Who knew that one simple phone call made on a simple, regular day would change my life. I dialled the regular numbers, heard Jan’s regular voice, and then, just like that, the regularity was shot from my life, possibly forever.
“Myanmar?” My voice was the perfect representation of shock that I felt to my core. Even my eyelashes were shocked. “Why Myanmar? Is this a joke? Why the fuck would they have an international radio conference in Myanmar? Are you firing me and doing it by sending me to a weird country to be killed?” It was a genuine question.
“Don’t be dramatic, Rosie. And watch your language. You are not going to die. I think Myanmar is trying to re-invent itself as a tourist destination. Maybe that’s why it was chosen. I don’t know, I just organise people to go. And you’re lucky to be going. I can’t go because Mum is sick. Oh, and Mike is going with you.”
What the fuck was happening to my world? One part of me, a very small yet very present part, was jumping up and down and squealing in a voice I didn’t know I had. I punched her and told her to shush. The grown-up part of me was frantically worrying about the cellulite that Mike would now be seeing, assuming there was a pool at the conference hotel. Was Myanmar landlocked or did it have an ocean? Where the hell was Myanmar, anyway? The jumping, squealing part of me said she knew exactly where it was, so I punched her again.
“Is there a pool at the hotel?” I asked Jan. First things first.
“What? Um, let me look. Yes, Rosie, there will be a pool. Does the hotel now meet your criteria?” I could hear her sarcasm dripping through the phone, but I chose not to engage.
“Yes. Yes, it does.” I didn’t dare ask if there was a bar at said pool, I would look it up when I got home, after I bought some fast acting and totally over-priced cellulite cream.
“Well, thank goodness for that. The conference is in a couple of weeks, the station has organised everything for the both of you. I’ll drop your tickets off as soon as I can. Oh, and you’ll need to get some injections. Have fun!” It was unclear if Jan was referring to daydreaming about going with Mike or the trip itself. Most likely she was referring to the needles I was going to have.
Hopefully there would be cocktail bars everywhere in Myanmar. I had always thought I was a hell of a lot nicer when I was drunk, even though I have been described as “belligerent” in the past. But obviously, that was the fault of the other person, not mine. I couldn’t see Mike making me belligerent, not since I had gotten to know him a bit better, and not since I was too far invested in creating a better version of myself. It had already cost me over $40, I didn’t want to waste the money. Ergo, the more cocktails bars, the longer I could stay just the right amount of drunk and, according to my well thought out logic, the easier it would be to stay nice. And of course, the nicer I was, the more chance I had at becoming an awesome person and maybe, just maybe, having sex with Mike.
I wondered what Mike thought about us going together? He probably didn’t think twice about it, and he was probably annoyingly happy to receive the news of our trip. He was frustrating like that, finding happiness in day-to-day living even though he had a license to be miserable.
If Mike and I were going to another country together, I was really going to have to increase my pace of learning to be nice. I wanted to be the new and improved version of me before Myanmar. Nothing like a looming deadline to increase the pressure of reaching an almost impossible goal.
I needed to create situations where Mike and I could spend time together. What did people do together nowadays? I thought of the things I liked to do; watch The Walking Dead; no, that would be weird. What would I say? “Hi Mike, want to come over and watch zombies eat people?” Although if someone asked me to do that, I would be delighted. I re-wrote it as a possibility on my mental list.
We could go kayaking together. Pindari, located on the Murrumbidgee, had some beautiful places to paddle. I wondered if I would still fit in my kayak. Better not do anything physical with a muscle man when I’m clearly out of shape. Excitement was definitely my primary emotion after my phone call from Jan, but the nagging feeling I was in for some serious self-renovation was almost choking me. If I was scuba diving, someone would have been stepping on my air hose.
With Freud long gone, my own resources for self-examination used up, and the possibility that I was going to die whilst scuba diving, it was time to bring in the big guns. As soon as I got home, I called Mum. She answered after the first ring.
“Rosie! So pleased you rang, how are you? How’s Snip?’
“He’s good. The reason I rang…no, I don’t need money…there’s a guy.”
“Oh Rosie, what have you done to him?” There was an awkward pause as I tried to decide if I was offended by this comment. I decided I wasn’t. Mum knew me too well, it was a valid question…although not one she would ever have to ask Kendell.
“Nothing! Well, nothing I could pinpoint in one phone call.”
“Mmmm?” I could hear Mum cooking in the background.
“I’m confused. I like him. But as we all know, I’m not exactly a nice person. So, I figure it’s time to make some changes. I want to be a better person. A better version of me.”
“Oh Rosie, that’s lovely.” This was Mum’s standard answer when a conversation wasn’t interesting her. I heard her turn a tap on. Good to hear she was one hundred percent focused on my issue.
“Well, the problem is, you always told us never to change for a man. Isn’t that what I am doing? But if I’m changing for a man in a way that makes me better, does that make it okay?’
“Rosie, I think…”
“I mean, you never let us watch Grease because the woman changes for the man,” I said before she could finish. “That’s why we always watched Grease 2. The man changed, not the woman. What’s the feminist thing to do here?”
“Rosie, I love you. I love you even though you are a naughty person a lot of the time.” I knew I should have had the conversation with Snip. He would have provided me with a better answer, even though I wasn’t sure if he was feminist. I’d never asked him. “If you are willing to put in the work to become a solid and active member of society, then it’s not really changing for the man. You are doing it for yourself, and this man, whoever he is, will benefit from a nicer Rosie. Go and put on some Frank, have a glass of wine, and relax for a bit. Then start tomorrow on your adventure of self-improvement.”
“Thanks, Mum.” Mum was a retired cellist and the smartest person I knew. It had always been unclear if Dad loved Mum because she was a cellist or because she was Mum. I always wanted to marry a cellist, Dad had told Kendell and I when we were young. I remember hot nights, sitting in the drawing room, the three of us listening to Mum play. They were beautiful memories…the family cat, Mushroom, curled on my lap as the cicadas sang back-up to Mum’s classical music.
I opened a bottle of Australian cab sav as my phone lit up with another call from Jan, taking me away from any other terrible ideas I was bound to come up with. And, as it turned out, she provided an answer to my conundrum.
“Rosie, I forgot to ask you, the camellia show is on next week, do you want to do an outside broadcast and cover it?” Of course I didn’t. A bunch of old people milling over different shades of red and pink flowers, no thanks.
“Not really, Jan. Do you have someone else to cover it? I can do it if you’re stuck.”
“Nah, it’s okay, I’ll ask Mike,” she said, hanging up.
I finished my wine on the back veranda with Snip curled at my legs. Myanmar was becoming a more and more exciting prospect. Perhaps god, and Dad, and maybe even Lee had gotten together for a round table, Knights Templar style, to discuss the divine coming together of Mike and me. The trip was going to be my chance to shine. It had to be. Pindari, as much as I loved my hometown, wasn’t exactly bringing out a successful, endearing version of me. Myanmar would. I would make sure it would.
In the less aggressive early evening light, I dusted off the suitcase under my bed, feeling comforted and adventurous after half a bottle of wine and two Sinatra CDs. This was my secret treasure trove of clothes I had either stopped wearing or had never worn. It was also testament that I could have paid off a lot more of my mortgage or HECS debt if this suitcase didn’t exist. Wondering what sort of clothes Mike liked, and then hating myself for wondering that, I emptied the contents on the floor.
“Snip, come and help me sort through these clothes.” Snip obliged by sneezing over most of them and flopping onto his side of the bed. “Holy shit, there are some treasures in here!” The dispersed dust would hopefully yield some surprisingly pleasant pieces to wear to Myanmar. The new Rosie must be appropriately dressed. It might even be worth another visit to thin and fit Kellie so she could do something about my out of control curls. Might. I decided to see how I felt about this when I wasn’t half drunk.
The first item was a pair of purple flairs I used to wear when I was at uni. The late 90s and early 2000s were a confusing time for fashion, and living in Newtown meant pretty much anything went. I had sewn small cloth flowers all over them. Looking at what was a huge part of my university experience—I wore these pants relentlessly and I would have been humiliated if I wasn’t so horrified.
“These can go straight in the bin,” I told my style guru, Snip the purple fur wearing fashionista fur ball.
The next piece was a yellow and orange striped bikini. And it was tiny. At least the bottom half was, the top half was a size 12, a whole size larger to accommodate my ridiculously large boobs. No way was older, size 14 me going to let anyone see me in a bikini. The rest of the suitcase was a medley of un-wearable clothes. No amount of time was going to make any of the pieces trendy again.
I was going to have to go shopping. A joy for many women, to be sure. I had read once that the Swiss or the Swedish—I always got those two mixed up—had scientifically proved that shopping was therapeutic for women. But anything therapeutic for me must include silence, no eye contact, and absolutely no verbal conversation whatsoever, and I had yet to experience shopping that involved an experience like that. Hmmm, maybe online shopping was more my thing.
The main theme of Pindari was singular. One. Uno, and any other word for one from other languages. I considered Pindari a place of one because the town had exactly one of everything and that included one clothes shop. Sheathers department store was pretty big for a town with a population of about fourteen thousand and was ten times more expensive than it needed to be. But it was there, it existed, and it had clothes on racks. At this stage that’s all I was looking for.
The son of the owners was a gay man in his thirties who had moved to Sydney to pursue a career in fashion design. He had failed and was now a buyer for his parents’ store. He spent most of his time huddled in his office, obviously miserable about the way his life turned out. Pindari didn’t boast a plethora of gay men either, so he must have been really lonely, and not in a Rosie Dunne-I-love-being-lonely-because-people-suck kind of way.
Debs, their only full-time staff member, was behind the counter, checking out her latest manicure that was done in a shade of green that should have been illegal. Aliens would have liked it though, it was their kind of shade; a Martian green. I ducked to the swimsuit section, hoping to try some on in the privacy of the red curtained change rooms. I didn’t need Martian green nail polish fumbling all over my possible clothes choices. The coat hangers scraped on the steel rack as I pushed aside bikini after bikini, looking for the full-length swimmers that I wasn’t sure even existed.
“Rosie, how are you?” Debs asked, obviously not in the slightest bit interested. “Say, so you get to see much of Mike at the station?” An interesting turn of events. I didn’t like Debs asking about Mike one single bit. Martian-influenced nail polish or not, she was not going anywhere near Mike. My Mike. Hopefully. Maybe. Probably not. But my Mike in my mind, and that was, after all, the most important part of my world.
“Hey. Sometimes. He’s gay,” I said, thinking of Andrew, the gay son. Debs looked surprised, then sceptical as I continued. “All the good ones are, aren’t they? That’s why he moved here. He split up with his long-term boyfriend and wanted to start fresh, far away. Plus, I don’t think his parents approved of him being gay.” I felt a little bit bad for bringing his parents into this deceitful yet necessary web of lies, but a girl’s got to do what a girl’s got to do.
Yes, the sisterhood was important, and women must band together, especially when it came to dealing with our male counterparts, but I could only be a part of the sisterhood if I was feeling thin and confident, which of course I was not. Being a woman was complicated, confusing, and down-right exhausting. I would re-join the sisterhood after I had been given an undying declaration of love from Mike and when I was a size 12 again. But not a moment before.
It was hard to tell what was making me more depressed; the swimmers, my internal dialogue, or talking to Debs. Telling such a horrible lie probably accounted for much more than I was admitting to, but blaming talking to Debs was a quicker, clear cut out. I grabbed a pair of plain black boy-legged swimmers that were hidden at the back of the rack, and a colourful kaftan off the neighbouring rack, and took them to the counter. Debs followed me, prattling on about how she has “nothing against gay people.” Lovely, I thought. Then why do you feel the need to clarify it?
“I’ll take this too,” I said, grabbing a jar of matte lavender coloured nail polish and holding Debs’s gaze. I could hear the music that plays in Westerns as two enemies stand in a dusty street, wiggling their fingers next to their guns, the townspeople looking on, waiting to see who has the quickest draw. Some tumbleweed rolled past, diverting Debs’s attention, and I shot her. Sinatra clapped for me and sang “The Lady is a Tramp.”
Leaving the bloody mess of my encounter with Debs in the wake of my strut, I walked straight past the bakery. No cakes for me today. No bikinis either, obviously, because cakes and bikinis were not mutually exclusive. Mission accomplished, I now had everything I needed for a romantic trip to a country I had barely heard of with a man I barely knew, in swimmers I barely wanted to wear. Yep, I was totally in control.