Old School Ties

Old School Ties
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday October 4, 2014

She weaved through the crowd towards me. I grinned and waved. I hadn’t seen her since I was 17 and now I was 46. Yet here we were at our thirty year high school reunion and she’d hardly changed. She looked softer than I remembered. Her hair was shorter. It suited her.

She squeezed in beside me at the bar. As I puckered up to greet her, I saw her eyes dart down to my name badge and back up to meet mine. In that instant, I realised she had no idea who I was.

My school-mate tried to recover her composure. “Ros!” she said brightly, but my ego had already collapsed. Our conversation lurched into a catalogue of our offspring and then we floundered. I made a lame excuse about needing the bathroom and fled.

The ladies’ loo is the only sanctuary at a school reunion. Re-applying my lipstick, I examined my reflection. Was it so surprising she hadn’t recognised me? I no longer had a centre part and camel-brown plaits. She and I were never close at school. We had no classes in common. To her, I was just another girl in the corridor in a broccoli-green blazer and drab pleated skirt.

And yet her memory lapse rattled me. Was I so forgettable? How could she have failed to notice my magnetic personality and sparkling wit? What was I like at high school? Twenty minutes into our reunion and my old insecurities, so long buried, swarmed to the surface.

I was the girl desperate to fit in but afraid of standing out. Always self-conscious. I remembered the hours spent preening, the bouts of self-loathing. “Better to be a late bloomer, I reckon,” said a friend’s dad. I still don’t know if he meant it as a compliment or a put-down.

Aged 15, I wanted a name like Jenny or Sally or Lizzy or Tracy because then I could reinvent myself as a Jen or a Sal, or Liz or Trace. I wanted a Reef Oil tan. I started drinking cola to look sophisticated. I blew a week’s waitressing money on a red string bikini like the one Elle McPherson wore in the TAB ads. (I mustered the courage to wear that bikini just the once – from my bedroom wardrobe to the bathroom mirror and smartly back again).

I feigned self-assuredness at school and wallowed in my inferiority complex at home. I was desperate to own a pair of white Starfire rollerskates because my friend Jane pirouetted effortlessly in hers. I wanted a boyfriend called Brent, or Shane, or Troy, preferably driving a V8 Falcon with a racing stripe down the side. I ended up with a boyfriend who drove a Ford Escort with a smashed tail-light. His name was Andy. Close enough, I decided.

I couldn’t bear to be parted from my posse of girlfriends. These were trusted friends who warned me that soaking my ponytail in lemon juice would make my hair go brassy, then brittle, then snap off. But they still went with me to the emergency hairdresser’s appointment afterwards. (Mum had already counselled me against do-it-yourself colorants. She disparaged hair dye the way she disparaged Gough Whitlam).

The door to the loos at the reunion hall banged open and in barrelled an old classmate. I snapped out of my teenaged angst as she shouted in mock anger: “I still don’t get why they made Jane the tennis captain! It should’ve been me! They made her bloody captain of everything!

I snorted.

“Trace,” I said, “does anyone, ever, get over high school!”

“Nup. Never.”

Back in the function room, the champagne was settling nerves and dissolving inhibitions. We shouted to make ourselves heard. I took a few moments to register some faces, but remarkably, our voices had stayed the same. One by one, we reconnected, exchanged life stories, surprised each other.

I recalled our previous reunion a decade ago. Then aged 36, I’d felt uncomfortable amid the jockeying that night. Who had their dream job? Who’d snaffled the perfect husband? Who looked good, better, different, old? Who was making a tit of themselves on the dance floor?

I’d arrived at my 30th reunion expecting more of the same. But actually, we’d finished gloating and posing. I admired the air traffic controller, the flamenco dancer, the opthalmologist, the mother of five. I heard about sick children. I swapped stories about ageing parents, friends who’d died. I listened to tales of crumbling marriages and cheating husbands. In middle age, most of us had shed our envy and were arriving at humility.

We all thought we’d grown out of our childish ways. Yet really, we’d just consolidated our personalities. The extroverts were still extroverts. The shy girls were still shy. And everyone said I was exactly the same. The same how? I don’t know what they meant. A giggly drunk? Hope not.