This is a piece I wrote for uni, which has since been polished a tad (though if I really put my mind to it, I'd spend my whole life editing what I've written). As part of my Novel and Memoir course, I decided to write about the man who never fails to inspire me, and steal a bit of Sedaris' style in the way he rambles.
Upon assembling my portfolio a few nights ago, I came across it again (of course, my stories never have the correct titles as their save names, so I opened it going, 'What on earth is this going to be?'). Here it is, for my lovely readers. I know I abandon you way too much. Don't forget about me, please!
About the Toes
My mother apparently told my father – before she
had the real notion of dating him, that ‘young kid’ who couldn’t really speak
English – that she refused to stay in the city forever. She was from Tallimba,
a tiny town out in the middle of nowhere that breeds spiders as large as horses
and thistles with points on all sides that’ll puncture a tyre if they have the
inclination to. Tallimba is mostly red, with greying trees dotting the horizon,
and with a dam that’s a murky haze of blue and brown with sticks floating
lazily on the top. The only real colour out there comes from her mother’s
roses, and they have patches of brown lurking on the leaves, just waiting to
conjure the pinks and oranges into their monotonous outback palette. My
grandparents, too, have conformed to a sepia-toned life – my grandmother’s
flowered housedresses are crafted in muted browns, while the colours in her
husband’s neatly pressed trousers and shoes match the rusting tin found
covering his work shed.
My mother must have tired of sepia with flashes
of russet, tired of the people she’d met who were all one and the same. When
she turned 16, she fled to Sydney to find someone different, to find something new. Unimpressed by greys and blacks, she decided to
move further along the coast.
She was with my father
in a pub one night, and it was there she told him about the town she had
decided to move to. It was a place called Wollongbar. “My grandmother lived
there,” she said. “It’s nicer than here, because there’s grass and water and
the people are better.”
My father, having grown
up in Santiago but occasionally visiting his grandma on a farm out in
Concepción, liked this notion of a place with grass and water. (He liked my
mother more than he liked that notion, however, but wisely decided to keep that
to himself.) My mother eventually chose him as her ‘someone different’ (she
couldn’t see a similarity between her father and mine, and decided that this
was for the best). They had been married for 5 years before hauling my brother
and I to Wollongbar.
It’s small, and certainly green. No matter where
you go, grass is the preferred floor covering. They recently built a new bypass
through a paddock, and as though to compromise for the wide expanse of bitumen
now plonked where there were once cows and the occasional horse, they made the
dividing wall – highway to bypass – from grass. Rather than roads commanding
space and demanding that trees move for them, the roads snake around trees and
hills politely. You physically can’t get to the shops without traipsing through
grass. My father hated that. He fully embraced his new ‘country’ lifestyle when
we moved, as though this move was the thing that set him apart from other
Chileans in their quest to become Australian. He went driving around the little
towns near our little town to find a proper Akubra hat, an act my mother was
slightly horrified by. He bought a pair of thongs and hid his sneakers in the
wardrobe, carefully encased in layers of plastic so spiders wouldn’t think to
hide in them. He decided he wanted to become a farmer, and that we should buy
some cows and take them to market. (Thankfully, my mother is a pragmatic woman
and also frightening when she wants to be, so there were no cows in our
backyard.) However, when it came to walking to the shops of a morning, when the
grass was lusciously dewy and the magpies were coming out to warble on the
power lines, Dad preferred to drive.
“But it’s a five minute
walk,” my mother protested. “You just walk along the highway and cut through a
paddock. How hard is that?”
“If it’s a five minute
walk, it’d be a one minute drive,” he said, possibly thinking he could drive
through the paddock to avoid the grass.
“You’re not taking the
car. Honestly, Mauricio, just walk. Take the kids with you.” She gestured at us
– probably wrecking all her good furniture, if her retellings are anything to
go by – and returned to her book.
So Dad took us to the
shops, shoes tightly laced and hats jammed on our heads, legs pale from years
of being encased in Sydney smoke. We toddled along the highway, passing the
twenty-or-so cars that we’d later describe as “lots of traffic”. And Dad’s step
began to falter as we reached the paddock and as the footpath stopped.
My brother and I didn’t
care, and we continued on through the paddock. Our sneakers were wet? They
would dry. Grass seeds were caught on our neatly rolled socks? Mum was magic,
so she’d probably get them off.
Dad, however, cared a
lot. His brand new thongs were shiny, and he hadn’t lost enough of his city
ways to not care about that. His toes were also dry. He liked dry toes. But he
carried the wallet, and his wife was waiting at home for some bread and eggs.
So, he stepped into the paddock, toes curled upwards, and tried to flee through
the grass whipping around his knees.
Chris and I were prancing around in the car
park, being the idiot children we were, when we saw our father approaching. The
upward-turned toes method hadn’t worked, and he had (inexplicably) thought to
inch across the paddock on tip-toe. Chris and I stared at him, all prancing
forgotten, as his toes dug into the red dirt beneath the grass; each step
looked as though it was causing him more pain. Worse, he had to go back through
the paddock to get home, and the look on his face showed that he had also
realised this fact.
When he finally reached
us, we silently reached for his hands, and went to buy our eggs and bread.
Fifteen years later, he
still has not gotten past this, and he gleefully bought a pair of steel-capped
boots to brave the paddock. That, combined with an old pair of soccer shorts,
his Universidad Catolica de Chile shirt, and his floppy sunhat (the Akubra
mysteriously vanishing a year after he bought it), has led to vast amounts of
amusement on all our parts.
I came home for a week recently, and Dad decided
to take me to the beach. Lennox Head’s beaches have so many blues that there
aren’t words to describe them. My father is the only male I know to own more
shoes than I do, except that his shoes are actually useful rather than purely
purchased for aesthetic reasons, and the day we went to the beach he wore a
pair of grey mesh water shoes. I hadn’t seen a pair of those since he’d forced them
on me as a child. “Shoes at the beach?”
He didn’t respond, but
kept squelching along on the wet sand, dodging the waves.
“What’s the point of
going to the beach if you’re going to wear shoes and not go in the water?”
He shot me a glare. “You
know exactly why.”
Of course, there was
only one outcome. I hooked my arm in his. “It’s nice to be down home,” I said,
casually veering deeper into the water.
“I’m glad you’re back.”
“The water’s nice.”
And a wave came, soaking
Dad to his knees.
I might have gotten
dunked in revenge, but watching my father gingerly step across the sand on
tiptoe as he futilely attempted to drain his shoes made everything worth it.
Of all the things my father protects, his toes
take the cake. For reasons I still don’t understand, he feels the insane need
to protect everyone else’s toes. I remember the look of horror he gave me when
I returned home from a day in the park across the road from our new place.
Maybe he suspected the park was laden with syringes and I’d come home, doped to
my eyeballs and with HIV, but all that happened was my feet were covered in the
Northern Rivers’ trademark volcanic dirt. I bounded inside, and Mum rolled her
eyes. “Oh, go wash your feet.”
Dad stared at my feet.
“How did they get so… dirty?”
“She’s a child,
Mauricio, they’re meant to get dirty.”
The next day at the
park, Dad accompanied me. He wore sneakers, with laces tied in a complicated
knot that only he knows the method for. He had, much to my disgust, crammed my
feet in my own sneakers, complete with frilly socks. “Your feet won’t get dirty
this way,” he explained. “Your toes can stay clean.”
My mother, after seeing
me leave the house like this one too many times, hid my sneakers.
He gave me my first pedicure, having had to
paint his mother’s nails frequently as a teenager. “Don’t your nails look
nice?” he said, gesturing to the red polish. “You don’t want to ruin that.”
Seeing my nails chipped
in two days seemed to physically pain him.
But, despite my mother’s original reluctance to
date my father, their eventual marriage seems to be something that works – and
not only because they’re so different they cancel each other’s weirdness out.
Dad and Mum went to visit her parents in auburn Tallimba with the Acromantulas
(“Tash,” Mum sighs as I read this to her, “you sell this place so well”).
One morning, Dad walked
into the kitchen to see my grandpa sitting by the open fire. Dressed already in
slacks and a white button-down shirt, Grandpa was putting on shoes and socks.
Dad stared, awed. Despite being a farmer since he was 14, Grandpa’s feet were
lily-white. As he rolled on his thick socks, he met my father’s gaze.
“Don’t like things
getting on my toes,” he said quietly.
Dad looked down at his
own feet, in pristine white sneakers that wouldn’t stay that way for long.
“Yeah, I know what you mean.”
