The Glass Apple

My mother was not beautiful.

I am not being unkind. It is just a fact. I guess you could say she was plain. Small. A shadow in the room.

You would probably not have noticed her on the street, on the bus, or sitting in the park. She blended into the walls, the chair, even the very air it seemed.

But there was a brief time when that changed and my mother radiated pure light and everything and everyone was drawn to her – including me. Suddenly she was real. Seen. And I would wait for her to come home, my eyes on the door, and she would enter the flat so gracefully, almost floating, and when her eyes found mine I was hit with such a bolt of joy that I could not stay still. Even the TV could not win against her presence then. Especially when she smiled at me.

She would go and change out of her uniform and return in a cotton floral dress, her feet bare, and she would turn on the radio in the kitchen and she would take my hands in hers, and we would dance together on the linoleum floor, spinning and twirling until I was dizzy.

My mother was in love. It lit her up from the inside and her grey eyes glowed bright in the sunlight.

***

It was 1960 and I was in my last year of primary school. It was the year that my mother took a job at David Jones in the city, as a sales assistant in the homewares department because my father said we could do with the money. It was the year that I would have my own key, and come home to find our flat empty. I would put my school bag down and make myself a sandwich with white bread and margarine and jam. Then I would sit down in the lounge and turn on the TV to watch the afternoon programs.

Time was a black hole until my mother came through the door.

My father would not come home until 30 minutes after the pubs closed at 6pm. He would walk into the flat and take his coat and hat off and hang them on the coat rack. Then he would walk to the fridge and get a brown glass bottle of beer. When he came home, the TV would be his and his alone and I would not watch it with him. He would ask me about my homework and I would say that I only had reading which I would do at bedtime, and he would nod and then be lost to me completely until the next day at the same time when he would ask me a similar question. This is how we were together.

My mother would be in the kitchen rushing to get dinner ready, and soon after we ate, I would take all the dishes into the kitchen and then brush my teeth and go to my room. I don’t remember any talking at dinner, but the year my mother worked, she did talk to me. It seems like that year we talked together nonstop. She told me about the customers and the beautiful glassware and cutlery and vases rich people bought. And the things she loved the most that they had in the David Jones homewares department were all the new lines of Scandinavian glass – colourful and beautiful and useful at the same time.

She told me that artists designed all of the best pieces. And so the pieces were special and vibrant and works of art. She told me that if she could afford it, she would buy a glass vase or sculpture, and it would be her prized possession.

I asked her how much it would cost, and she told me that she could never afford one, even if she saved up very hard. And really – it would be a waste of money because what did we need a decorative vase or a glass sculpture for? But I knew she didn’t believe what she said, because the object would be beautiful – and beauty was worth having just to have it.

I told her that when I grew up and had a good job, I would buy her as many glass pieces from David Jones as she wanted. And she smiled and squeezed my hand and said, ‘Imagine travelling to Scandinavia. Wouldn’t that be something?’

***

I don’t remember the day that the green glass apple appeared. It was perfectly round with a glass stalk on the top, and it drew your eye no matter where you were in the lounge room. It called to you like it wanted to be picked up and held. Caressed. And I wanted to hold it in my hands and feel it, but I was so frightened that I would break something so beautiful and so I never touched it.

‘What is it even for?’ my father asked. ‘It is just a useless thing.’

And my mother said that she had bought it because it was on sale and then she had her staff discount on top of that, so it hardly cost anything. My father was annoyed that she had wasted our money on such a thing.

‘It’s my money,’ she said.

And he said, ‘What’s the point of you working if you spend our money on stupid things?’

I did not think it was stupid, and I knew somewhere deep down in my stomach that she had not bought it. I knew that it had been a gift and it had come from someone I would never know – never meet – and that person was the one who had lit a spark inside my mother that had made her her own person – strong and real and full of life.

And maybe my father knew this too. And maybe he did not. But soon after the glass apple appeared in our lives, my mother gave up her job at David Jones.

I began high school and I grew more selfish – more distant. I didn’t think about what it meant to my mother to have to give up this job that she enjoyed. And slowly my mother started to fade, and her eyes began to lose their shine and turn inward again.

There was no exact point – no exact day when I lost her completely, but the glass apple, glowing and beckoning from its place on the sideboard, began to dull with dust and with neglect, and one day it was gone from sight, back in the box it came in, and put away in a cupboard.

***

I have it now, the glass apple. I keep it on display – always. I hold it in my hands as often as I can. I hold it up to the light and let the glass catch the rays of the sun.

Maybe I am trying to get my mother back. Maybe I am wishing that she could have stayed the way she was in that year of 1960 for the rest of her days. Mostly, I am trying to tell her that I am sorry for letting her slip back into her great sadness.

I hold the apple and I feel like I missed it all – my mother’s life – her dreams and inner life. And I hope that that one year, the one when she was happy, stretched out for her and was like 1000 years inside her heart.

Favel Parrett is an author whose debut novel Past the Shallows (Hachette Australia, 2011) was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, won the Dobbie Literary Award and garnered Parrett the Australian Book Industry Awards 2012 Newcomer of the Year Award. Her subsequent novels, When the Night Comes (Hachette Australia, 2014) and There Was Still Love (Hachette Australia, 2019) as well as her first children’s book Wandi (Hachette Australia, 2021) have all been critically acclaimed.