“Susan”

(Originally published in HEAT Magazine.)

When Susan Gutman strode into classroom 7B—long-limbed, graceful, every part of her doing exactly what it was meant to—a jump of recognition bolted through me. From the moment I saw her I knew I wanted to be her, that in some way I was her, or she was me. The real, parallel me, that is. Envy and excitement lumped in my throat like a wad of swallowed Juicy Fruit.

She stood before us, pigeon-toed against the blackboard, slim ankles tapering into perfectly turned down whiter-than-white socks. Her hair was the colour of dry summer grass, texture something silky: water, spider’s webs, the small pale feathers of a budgerigar’s belly. Pencil fine strands curved over her skull and fanned down her shoulders. Her eyes were dark blue with long pale lashes. Her smile was wholesome, wide and crammed with broad, white, smashable teeth.

“This,” said Mr Pinchas, the round-faced Hebrew teacher whose cuffs were always coffee-stained and whose skullcap pasted to his bald patch with sweat, “is Susan Gutman. She’ll be joining our class. Let’s make her feel welcome.”

A Mexican wave of admiration swept through the room. The Year Seven class at King Saul Primary was the same fifteen kids, give or take one or two, who’d been together since kindergarten—a tiny enclave of Judaism that, 2500km from the nearest large city, laid claim to being the most isolated Jewish community in the world. We were a club forever seeking new members, provided they had the right credentials. A collective thought bubble hung in the air like a zeppelin amid the heat and chalk dust: Fresh blood!

At recess she was mobbed. Like Columbus returning from the Americas, Susan had the smell of the outside world on her and everyone crowded around, eager to inhale. We huddled under the peppermint trees near the oval, sniffing and wagging. I hung back, distancing myself from the group, eavesdropping.

Before she arrived Susan had been a rumour. We’d heard about a new girl, a convert, mother a former Irish Roman Catholic who’d married a Jewish doctor. There’d been a battle with the school board to let her attend. A shiksa’s daughter was a shiksa’s daughter, no matter how generous the donation her father made. Apparently, though, Susan was the exception.

She was a beautiful anemone in a sea of pimple-faced, overfed kids who did too much homework and not enough sport; coddled, third-generation Jewish progeny who lived cloistered within the shiny new suburbs north of the city—places with names like Coolbinia, Noranda, Dianella, Mirrabooka, whose final, upward-ending syllables pointed to optimistic futures in which no opportunity would be withheld—which my mother referred to as “Nouveau Ghetto.” We lived in the Waspish Western suburbs closer to the sea, at the wrong end of the right street. I had to take two buses to get to school in the morning, three to get home, bypassing the Ghetto mothers in their velour tracksuits and sun-visors, Princess Di shag cuts shaking like leaves in the breeze as they waited to fetch their offspring.

It didn’t take long for Samantha Wineberg, a girl raised on cheese sticks, Marmite and the undying light of unflinching parental approval, to try to prove something. Her father was on the school board.

“You’re lucky you were allowed to come here you know,” she said. “If your mother’s not Jewish then technically you’re not Jewish either.”

“But she’s converted,” said Mark Field, round-faced and cheeky, his curly black hair like an explosion, shirttails escaping from pale grey school shorts. The Winebergs and the Fields, along with the Sniders, the Halperns, the Goldmans, the Blades—united by geography and membership to various Jewish clubs, committees and fundraising associations—formed a tight weave around their kids that was replicated in the intricate power structures of classroom and playground, from which I was largely excluded. On weekends they picnicked, and in summer they holidayed en masse in adjoining timeshare flats in Rockingham. Their fathers’ professions in complementary fields enabled everyone to patronise everyone else’s business without overlap. Mr Field fixed orthodontics; Dr Wineberg did fillings and crowns; Dr Halpern sorted out flu shots and general aches and pains; Mr Snider supplied pharmaceuticals; Mrs Liebler catered at weddings and Bar Mitzvahs; Mr Rosenbloom, a whiz with electrics, fixed everyone’s computer; Miss Robbinovitz, who had been a concert pianist in Prague in the 1960s, rode her Vespa between houses teaching piano and French grammar. Gentiles were contracted as a last resort, usually for the grubby jobs—plumbing, lawn mowing, garbage collection.

“Well, I’m not sure that matters,” Samantha said.

“Of course it matters,” Mark said. He turned to Susan. “Do you keep kosher?”

“Yeah.”

“Go to shule?”

“Yep.”

“Did you have a bat mitzvah?”

“No, well not yet.”

“Well, there you go,” he said, satisfied with this collection of facts as proof of identity. “And anyway, what about Naomi? Her Dad’s not Jewish.”

I flinched, hearing my name. Everyone looked at me and I looked at Susan. The blood that was in question flushed my entire face but on Susan’s it confined itself to two neat, strawberry-sized circles on her cheeks.

“Judaism runs through the maternal side,” Samantha said.

True, though on my mother’s side this was not for want of trying. Mum attempted to erase her Jewishness in all the usual ways. From the age of thirteen her dark hair was bleached the kind of yellow blonde that women with brown eyes rarely get away with. To the dismay of her Polish-Russian parents she sought pastimes for which there’d been no family precedent—decking for a twenty-foot sailboat, surfing, riding in FJ Holdens with non-Jewish boys. The final leg of her transformation came when she met my Catholic father at a University football party. She wore her favourite hot pink mini-dress and white knee-high boots; he wore the championship cup trophy on his head. They married six weeks later. My grandmother wept through the church service that my grandfather refused to attend. Honeymoon photos show them snowside, Mum in a hot pink snow bunny suit, Dad with aviator sunglasses and icicles dripping from his moustache cheers-ing the camera with his Heineken pitcher.

Dad was good at skiing but bad at business. When the stock market crashed in the eighties we went down with it, along with the shiny white house by the sea, the golf lessons, the ski trips, the sprawling holiday shack on the coast, the his and hers matching BMWs. The club memberships had to be forfeited. There was some messy business with reporters hanging around for a few weeks but eventually they, too, disappeared.

We moved into a two-bedroom one-bathroom townhouse. Mum refused to part with “her things”–scaffolding to hold her unsteady self in place—so we squeezed ourselves into the spaces between the ottomans and chesterfields and still boxed martini sets. Unable to find a job, Dad grew a beard and went back to university to study philosophy. Mum made the best of things but couldn’t hide her disappointment that the man she married turned out not to be the one she ended up with. A hard knot of bitterness clamped itself to her upper lip, compressing it to a pencil-thin smudge of fuchsia that turned down at the edges. At night my flimsy plaster bedroom walls vibrated with the sound of my parents in the next room fighting about money. Eventually it got too much for Dad who left Mum for the School of Philosophy secretary, a woman who “really understood him,” the only consolation for my mother being that as a redhead, at least she wasn’t a natural blonde.

Mum was forced to turn to her parents for help, which they were only too happy to give. Her real estate agent’s commission didn’t stretch to pay for her haircuts, clothes and gym memberships. Nor did it subsidise the nose job, braces and contact lenses she insisted on for me. The condition my grandmother extracted for her largesse was that I attend Jewish day school, to which my mother reluctantly complied.

Before my fifth birthday I had already inherited a sense of yearning for a past I couldn’t remember which transposed itself into a knotty dissatisfaction with my present. I came to regard my classmates, for reasons I can’t entirely explain, as inferior to me. To distinguish myself from them I wore my school blouse untucked, my tie loosely knotted and my gingham pleated skirt rolled up at the waistband to make a short hem over holey ribbed tights and Doc Martens. I wagged classes. I cut my hair and dyed it black. I cultivated a pendulous lower lip that could drop any moment like ripe fruit into a devastating pout.

The first time I spoke to Susan I was shoplifting sesame bars from the tuck shop. The place wasn’t a real tuck shop, more like an exaggerated cake stall—a makeshift trestle of cold buttered pikelets, packet-mix chocolate cake, rugguleh, bags of carrot sticks, sultanas, carob and sesame ‘health bars’. Mrs Liebler, the fat-ankled canteen tsarina who wore body-length aprons like sashes and her hairnet like a crown, was fanning a tray of cheese toasties when I slid the bars into my blazer pocket—one, two, three—without a rustle. Mrs Liebler never smiled and gave her daughter Stacey and Stacey’s friends free food anyway, so I didn’t feel guilty stealing from her. I figured she’d probably expect it from me anyway, gentile’s daughter. I paid her for a toasty and walked out of there with my pocketful of sesame.

On the way out I passed Susan. She gave me a movie-star smile, flashing gums the colour of grape jubes. It was an I-know-what-you-just-did smile, unmistakably. Shit, shit, shit. I sauntered past nonchalantly, biting into my toasty.

Her Bata-soled footsteps on the cement corridor pounded alongside mine. I sped up but her long legs easily kept pace. I stopped. Spun around to face her.

“Can I help you?” I said like I was pissed off, not scared, not seeing myself hauled before assembly at Afternoon Prayers to apologise and therefore confirm everyone’s suspicions that I—lone luncher, straight-A student and misfit with the dark Lulu hairdo—was indeed an impostor among them.        

Susan shrugged. “Can I have one?”

“One what?”

“A sesame bar. I saw you take them.”

“No you didn’t.”

“Don’t worry. I’m not going to tell. How many’d you get?” She looked at me enthusiastically, like she wanted to conspire. I stared at the pale yellow ponytail, the pointed chin. “I know you took them,” she said again, blinking.

“If you know, why ask?”

A couple of fifth-graders ambled toward us, laughing and whacking each other with foolscap files.

 “No one saw,” she said, reading my mind.

“Okay,” I said, after they had walked past. “Here, have one.”

That afternoon Susan and I wagged final period sport and went to my house to hang out. In the bus we sat on the back seat. When some boys from St Marks shot admiring glances at Susan I marveled at the easy way in which she allowed herself to be admired. A corduroy-capped old man with halitosis sitting next to me pointed to the ladder in my tights and asked if he could climb my “stairway to heaven”. Susan stuck her fingers down her throat and pantomimed throwing up. We laughed all the way to my place.

As I unlocked the front door the smell of cleaning products engulfed us: Ajax, Pine-o-clean, Mr Sheen. Mum was obsessed with hygiene. It was as though being poor made her feel dirty and no amount of scrubbing could get the place clean enough. She loved smooth, shiny surfaces, wanted everything neat, clean, perfect on the outside, as if that would smooth over the chaos within. She wielded her dust-buster like a weapon. When she couldn’t sleep she Hoovered. At three a.m. the neighbours would be banging on the ceiling with a broomstick as she vacuumed away, oblivious.

Susan and I watched TV for a while and hung around, not knowing what to do.

“Got any make-up?” Susan finally asked.

“Mum does.”

Mum’s bathroom was a gleaming mecca of mirror and yellow Laminex and cabinets filled with glass bottles and creams, perfumes, dusty powders and rows of lipstick in shiny gold canisters.

“Wow,” Susan said.

“I know.”

She did her make-up, then mine. I closed my eyes and the sweet chemical smell of cosmetics caused a funny lump to rise in my throat. As Susan smeared gold shadow over my eyelids I could feel her breath on my face. My skin tingled with her overwhelming closeness. Her hair smelled of apple-scented shampoo. Her ponytail, swept to one side above her ear, brushed my cheek and I jolted, making her smudge eyeliner across my temple. Making her laugh.

We smoked Alpines on the balcony, a graveyard of hanging pot plant corpses. My mother was a murderess. A killer of all things green. Bougainvillea. Gardenia. Geraldton Wax. She killed them with neither neglect nor malice but with overfeeding, overwatering, overcare. She killed them with love. Mum only loved things that couldn’t love her back.

“Do you get this place to yourself every afternoon?” Susan asked beneath a bowl of smoke.

“Yep,” I said proudly, hoping to impress her.

“Don’t you get lonely or bored?”

Susan’s presence on the cool balcony tiles, her slim freckled legs kicking through the rails next to mine, seemed suddenly necessary. Our friendship felt dangerous and strange and I was clumsy with it, unfamiliar with its forms, afraid of breaking it.

“No,” I lied. “Never.”

After she left, the house echoed with her absence.

That night Mum came home exhausted as always. The synthetic fibres of her hot pink pantsuit crackled as she walked through the door. ‘Walked’ isn’t exactly the right word; it was more a fast-paced shimmy. It reminded me of pictures you see of snakes wriggling across the surface of the Sahara. She had several rustling pantsuits in identical styles but different colours—bright green, bright yellow, bright blue—all with gold buttons and shoulder pads, matching handbags and court shoes made to measure on a trip she took to Hong Kong with Grandma when the divorce papers came through.

She sat heavily with a sigh, letting out air she’d been holding all day. If my mother had once been beautiful there was no longer evidence of it. She wore her hair scraped into a bun so tight her puffy face erupted from the hairline. She would release a few strands which, instead of creating the softening effect intended, dug like pitchfork prongs into the shallow curve of her forehead. Lacquered hairspray glistened on the surface of her tight yellow head. Her eyes, dark pinholes of sad intensity, missed nothing. Weapons of mass disapproval, they could burn holes through you.

The first thing she did when she got home was fire off questions.

“Did you do the dishes?” “Did you get the washing in?” “Did you wipe the benches?” “Did anyone call?”

Yes, yes, yes and no. No one ever called.

Mum went over to the bookshelf where she hid the scotch and poured herself a large tumbler.

“If you’re going to have it you might as well taste it,” she said, more to herself than to me, sliding her feet out of her pumps and into a pair of drab moccasins. The drinking started before Dad left—she always had a glass of wine in her hand by five to match his stubby of Swan Gold—but the scotch was a recent addition. She drank it straight, no ice or water. I couldn’t stand the smell of it. Or her when she drank it.

“What? Don’t look at me like that, Naomi. I’ve had a hard day.”

Dinner was saveloy sausages and packet mashed potato. We sat on oversized red velour cushions on the floor in the lounge and watched The New Price is Right. Mum knew what everything cost—the power tools, the pillow set, the hair care products, the coffee maker. She read junk mail like it was real post, circling all the things we couldn’t afford.

“I made a new friend today.”

“Oh? That’s nice.” She was eyeing off a Stairmaster for $199.95.

“Her mother’s Irish,” I said, knowing this would interest her. There were three main labels Mum used to refer to people: nationality, whether they were short or tall, and whether they had “pots of money”. A fourth category could be added: Jewish/not Jewish, and to that a sub-category, in ascending order of merit: religious/not religious. To these subsets, all of humankind could be neatly boxed, sealed and sent off to whatever part of her mind she might choose, or not, to store them.

“Irish Jewish?”

“Converted.”

“Is she crazy?”

“I don’t know, but I’m invited there for Shabbat dinner one Friday. Can I go?”

“They’re religious?”

“Yeah.”

“Hmm… I suppose it can’t hurt,” she said, wedging a corkscrew into her $2.99 bottle of Lambrusco. She was halfway through it during Neighbours. When Dynasty finished she took the rest of the bottle to her room. She was usually in bed by 8.30 p.m. which left me with plenty of freedom to watch late night movies and infomercials. Sometimes I would fall asleep on the cushions to be woken at 6.30 a.m. by Mum doing Aerobics Oz Style on the lounge room floor in front of the television. I told teachers the bags under my eyes were from studying.

“Naomi! Good morning! Wake up.”

Mr Pinchas’ shadowy bulk hovered over my desk. His cheeks—sombre oblong wings flaring downward from the bridge of his nose—were the widest points on a face whose bottom half flattened and spread like a beanbag dropped from a great height. He trawled the uneven rows between our desks emitting small puffs of resignation.

Religious instruction at King Saul was always an uphill battle. It was one of the ironies of the school that very few of the parents who insisted upon its strict religious codes upheld them at home. Kids whose parents attended synagogue at most three times a year were required to recite prayers twice daily in the stained glass glow of the school synagogue windows—abstract expressionist scenes from the Old Testament depicting Moses lifting his staff to part the Red Sea in lurid green, yellow and purple waves; Jonah wide-eyed and violet in the undulating belly of a whale; Jacob dressed as Esau with a blue and burnt orange sheepskin on his back. At school a piece of ham in a packed-lunch sandwich was grounds for expulsion but a bacon double cheeseburger from Hungry Jacks on the way home was for many a permissible treat.

It was as though the King Saul parents—most of whom were the assimilated dentist, lawyer and chiropodist children of pre- and post-WWII European migrants—were more than happy to hand the burden of guilt they’d inherited from their own parents for provision of religious instruction over to the school. In the same way, five years later, they would send their children to Israel for a ‘gap’ year to acquaint them with Zionism.

In the meantime, perhaps in the dull pulse of parental ambivalence, Hebrew teachers were treated as a kind of sport by the kids at King Saul. Many left after a single term, some in tears. The remarkable thing about Mr Pinchas was that he seemed unbreakable; like an old large dog used to suffering the humiliations of children. While bits of eraser and spit-balls flew past his nose he fought on. His voice was a soft low bleat of religious rhetoric amid the white noise of classroom chatter—fodder with which he vainly hoped to cut our Jewish baby teeth.

 “The Jews,” Mr Pinchas was saying, “are the Chosen People. Who can tell the class why this is so? Naomi?”

“Me, me! I know, I know! Pick me,” Melanie Ratner screamed from the back of the room in mock enthusiasm. Her arm jabbed the air like a rocket trying to launch.

“Melanie.”

“Because no Christians were available?”

Foot stamping. Desk clanging. Roars of laughter. Someone coughed “Pinhead!” under their breath.

“That’s partly true, Melanie. There were no Christians in Abraham’s day. Only idol worshippers. Who knows what an idol is?”

“Tom Cruise!” Samantha Toppleberg yelled. Someone started singing the theme song from Top Gun. Others joined in.

Mr Pinchas sighed. Dark circles bled from his armpits. “This behaviour does not befit those chosen by God,” he said quietly, shaking his head.

It was one of those long afternoons that stretched flat and wide, where every few seconds you looked at your watch and it still wasn’t home time. The classroom—recently built by Melanie Ratner’s Dad’s construction company—was small, hot and smelled of acrylic paint and rubber carpet underlay. Twin portraits of the Queen and Golda Meir glared down from above the blackboard as if in judgement. At the back of the room was a fish tank full of mud-coloured tadpoles paddling frantic nubs through murky water, impatient for frog life. Enormous bore-water sprinklers inched across the grass outside like rusted dinosaurs.

I watched the back of Susan’s head, the slightly darker roots down the middle of her part, the softer curled hairs at the base of her neck. Her perfect gentile head sat lightly on top of her spine, unweighted by the burden of selection. I tried to imagine how it felt to be in her body, inside her head. I didn’t want to be chosen by God, only her. That would be enough.

To my surprise, Susan did choose me. United by the magnetic pull of our mutual deviance in the school she perceived me as key to her survival in it, whereas to me she was a symbol of what might be possible outside of it. We formed our own exclusive club with a membership of two.

I liked the odd coupling we made, she the tall graceful one, me the short, dark interesting one. She was the glamour, I was the brains—or at least I found comfort in telling myself this was so. Her limbs were long and slender and were the biscuity tone of fresh baked bread—baguettes to my tank loaves. I had a narrow face with catty little eyes that sloped toward each other, and a row of piercings in one earlobe that made me look mean. Susan’s face was clear and kind, each feature defined as though outlined in fine ink pen. Where I had already developed small ridges between my brows from frowning, Susan’s broad smooth forehead looked as though no anguish had ever rippled beneath it. When she looked at me there was no censure or recoil in her eyes, only a sweet, dumb trust.

It was my idea for us to become “blood sisters”—for our friendship to take some physical form—a procedure that involved gashing our thumbs with the sharp point of a compass then pressing them together for our blood to mingle. I could tell Susan was squeamish at the idea, but she went along with it. Her compliance was uncomplicated and did not waver.

I cut into my skin first, piercing my thumb and enjoying the sharp sensation and the bright red colour of blood as it rose to the wound and collected in a bubble that seeped into the ridges of my fingerprints. When it was Susan’s turn she punctured small, bloodless holes into her flesh without success.

“Here you try.” She handed me the instrument and I poked at her thumb with the metal point, gently at first, then more brutally, ignoring her howls of protest. There was a perverse pleasure in her squeamishness for both of us.

“Hold on I’ve nearly got it.”

Finally I pierced a vessel. At the sight of her own blood Susan’s already pale complexion turned greyish. We jammed our bloody thumbs together.

Afterwards we lay on our backs on the oval sucking the sour roots of buttercup stems. Buffalo grass imprinted our calves and elbows. We hung wild wheat stalks from our lips and talked out of the sides of our mouths. The blue sky bulged and dropped around us like a parachute. Susan split a three-leaf clover into four and made a wish on it. I didn’t wish for anything. It wasn’t a real four-leaf clover.

The following Friday I caught the 103 bus into town then the Number 19 to Susan’s house in the northern “Ghetto” suburb of Dianella. Susan’s house was within walking distance of the main synagogue, at the end of one of the cul-de-sacs which concluded so many of the pale grey bitumen streets that curved around gum-tree lined playing ovals, cement roundabouts and deserted bus stops. She lived in one of the identical double-storey homes whose every blonde brick, asbestos fence, fibreglass swimming pool and games room stocked with ping pong table and Atari set served to reinforce and protect their ultimate quarry: Jewish family values.

At the door someone who looked like Susan—only in twenty-five years time—greeted me. On her mother’s face I saw how with age Susan’s prettiness would disappear. The delicate features would become thickset; the dark blue eyes would sink into the puffy flesh of her face. Cheeks that had once flushed pink would turn ruddy, blonde hair mousy. Dullness would settle over her features as though, after hiding her feelings under an expressionless glaze for so long, the blankness had just stuck there. The liquid movement of her hips would congeal to a slow, murky-river undulation. Her calves would thicken and her ankles would develop creases. Looking at her mother I wondered if Susan really was as pretty as I’d imagined, or if her beauty hadn’t been inflated by my desperate desire for her to be beautiful, an aspiration I hung on her like decorations on a tree.

Mrs Gutman smiled and motioned me inside. The house was cool and bright and smelled of roasting chicken. She led me through a long hallway to a large, white-tiled kitchen. Sweet peas grew up chicken wire against an asbestos fence outside the kitchen window. Seeds nudged through cotton wool in jars on the windowsill: avocado, watermelon, pumpkin, sunflower. A heavy white fridge hummed—I imagined it fat with Tupperware-bound leftovers. There were aluminium cups in bright metallic colours and lavender cut from the garden sprouting from an old coffee jar. A growth chart on the wall marked Susan’s height at age eight, nine, ten-and-a-half, twelve.

Susan strode into the kitchen grinning.

“Show Naomi your room then go and wash up for dinner.” Mrs Gutman’s voice was as gentle as a loving pat, the way that smiling mothers in sitcoms always sounded. It was nothing like my mother’s jabbing uppercut commands.

Susan’s mother had taken to Judaism with the earnest enthusiasm of a girl guide. If God hadn’t been first to choose her she was jolly well going to convince him of her worthiness to join the club. When she blessed the Shabbat candles her hands made two efficient circles over the flames like someone rubbing out a mistake. Her Irish accent made the Hebrew sound like another language altogether. As Susan’s father said kiddush—stumbling over the words and finally giving up and reading the Hebrew spelled out in English phonetics on the left hand side of the page—she nodded and mouthed along like a stage mother watching in the wings. When he finished she gave a hearty “Amen,” which she pronounced the Yiddish way, “O-mein.” 

Throughout the ritualistic blessings Susan refused to participate. Her eyes stared straight ahead. When her mother passed her the kiddush cup Susan shot her a look of sophisticated disdain, the way a pissed-off cat glares at someone trying to coax it to their lap, and refused to drink. I knew her rebelliousness was token and that it was for my benefit. When the cup came to me, I took it gladly and drank freely, filling my mouth with its sweet sticky contents.

“O-mein,” I said loudly. Mrs Gutman grinned.

Susan scowled like I was a traitor but I didn’t care. Sitting there, in the glow of the white tablecloth, the flickering candles, the glittering silverware, the kosher wine I sipped from a silver goblet a little too freely, I felt a stupid sort of bliss rush my organs and spread through me like warm honey. As Mr Gutman blessed the challot and sprinkled salt on the soft yellow dough I felt finally, unfathomably, home. Mum, alone in our disinfected lounge room with her half-drunk summer wine and A Current Affair on the television, was a million miles away.

The next Monday when I arrived at school there was pandemonium. The synagogue had been vandalised. There were giant black swastikas spray-painted over the walls. One of the stained glass windows had been smashed with a brick. A nearby Chinese restaurant and a Vietnamese deli had also been graffitied. News crews hung around like seagulls. The principal was giving interviews outside the school. Some kids were crying. Morning Prayers were cancelled.

Susan and I went to sit in what had become our ‘spot’ under the peppermint trees. On the swings, ploughing arcs through the air with our feet as the high boughs of eucalypt rose and fell, scuffing our heels in the sand on the way through, we were like alternating legs on a single body. The edges between us were blurring. Susan had started to roll her school skirt like mine; the ladders in her tights resembled similar complex webs of black ribbing to my own. She cracked her knuckles finger by finger the way I did. My walk— slow, lilting, leaning weight back on my heels as though I was in no hurry to get anywhere; Mum said I was like Lady Muck, making the world wait—had become our walk. Inflections in her speech—slow, fast, slow—had begun to mirror mine.

“I don’t see what the big deal is,” Susan said. “It’s just a bit of paint.”

I suspected she was anticipating my opinion before forming her own. Grinning her wide grin, with that stupid ponytail bobbing and wagging behind her like an obedient, panting dog.

“How can you say that? You don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

The harshness of my tone surprised us both and left her with no room to back down, even if she’d wanted to.

“I can say whatever I like. It’s not like we live in Nazi Germany, you know.”

I tightened my grip on the swing and felt the cool chains cut into my palms. “It’s not just paint. You wouldn’t understand.”

“What? What wouldn’t I understand?”

“It doesn’t matter. You just wouldn’t.”

“Why? Because I’m a shiksa? A goy? Is that it? Jesus Naomi, you’re as bad as everyone else around here.”

“Your relatives didn’t die in concentration camps, Susan.” I spat the words like an accusation. Susan’s pretty face suddenly crumpled. The skin on her throat went red. A single tear welled in the fringe of her lashes.

“You’re so fucking superior, Naomi, you know that?”

At Afternoon Prayers that day—held in the gusty undercroft instead of the vandalised synagogue— Susan sat with Stacy Liebler, leaving the place I’d saved for her empty.

We had arranged for Susan to sleep over at my house the following Saturday. I wasn’t sure she’d come, but at 7.30 p.m., after three stars had pierced the night sky signalling the Sabbath’s end, Susan’s mother dropped her off as arranged.

We settled in front of the television to watch Hey, Hey It’s Saturday, sitting a little further apart than usual. Mum emerged from her room in a cloud of Shalimar, blonde hair pasted to her head. She was off to the local grab-a-granny with her friend Judy—a fellow divorcee with a sharp nose, a voice that sounded like it had been through a meat grinder and a commitment to synthetic fibres equal to Mum’s own.

“Be good,” Mum called as she swept out the door. She’d already had a few wines. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“Don’t worry, we won’t,” I sang out. I turned to Susan. “What do you want to do?”

Susan’s eyes flickered with the reflected glaze of the television where a man was juggling chainsaws in a variety segment. She kept her gaze on the screen as she spoke, mechanically crunching the salt and vinegar Samboys I’d placed in front of her in a small bowl like an offering. Oil and chip crumbs greased the corners of her mouth.

“Dunno.”

“Make-up?”

“Nah.”

“Smoke?”

She wiped her mouth with the back of her sleeve. “Mm… no.”

“What about some of this?” I pulled Mum’s Jack Daniels from its bookcase hiding spot. The bottle was smooth and heavy in my hand, about two-thirds full. Susan looked up from the television and shrugged. I uncapped the bottle and offered it to her. She shook her head.

“You go first.”

I threw my head back, swallowed, and then coughed as the liquid burned a sharp path down my oesophagus. Susan followed my lead.

“Tastes disgusting,” she said.

“You get used to it.”

As we passed the bottle back and forth the heat of the spirit dissolved the lumpy awkwardness between us like sugar in a stove-warmed pot. It made us fluid and light with each other. We took bolder and bolder sips. Hot waves of alcohol curled delightfully in our bellies. We put on one of Mum’s Rolling Stones records and danced around the lounge room, making smooth shapes with our limbs and scuffmarks in the carpet.

“I’ve got an idea,” Susan said.

“What?” Her face loomed before mine. Her pretty eyes shone.

“Cut my hair.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No I’m not. Cut it short like yours. I’m sick of it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yep. We’ll be twins. Just do it. Or I will.”

“But Susan—”

“Pretty please. With sugar, a cherry—I really want you to.”

I went to the drawer and took out Mum’s stainless steel sewing scissors. They were old and heavy and squeaked like some medieval torture instrument. Susan sat on the floor while I kneeled over her, a little unsteadily. I took a pale clump of hair between my second and third fingers the way I’d seen hairdressers do. The blade slicing through the fine strands made a high-pitched, metallic scraping sound, like the noise of a small boat engine under water. “Geronimo,” I said as her hair fluttered to the floor, and Mick Jagger sang “Under My Thumb.”

Because the scissors were quite blunt it was hard to cut in a straight line, and I had to hack larger and larger chunks to even it up. My tentative start grew more brazen, and soon the exercise gained a momentum of its own. Hair was flying everywhere but I couldn’t stop. I was delighting in my destructiveness like a child stomping on a sandcastle. With each cut I seemed to grow in strength, to become taller, while Susan seemed to shrink lower in her chair.  With each cut she appeared to shudder, diminished, as though struck by cold. Her blonde hair fell like feathers and lay at our feet. Outside, the summer easterly had picked up to a bluster, carrying its dry inland heat across the desert to the coast, slapping branches against windows and blowing in under doors, rolling tufts of Susan’s hair across the carpet like spinifex. Still I kept on, unable to stop, high on the violence of what I was doing. Wanting what—to hurt her? Damage her in some way?—I didn’t know. Blood throbbed in my head. I started to laugh.

Susan was laughing too, though a bit reservedly at first.

“You look like a Holocaust survivor,” I said.

“Let me see.” I stood back from the mirror.

On seeing her reflection Susan fell silent. Her eyes went hard. Her features looked pinched, smaller, harsher beneath the ugly tufted hair. For a moment she looked confused, unsure what her reaction should be. Then came the tears. Thick. Hot. Fast. I’d never seen Susan cry like that before. It sent a shiver through me.

“Susan I—I’m sorry.”

I tried to put my arm around her shoulders. She shrugged it off. Convulsed with sobs, it was like she was shaking the tears out of her. Liquid seemed to come from every orifice: eyes, nose… then her gasping turned to retching. She made it as far as the toilet before collapsing on the tiles.

I don’t know what time it was when Mum came home but relief overcame my dread at her arrival. She took one look at Susan sprawled on the bathroom floor and snapped into cleaning mode. With tired efficiency she pinned Susan against the shower recess and scrubbed her down like a dirty oven plate, washing sick out of her hair and face. Then she wrapped her in an oversize bathrobe.

While Mum worked on Susan I fetched a broom and pan to sweep the remains of Susan’s hair which, like shattered glass, had spread amazingly far. Little blonde colonies sprouted the length of the lounge room and, beyond it, the hallway and kitchen. It took me a long time to collect it all. I brushed the contents of the pan onto a sheet of newspaper and folded it into a small package. I couldn’t bring myself to throw it in the rubbish bin so I folded the package again and stuffed it behind the sofa.

Susan sat whimpering and shivering at the kitchen table. Her face was the colour of dead eucalyptus. As soon as Mrs Gutman arrived she burst into tears again.

“My God! What have you done?” Mrs Gutman looked at Susan, then at me, her Irish accent more pronounced than I remembered it. “How did this happen?”

“She did it!” Susan’s words hit me like plates smashing. From her mother came daggers. Steak knives. Cleavers. I stared at a crack in the linoleum.

“Well, I guess girls will be girls,” Mum said, trying to be light. She was a mess from her efforts at cleaning. Her yellow bun had swollen into a frayed aura around her head and make-up had leached into the crevices around her eyes. Her floral chiffon blouse gaped like an open wound, exposing her motley chest flesh.

“I don’t think that’s an appropriate excuse,” Mrs Gutman responded, looking Mum up and down, then fixing her gaze on the empty bottle of Jack Daniels lying on the lounge room floor. “And I’m less than happy with your supervision. I don’t want Susan coming here again.”

“Fine.” Mum puffed her chest out and held the door open. As Mrs Gutman exited with Susan slinking behind her, still in Mum’s robe and refusing to meet my eyes, Mum turned to me and said, loud enough for them to hear, “We don’t want you hanging around those religious crazies anyway.”

After that Susan avoided me as much as possible. In class she asked to move to a different desk, away from mine. At recess we greeted each other the way players greet opposing sports teams at the start of a match: curt and courteous. I went back to my solo lunches, while Susan struck up an instant and conspicuous friendship with Stacy Liebler. In a way I was relieved. It was as if our friendship had uncovered some dark, ignoble thing in myself I didn’t want to risk exposing again.

At the end of the year I got a scholarship to attend Presbyterian Ladies’ Academy—a prospect that thrilled my mother. Her hope was for me to fall in with wealthy peers whose families would take me along on their overseas holidays and ski trips—something I eventually did. As for Susan, she followed on to King Saul Senior High, then left school at fifteen to go to secretarial college. I heard through the grapevine she married a frummer soon after—a Talmudic scholar from England—in an arranged match. From then on Susan’s blonde hair would be covered with a thick dark wig or scarf, never to be seen again.

Still, I thought of her often. Small things would bring her back. I would see her among groups of schoolgirls, the tall, clear-eyed blonde with the perfectly tied pony-tail, or at law school—where I met my husband David—the pale, oval-faced girl sitting in the front row doodling flowers in coloured ink over the margins of her notebook. Sometimes she would be in my dreams, never starring but playing bit parts, just sort of hanging around in the background. It was like the possibility of her continued to exist in my imagination and refused to depart.

The last and strangest time she appeared was a few years ago during a trip to the U.S. We were in Washington D.C. for a law conference and had checked out of our hotel with a few hours to kill before our flight to Aspen. I was anxious to leave. The Capitol’s gargantuan monuments made me feel minuscule and vulnerable, as though the giant people who lived there would any moment thunder down the oversized boulevards and grind me into the sidewalk. It was David’s idea to visit the Holocaust Memorial Museum. While not Jewish himself, he was one of those odd non-Jews for whom all things Jewish held a fascination, from Zionist politics to fetishism for bagels with cream cheese and lox.

Inside the museum we merged with the squelching, swishing herd of rubber-soled Nike and nylon jacket wearers trudging up ramps to the main exhibition. Many of the images were familiar—haunting pictures of gaunt-faced survivors, limbs piled high like rubbish heaps, mass open pit graves and empty gas chambers. It was there, amid the flash of bulbs and whir of rewinding cameras that I saw Susan, or at least a version of her. She was thinner, with dark circles under her eyes and deep hollows in her cheeks. But the girl staring out at me in black and white from behind the metal rail, clutching a battered suitcase with a yellow star tacked to her breast, had the same pretty, symmetrical features, the same clear-eyed stare and the same hacked-off, tufted blonde hair as the original. The caption said she was Ruth Greenblot, a twelve-year-old Dutch girl killed in Bergen-Belsen in 1944.

I looked around for David but he was a long way back, dutifully studying the commentary with each display. He had only just reached the Warsaw Ghetto, while I was nearing Liberation, so I sat down in front of a video screen to wait.