out of hours. Dave insists that Johnny is a decent guy, deep down, and he can be a great conversationalist if you catch on the right topic.

Evelyn has often joked with Imogen about his pronounced and thoroughly opined aversion to the ‘F-word’ –Feminism, that is. His vocabulary tends much more towards liberality with what is typically associated with this euphemism.

“Hey, Johnny,” Evelyn says. “How are you?”

“Yeah, good, good. Shit, it’s been what, a year? Two? You were sitting your HSC when I saw you last. You’re looking good, I’d say. Grown into the ears. Nah, I’m just kidding. You’re not going to get emotional on me, are you?” Here he laughs heartily. “Nah, you’re not that type. Rare. It’s a rare quality in a woman, knowing how to take a joke.”

“As a rule, jokes are funny,” says James evenly. “And in such cases, in my experience, women in general are disposed to appreciate them.”

“God, see, Evelyn? Everyone is so easily offended. Although usually it’s the women who act like this.” He laughs again, loosely. “But then, you’re a bit of a girl, aren’t you, James? How’s the hubby? I’m kidding. Evelyn’s not offended, are you?”

There is suddenly a sharp, insistent heat behind her ribcage. She is nauseous. “I don’t want to talk to you.”

For a moment, Johnny looks surprised. Then he grins knowingly. “Ah, I see how it is. Went off to university and turned woke.”

Sometimes the distance between her body and her self widens like a crevice in the earth. It has been weeks since she has felt functionally whole, but now the gap closes with sudden force, and she is conscious of the grounding of her feet, and for the first time in a long time, she is together: self inside body, body welcoming self.

“I said I don’t want to talk to you.” Imogen is waving Evelyn over to her seat by the punch. She has the lopsided, conspiratorial grin on her face which seems to say, You’ll never guess what I’m going to tell you, but could just as easily be, I have had a brilliant and scathing idea about the character of somebody at this party: come and guess who.

“Uncle James, you remember Imogen?”

They leave Johnny to his sweat and beer and are assailed by the considerably more welcome monologues of Imogen’s.

 

*

 

At home, rain comes like a petulant houseguest who overstays their welcome. The sky is wrapped in white-grey clouds for three days, which are spent in quietly working and reading The Bostonians and playing New York Times games. Evelyn makes cups of black coffee for herself and her father, who has been reading too many articles on World War II again and tries to bait them all into arguments on it. (This is a habit which, as far as Evelyn can tell, her father has always practiced, maybe unconsciously. His beliefs don’t seem to be fixed: they change depending on who he is talking to at a given moment so that he can always be the educator, or the opponent.)

She bakes box brownies with Ollie which they eat from the tray over episodes of Full House. Ollie tells her about his girlfriend, Beatrice. He says they’re not official, and Evelyn says he is too young to be in a situationship. He rolls his eyes at this, and smiles, and says Beatrice just got out of a relationship a month ago. “She doesn’t want to get straight into something else.” Evelyn privately wonders what the practical difference is between official and unofficial, but decides not to say so.

In the evenings she makes scrapbooks with Maya from old photos and books and flowers from the garden. Her mother has been crafting lately—macramé, crochet, pottery—and has a knack for almost all of it. A few weeks ago, she recreated in watercolour a photo she saw on Facebook that said, Crafting because murder is wrong, which now hangs on the wall next to the TV.

On the fourth day, Evelyn wakes up damp with sweat. She has kicked the blankets off during the night, and they lay bunched at the end of her bed. There is a gap in the curtains where sunlight spills through and pools at her feet. For a moment the air smells like mangoes and sunscreen and Christmas. The house is quiet, but there are birds chattering outside and Evelyn feels that at any minute a set of younger cousins will trip inside for Boxing Day breakfast.

There is orange juice in the fridge. She pours herself a glass. Imogen calls and tells her to get dressed, they are going to the beach. “I’ll pick you up in an hour.”

Imogen brings three friends—two from school, Eliza and Areeha, who Evelyn hasn’t seen since last year and greets with enthusiasm, and one from her psych class last semester, Dalia. They are all in high spirits and chatter ceaselessly through the drive, except when Waterloo plays on the radio and they shout it out the windows.

They set up towels and umbrellas on the sand and spend half the day alternating between swimming and laying in the shade. Evelyn tires of the water quicker than the others, so mostly she stretches out on her towel and dozes and reads her mother’s copy of Beloved.

It’s past lunchtime when hunger wins out and they haul their things up to the car. It is hot enough that their swimmers are already dry, and they pull on shorts and sandals. Eliza suggests walking barefoot, but the pavement is warm enough for discomfort and this idea is vetoed.

They get hot chips and wander along the street facing the ocean. They come to a little bookshop which Evelyn has been to once or twice before, but not in years. Inside it is unchanged, except for a new table by the counter displaying books that are popular on TikTok.

She is arrested by a shelf of new releases. There is a small stack of copies of the novel Charlie Davies wrote. She picks one up and balances it on her palm, weighs it. It is lighter than she expected.

When she brings it to the counter, the bookseller says, “Oh, good choice. I loved that one. Australian author, too.”

The drive back is sleepy and companionable, and Evelyn starts to read Charlie’s book with her head against the windowpane.

 

Nethra video calls in the evening wearing a wide grin.

You’ll never guess what, she says.

“What?”

I got the curatorial internship.

“Nethra! That’s so exciting. Although I’m entirely unsurprised. They would have been stupid not to choose you.”

Nethra laughs.

Thanks, Evelyn. I’m really excited. I can start planning all my outfits now that I know I’ve got it.

“Now you’ll be the coolest and most beautiful and fashionable person in the whole gallery.”

I was talking to my art lecturer, and she says interns usually end up with permanent job offers, too.

“You’ll be perfect for it. I’m so proud of you.”

How is home?

“Home is good. You were right, it’s what I needed.”

And the wedding?

“Tomorrow.”

What did you get for a wedding gift?

“A set of knives. I had to ask one of the employees for help.”

Nethra laughs again.

Hopeless.

“How should I know what to buy someone for a wedding gift? I’ve never even been to a wedding, except my uncle’s when I was seven.”

Well, I suppose the couple has never gotten married before, either, so I’m sure they don’t have over-strong notions of wedding gift etiquette.

“Even if they did, these are great knives. Superb, really. They come in a wooden case and everything. In fact, I would say I have exceptional wedding gift etiquette.”

I’m starting to believe you: these sound like first-rate knives.

“I’d show them to you, but I had to wrap them as soon as I got home. The old dull ones in my parents’ kitchen started to get jealous of their superlative shine and chopping ability.”

That’s reasonable; we can’t have any kitchen rivalry.

“I’m glad you understand.”

I consider myself an understanding person.

A moment, then she says, I miss you. Come back. But don’t, you need to sort out your life.

“Did you ever read Charlie’s book?” Evelyn says.

Yeah, most of it. I got busy and didn’t finish it. Why?

“I don’t know. I just wondered.”

It’s okay, you know.

“What’s okay?”

All of it. No one knows anything at our age. You’re doing as good as anyone.

They chat a while longer, and when they hang up Evelyn goes to bed. She lays awake for a long time, staring at the ceiling of her childhood bedroom.

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