Giving Up

Giving Up
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday December 5, 2015

The tree is up. Faux-pine and nuclear-green, it is a six-foot monument to the wonders of PVC and all things ersatz at Christmas. Ours is pretending to be a Norway Spruce. It stands unsteadily on our lounge carpet, tripod legs seeking terra firma beneath two inches of 1990’s plush pile carpet.

I bought our tree second-hand from a school fete. Fifteen Christmases have taken their toll. The tips of its branches have sloughed off their plastic skins to expose wire claws which rake your arm and sting like a cat scratch. Brush against the cellophane foliage and our tree sheds clouds of glitter.

This year I’ve abandoned my tree-trimming fantasies to allow my 8-year-old and his small sister decorating carte blanche. Clearly, they’ve inherited their father’s gene for dressing. They give no thought to proportion or colour coordination. They choke the lower branches with thick black cables knotted with our lumpish hand-me-down lights. Some strands they wind tightly around the trunk, some hang floppy and loose. Symmetry is ignored in favour of attaching a decade of kindergarten craft to the same five branches. An argument breaks out over whose lopsided paper stars are whose, and whether the toilet-roll Santa should hang next to his toilet-roll wife. A red globe blows and takes out its neighbours on either side. Our tree is both festive and fire hazard.

Already, a pyramid of presents leans against the trunk. These are the ones Santa allows me to buy for cousins and nannas. I am the Christmas shopper in our house. Somehow, the job always falls to me. The Grinch I live with abhors what he calls the ‘sad spectacle of materialism gone mad.’ He makes a sterling effort for birthdays and anniversaries, but I can’t enthuse him with a soupcon of Christmas spirit.

“What would you like the kids to get you this year?” I ask as he props at the kitchen bench with his morning paper.

“Socks and jocks,” he intones, without looking up.

“C’mon,” I plead. “You say that every year.” (What he really wants is someone to make a fuss over his December birthday.)

“Well,” I say to his centre part. “I know what I’d like. An extension ladder.”

His head jerks up.

“Only kidding. I’d like some lingerie.”

He rolls his eyes. This is the signal that this year, like last year (and the eight before that), I should buy my own Christmas present. I may even need to wrap it, on Christmas Eve, at midnight, with a pavlova still in the oven. Six hours later, I’ll feign surprise when I open it.

“You shouldn’t have!” I’ll say, throwing my arms around his neck.

Following the script, he’ll reply: “I know, darling. I hope you like it.”

This is the problem with gifting between couples: our expectations get in the way. I see Christmas as an opportunity to find my beloved a gift that symbolises our marital nirvana. He sees Christmas as an interruption to the sports pages.

In relationships, presents come loaded with assumptions, judgments and occasionally, disappointment. Givers guess – and hope to find – the perfect gift; receivers have to figure out the agenda behind the gift and then respond accordingly. It’s exhausting trying to be a mind-reader. Instead, I like to apply my first law of Christmas shopping: be gracious if your receiver is not delighted with your choice of present.

This time last year, I remembered my wannabe weather-man had admired an old ship’s barometer we’d seen in an antique shop window. And so I set about finding him one.

I scoured op-shops and auction lists until finally, a dealer handed me the card of a maritime collector up the coast. He gave me a fascinating hour on the history of ships’ instruments. He’d restored two barometers, one of which was a handsome piece with a circular timber mount and the beryllium and copper mechanism on display.

Back home, I smuggled my expensive treasure inside and wrapped it, folding hospital corners into the shipwreck-themed paper I’d found.

On Christmas morning, el capitan looked nonplussed as he peeled away the paper to reveal his prize. I watched a frown crease his forehead as he inspected his new antique. “It’s from 1907,” I said proudly. “Hand-carved oak and the original glass. See? Restored by a specialist. I drove to Yanchep to find it.”

He looked from the barometer to me and laughed. “You know, darling, there’s this marvellous invention they call the internet? Day or night, you can press a button and it’ll tell you everything about the weather!”

It was at that point I stood up, smoothed my apron and flounced away to check on the turkey.

Perhaps this year, I’ll get him his damned socks and jocks after all.

Older and Wiser

Older and Wiser
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday May 16, 2015

I spot a friend’s elderly father sitting outside the cafe with his coffee. A brisk north-easterly has turned Kirwin Street into a wind tunnel. A gust flaps his newspaper and whips a flurry of dry leaves under his table but he’s unperturbed.  

“Edward!” I say. “It’s freezing out here. Come inside and have your coffee with me.”

He hoists himself up to kiss my cheek. We move inside to a table by the wall. Edward, dapper in a navy sportscoat and crisp shirt, sweeps one hand across his glabrous head, flattening a few token wisps to his pate.

“How are you?” I say. It seems an obvious question to ask an 87-year-old.

“Can’t complain,” he replies. “I can still read the paper without glasses.”

I detect a note of pride.

“But my teeth are wearing out,” he adds. “I’m going to get new dentures and have the teeth of a 20-year-old. That’ll confuse the ladies!”

I ask about his left knee. (Long pestered by arthritis, it was reconstructed last year). He gives it a slap.

“It feels brand new!” he says, then cranes forward as if to tell me a secret.

“You know, I was dying at 71. My aorta was leaking.”

He unfastens the top button of his shirt and gives me a glimpse of the scar he says bisects him from throat to navel.

“They fixed me up with a pacemaker and a new aorta made of Kevlar. Kevlar! Now I’m bulletproof. I could live for a thousand years. The question is: would I want to?”

I wonder what’s coming next.

“At my age, people die. I’ve said goodbye to almost everybody.” He rattles off a catalogue of three dead brothers, long gone friends, neighbours, classmates, colleagues, the dentist.

“People my age are only alive because death’s forgotten to visit.”

“But are you lonely?”

“Of course! No-one wants to be alone. I miss the warmth of another body sleeping next to mine. But my life is never dull or empty. The good thing about getting old is there’s finally time for thinking. I like to speculate on the nature of human beings. In the mornings, I lie snug in my bed for a long time.” He chuckles. “Because I can!”

“Would you like to meet someone?”

“Where would I find another Barbara?” he ponders aloud. “I was so desperately in love with Barbara.”

His voice trails off and I study my coffee foam to give him a moment to collect himself.

“She was a helluva catch. I was eight years older. She died of lung cancer at 65. She was just a kid, for goodness sake!” I hear the bitterness in his voice, but then he softens.

“That’s the unfairness of life, isn’t it? I’ve never recovered from Barbara’s death. I’m not sure I want to.”

I stay silent.

“A man is only the reflection of the woman he lives with,” he says with a smile. “She completed me. We were married for 45 years. She’s been gone twelve years. It feels like an eternity.”

He brightens.

“But a large family is a good shock-absorber: five children, eight grand-children, four great-grand-children. When I’m with them, life’s fantastic.”

I tell him about my middle son’s upcoming birthday and ask: “How do you think of the future?”

“I make plans. I want to putter down the canals of France in a houseboat; go places I’ve never been. In January I cruised from Sydney to Fiji. There were 2000 passengers. I went to a singles night but only four people turned up. And two of them had partners.”

We snort in unison.

“You know, time goes faster as you get older. But it’s not time that’s going faster – it’s me going slower. Old age is what happens as you wear out. Like the soles of your shoes – week by week, slowly, imperceptibly, and then one day they’re just too worn out to put on. They’ve outlived their purpose.” He quotes a Jaques’ line from As You Like It:

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

He inspects the mottled skin on his still manly hands. “I’m doing okay, compared to some. I’m gobsmacked by my own good luck. How have I managed to get this far in such good nick? My memory’s the problem now. I can feel the fine details fading out. I see people I’ve known for 40 years and I can’t remember their names.”

It’s time to go. I feel buoyant after my half hour with this insightful, perpetually youthful old man. He stands up to say goodbye. “Luck is everything,” he reminds me.

I sit in the car and reflect, wondering if he’s right.

Greener Pastures

Greener Pastures
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday January 17, 2015

I’ve never understood the relationship between man and lawn. On any summer’s morning, I can wake to find my live-in greenkeeper out the back, in the smallest of silky pyjama shorts, inspecting his Sir Walter buffalo. Hands on hips, he meanders back and forth tracing grid patterns in his turf, engrossed in the grass at his feet. The swell of his New Year’s tummy throws a soft round shadow on his beloved lawn.

I lean against the kitchen bench and admire his XL silhouette through the glass doors. Something catches his eye. He drops to one knee and prospects in the grass with a stick. I predict a lone dandelion weed, or some marauding clover or – quelle horreur! – a lumbering black beetle.

Watching him worship his lawn, I feel a surge of jealousy. Why is he yet to descend on bended knee before me, the saintly mother of his children? I brush aside my Virgin Queen fantasies as he rises and greets me with a winsome smile. He points triumphantly to the leafy weed he has snuffed from the grass. Such devotion to his turf!

Our lawn spreads from the back veranda like a viridescent carpet. It’s eye-calmingly green but has become inexplicably brindled with two brown patches along the south fence. By day’s end, I’ll find my man crouched beside one circle of yellowed thatch, hose in hand, lovingly coaxing four small green shoots to proliferate.

In summer, the soundtrack to my weekend becomes the absonant roar of his mower. My bloke emerges from the house in a Panama hat and shorts, printed with a vivid pattern of interlocking elephants. The garden shed is emptied of trimmer, edger, whipper snipper, blower and broom. He lines them up along the driveway and stands back to admire his arsenal of gardening tools. (In our house, a chore can be elevated to a hobby if it requires a trip to Bunnings and the purchase of a power tool.)

He flexes his biceps and leans down to grasp the pull cord. With a single powerful jerk, his periwinkle-blue Victa Vantage coughs, then screams to life.

“And that’s how it’s done!” he calls over his shoulder to seven-year-old son. Small boy bolts inside, hands clapped to his ears. As his father marches the mower across the lawn, small daughter pinches her nose, choked by the smell of petrol. I remind myself to appreciate the sight of man and machine in perfect congruence.

The lawns of my childhood were swathes of spongy buffalo needing constant nurturing. In the early mornings, our street thrummed with the tic-tic-tic of sprinklers, calling to each other like birds. I practiced my handstands and cartwheels on the front lawn only to be rewarded with a patchwork of grass cuts that stung like blazes.

In the summer holidays, it was my job to shepherd our Beagle on his morning constitutional. We’d sniff our way around the golf course. Even at 6.30am, I could smell the heat riding in on the easterly. Then the greenkeeper would climb aboard his ride-on mower and saturate the air with the humid sweetness of cut grass. I warily skirted the par four fairway, where the giant sprinklers spun around on their tripod legs, trying to blast me with machine-gun jets of water.

On drowsy February afternoons, our back lawn would be baked crisp. My job was to water the garden with the hose. Cranky and hot, I haphazardly squirted the grass, yanking on the hose and cursing the kinks. More often than not, I heard the sound of the kitchen window being wrenched open and Mum’s voice shouting: “And if you break that hose, young lady, you’ll be watering ‘til April!”

Thirty years later, I live with a man who has joined that great confraternity of lawn devotees. How green is it? How lush is it? How neat and clipped and weed-free is it? These are the questions that try men’s souls.

I asked the local lawn-mower man, Selwyn, about his philosophy of lawns.

“Mowing grass is therapeutic,” he explained. “It’s about power and control: crisp lines, clean edges. A perfect result in a crappy world.”

That made sense. At 78, my mum still cuts her own lawn with a hand mower.

“I do my best thinking when I’m mowing,” Mum says. “In any case, a lawn should reflect nicely on a house.”

Arriving home yesterday, I discovered my lawn-lover face down on the verge. He’d hacked up a square foot of grass and was elbow deep in dirt, swearing over a retic pipe I’d driven over. I sat beside him and gently suggested his lawn fetish was becoming obsessive.

“Honey,” I asked. “What’s that relationship in nature when one organism lives off another?

“You mean marriage?”

“No,” I bristled. “I meant symbiosis. But feel free to sleep out with your lawn tonight.”

Farewell, my friend

Farewell, my friend
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 1, 2014

I’m not one for living in the past. But the death of a long-ago friend has marked me in strange ways. Our friendship blossomed during a summer of waitressing in 1985, the year I turned 18. We shared the breakfast shift at the North Cott cafe, overlooking the beach. Her name was Jan. Her name-tag said so.

She was twelve years older, fit and tanned, a single mum to two girls. I’d pull up to the cafe at 6am and see her dilapidated Volvo 240 parked skew-whiff out front, windows open and a pack of Sterling Ultra Milds on the front seat.

By 6.30, the easterly dropped and left the cafe blinds in peace. The first swimmers shuffled up the concrete steps, salted by the ocean, hungry for breakfast. I’d never seen such a smorgasbord of near-naked bodies up close. Jan would elbow me as she folded a mound of serviettes. My eyes followed hers to some swarthy athlete who’d hitched up his red sluggos to display two meaty buttocks. A collection of old boys who swam daily, all-weathers, stood chatting in saggy bathers, drying off their wrinkly brown hides. Girls in bikinis paraded perkiness.

Behind the coffee machine, I admired Jan working the outdoor tables, a model of waitressing efficiency. She could stack three greasy plates along one forearm yet still wriggle free from the bloke who liked to pat her bottom as she took his order. Swatting his arm with her free hand, she weaved back to me. She’d dumped her plates and cutlery so they clattered on the bench and every head turned towards her. “One cappuccino for The Octopus!” she’d announce, grinning.

A virgin at waitressing, I was intimidated by the hulking coffee machine. The frothing proboscis dribbled boiling water on my hand or spat steam at my face if I lost concentration. Customers flustered me by huffing when their lattes took too long. I boiled the milk into a frenzy and served up flat whites with slimy skins that stuck grotesquely to upper lips. My new friend Jan was always encouraging: “You’re getting the hang of it. See? Do table four’s next – they’ve only been waiting for ten minutes.”

Now accustomed to dawn risings, Jan and I started meeting at the beach to exercise on days off. I wore a tie-dyed singlet and my favourite white shorts with elasticated lacy hems. Sometimes I wore a g-string leotard over the white shorts because I was all class in the 80’s. Jan had a bright purple leotard and black micro-shorts. We power-walked along the footpath that hugged Marine Parade from Swanbourne to Leighton beach. Engrossed in conversation, we ignored the smirks from middle-aged couples in sensible tracksuits.

We dissected our relationships – her new squeeze, my over-familiar one. We itemised their shortcomings, justified our own. We raked over our childhoods, volunteered deep secrets. Nothing was too personal or too painful for a verbal autopsy. I marvelled at her insights. She could solve any of my problems.

On the weekends her girls went to their father, we warred at the tennis net. Line calls were disputed with McEnroe histrionics. The sore loser copped the bill for lunch. We counted calories, invented new diet regimes, wondered if this would be the year we’d be thin enough (and brave enough) to wear a bikini.

And then I got sacked from the cafe. The boss caught me hiding in the coolroom, scoffing a slab of his prized hummingbird cake. Jan constructed an elaborate defence, but my coffee failures had caught up with me, and now I was also a cake thief.

I went off to Psych 101 at Uni, she had a baby with the new boyfriend. We still walked along the ocean once a week, then once a month, then not at all. We caught up on the phone, as delighted with each other as ever, but the gaps in our friendship grew longer until I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her.

And then one morning last year, I spotted her at the shops. She looked gaunt, her collar bones sharp against her oddly pale skin. I was shocked, but made a pretence.

“All right,” I said as we hugged. “You win. You’re thinner!”

“No. You win,” she said. “I’ve got cancer.”

I burst into tears.

I hardly knew anyone at her crowded funeral. A few faces were vaguely familiar, old friends of hers I’d met once or twice. Jan’s girls had slyly grown into women. I spotted three small grandsons. I was now a middle-aged relic from her past. I stood against the chapel wall and my mind drifted to the year we met, when the beach beckoned to sun-tans and summer romances. I longed for her company, for our shared confidences, for my younger self. But she is gone now, my friend Jan. Part of me went with her.

Airing Dirty Laundry

Airing Dirty Laundry
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday June 28, 2014

My laundry is a showcase of my domestic shortcomings. A pagoda of clean clothes is stacked on the bench. Eldest son’s sports gear lies reeking on the floor awaiting fumigation. Suspended under the skylight is a dowel rail trimmed with dripping garlands of blue and white school uniforms. My husband’s favourite polo shirt, the lavender one with the chlorine stains, hangs damply off the door knob to the broom cupboard. A load of wet washing I forgot to hang out yesterday is crumpled in the washing basket, beginning to turn whiffy.

I am not a laundry-proud kind of person. My laundry is a sweat-shop that’s either stopped up with five peoples’ dirty clothes, or clogged up with clean ones. No-one but me ever puts anything away.

Of all the domestic duties that co-habitation requires, it’s the laundering that my live-in clothes horse takes for granted. Before bed, he unbuckles his trousers, liberating a roll of tummy. His fawn chinos drop to the floor. He daintily steps over them and untucks his business shirt from his underpants. He inspects his shirt front for soy sauce and coffee drips. Satisfied at finding both, he balls up the shirt and lobs it almost into the laundry hamper. Jocks and socks follow in alphabetical order. He knows it’s only a matter of time before these items of clothing will magically reap ear, spotless, back in his wardrobe.

On weekends, his gaudy, fraying favourites emerge from his chest of drawers. The burnt-orange tracksuit top is a permanent Saturday fixture. He usually teams it with the dung-brown trackie daks with a navy stripe and a saggy seat. These are the items of clothing that pass regularly through the laundry on their way to Bunnings, or to middle son’s soccer game. Another dad snorts in my husband’s direction: ‘Get dressed in the dark, mate?!” Later, after father and son’s obligatory post-match hot dog, I soak the tomato sauce stains out of the pants and dry the orange tracksuit top over a chair so it won’t shrink, because I know what love is.

My laundry is also a dumping ground for miscellaneous household items. I’m supposed to find a home for the secateurs, a container of ceiling putty and half a metre of air conditioning duct in case in case they’re urgently needed. I babysit an assortment of batteries (possibly live, more likely dead) lined side by side beside the washing machine. A lonely shin-pad waits for me to locate its mate.

On the highest shelf next to the dryer, I keep a stash of Allen keys. These keys sit atop an Ikea screwdriver kit, now on permanent standby after last week’s upstairs emergency.

In a huff, 13-year-old had stomped into his bedroom, slamming the c 1978 door. The outer door-knob flew off taking the spindle with it, and imprisoning teenager inside his room for forty minutes. (I congratulated the house for that stroke of genius).

I have friends whose laundries are more show-pony than work-horse. I don’t understand how their laundries operate with such efficiency. Even when I call in unexpectedly, their polar-white Corian benchtops are pristine. They must live in the nude.

When my kids are whining and husband is jet-lagged, I use the laundry as a safe-haven. No-one in my family expects to find me there. I make a start on folding t-shirts and re-uniting socks, but my mind is elsewhere. I fantasise about washing teenage son’s new black jeans with husband’s burnt-orange tracksuit and watching gleefully as the colours run. I peel a pelt of lint from the dryer filter and sweep up the gravel of spilled cat biscuits.

Yesterday morning, my husband was running late for a meeting and rummaging through the laundry clothes pile for his lucky lilac-checked business shirt. “This place is a sty!” he complained loud enough for me to hear from the bathroom. “Where’s that shirt?”

“I think your blue one’s dry!” I called back. He grabbed his blue shirt from the bottom of the stack, upending the pile. As he barrelled past me to get dressed in our bedroom, I braced myself for this month’s lecture. (He calls this talk a ‘minor marital adjustment,’ I called it a ‘blazing row’).

He swung open the bathroom door and poked his head around the corner, hopping on one leg to put a sock on the other. “We’ve been in this house for more than a year now,” he said. “Any chance you could get a system going in that wash-house of yours?”

Of yours? What a cheek! I was incredulous. Then furious. I bent down and retrieved yesterday’s purple socks and his lime-green running shorts. “Here you go!” I said, tossing them in his direction. “The laundry’s all yours. Let’s see how you manage in there!” And I flounced into the shower, grabbed the soap and got to work shaving my legs with his new razor.

The Male Mystique

The Male Mystique
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday August 24, 2013

I live with a man who inhabits a different relationship to mine. Our marriage is a his-and-her version of the same conjugation. I can never tell what my husband is thinking because he’s master of the poker face. On weekends, having tried (and failed) to read his mood, I’ll squeeze in beside him on the sofa and inquire: “Honey, what are you thinking?”  

“Nothing.”  

I like to press him further: “You know, it’s impossible to think about nothing. Even nothing is something if you can’t think of anything.”

“Okay then,” he sighs. “I’m thinking about what a plonker that Hayden Ballantyne is.  And if I’ll have time to scarper to Bunnings at half time. And whether they’ll have a sausage sizzle out the front. Happy now?”

He shoots me a look that’s either bemusement or incredulity but I can’t tell because I can’t read his mind.

I’ve spent years trying to get inside his head. I have tried to follow his man-mind by over-processing everything he says and does. I look for hidden meanings in his shrugs and read far too much into his harrumphs.

Here’s my theory: my husband has a one-track mind. His brain chugs along the straightest possible route from A to B. He stays calm, measured and entirely predictable. As far as I can tell, he neatly divides his day into work, football, family, newspapers and sleep. (On weekends, in reverse order). And if the gentle hum of domestic life with a wife, three children and a cat turns into bedlam, he seeks refuge in the dunny.

On Saturday mornings, the bathroom floor is littered with newspapers. The sports section is in disarray, and the liftouts have had pages torn out willy-nilly. No amount of my shuffling can get the paper back in page order. I can hear contented rustling as I walk past the john on my way to the laundry. The fan is a muffled roar. The kids are yelling for their dad to teach them table tennis.

I’m expected to respect his hide-out by declaring: “Papa’s ducked out to the shop to get milk!” And then I fumigate the hallway with lavender spray to throw them off the scent.

Why do I protect him from his own children? For love, apparently. What’s a wife worth anyway? I’ve become as ever-present and useful to him as fresh air.  

Sometimes, marriage and its chores are stultifying. For every man who dives for the dishcloth after dinner, there are plenty who push back their chair and announce: “Delicious, darling.” Then they ignore the kitchen carnage and settle into the sofa to watch Four Corners.

It’s never 50-50 in domestic work. It’s 60-40 or 70-30. Or worse. One party works tirelessly to keep the household juggernaut rolling, the other takes advantage of the smooth ride.

Every six months or so I like to give our relationship a litmus test. I prop against the door of the study and casually enquire: “So, honey, should we go out to dinner, just the two of us, and talk?”

“Talk about what?” he says.

”The state of our relationship.”

And he’ll reply: “It’s chaotic. There. Now can we stay at home?”

It’s the same answer every time. No man wants to talk about his relationship. Every woman likes to dissect hers.

My husband thinks my working week involves sitting around with my housewifey girlfriends drinking pots of tea and gas-bagging. It’s the kind of ignorant accusation that infuriates me and my two best pals when we meet on Friday mornings to discuss the latest Nielsen poll and why our husbands are infuriating.

I admire those women who tell their man to shape up. Instead, I have a happy husband by default. I pretend I don’t mind him always getting his own way because I don’t want to sound like a nag. Instead, I only come unhinged every few weeks. The resentment backs up and explodes at inopportune moments. Usually on turbulent school mornings when he’s swanning around after a 20-minute sabbatical in the shower.

The sexes also divide over fine detail: I like a nicely made bed with hospital corners, my husband cuts corners by shutting the bedroom door. After dinner, he’ll earn an adoring glance from me by announcing: “Sit down Blossom, I’ll do the dishes tonight.” And then he’ll put the last four plates in the dishwasher and leave the crusty lasagne dish and a burnt saucepan on the sink.

Marriage is the accumulation of thousands of nondescript conversations held over thousands of unremarkable breakfasts. It’s the kindness of a husband who lets me have the first shower, and the tolerance of a wife who picks up the five socks scattered across the bedroom floor. But next time the kids are screeching for their dad on a Saturday morning and I can’t find the newspaper, I’m going to give them a wink and point them in the direction of the lavatory. I hope they annoy the crap out of him.

A Lost Opportunity

A Lost Opportunity
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday May 4, 2013

In our house, I am the finder of lost things. Except if the lost thing is the repair kit for the coffee machine. Sealed in a plastic bag, these are special tools: a weird-looking tube and a yellow brush, a metal thingy with a hole punctured at one end and a perforated paper cone.

They are also implements so vital to the espresso-making process that I’ve never seen them before. My husband says otherwise, seeing as it’s me who has lost them.

Three weeks ago, as I was making beds, our Breville coffee machine began gurgling uncomfortably. As it choked down the last of the Costa Rican Arabicas, my newly woken (de-caffeinated) husband yelped from the kitchen. I ran to his side. We stood by the coffee machine, helpless. It shook uncontrollably, then exhaled a weak steamy breath and was still. I thought I heard a faint death rattle in its metal throat, then silence. With no trace of emotion my husband turned to me: “Quick – get the cleaning bag, the coffee machine’s croaked.”

The bag wasn’t hiding in the big red bowl on the kitchen bench kept precisely for mystery objects. Nor was it at the bottom of the pantry, or in the garage (you never know). For three days in a row, my husband drove at sunrise the 200m to the corner café to satisfy his craving. On his return, only slightly less agitated, he demanded: “Find the damn repair kit, blossom.” And so my hunt began anew.

Clearly my powers of encyclopedic placement had let me down. All that memorizing of the precise whereabouts of each item belonging to five people in one house had come to nothing. Suddenly one see-through zip-lock bag was as lost as 18 minutes of Watergate tape.

However, I did find the allen key for dismantling the spare bed, the commemorative gold coin we got sucked into buying at the Bell Tower and an unclaimed Medicare receipt from 2011.

In our family, there are two types of searches for lost things:  there is a “boy look” and a “girl look.” When the man of the house misplaces the keys to his ute, he swivels his head from left to right before announcing: “Nup, they’re not here.”

This constitutes a “boy look.” It does not involve looking under or behind things or anywhere above or below eye level.. 

My bloke, when desperate, will ramp up a “boy look” by taking one step in each direction from the kitchen bench before accusing: “What have you done with my keys!”

That’s when I can swoop in for a “girl look.” I shift sheaths of unpaid Telstra bills to their rightful file and drawer and put magazines with Ray Martin on the cover into the recycling at last. I clear my husband’s desk of stretched out paper clips, discarded envelopes and a pagoda of Post-it notes. Along the way I also find eldest son’s missing pocket knife and joy! – the plug for the bath.

Eventually I discover the ute’s keys chilling on the third shelf of the fridge: “Oooh, that’s right!” he says “I put them on that six-pack so I wouldn’t forget the beers.”

 “Girl looks” are imperative when living with teenage boys. My man-child can’t remember what day it is, let alone where he put his lunch box: actually nowhere. It’s still in his school bag on the porch, lid off, with a few crusts and a whiffy yoghurt container signposting a free meal for passing vermin.

Sometimes it’s me that feels like the lost thing – picking my way through the jumble of other peoples’ stuff trying to restore order – no place for me. My carefree days are behind me, but I’m not yet old enough to need taking care of. Instead, I am sitting uncomfortably in the embrace of middle age – needed instantly when tummies are hungry or sock drawers need a refill. Why can’t I be wanted as much as needed?

I like to pretend I know where everything is. Even the children. And if something is too important to lose, I put it in the only place I’m guaranteed to find it: in my bra. Recently, while having a (womanly) check up, my doctor said: “Pop up here on the bed and take off your bra and we’ll be done in no time.” So I unsnapped my bra and a train ticket, two one-dollar coins and the lens cap for my camera dropped onto the floor. (Best to take photos dressed in something with pockets.)

So now a month has passed and a new repair kit has been delivered: $68.95. The coffee machine has spluttered back to life and the household is re-caffeinated by 7am.

But last night I had a dream, a dream so real I woke up and my brain was instantly alert. Suddenly, I remembered where I’d put that indispensable zip-lock bag with all the coffee parts: in the bin. The same place I put all useless-looking tubes, metal-thingys and strange paper cones. But that’s a guilty secret best left between you and me.

Writing on the wall

Writing on the wall
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday April 6, 2013

Memory has a mind of its own.  At random, it chooses what to keep. My grandmother’s handwriting is writ large in my memory. I remember her ringing me on her black Bakelite phone: “I’ve posted you a surprise, darling.” She knew my little legs would be dashing to the front  gate every five minutes to see if the postie was a speck up the road.  

I could pick out my nan’s penmanship in an instant, even before the perfumed envelope gave it away. Her capitals had graceful loops and flourishes – an artistic hand that also embroidered daisies on dresses for my doll. I watched mesmerised as the same hand whisked eggs into a blur to make dainty sponges.

It was there, in my nan’s kitchen, that she wrote me her shopping lists: long columns of her handwriting showing off her beautiful curlicue C for corned beef – 1 lb. Potatoes with a flouncy P, a firm downstroke for the B in Bovril, an exaggerated T for treacle and Sago – the o with a hook that swept the next word ‘Pudding’ into brackets – so I’d know what Sago was for. Such foreign-sounding things she wanted. I tucked her list into my koala purse and pedalled to the shop. First hurdle: deciphering her script. Second hurdle: matching the groceries to the strange words on the list. Then I’d ride home with bulging string bags hanging from my handlebars, banging on my knees or swinging dangerously into the spokes.

Even now, her writing goes hand-in-hand with how I remember her: graceful and neat. She left behind that permanent imprint of her 90 years on the planet. My nan’s lovely cursive resides on the backs of family photos. It lives inside the letters we keep as treasures under the lid of the piano stool at mum’s house. The seat of our family.

My own handwriting is as erratic as a chicken scratch. I’m so out of practice I can barely jot down half a page without writer’s cramp. I used to write my television stories long-hand on spiral notebooks, a welter of script. I sweated on the fire escape stairs outside the newsroom, scribbling away as deadline approached. Sentences that didn’t sound right when spoken aloud were roughly scrubbed out in favour of rhythmic ones. Sudden brainwaves would force themselves onto the pad, squeezed into margins  – a scrawl legible only to me. It was always a race to see whether inspired thoughts would vaporise before I could get them on paper.

No such trouble now. My laptop and I are intimates. My fingers fly over the keys – brain and hands finally in unison. Typing fast feels masterly. With such mechanical clarity, should I ever bother with pens?

My children won’t remember life before the internet. Their ideas will be pressed onto paper by the clicking of keys rather than the scratching of biros. For them, postcards will be quaint reminders of holidays before Facebook.

In high school French I decided my number 7 needed the European sophistication of a cross bar. I was a maths dunce but with one horizontal stroke, I became numerically glamorous – those 7’s of mine were so continental they could have been smoking Gauloises and eating croissants. Smitten, I have written my 7’s with a bar ever since: seventh heaven!

As classmates, we took great pains to graffiti our fanciest handiwork all over each others’ diaries. We changed our writing styles as often as the hems on our pleated beige dresses. Even now, I can instantly picture the cursive of my closest school friends: all those birthday cards and books gifted with their funny, affectionate inscriptions.

Curious, I don’t know the handwriting of newer friends. We talk and text and email, but don’t pen notes. Will their writing be bold or slap-dash or in beautiful italics? Are they right-handed or mollydooker? I’d like to know.

My husband hides a handwritten note each time he creeps out of the house at dawn for the airport. I wake up in our bed and feel less empty for the small thrill of finding his letter. Usually it’s tucked under my laptop or in the Cornflakes box. Silly I know, but it’s comforting to see the essence of him on paper, a billet-doux tiding me over until his return. I return the favour by planting an even more effusive love letter in his suitcase. (I usually wrap it around nasty household bills, each one annotated with a love heart in the hope he’ll pay them and leave me flush with cash.)

Now I’m mourning a graceful skill that has had its day. Handwriting is an art because expressing ourselves in ink is an exercise in restraint. Even a rude letter starts with ‘Dear…’ before roasting the recipient. How many times have I dashed off an email forgetting my hasty reply might be mistaken for bluntness – I’m always embarrassed at sounding impolite. Perhaps I need to slow down and reacquaint myself with the gentleness of handwriting. If I concentrate, I might even be able to make it legible.

For love or money

For love or money
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday March 9, 2013

Money is a delicate subject in our house. So delicate my husband likes to refer to me as Paris Hilton. I take offence because Paris Hilton is a vacuous party princess and I’m a down to earth toilet-scrubbing kind of princess with calluses on her knees.

The laws of marriage demand we define ourselves as either Scrooge or Squanderer. Rarely are we on the same team. Agreeing on whose label is whose is a barney in itself.

Some spouses grudgingly accept they’re a Scrooge because they imagine they are sensible with money. They also know a teabag can make three consecutive cups of tea if it’s wrapped in plastic and kept in the fridge.

Others leap the trench and proudly embrace the title Squanderer.The Squanderer’s catchcry is: ‘Keep the change!’ or ‘I’ll take one in every colour.’ They understand they may die tomorrow and never again take delight in a David Jones sale. That’s how a Squanderer justifies buying three pairs of basket-weave platform sandals in buff, nude and sand.  

My husband is a tightwad but doesn’t know it. Secretly he loves me for being lavish and reckless. I might be a compulsive spender but that doesn’t mean I’m not good with money. I run the house, the children and my wardrobe. Our phone has only been cut off once in the past year. If I forget to pay the gas bill, I just use the electric oven.

When I bought four stools for the kitchen bench, the man of the house said ‘Blossom, you do know we only have three children?’ (Doesn’t he realise I like to sit down while I’m counting out his peas for dinner?)

It’s a mystery to me why my Scrooge’s wallet is always bulging with fifties. I like to relieve him of a few because my purse is always empty and his wallet needs clean lines. In return, he tells people: ‘She’s light-fingered.’ Then he lectures me about how annoying it is that I never have cash, and how a Squanderer should love visiting the automatic teller: ‘You won’t believe it Blossom, money comes out of those things like magic!’

A girlfriend gets around her own Scrooge by telling her husband everything she buys costs 20-bucks: ‘It’s 20-bucks to have my hair done’; ‘I got these shoes for 20-bucks!’. She’s getting divorced now, but her bloke still thinks a girl’s lunch costs 20-bucks.

My husband happily pays the mortgage (he calls it a ‘co-habitation tax’). He buys me Lindt chocolates for our anniversary (the ‘spousal levy’). Yet he can blow big sums of cash when the mood strikes him. Six years ago he paid some serious dosh for a dinghy we’ve only sat in three times. He bought a kayak that has seen rapids just the once, (from the roof of the car), and shelled out for a top-of- the-range electric mower that snips six square metres of grass owned by the Council.

My snarky Scrooge is also a forensic accountant who knows how to bust me when I try to cover up a spending spree. I come unstuck when I forget to shred receipts or he trips over the shopping bags I’ve left in the hallway. It’s even more embarrassing when he catches me out on my bad arithmetic. Last week I blithely waved in the direction of the new ottoman:

‘Oh that thing? It was 25-percent off, virtually cost price.’

‘So what was the discount?’

Me (dumbstruck): ‘Um, 35-bucks?’

Then I take the blasted ottoman back to the shop and ask for my $200 back.

I know that money goes off if you leave it on the kitchen bench. Idle cash needs to be exchanged for something new, like another juicer. Or other shiny things.

For five years, we’ve had an ongoing tiff about the prized soccer table I bought at auction. You remember how much fun it is flicking balls past rows of little soccer men? Well, my husband doesn’t.

But the auction house was selling off the contents of the Old Raffles Hotel and I was excited. It was like being back at school and knowing the answer to everything. I repeatedly shot my hand up in the air until even the swarthy men with the big gold watches stopped bidding:

‘Do I have $400? Once? Twice? SOLD! to the young lady in the tracksuit with the crying baby.’

My husband delights in telling people: ‘Yes, she went to town on a crappy piece of pub history – now a soccer table is parked in the garage and my car is parked on the road.’ He claims the kids have played with it ten times in five years: ‘Blossom, I’m telling you for the last time – sell it!’

I suspect an ulterior motive. Yesterday, I spotted some papers in the study that look a lot like ads for second-hand caravans. He wants me to become a trailer park wife. That, or he’s planning to be a ginger nomad. Either way, the soccer table’s coming with us. The kids and I can have our 11th game while he’s loading up the dinghy, the kayak and the electric mower.

PS. Ros has agreed to sell the soccer table when her husband agrees to get a vasectomy. Fair trade.

In the Passion Pit

In the Passion Pit
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West Magazine
Published February 9, 2013

Power is still the best aphrodisiac. That’s why I get all atingle at the sight of my husband brandishing an electric drill or a whipper snipper. The mere suggestion that he has forsaken the cricket, the newspaper and his children to do a job that lessens my domestic load is guaranteed to earn him an afternoon delight. And I don’t mean a visit from my mother.

Sometimes I fantasise about my bloke leaning over the kitchen sink. I like to imagine him up to his elbows in suds teaching that saucepan with the scrambled eggs burnt into it a lesson in brute force.

I can also get steamed up watching him iron a shirt. He likes to do his ironing after a shower with a towel wrapped around his waist. I’m always captivated by the way he moves from cuff to collar instead of the other way around, though really I’m just excited that it’s not me taking the creases out. Just once, I wish the towel would drop to the floor. Instead, his belly works against gravity to keep it firmly in place. (Ironing has always been a wrinkle up the sleeve of fun.)

Foreplay in a marriage is a dance of many complicated steps. It’s not like the  hokey-pokey we did in our single days. Back then, shaking it about after a couple of shandies at the pub was all it took to get propositioned. Now, in a long-term partnership over-run with children’s swimming lessons and endless cut lunches, the matrimonial polka comes a sad second to wakeful toddlers and 12 year olds who can stay up later than I can. Even when the kids are finally asleep, I find it difficult to read the signals coming from the man on the sofa. If he’s engrossed in the latest Economist magazine, I never know if my fortunes are looking up, or if Greece has killed off any hope of a stimulation package: Mine.  

A girlfriend says her husband needs to understand that foreplay starts three hours before bed-time. For her, it involves curling up on the sofa with him while they watch Stephen Fry on QI. During the show, she likes to talk about subjects that have been troubling her during the day. Vexatious questions like whether the dripping laundry tap might fix itself. After that, my girlfriend likes some hand-holding (her hand being held) or foot massaging (her feet being massaged) while they watch re-runs of his favourite show The Sopranos, and she asks him repeatedly whose hit-man is whose. Maybe he gets up to make them both a cup of tea because ‘togetherness’ is all about connecting in ways that make her the centre of (his) attention’.

If he’s perfectly content watching a mob hit without her, having baggsed the comfy arm of the sofa after leaving the dishes for the maid, then she’s not hitting the sack with him later on. Any hopes he has of making faces with her at 10pm sink faster than a Mafia victim in New Jersey habour.

I’m going to make an educated guess here and say most blokes don’t need foreplay. In fact, I’ll take a stab in the dark and say that leaving a man in peace in front of the telly is foreplay in itself. In our house, I have learnt the Golden Rule of obtaining amorous congress: Silence. Sometimes I give myself an extra challenge and see if I can remain mute even during the ad breaks. (No success yet.)

The only trouble with pandering to my man’s love of quiet is that some nights I have no idea where I stand. He might be a prized stud, but occasionally, I like to imagine I am queen of the Stepford wives and can expect certain reward for my verbal restraint, only to discover that while I was loading the dishwasher he has hit the hay and any pleadings for a roll in it are met with: “Go to sleep please Blossom, I have a 7am meeting.” (Business and pleasure are mutually exclusive in our house.)

As far as I can tell, men don’t talk with other men about their sex lives. If they did they’d have worked out that women like to use sex as a reward for good behaviour. A husband who takes the kids out and leaves me in my house alone for an afternoon is in for some conjugal happiness. On the other hand, any husbands who take the rubbish out then act as though they’ve cleaned both toilets are likely to be going to bed alone.

Men should talk more to each other – that’s what the phone is for. Commiserating with mates over the mysteries of the female libido might unravel why it blows cold even after you’ve taken the bins out. Women, of course, are enlightened about what men want because they discreetly share the details for the greater good of womankind. These are the kind of private conversations best saved for fifteen of your besties at book  club.

If men had book clubs they’d have all the answers. Instead they’re doomed to pub get-togethers where the talk rarely ventures outside the cricket or the nags until some bloke, half-polluted, asks wistfully: “You know that look women get when they want sex? Me neither.”