Emily Bitto Quotes

I didn't know what he meant, but tried to remember his words, to store them up until I grew into them, like the clothes of an older child packed away for a younger.

With Eva, I had given no though to the world of adulthood that awaited us. But she had crossed some secret threshold while I was facing the other way, absorbed still by the childish fantasies she had cultivated for us: our talk of traveling the world together; of having a salon in Paris or on the Riviera, where all the famous writers and artists were; of becoming artists ourselves, marrying exotic European strangers and always living close to one another; of how, when our husbands died, we would move together into a great crumbling mansion and be visited by amazing people from around the world. Now, I saw so clearly that all of that had been a silly game. She had a lover, presumably, while I did not even truly know what this vague and glamorous term entailed. She had become a woman, with no thought to warn me that I should be packing away my own childhood, dismantling it piece by piece like a rotten tree house, and preparing myself for the new world.

I am angry with myself. I failed to speak from that compartment in myself, as that persona who represents motherhood the one who knows my daughter will always in some way look down on me; will not know my dark places and my desires, my ambivalences, even toward her; will think herself wiser, braver, more modern, her inner life more intriguing, her challenges more compelling I have cherished the self who knows this and accepts it. It is without vanity, able to resist the urge to be understood.

In a house, as in a garden, there is a point when over-mingling can occur. At first, when the new plants are dug in, there is too much space between them. They seem artificial, temporary. Then, as they grow, the bed finds a point of balance, the taller trees occupying the upper layers, the sprawling shrubs - the hydrangeas, buddleia, pittosporum - filling out the middle, and the smaller bulbs and ground covers punctuating the under-spaces. Then, without warning, equilibrium is lost. A rampant jasmine covers an adolescent tree; a hydrangea thrives, forcing out a lilly pilly that struggles for light beneath a spreading magnolia. The spaces are subsumed. In the house, there was a period when everyone thrived. Even Heloise had been noticed by Jerome, who was sitting down with her on most days and doing sums and geography, and reading poetry. 'She has real talent,' he said to Helena, over the kitchen bench. She raised an eyebrow ambiguously but didn't comment. Then, slowly, the balance began to slip.

It is strange which events leave those deep scars we carry with us over a lifetime. When Heloise talked about that night, even years later, it was with a bitter seriousness, a complete inability to see the events other than as they occurred to her as a seven-year-old. It became a foundation myth, a lasting symbol of the troubled nature of Heloise's childhood, the real sufferings she endured, but also the way she experienced these sufferings, reliving them over and over until they wore away their own caged-animal paths within her.

What drew Eva and me together was our shared sense of imagination. Hers was formed from rich materials, mine from poor; hers developed over endless hours in the exotic garden kingdom she inhabited with her sisters, mine over hours alone. But the end result was the same, and each recognized it in the other.