‘She’s got a headache,’ Amy would say to her mother, watching her.
‘What? No she doesn’t, she hasn’t said a word.’
But Amy could tell. There was something about the way Brooke walked when she had a headache, as if her head was in danger of rolling off and she had to keep it balanced on her neck, and Amy wanted to cry for the poor little kid walking out there with the weight of everyone’s expectations on her shoulders, as if she already knew she would end up as the last hopeless hope for the Delaneys. Amy’s parents could read their children’s games with perfect accuracy, they could predict their every shot, exploit their every weakness, but in other ways they were clueless, blinded by their love of the greatest sport ever invented.
Maybe it was the migraines that made Brooke so serious.
Amy wished she could take them away from her. She remembered Brooke when she was a baby, dark curly hair in a topknot, only two chipmunk teeth. She never crawled, she bum-shuffled. It was hilarious to watch. Now look at her: so serious, so married, her shoes so sensible, her bra-strap so beige, you’d think she was fifty, not twenty-nine. Had Brooke ever danced all night? Had a one-night stand? Brooke would say these were not examples of a life well lived, and maybe she was right, but Amy blamed those cruel migraines for aging her sister beyond her years.
Amy threw her journal on the floor and lay back down in the cold flood of air from her open window. Her three flatmates were all out. She’d moved here six months ago and she’d thought that with three flatmates she’d rarely have the place to herself, but, in fact, she often seemed to be the only one at home. It was cheap rent because the neon light from the sign lit up her room like a disco.
For the last year she’d been keeping herself afloat with a cobbled-together series of part-time jobs. She’d finally accepted that regular full-time work was not for her. It wasn’t a matter of finally settling on the right career path. The right job didn’t exist. Full-time work caused a kind of claustrophobic terror to build and build within her chest until one day there was a humiliating emotional spillage that resulted in her termination or resignation and her parents looking distressed when she said the new job hadn’t turned out to be so wonderful after all.
Now her most regular work was three three-hour shifts a week as a taste tester or a ‘sensory evaluator’ if she ever wanted to sound more impressive, which she never did. She joined a group of university students, young mothers and retirees to taste and discuss food with immense seriousness. She wore no lipstick or perfume or hairspray. She drank no coffee nor chewed gum beforehand. She sat at a laptop, logged in, spun around on her chair and waited for the kitchen staff, dressed in black, to bring out trays of labelled food. There was no right or wrong, there was no winning or losing. It was very important but also of no consequence whatsoever. No-one got upset, except for the occasional roll of the eyes if someone went on and on making their impassioned point about lemongrass to the panel leader. There was also that one time an executive stormed out because none of the taste testers liked the bolognaise sauce he’d spent a year developing, but that had been exciting.
In between taste-testing shifts she did market research and product-testing work. Today, for example, she’d spent an hour as part of a focus group discussing toilet paper. It was cash in hand, the sandwiches were excellent: that was lunch sorted. Everyone was extremely nice and polite when you did focus group work. She didn’t care that it was fake; it was soothing. She got to walk into a lovely plush office in the city like she was part of corporate Sydney and then walk right out again and go to the beach.
This afternoon she’d filled in a long questionnaire about her thoughts on deodorant and in return she’d received a department store voucher that she’d used to buy two bras on special.
It felt like she was getting away with something, like she was living by her wits picking pockets in Dickensian England.
She also had a theory that this sort of work was good for her mental health because it forced her to make multiple choices （Do you prefer spray or roll-on, with or without perfume?） and when she was sick she found choices impossible. She could stand in a grocery store staring at a shelf, paralysed with indecision. She hadn’t yet found a therapist who fully endorsed this theory.
She would be forty next April.
She wasn’t sure how that had happened. She could remember when her mother turned forty, and it had seemed ancient. Amy had assumed there would be flying cars by the time she turned forty.