what the family needed

‘Every once in a while, Ruth felt the necessary pull of destiny. When she’d eloped, when she finally took the kids and left, when she’d switched to night duty, when she’d bought this apartment. In each case, she couldn’t have done otherwise. Her decisions had been inevitable.’
– What the Family Needed, Steven Amsterdam, page 137

For me, a big decision feels more like the moment after Wile E Coyote runs into the air over the canyon, just before he realises he’s about to fall. It feels like the intake of breath as I put my head underwater in the early summer ocean. Or the flattening out that happens before orgasm.

Pete and I talk in the kitchen about friends who are deciding whether to hold onto a relationship or let it go. 

‘They’re at the pointy bit,’ I say, making my hands into an apex. 

‘They’re at the bit that goes like that,’ says Pete, pointing his hand to the floor with his fingers fanning out in five directions. 

Occasionally Mum mentions a chap she dated in high school who moved up north to be a prawn farmer. She could have married him, the story half goes. Her eyes get humid when she takes herself there: a maybe-rich fishwife living in a house on stilts, raising burly blond children who run to their father as he comes through the laundry door with the evening breeze, smelling of crustaceans. Would he be kind to them? Would she be happy, with her ankles swollen in the heat?

It’s hard to see. Steven Amsterdam’s character gets off lightly, with destiny dragging her in one direction.