Cuts Both Ways

Cuts Both Ways
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday April 11, 2015

I glide around the shop display, high on the heady scent of perfumed candles.

“Would you like to sample our skin creams?” purrs the willowy shopgirl. She hands me a luxury Popsicle stick. With it, I scoop out a polite portion of Kashmir Petal lotion and knead my hands until I smell like a marshmallow. I admire her little amber pots arranged in careful rows along the counter and marvel at her equally decadent prices.

Into the shop walks a woman my age with a familiar face. I can’t place her but I know we’re acquainted somehow. Perhaps we have friends in common? I acknowledge her with a smile and say ‘Hi!’.

She glances towards me and for a micro-second, our eyes lock. I see a flicker of recognition before she hesitates. My greeting hangs uncomfortably in the air. I search her face for friendliness but she gives me a look of Easter Island disdain. I register her unsmiling mouth and realise she has cut me dead. She turns her head to avert my gaze and lavishes her attention on a glass cabinet full of trinkets.

I am flummoxed, then embarrassed. What to do? The slender sales assistant eyes me, waiting for Act II of this shop-staged melodrama. I busy myself with a pot of Magnolia body crème while my mind ratchets through my options. Perhaps she didn’t hear me? Do I say hello again? Maybe she didn’t recognise me? Maybe she decided not to recognise me? Perhaps she’s shy? Is shyness an excuse for rudeness?

Up surges a flood of teenaged insecurities. Perhaps she just doesn’t like me? Why doesn’t she like me?

I berate myself for caring and become incensed instead. How dare she! Is it so hard to be friendly and say hello? My Freudian brain scrambles to rationalise id from ego. I decide to give my nemesis the benefit of the doubt. I sense she’s as aware of my presence as I am of hers. I throw a final glance in her direction and resolve to greet her again if she meets my gaze. Her eyes dart from mine and she feigns sudden interest in a box of greeting cards on the counter. The irony is not lost on me. I cut my losses, nod my thanks to the shopgirl and slip out of the store.

A fortnight later, even as I write, I’m reliving my indignation. Why is snobbery so infuriating?

I’ve only been labelled a snob once (at least to my face). At a bar in Sydney, a bloke in a suit who’d had tee many martoonis suggested I join his table for one. I pointed out my table of ten noise-makers and told him I belonged there. He crooked his index finger at the barman, who leaned in to hear his order: “You call this happy hour?” said martini-man loudly, then pointed at me. “This one’s a snob.”

A dozen heads swivelled on necks. I was mortified. Martini-man, well-pleased with himself, slid off his stool and zig-zagged back to his table. I slunk back to mine.

At high school, I watched the social climbers with awe and envy. One in particular fascinated me. She was the 16-year-old protégé of an upwardly mobile mother, a woman who parked her Mercedes conspicuously outside the principal’s office. I got the feeling we could be friends until a more suitable friend became available. (Nobodies and Somebodies couldn’t be pals.)

I learnt from her that snobs-in-training can’t be complacent – there is always someone higher up the ladder to impress. And this girl was never satisfied. Social climbing was relentless. There were always more and more people to look down on.

By the time we’d left school, she’d run out of friends. Her ritual sneering reinforced her hypocrisy. I was good enough to talk to if nobody better was around. (Her admiration for those above her was far greater than her contempt for the likes of me below.) Years later, we bumped into each other at a fete. Our talk turned to school and her embarrassment at having a mum who aspired to be Queen Bee of the Mother’s Auxiliary. “I didn’t enjoy school much,” she said. “I never felt like I belonged.” I realised then that despite all her social manoeuvring, her schoolyard snobbery was deep-rooted in insecurity.

As for my priggish acquaintance from the gift shop, I’m sure to bump into her again. But this time, I’ll be ready. I’ll bear down on her with my arms stretched wide. I’ll shout excitedly, “Hellooo darling!” Cupping her face with my palms, I’ll plant noisy European kisses on her cheeks. “Where have you been?” I’ll gush and hold her at arm’s length admiringly. I can’t wait to see the look on her face. Snob value!

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.

Reality Bites

Reality Bites
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday September 6, 2014

“I’m trying to get the kids excited about the power of words,” her email said. “They are selecting subjects (for the rest of their lives).”

It was a letter from a high school English teacher, asking if I’d talk to her Year 10s. I cast my mind back to last century and tried to remember being 15.

That was the year I rolled down my camel-brown school socks until they sat like a pair of bagels around my ankles. I thought those bagel-socks made my legs look longer and shapelier. Really, I just looked like someone who needed to pull her socks up.

Aged 15, I went to my first school dance in a raspberry dress paired with mum’s Glomesh clutch hoping I’d be mistaken for Debra Winger in An Officer and a Gentleman. I fantasised about sashaying past some Richard Gere look-alike in my white snakeskin court shoes and overhearing him whisper to his mate: “Look at them bodacious set of ta-tas!” Instead, I spent the night dancing with another Debra Winger I met in the ladies.

When I was 15, adults persisted in asking me: ‘So! What are you going to do when you leave school?’ I’m sure these were grownups who hadn’t talked to a teenager since they’d been one. Their inquiry, loaded with expectation, would hang awkwardly between us. I knew my interlocutor was hoping to hear me say: “Actually, I’m thinking of becoming an astronaut!” That would give them the starter they needed to slide easily into a conversation with this sullen teenager: “Wow! An astronaut hey. Wouldn’t that be marvellous?”

Instead, I said nothing. I’d inspect my bagel-socks: “I dunno.” I took a 15-year-old’s delight in having silenced my interrogator. Our heart-to-heart would be paralysed by rigor mortis and I’d be granted a getaway.

Aged 15, my school’s career counsellor demanded I choose a profession, if only so she could book me in for a week of compulsory work experience. My girlfriends were desperate to impress as wannabe veterinarians and architects and stockbrokers.

I decided I’d do work experience as a dental nurse. It was an odd choice given I was scared of the dentist’s. But I figured dental nurses couldn’t be scared of dentists, could they? More importantly, I might get to wear one of those pink nurses’ uniforms with a little watch hanging from my breast pocket. I could twirl my hair into a bun and wear soft-soled shoes.

And so I arrived at 8am outside the shiny white doors of my designated dental surgery. The dentist seemed friendly and not-so-scary, but I think that was because we were both standing up.

All that week I made excellent cups of tea. I presented miniature toothbrushes to little kids. I gave knowing smiles to all the patients sitting glumly in the waiting room.

On the last day, the dental nurse called in sick. The dentist asked for my help with a patient. Puffing up with pride, I tied a perfect bow on my crunchy paper apron and blew a lungful of air into my washing up gloves, the way I’d seen Delvene Delaney do it on The Young Doctors.

A very old man was reclined in the dentist’s chair. He was staring at the ceiling with his mouth stretched open. The dentist presented me with a long metal nozzle. He called it a high volume evacuator, but I can tell you now, it was a saliva sucker.

The dentist put on his pretend glasses, and began drilling a putrid incisor. I gingerly inserted my metal probe into the patient’s slackened mouth, trying to steer it inside his cheek and down beside his gums towards his one remaining molar. But the nozzle had other ideas. It lurched sideways and suckered itself to the root of his tongue.

I panicked as the old man gagged and gurgled. I couldn’t tell if he was talking or choking so I yanked on the high volume evacuator. I thought if I jerked it hard it’d break the suction from his tongue. But the patient only yelped in shock and pain. His arms flew up and knocked over a tray of instruments.

That’s when the dentist grabbed my hand and shoved me aside. He gently let a puff of air escape from the nozzle which released the suction. The old man’s tongue flopped back into his mouth.

I spent the rest of the afternoon in dentist’s detention, tidying up the magazines. And then I slunk home.

A weekend later, back at school, the work experience report cards were handed out. Mine said: “I don’t think Miss Thomas has the necessary skills or temperament for the dental profession.” I was mortified. As were several of my teachers. I don’t think they’d had anyone flunk work experience before.

So I decided to become a journalist instead. And now I embarrass myself for a living.