chapter ten
‘You’re not seriously expecting me to come to a Tupperware party,’ Rachel had said to Marla when she’d asked her a few weeks back while they were having coffee.
‘You’re my best friend.’ Marla stirred sugar into her soy decaf cappuccino.
‘My daughter was murdered,’ said Rachel. ‘That gives me a permanent “get out of party” card for the rest of my life.’
Marla raised her eyebrows. She’d always had particularly eloquent eyebrows.
Marla had the right to raise her eyebrows. Ed had been in Adelaide for work (Ed was always away for work) when the two policemen turned up at Rachel’s door. Marla came with Rachel to the morgue and was standing right next to her when they lifted that ordinary white bedsheet to reveal Janie’s face. Marla was ready the moment Rachel’s legs gave way, and she caught her instantly, expertly, one hand cupping her elbow, the other grabbing her upper arm. She was a midwife. She’d had a lot of practice catching burly husbands just before they hit the floor.
‘Sorry,’ said Rachel.
‘Janie would have come to my party,’ said Marla. Her eyes filled. ‘Janie loved me.’
It was true. Janie had adored Marla. She was always telling Rachel to dress more like Marla. And then, of course, on the one occasion Rachel had worn a dress that Marla had helped her buy, look what had happened.
‘I wonder if Janie would have liked Tupperware parties,’ said Rachel as she watched a middle-aged woman arguing with her primary schooler at the table next to them. She tried, and failed, as she always did, to imagine Janie as a forty-five-year-old woman. She sometimes ran into Janie’s old friends in the shops and it was always such a shock to see their seventeen-year-old selves emerge from those puffy, generic middle-aged faces. Rachel had to stop herself from exclaiming, ‘Good Lord, darling, look how old you’ve got!’ in the same way that you said, ‘Look how tall you’ve grown!’ to children.
‘I remember Janie was very tidy,’ said Marla. ‘She liked to be organised. I bet she would have been right into Tupperware.’
The wonderful thing about Marla was that she understood Rachel’s desire to talk endlessly about the sort of adult that Janie might have become, to wonder how many children she would have had, and the sort of man she would have married. It kept her alive, for just those few moments. Ed had hated these hypothetical conversations so much, he’d leave the room. He couldn’t understand Rachel’s need to wonder what could have been, rather than just accepting that it never would be. ‘Excuse me, I was talking!’ Rachel would yell after him.
‘Please come to my Tupperware party,’ said Marla.
‘All right,’ said Rachel. ‘But just so you know, I’m not buying anything.’
And so here she was sitting in Marla’s living room, which was crowded and noisy with women drinking cocktails. Rachel was sandwiched on a couch in between Marla’s two daughters-in-law, Eve and Arianna, who had no plans to move to New York and were both pregnant with Marla’s first grandchildren.
‘I’m just not into pain,’ Eve was telling Arianna. ‘I told my obstetrician, I said, “Look, I have zero tolerance for pain. Zero. Don’t even talk to me about it.”’
‘Well, I guess nobody really likes pain?’ said Arianna, who seemed to doubt every word that came out of her mouth. ‘Except masochists?’
‘It’s unacceptable,’ said Eve. ‘In this day and age. I refuse it. I say no thank you to pain.’
Ah, so that was my mistake, thought Rachel. I should have said no thank you to pain.
‘Look who’s here, ladies!’ Marla appeared with a tray of sausage rolls in her hand and Cecilia Fitzpatrick by her side. Cecilia looked polished and shiny and was wheeling a neat black suitcase behind her.
Apparently it was something of a coup to get Cecilia to do a party for you, because she was so booked out. She had six Tupperware consultants working ‘beneath her’, according to her mother-in-law, and was sent on all sorts of overseas ‘jaunts’ and the like.
‘So, now, Cecilia,’ Marla was flustered with responsibility and the sausage rolls slid about on the tray in her hand, ‘would you like a drink?’
Cecilia wheeled her bag to a neat stop and rescued the sausage rolls just in the nick of time.
‘Just a glass of water would be lovely, Marla,’ she said. ‘Why don’t I hand these out for you while I introduce myself, although I think I know a lot of faces of course. Hello, I’m Cecilia, it’s Arianna, isn’t it? Sausage roll?’ Arianna looked blankly at Cecilia as she took a sausage roll. ‘Your younger sister teaches my daughter Polly ballet. I’m going to show you the perfect little containers for freezing purees for your baby! And Rachel, it’s so nice to see you. How’s little Jacob?’
‘Moving to New York for two years.’ Rachel took a sausage roll and gave Cecilia a wry smile.
Cecilia stopped. ‘Oh, Rachel, what a bugger,’ she said sympathetically, but then, in typical Cecilia style, she instantly shifted into solution mode. ‘But listen, you’ll visit, right? Someone was telling me recently about this website with amazing deals on New York apartments. I’ll email you the link, promise.’ She moved on. ‘Hi there, I’m Cecilia. Sausage roll?’
And on she went about the room, serving food and compliments, fixing every guest with that strange piercing gaze of hers, so that by the time she’d finished and was ready to do her demonstration, everyone obediently swung their knees in her direction, their faces attentive, ready to be sold Tupperware, as if a firm but fair teacher had taken control of a rowdy classroom.
Rachel was surprised by how much she ended up enjoying the night. It was partly the very good cocktails that Marla was serving, but it was also thanks to Cecilia, who interspersed her lively and somewhat evangelical product demonstration (‘I’m a Tupperware freak,’ she told them. ‘I just love this stuff.’ Rachel found her genuine passion touching. And compelling! It would be great if her carrots stayed crunchier for longer!) with a trivia competition. Each guest who got a trivia question right was awarded a chocolate coin. At the end of the night the person with the most gold-wrapped coins would win a prize.
Some of the questions were about Tupperware. Rachel did not know, or particularly feel the need to know, that a Tupperware party began somewhere in the world every 2.7 seconds (‘One second, two seconds – that’s another Tupperware party starting!’ chirruped Cecilia.), or that a man named Earl Tupper created the famous ‘burping seal’. But she did have good general knowledge and she began to feel competitive about the growing pile of gold coins in front of her.
In the end it was a fierce battle between Rachel and Marla’s friend from her midwifery days, Jenny Cruise, and Rachel actually punched her fist in the air when she won by a single gold coin on the question, ‘Who played “Pat the Rat” on the soapie Sons and Daughters?’
Rachel knew the answer (Rowena Wallace) because Janie had been obsessed with that silly show when she was a teenager. She sent up a word of thanks to Janie.
She’d forgotten how much she enjoyed winning.
In fact, she was on such a high that she ended up ordering over three hundred dollars’ worth of Tupperware that Cecilia assured her would transform her pantry and her life.
By the end of the night Rachel was a little drunk.
Actually, everyone was a little drunk, except for Marla’s pregnant daughters-in-law who’d left early, and Cecilia, who was presumably drunk on the joy of Tupperware.
There was much shrieking. Husbands were telephoned. Lifts home were negotiated. Rachel sat on the couch happily eating her way through her pile of chocolate coins.
‘What about you, Rachel? Have you arranged a lift home?’ said Cecilia when Marla was at the front door shouting goodbyes to her tennis friends. Cecilia had all her Tupperware packed away into her black bag and was still as immaculate as at the start of the night, except for two spots of colour high on her cheeks.
‘Me?’ Rachel looked around and realised she was the last guest. ‘I’m fine. I’ll drive home.’
For some reason it hadn’t really occurred to her that she needed to find a way to get home too. It was something to do with her sense of always feeling separate from everybody else, as if things that worried them couldn’t possibly worry her, as if she was immune from the ordinariness of life.
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ Marla swooped back into the room. The night had been a triumph. ‘You can’t drive, you crazy girl! You’d be way over the limit. Mac can drive you home. He hasn’t got anything better to do.’
‘That’s okay. I’ll catch a cab.’ Rachel roused herself. Her head did feel fuzzy. She didn’t want Mac to drive her home. Mac, who had stayed in his study throughout the Tupperware party, was a man’s man and had got on great with Ed, but he was always so painfully shy in one-on-one conversations with women. It would be excruciating being alone in the car with him.
‘You live down near the Wycombe Road tennis courts, don’t you, Rachel?’ said Cecilia. ‘I’ll drive you home. You’re right on my way.’
Moments later, they’d waved Marla off and Rachel was in the passenger seat of Cecilia’s white Ford Territory with the giant Tupperware logo along the side. The car was very comfortable, quiet and clean and nice smelling. Cecilia drove just as she did everything: capably and briskly, and Rachel put her head back against the headrest and waited for Cecilia’s reliable, soothing stream of conversation about raffles, carnivals, newsletters and everything else pertaining to St Angela’s.
Instead, there was silence. Rachel glanced over at Cecilia’s profile. She was chewing on her bottom lip, and squinting, as if at some thought that was giving her pain.
Marriage problems? Something to do with the kids? Rachel remembered all the time she used to devote to problems about sex, misbehaving children and misunderstood comments, broken appliances and money.
It wasn’t that she now knew those problems didn’t matter. Not at all. She longed for them to matter. She longed for the tricky tussle of life as a mother and a wife. How wonderful to be Cecilia Fitzpatrick driving home to her daughters after hosting a successful Tupperware party, worrying over whatever was quite rightfully worrying her.
In the end it was Rachel who broke the silence. ‘I had fun tonight,’ she said. ‘You did a great job. No wonder you’re so successful at it.’
Cecilia gave a small shrug. ‘Thank you. I love it.’ She smiled. ‘My sister makes fun of me over it.’
‘Jealous,’ said Rachel.
Cecilia shrugged and yawned. She seemed like a different person from the performer at Marla’s house and the woman who zoomed around St Angela’s.
‘I’d love to see your pantry,’ mused Rachel. ‘I bet everything is all labelled and in the perfect container. Mine looks like a disaster zone.’
‘I am proud of my pantry,’ Cecilia smiled. ‘John-Paul says it’s like a filing cabinet of food. I make a big song and dance if the poor girls put something back in the wrong spot.’
‘How are your girls?’ asked Rachel.
‘Wonderful,’ said Cecilia, although Rachel saw a shadow of a frown. ‘Growing up fast. Giving me cheek.’
‘Your eldest daughter,’ said Rachel. ‘Isabel. I saw her the other day in assembly. She reminds me a little of my daughter. Of Janie.’
Cecilia didn’t respond.
Why did I tell her that? thought Rachel. I must be drunker than I realise. No woman wanted to hear that her daughter looked like a girl who’d been strangled.
But then Cecilia said, with her eyes on the road ahead, ‘I have just one memory of your daughter.’