One Whole and Perfect Day Read Online Free PDF Page A

stout heifer urged to jump a fence. ‘I can’t wear that!’ she’d protested. ‘It looks like a nightie!’
    ‘A nightie!’ Stan had echoed, giggling wildly, jumping up and down so that the old floorboards had shivered and the pots had rattled on the stove. He’d been ten at the time, and you didn’t know what was what at that age.
    And though it was all of seventy years ago he could remember how his mother’s face had gone bright red. They were all like that, he and mum and Emmie: when they were hurt or angry the skin of their faces turned a dark dull red. They couldn’t do anything about it; everyone could see how they felt. Lily was just the same.
    Back then Stan hadn’t noticed how Mum was hurt because they were poking fun at her wedding dress, and neither had Emmie, though Em had been eighteen. He could only see it now, when he was eighty, and Mum and Emmie were gone; he could see Mum’s thin hands folding the dress away, hear her voice saying stiffly, ‘Well, it’s not a nightie’; even hear her heavy footsteps on the hall linoleum, bearing it away.
    He’d never seen it again.
    Stan lifted the dress carefully from the trunk. The soft white – silk, was it? (he didn’t know much about materials) had mellowed to a creamy colour over years and years. It was older than he was, heading on bravely into its tenth decade. There was fancy stuff along the top and down along the hem – wide bands of tiny pearly beads in the shapes of leaves and flowers. Stan thrust out a stubby finger, half expecting the beads to fall at his touch, scattering on the oily floor of the shed, but they held fast and he thought how things were made properly in those days, things were made to last. Folding the wedding dress across his arms he carried it out from the shed.
    It was a gloomy morning up there in the mountains, the clouds hung low and the foggy dew drifted in fat white streamers across the yard, and yet as Stan crossed the lawn towards the back door there was such a feeling of warmth on his arms where he held the dress that he thought for a moment the sun had come out and he looked up in surprise.
    There was no sun. It was the dress; it was like carrying a warm ray of sunlight folded across his arms.
    ‘Emmie thought it looked like a nightie,’ he told May.
    ‘A nightie? Nonsense!’ May took the dress from Stan’s arms and laid it gently over the back of the sofa, its soft length spilling down over the plumped cushions and ribbed blue corduroy. ‘It’s a 1920s wedding dress, anyone can see.’
    ‘Yeah, well, I don’t know about that – dresses and stuff.’
    ‘And your Emmie wouldn’t have fitted inside it, anyway,’ giggled May. ‘She was a big old thing.’ May patted her own ample hips. ‘It wouldn’t have fitted me, either, or our Marigold – she’s skinny enough, but too tall. You need to be small for this kind of dress – a chemise dress, it’s called.’ May’s voice went soft on the word chemise , as if she’d remembered her own mother in just such a dress, scoop-necked, sleeveless and embroidered, leaning over the cot to sweep May up in her arms. That couldn’t be, of course, because Lily’s nan had been a foundling; she’d never known her mother.
    Lily was ten when she’d learned Nan had been brought up in a Home, and for a long time afterwards she’d kept waking up in the middle of the night, imagining what it might feel like to be all by yourself in the world. Not simply to be without a dad, but to have absolutely no one in your family: no Mum and Dad, no brothers and sisters or uncles and aunties and cousins, no Nan and Pop – no one except for you. And though she lay snug beneath her doona, the thought would make Lily go cold all over, from the top of her head to the tips of her tingly toes.
    To have no one. It made her own small family, with all its faults and peculiarities, its bickerings and squabblings, seem rich in comparison.
    It certainly seemed rich to May. In her pretty