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.

Enough about me

Enough about me
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday May 11, 2013

A conversation is not just a rudimentary exchange of information or a conduit for drinking with friends. It has winners and losers. It can be life changing. I know this because a conversation in a pub landed me my husband.

Back then, I didn’t know fate had arranged for me to be leaning against the back bar of the Subi hotel with a man wearing Ronnie Barker glasses. He was comfortably stout, like a prized footballer gone to pot, and I noticed his manly hands (I have a thing about extremities). He was charming, disarming and attentive but it was the way he spoke to me that made me skittish, like Bambi. Here was a man who was warming up for a conversational joust. I set out to beguile him with my verbal prowess.

I failed to allow for the first glass of champagne on my empty stomach. It sent my mouth galloping ahead of my brain. Halfway through the second glass, I was babbling and gushing. Sentences I should have filtered for tedium and stupidity dropped straight onto my tongue and became clumsy word spillage. I was all single-entendre, my brilliant wit sabotaged by a bad case of love jitters.

On this night, I thought it best to attempt being a coquette, rather than try to outfox this razor-sharp raconteur when I’d gone all goosy. And anyway, he was asking too many Mensa questions: “So, being an only child, what have you learnt about other people?”

How to respond? I squirmed. He leaned back and propped his elbows on the bar while a lively silence throbbed between us. My brain darted about in search of a penetrating reply but all I could come up with was: “the big question for me is why none of my yoga pants have ever been to yoga?”

He grinned – I took it as a compliment. And then he leaned in close, brushed an eye-lash off my cheek and whispered “Make a wish.” I giggled in falsetto.

I secretly asked the champagne fairy for three wishes – I wished this man would take me home and hang his bad tie in my closet, I wished to grow old and grey with him and I wished for thinner arms. The good fairy granted two wishes, and I’m resigned to wearing sleeves.

That is the G-rated version of the night I met my man on a late summer’s night. Our eighth anniversary has just passed (un-remarked), but he remains a challenging conversationalist.

Conversation is an art form. We all admire those who have mastered the serve and volley of lingual ping-pong.   

But some acquaintances suck the oxygen out of the air by talking incessantly. Self-obsession asphyxiates friendships. If I’m button-holed by a bloke who doesn’t draw breath for two minutes, I hightail it to the dessert buffet.

Interrupters also infuriate: my children have perfected the technique. But it’s adult interjectors who should be gagged – those people who leap in and ruin my punchlines, or smother me with their preoccupations. I murmur to myself: “Sorry I was talking while you were interrupting.”

Why can’t bores recognise themselves? Some even refer to themselves in the third person, just so we can appreciate them from yet another angle: “And then the nice girl in Country Road said to me – Barbara Blackwood – you look amazing in that colour. Barbara, that dress goes so well with your tattoo. Barbara, we should name that dress after you – we’ll call it…. The Barbara!”

I, too, used to think my stories were riveting. At 20, I landed my first job in commercial radio: a chick among peacocks. I answered the phones with try-hard sophistication: “96FM , we will rock you!” Teetering in my white stilettos I would carry cups of International Roast to celebrity disc jockeys with velvet tonsils. On Friday nights I would regale my friends: “And then he asked me to be the barrel-girl! Me! He told me to giggle and rustle the entry forms so they made crunchy paper noises, it was sooo cool…”

Before long I caught two girlfriends rolling their eyes at each other across the table. My ego collapsed. These days I tell my stories while keeping my third eye roving for audience boredom.  

Some people like to take over a conversation – they interject about their famous second cousin the soapie extra, or launch into the intricacies of their colonoscopy (scraping the bowels of social convention). Some people feel compelled to convince me that daddy long legs are poisonous but their mouths aren’t big enough to bite people, and if I disagree, they become strident.

At my home in Utopia, my conversational skills are sagging. My 12-year-old cancels me out with his noise-cancelling headphones. Husband is riveted by The Footy Show and can’t be distracted so my three-year-old and I compete for each other’s attention.

Sometimes, when I want to ask my beloved about the state of our relationship, I’ll sidle up to him and say: “Honey, do you remember that night we met in that pub?” And he’ll smile and say: “Yes, blossom, that’s the night you thought talking about yourself constituted a conversation.”