Australian Women's Book Review Volume 14.1 - School of English ...

The One Who Looked Like Beethoven
By Alison Lambert.
I phone her and she's delighted to hear from me, asks me over and though it's been over 20 years we
just talk and talk and talk. So much shared history. Both of us born in 1943, the vanguard of the babyboomers;
both ex-nurses, single now; both struggling with clutter of both a domestic and a historical
nature. She was the nurse in the labour ward when I had my first baby, at seven in the evening on 27
February 1968. She was kindness itself.
Historical, herstorytell. She's stayed here, in this pretty hinterland area an hour or two from the city;
whereas I escaped and have just come back, tail between my legs (keeps your pink bits warm though)
because I'd run out of options, it seemed. Well, options that I could stand, anyway. I sometimes look at
women who've stayed with their husbands and careers and I wonder, what is the price of their comfort
and security?
You get that. I do anyway, nearly every time. I'm living in this shed on my son and daughter-in-law's
property, and lucky that my son is building me a little place here, but I don't quite fit in this area of
relative affluence.
Even so I tell some of my stories with a laugh, though I do get some shocked looks and changing of
subject. Whereas this poor love is still licking her wounds from her one true love, who I remember way
back kept leaving her then coming back, leaving again with mouthfuls of accusations against her that
some apparently still believe. J became, from what she tells me, a broken-down alcoholic schizophrenic
with leukaemia. It was the pot, she said, some people just shouldn't have it. But her ex-father-in-law
still won't let her near him ('he's OK as long as he keeps away from you').
Misguided bloody arsehole.
I can see why so many people have got angry on my behalf, when they've heard me tell of this
predicament or that. I hear myself in her, that gentle voice with the question in it, the plaintive why?,
the small quiet shock that grows as you find yourself on a beach with the tide going out, dumped by the
big lively sea. Still more or less sound, as you look at yourself; not too scarred by your
relationshipwrecks; plenty to offer, yet there you are, a bleaching old bit of flotsam in the eyes of the
beachcombers. I am angry that after all this time, all her efforts, being a single mum to kids who
believed his version of it all, hanging in there in the very place of her humiliation, running tuckshops
and local markets while the locals lopped at this poppy who could have been tall - oh yes, brains there
all right, it takes brains to get depressed doesn't it, just going off to the pokies or whatever doesn't
work, oh no you've got this keen mind and it has to stew and chew and because of innate loving
kindness you don't blame others so it has to have been your fault. I am angry to hear her still
questioning in this way.
But it's hard to know what it is that's making me angry. I am angry with whatever it is that lets her, and
me, at this stage of our lives, still be struggling with not enough money, unwashed dishes, an unmade
bed, an unquiet mind. We talk, we analyse via various modes: social, gender, astrological,
psychological, Buddhist. We speak these languages. The answer lies in all of them and then some, we
decide.
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