by Cate Kennedy
‘No side-effects that I can remember,’ you say. ‘Maybe an increased appetite.’
The doctor smiles briefly. ‘Yeah, they’ll give you the munchies all right, you’ll have to watch that. You’re not a smoker, are you?’
‘No.’
‘Only because if you were, at your age, I’d never be prescribing this brand.’
And you feel that little swoop again, hear the at your age like stepping on a sharp piece of gravel, a wince of ludicrous defensiveness.
It’s the same when you break the news to your friends.
‘Come on then,’ they say. ‘No one cares, Mel. Just tell us how much younger the guy is.’
‘Thirteen years,’ you answer. You want — no, you need — one of them to come in on cue now, with something sisterly about nobody even commenting on the difference if it was the other way round. Instead there is a surprised silence. Come on, somebody.
‘Well,’ says Helen abruptly, ‘I mean, for godsakes. If he was thirty-nine and you were thirteen years younger nobody would turn a hair. I say go for it.’
You will crush the lemon slice in your drink with the edge of your straw. You need more.
‘I mean, look at you, you’re gorgeous. No wonder,’ says Sandy. ‘I bet the guy can’t believe his luck. What is it you said he did?’
You wonder, later, why you lie here. Why you say Paul is an academic, even though he’s actually just finishing his PhD and tutoring. Why you have to add: ‘And he writes movie reviews.’
Then later, standing in your bathroom, about to perforate the foil package and take that first pill of the cycle, you will glance up into the mirror and notice what people at work have been stopping to comment on: how good you’re looking lately. You can see it yourself. That fuel pumping through the body, firing up the colour in your face. It’s lust that’ll do that to you, every time. Being the object of desire. Three weeks into it, and just look at the difference.
Once upon a time you would have said, confidently: show me someone who says they’ve never had a fantasy of being the Older Woman, and I’ll show you a liar. It’s like one of those dreams where you’re walking through your ordinary familiar house feeling its confines and thinking nothing’s going to change now, might as well accept it, when you notice a door you’ve never seen before. And you open it and on the other side is another whole possible living space, another alternative route through each day.
Before you get up, now, you think about what you’re going to wear. You find lipstick, and put it on. You keep eye contact for longer than you need to.
Here’s a dead giveaway: in the supermarket, in that third week, your hand will reach out and take a box of hair colour and it’s the easiest thing in the world to appear the next day with red highlights. Who can blame you? This will induce recklessness: a 26-year-old guy ringing you up every night and saying he misses you when you’re not together. Telling you you’re beautiful and you shiver, feeling his hand move under your linen shirt (ironing clothes again!) and across your stomach. Sure, a little more effort’s needed at thirty-nine. Of course you want that stomach to be as concave as it had been on the beach at twenty-two, back when you were busy prematurely ageing your skin, carefree and oblivious and immortal. You have to suck in your breath, under that hand. You have to stay on your guard.
You tell your friends where you met, at a film screening. You can’t wait to talk about him.
It had been an industry preview with complimentary tickets, you say, and people seem to chat more when nobody’s paid for their tickets. ‘He asked me if his backpack bag thing was annoying me next to my feet, and I said no.’
‘They’re not called backpacks now,’ Sandy interrupts. ‘They’re called crumplers.’
‘Well, whatever. When the film ended he was taking a few notes and I asked him about it, we got chatting and went out for a drink.’
‘Out for a drink where?’
‘Mario’s. And just talked for an hour about the film.’
‘Aha,’ said Helen. ‘Mario’s. Over-thirties lighting.’ But you see she’s listening as avidly as anyone, to learn how to chance it, getting something started gracefully.
For a while now, you’ve avoided looking at yourself in the full-length mirror in the bathroom by neglecting to put the ventilation fan on. You hurry to dry yourself and get out of there before the mirror unsteams. Life, if we hold it up to the light, contains many of these foolish rituals. Like the one you notice lately where you always turn off the bedside lamp before you slide into bed with him, and the way you don’t wear your glasses at the movies.
You want his appreciation newly minted, you want to believe he actually can hardly believe his luck. The endorphins must bathe your brain with these possibilities. With every phone call, every new plan he proposes for the two of you, you start to believe you could maybe leave the bathroom fan on sometime soon, and deal with that scrutiny. You start thinking you actually have those rich chestnut highlights in your hair naturally. Well. You know the rest. You know how it all goes.
Then, a week into the contraceptives, you’re ravenous. Standing there in the kitchen eating spoonfuls of rice out of the saucepan, chewing and staring at the notices under the fridge magnets. Walking through the house gnawing on chicken legs, buying croissants at morning tea. Back at home you take the packet of contraceptives out of the bathroom cupboard and read the side-effects again — increased appetite, tendency to hirsuteness, loss of libido, double vision, nausea — and resolve to eat less, use sunscreen more, avoid alcohol except in moderation. This demands vigilance. Six weeks now, and soon you will be going down the coast for the weekend, like a proper couple on a romantic getaway, and all you can think about is how your thighs will look in a swimsuit.
Six weeks, and in two more months you will be forty, and the friends are making jokes about a party to run this new guy through his paces — this thinking woman’s toy boy, as they call him — an event it is impossible to comfortably imagine. Forty, and Sandy knows what a crumpler is because she has a thirteen-year-old son, whereas you, you have to keep smothering a rising panic that you’ve missed the bus. Thirteen years ago you were living in London, fervently avoiding any chance of children. Now you’re one of those nuisance women obstetricians must hate, waking up to the alarm on your biological clock just before it runs itself down.
So you find yourself at the chemist buying the sunscreen for mature skin, the moisturiser with concealer that guarantees a visible difference. Forty, and your fertile years are waning away in a dwindling flush of denial and negation, each lost month rushing closer like concrete pylons on the female superhighway, a marker of defeat, and if you were honest, you would admit that every pill sticks in your throat like a sugar-coated lie. Instead you swallow it with eyes closed, the better to avoid seeing details in that mirror. All those permutations, all those possible side-effects.
While you’re at the chemist, you buy another box of hair dye promising those living colour highlights. Your hair needs a wash — you glance at it in one of the make-up mirrors. Dark roots are showing through, an abrupt line drawn against the scalp like a growth ring on a tree, exposing a weak moment where you succumbed to vanity. Since you dyed it the chemicals have lightened it; the auburn highlights have disappeared. It looks kind of yellowish. Brassy, your mother would call it. Time to go to a salon and have a cut and colour, she would say, with that complacent little sigh acknowledging the mysterious burden of female duty.
You should leave it there, to grow out. But there is grey amongst the dark hair, a nasty cigarette-ash colour you tell yourself you haven’t noticed before. In the privacy of your own bathroom you shake together the contents of two ammonia-smelling bottles of chemicals and cover up those roots. Even as you sit waiting the allotted time, feeling vain and foolish but wanting lustrous highlighted hair for the weekend, you happen to glance in the afternoon light at yo
ur neck and see the downy hairs on your chin and throat are silhouetted, and they are dark.
In strong light you can see them perfectly clearly. Another side-effect, just as the contraceptive packet predicted. So, naturally, you grab the tweezers and pull them out. But when you tilt your head into that hard light you see dark hairs coming through on your upper lip, too. Jesus, no. If you start yanking these you’ll never be able to stop, you’ll be like one of those bristly old women with moustaches, stiff hairs you can feel when you kiss.
So. More vigilance, you think, grimacing. Pluck and cover. Smirking into the mirror, then deciding it’s one joke you’ll never be able to tell him.
It’s a slippery slope, once you start on it, once you’ve ignored that knock in the engine for long enough and it starts to miss occasionally as you careen down some hill dazedly gripping the wheel.
At the beach the sun comes out and the sea glitters to the horizon, and Paul is content to sit and watch the surfers for a while. When you’re twenty-six, obviously that’s what you do, because it’s still within the radar range of things you might conceivably try yourself. Then he goes and buys fish and chips and you eat them at a picnic table, everything dazzling and warm. But once that poison has started, once you’re committed to giving yourself a measured dose of it every day, nothing’s going to be enough. You have traded in your unselfconsciousness for this double-visioned state of standing outside yourself, watchful and tensed for exposure. You will despise yourself for every mouthful and for your insatiable hunger, and you will despise yourself more for breaking away from him as you walk out of the surf to hurry back to your towel to get your sarong and cover up. So that even as he grins at you sitting on the sand and says, ‘Isn’t this great?’, a small, snarling bitter voice will be sounding in the back of your head saying: Yeah. I’m sitting squinting into the sun getting crow’s-feet and eating saturated fats. Great.
Waiting for him to unlock the car to leave, don’t, whatever you do, look at your silhouette in the reflection of the car window. It will show you nothing but hard contrast. In the solarised shadow and light, you will see lines on your forehead, and those ones etched between your nose and mouth, the awful twist of discontent. Old harridan lines.
Just get in the car. Put your sunglasses on, and get in the car.
And later, when he’s not watching, feel disgusted scorn for yourself as you try to covertly open your bag and get out the factor-fifteen moisturiser, and put it on. Neck as well as face. Think of all the mornings when you get up and your neck and chest are creased like an old sheet. Jowls. Crepey skin. Turkey neck. Spinster aunt skin. Wonder if he wakes before you, and looks at those creases as you’re asleep, exposed, in the bright morning light.
The ever-relentless sun, inescapable, beats down on you through the windscreen.
All those hours you mindlessly lay on your towel in your twenties, and tilted your face up into it, heedless. You look across at his face, and of course he doesn’t care, he doesn’t need to. He’s got years.
Inexorable, this spiral down. Tell him later that no, really, you want the light off. Don’t say a word about turning forty. When he says he loves you, some reflex from those side-effects will mean you won’t let yourself believe it. Censor everything. Swallow the pill. Remember this: let the smallest reference to babies slip, and you can kiss this guy goodbye.
Funny how the dye seems to have missed the odd grey hair, which seem stronger and wirier than the others. And the way you only notice them when you can’t really lean forward and do anything about them — when you’re looking in the mirror of a change room, for example, in a fairly expensive department store on your afternoon off, and the sight of your own cellulite (all those chips!) so disgusts you and saps your energy that you doubt whether you can actually get dressed again and drag yourself out of there, away from that ridiculous lingerie or the jeans you’ve chosen. Why are you even wasting your time with this guy? Why don’t you find someone your own age who might actually be interested in a late bid for last-minute parenthood, someone who might be in for the long haul? You’re too pathetic to believe yourself. And just as you grab your hairbrush after changing back into your stupid frump clothes, just as you think for a minute you’ll at least brush your hair, you notice in these unforgiving overhead lights those dark roots coming through again already — any fool could see your colour’s not natural. Your hair sits lank and dried-out against your head.
You’ve got to stop this. But you can’t help yourself. While you’re in the hair salon buying shampoo for colour-treated hair, you find yourself making an appointment for a leg wax. You will be hairless. Forty is the new thirty. You will be smooth, controlled, gym-toned, with the body of a woman in her late twenties, lushly in her prime and way ahead of the game.
And the voice you hear now as you sit in the salon leafing through the magazines before your appointment will be a whiny, accusing one, nitpicking and obsessive, poking you on the shoulder saying: Look, Goldie Hawn, nearly sixty. Look, Sharon Stone, slim and elegant, had a baby at forty-four.
The receptionist says, ‘This your first visit?’ Her fingernails are curved like talons, alternately purple and yellow, and you see they are fake and stuck on with superglue. They are so long she can hardly write — but she can hardly write anyway, breathing laboriously as she prints your details in big Grade Five letters. Then into the back room and up onto the crackling paper sheet. Butcher’s paper for a slab of meat. You make nervous small talk.
‘Do you wax guys?’ you blurt.
‘All the time.’ The girl stirs wax implacably, arranges things on the counter like a dental nurse. ‘You’d be surprised.’ You lie back. She chats on.
‘Guys come in here, want their backs waxed, their arses.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘Nope. I do everything. You wouldn’t believe it. A week before Mardi Gras, or when there’s a bike race or the City to Surf, I’m booked out.’
Suddenly there is a hot stroke of wax on your shin, a pause, then blinding pain.
‘Ow. Jesus.’
‘Haven’t had them done for a while, that’s why it hurts more.’
‘Actually this is my first time ever.’
‘Really? Oh well, it won’t take long.’
Another rip that brings tears to your eyes.
‘Brazilians are all the go now,’ she says. ‘You want pain, boy …’
‘Don’t tell me.’
She tilts your leg, ices on some more wax, rips it away.
‘Yep, everything. Completely hairless. Like a Barbie doll.’
You shudder and lie back, willing it to be over. Like having a cavity drilled, you try to take your thoughts away. Paul, and what he would say if he could see you now. Think then about your first argument, the other night. ‘Don’t tell me what I’m going to do next,’ he’d finally fumed. ‘And Jesus, will you just relax and stop worrying about your weight? How much reassurance do you need?’
‘I don’t need reassurance.’
‘Yes, you do. It’s so bloody tiring. It’s like you’ve already decided to end it and you’re just waiting for me to slip up so you can blame me.’
You’d opened and closed your mouth like a stunned fish. A wave of nausea. You’d clenched your jaw, saying nothing. Don’t cry, you’d ordered yourself, don’t you dare. Mascara running. Haggard. Lines. Ugly. Old.
‘Let’s just light a candle then, if you don’t want the lamp on,’ he’d said later in bed, at his place. And you’d shaken your head, taken the matches from him.
‘No,’ you’d answered. ‘Let’s not. Really. I like the dark.’
She’s up to your groin and you feel the wax getting daubed around your undies line. She holds the skin taut and pulls. It’s excruciating.
‘Bloody hell!’ you gasp.
‘Yeah, the pubic hairs always hurt more — dee
per roots.’
‘And people have the whole lot ripped out?’
‘All the time.’
You look down at the reddened patch and see tiny prick marks of blood appearing where the hairs have been yanked out. It feels like you’ve had a layer of skin torn off. Like you’ve been peeled.
‘God, how could they stand it?’
She considers, moving her chewing gum around her mouth. ‘They reckon it looks clean.’
‘Clean?’
‘Sexy. Their boyfriends ask ’em to do it, they say.’
Rip. She’s on the other ankle. Clean, you think. Prepubescent, more like it. Like pink latex, like a blow-up fantasy doll, that sickly plastic smell of Barbie. The rip across the knee works like a quick, stinging, sobering slap to the face, finally waking you up.
‘That’ll do,’ you hear yourself say.
‘But we’re only halfway through.’ She stops, staring, rotating a glob of slipping yellow wax slowly on the hovering spatula.
‘That’s okay, I’ll pay for the whole thing. I just … that’s it.’
‘It’s not hurting that much, is it?’
You swing your tingling legs off the table and reach for your jeans.
She’s looking at you, moving the chewy around in her lip-glossed mouth.
‘Okay, then,’ she says with a shrug. And, half-finished, like someone released from custody, you’re out of there.
Later that night, there’ll be tiny dark patches on your bare legs when you take your jeans off, where wax has stuck spots of lint to the skin, but you will pull a sheet over your legs instead of jumping up instantly and washing it off in the shower. Your energy for subterfuge seems spent now; like the tank’s empty. In the dark, all other senses are more acute; the brush of skin on skin, the scent of hair, a whisper blooming next to you on the pillow; risky secrets that cannot be taken back. You will feel things coast to a stop, sharpened into wakefulness, and steady yourself. You open your mouth and set whatever’s coming next in motion.