When I was five, I’d sit for hours under a beach umbrella on our front lawn, protected from the heat of the midday sun. I would arrange ceramic fairies in neat rows on my plastic play table, like rings in a jeweller’s display box.
‘Fifty cents a fairy!’ A fair price for my handcrafted figurines.
The bus drivers, trailing by on their way to and from the depot, often gave me more than the asking price. But this wasn’t a charity. Like my parents who owned a commercial cleaning company, I was running a business. Rather than accept donations, I sold them three fairies for every dollar.
Growing up as an only child in the ‘90s and early 2000s, the infant era of the internet, and with parents who worked before and after office hours, meant I spent a lot of time in my imagination. In addition to part-time entrepreneurship, I transformed into The Little Mermaid, a Bee Gee’s backup dancer and Writer. I was happy on my own; but even still, when my parents told me that my father’s daughter from his first marriage was coming to live with us, it felt like they’d announced the arrival of Cinderella in her ballgown and glass slippers.
Until then, like all Disney princesses, my big sister had only ever existed in stories and my imagination: a wonderland where we shared a room, whispered secrets and stayed up past our bedtime giggling in the dark until we heard my mother’s door creak open. I was old enough to know we—our lives—were different. Julie was raised in Argentina, and I in Australia; she was thirty, and I was nine; my mother was not her mother. What I didn’t know was that, like dropping Mentos into a Coke bottle, some substances erupt when combined.
As my parents leave for work, the thump of the front door and the click of the phone being lifted from its cradle occur in unison.
‘Si Mama, todo está bien.’
Julie’s tone resembles the candour of someone speaking from the privacy of their own home. I hear her clearly, despite the plasterboard wall that separates the kitchen from the living room, where I sit on a sofa, with crumbs from my Nutella sandwich scattered on a paper towel on the coffee table before me. On the TV, the animated figure of Kim Possible pulls open her parachute after jumping from an aircraft. Through the gap in the door beside me, sound bites of my big sister’s conversation catch my ear.
‘Déjala que sigue limpiando inodoros.’ Let her keep cleaning toilets.
My eyes remain fixed on the TV but I do not register what happens to Kim Possible next.
‘Después le gasto la plata.’ I’ll spend her money later.
She is talking about my mother.
I tiptoe out of the living room to grab an HB pencil from my room and hurry back. Before returning to the sofa, I pick up the paper towel from the coffee table, press it flat against the wall and transcribe.
When my parents arrive home, I pull my mother to the side and hand her the paper towel. The paper towel where I listed Julie’s complaints about sharing a room, my mother’s cooking and the condition of our old weatherboard home—the one she, as first-born daughter, expects to inherit.
‘You shouldn’t listen to people’s phone calls,’ my mother says, holding my shoulder with an authoritative grip. ‘It’s like opening a letter with someone else’s name on it.’
She leads me to my father sitting in the home office in our converted garage. While my mother relays my sins, I look down, imagining myself as Tinkerbell—small, inconspicuous and with wings to carry me away. But my father, rather than reinforce what my mother has said, as we both expect, turns to me and says, ‘Good girl!’ His praise jerks me from my daydream.
‘This is your home,’ he continues. ‘Now, tell Papi, is there anything else?’
That day, I begin to learn that right and wrong exist within a spectrum of grey, but it will be years before I can articulate this.
Despite my mother’s advice, I continue my spy missions. I upgrade my paper towel to a Spirax notebook but I don’t tell my parents I’m still eavesdropping. And they don’t tell Julie about the paper towel.
Even now, I wonder why we played happy family for so long. If my parents had a plan, they didn’t tell me about it. Just like Julie, who kept her plans to herself.
Before Julie arrived, my father had received a phone call from his ex-brother-in-law, Fernando. ‘Be careful, she’s just like her mother,’ he’d said.
My father dismissed this as well-intentioned speculation, but Fernando insisted, asking to speak to my mother. ‘Teresa, she is being sent to mess with your family.’
Julie was five when her parents divorced and fourteen when my parents moved in together. If my mother answered when she called, she would demand to know, ‘What are you doing in my dad’s house?’ But it was her mother’s calls that were the most devious.
Once, after my mother returned home from a trip to Brazil to visit family, Julie’s mother, Alejandra, rang to ask about a lipstick she’d apparently misplaced in my parent’s apartment.
‘Teresa, darling, could you check the bedside table, the one nearest the cupboard with the floral lampshade?’
‘I’m so sorry, darling, it’s not here,’ my mother replied, her voice composed and full of pride. This composure lasted until my father came home. That fictitious lipstick may have marked the end of them, had it not been for the conviction in my father’s self-defence.
‘I’d rather let my dick rot than ever touch that woman again!’
My father had walked in on Alejandra having sex with another man in their bed. So naturally, he had divorced her. ‘Your father wasn’t innocent either,’ my mother adds, but she doesn’t share the details and I don’t ask.
Before meeting my mother, my father lived mostly in Australia working as a cleaner, milkman or labourer. Once he’d saved enough money to buy himself a house and retire early, he planned to return to Argentina. I don’t know what happened to his relationship with Julie during those years but I doubt he contacted her often. It was the seventies, international calls were expensive and he was a man of few written words.
He returned to Argentina earlier than planned, following his father’s hospitalisation after the discovery of a tumour in his liver. At the hospital, my father met a nurse with blue eyes and long blonde hair; but it was the G-string teasing from above the waistband of her white low-rise skinny jeans that ‘he couldn’t resist’. Three months later, they moved in together. Six months after that, they moved to Australia. They emigrated because of Argentina’s political and economic instability. ‘And to get away from Alejandra,’ my mother adds. They never intended to live the rest of their lives so far from home, but when my mother fell pregnant, they felt that Australia would be a better start for a child.
I don’t know if my father tried to bring Julie, but I doubt he wanted to leave her behind. He knew abandonment. After his parents divorced, his mother put him on a train to go live with his father. He was three.
Despite leaving Julie, he paid child support with Rolex-like precision. But I wonder if Julie knew that, since Alejandra took him to court claiming otherwise. In court, my father didn’t say much. He simply walked to the magistrate and handed over the manila folder with photocopies of all the cheques—chronologically ordered—from the last twelve years.
Since my first spy mission, there is a silent but visceral tension suffocating our household. My maternal cousin, Gabi, who is about the same age as Julie, also moves in. On most nights, they stay up past my bedtime. On other nights, I watch them through the closed glass doors of our garage, whispering, giggling. They tell me that, ‘Some conversations aren’t suitable for little girls.’ Were it not for the contrast between Julie’s dark eyes, jet black hair and olive skin against Gabi’s blue eyes, dirty blonde hair and fair complexion, they could be mistaken for sisters.
One morning, Julie and I sit at the dining table, waiting for Gabi to come out of her room. After dropping me off at school, my mother will drive them—45 minutes in peak hour traffic—to their private English class, which my parents pay for. My mother, while washing up my bowl and Julie’s mug, yells out to Gabi. Too uninterested to feign small talk with Julie, I watch my mother walk to Gabi’s room.
Raised voices spill from the room, but I cannot make out the words. If they don’t hurry up, I will be late for school. Julie goes after my mother and now the shouting begins. But I still can’t decipher what they’re saying. I remain in my seat. Stiff. Breathing silently. Staring at the door.
I clasp my hands over my ears and shut my eyes, and then I’m no longer at the dining table but lying on my bed, with Julie kneeling by my side. She lowers herself to look me in the eye.
‘Now, be honest,’ she says. ‘Your mother asked you to write those things about me, didn’t she?’
And now I’m no longer in my bed, but being dragged up the driveway by my mother, ordering me into the car—but I don’t want to go.
‘We’re going to the movies,’ she says. In the absence of any mention of school, I recognise her attempt to coax me from the house.
‘But I don’t want to go!’
She pulls away from the curb.
When we arrive home, Julie and Gabi are walking up the driveway, suitcases in hand.
It has been one week since my mother told Julie and Gabi to get out of the house. My mother is standing by the kitchen sink and my father sitting at the dining table when Julie struts in.
‘Listen,’ she says, resting her hands on the corners of the kitchen bench with outstretched arms, standing tall. ‘I’m returning to Argentina to sort out my affairs and then I’ll be back.’
‘Not to my house,’ my mother says calmly. Julie glares at our father. Pale-faced, he lowers his head in silence. He is usually the driver of our family, my mother beside him in the passenger seat, but today she takes control with both hands.
‘And who are you to tell me that I can’t?’ Julie says, her eyes snapping back to my mother.
‘This is my house. And in my house, I decide.’ Like a clock striking midnight, my mother calls Julie a taxi and she vanishes like the princess I’d wanted her to be.
She calls four weeks later. She is in Argentina and ready to return but needs my father to buy her ticket. I will never know if he wanted her back—he only asked if I did.
After that phone call, we didn’t speak about Julie or hear from her for eight years. She did not once call my father—her father—to wish him happy birthday, or Merry Christmas, or get well soon when he was diagnosed with stage four stomach cancer.
Several months after my father’s death, my mother received an email from an old friend who had found her contact details on the Argentinian Embassy website. Julie had written an open letter the day after his death.
My name is Julie Rodriguez. My father’s name was Juan Carlos Rodriguez. His wife’s name is Teresa and their only daughter, Amanda. He was the owner of Commercial Cleaning Services. Their email is commcleaning@hotmail.com. He died on 22 May 2009. I’m looking for information regarding his estate.
It’s strange to think that I am now the same age Julie was when she arrived in Australia. The memory of the day my mother threw her out remains vivid, but only a decade later did I learn that Julie lied about my answer to her question—the spy missions were entirely my initiative. But Gabi believed her lies and it was nine long years before my mother allowed Gabi back into our lives. Julie manipulated us. All of us. I find it difficult to imagine doing that to someone, let alone my own family. But, then again, we weren’t family, not in Julie’s eyes, merely a woman and a child who took away her father. While I don’t excuse her actions, I now understand her resentment. I wonder, if my father had left me as a child, would I have been capable of the same?
The more I look, the more I find, and the more I understand that reality and imagination are not always distinguishable. When I look closer still, I discover that, perhaps the glass slipper fit us both once, once upon a time. And that helps me realise, we were both, at some stage, Daddy’s little girls.