‘Rosie! Dinner!’
What a strange sound.
She scooped it proudly, lovingly, into bowls, with a ladle, and we sat together, at the dining table, eating chicken soup, the way it’s meant to be made.
I liked it. I really, really liked it.
I know hope is dangerous. I know the eight-year-old inside of me is telling me that this won’t last, that hope only leads to anxious disappointment.
But I think I’m going to let my mum keep making me proper chicken soup for a while. Maybe this time, the warm hug won’t turn cold.
When I’m home alone, I always look sexy and never do anything weird.
(*laughs uproariously*)
There once was a time, when I got out of the shower, that I realised I had allowed the hair on my legs to grow so long that my towel alone was not enough to dry them. That’s how I found myself, at 11.45pm, standing completely naked in the middle of my bedroom while I bent over and blow-dried my legs.
Also at that moment, I suddenly found myself eyeing off my dripping, glistening pubes, and obviously I decided the same useful system should apply to them. And let me tell you: figuring out that I could use the hairdryer on places other than my head was a revelation. I’ve not had to do the butt-floss manoeuvre with my towel a single time since. It streamlined my entire shower routine.
I’m single, I’m thirty, I live alone, and I do some weird shit. Squatting over the carpet while I blast hot air onto my snatch is just the tip of a very suspect iceberg.
And I refuse to believe that I’m the only woman who behaves in a breathtakingly disgusting manner when she is home alone. I know I’m meant to believe that I’m the only one; everybody is. When Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City was home alone, the most ‘shameful’ thing she did was read Vogue at her kitchen bench while eating crackers. And most single women in movies behave as if their apartment is located inside a horny man’s brain – she’ll mop the house while wearing cute underwear and a cropped T-shirt, not realising there’s an adorable little blob of bubbles perfectly positioned on her nose as she sings along to a Taylor Swift song, dancing in a way that is just so accidentally sexy.
The closest I’ve come to either of those scenarios is sitting on the couch in my undies while I watch TV, drinking wine straight from the bottle and wiping my potato-gem fingers on my boob. Carrie Bradshaw’s shameful secret behaviour sounds so classy I’d probably film myself doing it and put it on my dating profile.
If I were sitting at that table with Carrie and the girls, or at a table with any group of women on any TV show, I’d drop so many disgusting truth bombs that we’d immediately be taken off air by the prudish male executives who are the experts on how ‘real women’ look and act.
‘Ladies,’ I’d say, staring at three women who are all played by Sarah Jessica Parker, ‘you know when you’re home alone, and you fart on your hand and smell it, just because you’re curious?’
‘You fart?’ one of the Sarahs would reply.
‘Ah, yeah,’ I’d say, leaning in to take a sip of my cosmo. ‘Actually, don’t tell anyone this, but I also shit.’
They’d recoil in horror, but would secretly be relieved that they’re not the only ones. At least about the shitting part. The farting on the hand thing, I’m not so sure. I don’t know where the urge to do that comes from. I don’t do it all the time (I’ve got class), but occasionally, when curiosity overwhelms me, I stick my hand in the line of fire and smell the worst of what my body can produce. I suppose there’s a sense of narcissism to it that I probably shouldn’t delve too deeply into. I’m not sure what that says about me. But I do like that it says I’m at a point in my life where I’m independent, powerful, self-sufficient, and can afford my own apartment in which I can fart on my own damn hand and smell it in peace.
In my next attempt to corrupt the perfect, cocktail-sipping Sarahs on the TV show in my dreams, I’d tell them about the underground universe of bad-skin delights that is pimple-popping videos. I have manipulated the actual space-time continuum while looking at pimple-popping videos. Like people who insist they’ve been abducted by aliens because they can’t remember three hours out of their day. Or like anyone who’s ever run into Kmart to get batteries and wanders out six hours later, in a daze, with an entire new living room set and a bright orange Teflon spatula.
Pimple-popping videos are the Kmart of the internet. I first came across one online, probably after seeing a Buzzfeed headline that screamed something like, ‘Watch a woman squeeze three years’ worth of pus out of this man’s neck!’ which is exactly the kind of subtle thing that would make me say, ‘YES THANKS,’ and immediately click.
From that first viewing, I followed a video trail that I’m yet to find the end of.
‘Blackheads on man’s back.’
‘Popping whiteheads and blackheads close up.’
‘HUGE volcanic pimple eruption!’
‘You won’t believe how much comes out of this guy’s ear pimple.’
‘Peaceful and satisfying removal: blackheads on nose.’
The videos are varied in their approach to the artform, but I love them all. I’m just not sure anything brings me as much pleasure as watching a blackhead turn into an empty pore. It probably started when I was a child, running away from my mother screaming when she stared at my nose and said something like, ‘Rosie! That’s a really big one! PLEASE let me get it!’ After having let her ‘get it’ once before, I knew the pain that came with blackhead squeezing and refused to allow her to hack away at my face again. Until we negotiated a price.
My mother was so desperate to squeeze my blackheads that she was willing to pay me five dollars for every single one she pressed her fingernails against. She was a woman possessed, and I never quite understood it until I saw the blackheads on my first boyfriend. Lying in bed together, romantically intertwined, I’d stare loving into his back until I became fixated on a single blackhead. Then another. Then another. All I’d have to do is apply the tiniest amount of pressure and . . . Holy Oprah. I needed to do it. Initially, I just reached up and started squeezing.
‘What the hell?’ he yelled, spinning around to face me.
‘What?’ I said, acting mystified and innocent. ‘I was just clearing a blackhead for you.’ How could he not appreciate my selfless and generous act?
‘Well don’t. That hurt.’
‘No it didn’t,’ I said, turning him back around and forcing him into submission. ‘Don’t be a baby.’
I was repeating the trauma my own mother had put me through. I was a monster.
He let me squeeze a couple more that day. And the feeling I got, watching the blackhead come free, a tiny line of yellowish gunk snaking out behind it and leaving an empty, clean pore? Well, I’m fairly certain that’s probably what heroin feels like. I became obsessed with squeezing his blackheads. I’d wait for him to fall asleep and shine a torch on his back, trying to get as many as I could before I woke him. I would do anything to chase that high. I started seeing them all over his body. My eyes had turned into a Terminator-like computer tracking system. Whenever I looked at him, I would scan his entire face and body and zero in on what blackheads could be attacked. He was no longer a human boyfriend to me. Just a walking, talking ecosystem of blackheads, waiting to be squeezed.
Funnily enough, that relationship didn’t last, and I found myself, years later, thinking back to the sweet, sweet feeling of release I had for those few months I was getting high on his blackheads. Years later, when I found a way to satisfy my cravings online, I fell back into it with a little too much intensity. That first video I watched may or may not have led to a twelve-hour bender that I can’t quite remember. But I do have a handle on it now. I can proudly say I only watch pimple-popping videos a few times a week. And definitely only for a few hours at a time.
I know for sure that at least one of the perfect Sarahs sitting sipping cocktails with me would be a secret pimple-popping watcher. I don’t care how well vetted she was i
n ‘what ladies should do’ by the network’s management. I can safely say, as a result of my own thoughts and assumptions, that at least eighty-five per cent of women get their jollies from squeezing other people’s blackheads. It’s one of the only legitimate reasons I would consider having a child.
Next disgusting truth bomb for the perfect, cocktail-sipping Sarahs in the TV show from my dreams: when I’m home alone, I take photos of any and all things I am curious about on my body but cannot see with the naked eye (usually due to my having the flexibility of an 85-year-old). If someone were to scroll through the photos on my phone, they’d inevitably come across about seven hundred photos of my vagina. These photos are sometimes about curiosity, sometimes about boredom, but mostly about an irrational fear I have that several debilitating things are constantly and simultaneously wrong with my lady garden.
(‘You just leave the photos on your phone? Isn’t that just asking for trouble?’ one of the Sarahs would ask. ‘No!’ I would say, swigging wine from the bottle now, ‘because no woman can ever be blamed for the sexual assault perpetrated on her by a man! Including distributing images without her consent! Isn’t this TV show we’re on great! Now, what do you guys say we order some food?’ All three perfect Sarahs: ‘Food?’)
I had cause to photograph my vag one day when I was walking through my local shops, looking to buy lunch with not a care in the world. Suddenly, I felt something abrasive against my labia. Like my undies were rubbing against it the wrong way or something. I tried to awkwardly readjust my underwear positioning by subtly shaking my leg out a few times as I walked, but to no avail. It really did feel like my undies were suddenly made of sandpaper. I made my way to the public bathroom to have a bit of a feel around down below. That’s when I felt it – bulging just under the skin on the left labia majora (that’s the outside flaps, fellas) was a marble-sized lump. Obviously I pulled my pants up immediately and hurried home to make a closer inspection. I lay down on my bed and felt around. There was only one of these lumps, but it was definitely there. I became convinced it was herpes, since I’d had a one-night stand a few months earlier, before I’d decided to take a break from random sex for a while (a girl needs to recharge every so often). We’d used protection, but I was sure the virus had jumped ship, latched onto one of my pubes until the coast was clear, then set up camp right in my vag. I took about fifty photos with my phone, trying to come at it from different angles so that I could get a clear picture that I could match to something on Google images. Eventually, I sent the best picture I had to my sisters, and broke the news to them that I was now a herpes carrier.
‘That’s not herpes,’ Tayla immediately messaged back. ‘It’s just one random little thing. It’s probably an ingrown hair.’ (I knew it wasn’t an ingrown hair. I’d had one of those before as well, and was convinced it also was herpes until I made Tony stick his head between my legs with a torch to have a closer look.)
Rhiannon said the same thing as Tayla. ‘Rosie, if it was herpes, there’d be like, a cluster of scabs and stuff. That doesn’t really look like anything. Just go to the doctor if you’re worried.’
Going to the doctor with a vag problem is the worst possible thing on earth to do, except for maybe sitting through a conversation with a guy who constantly says ‘NOT ALL MEN’. But I was concerned enough that I knew I had to suffer through it, so I made an appointment with the GP.
‘Um, yeah,’ I said, sitting in her office. ‘I have, like, a vagina problem. There’s a weird lump . . . on my vagina.’ Ugh. Kill me please.
‘Alright, well let’s take a look at it then,’ she said, gesturing towards the bed. Taking your pants off and getting on the bed is always such an awkward endeavour. It must be so much easier for guys, who can just pull their pants down and stand there. For women, you have to take your entire bottom half of clothing off, then you have to hoist yourself up onto the bed, lie back, and timidly spread your legs apart while you wait for the doctor to toddle on over. I always worry about toilet paper being stuck in my crack, which I’ve had a complex about since a boyfriend laughed himself out of bed during sex when he saw some three-ply wedged between my cheeks. (I found out later he’d told that story to a lot of people after we broke up, so I’d like to take this opportunity to say that he was basically a human jackhammer in bed.)
I reached down and pointed out my mystery lump to the doctor. It feels odd to say she ‘fondled’ it for a second, but it also feels like the most apt description: she fondled it for a second, told me she was done and went back to her desk. I slid off the bed as elegantly as I could (so not very), and put my pants back on.
She basically told me that I was being punished for having cut back on random sex with strangers. Well, that’s how I chose to interpret it. It was something about a cyst that had formed because the glands that produce vag lubricant had become backed up with fluid. Backed up, I was certain, because I hadn’t been using them enough. That’s what I got for taking a sexual breather. She then informed me that the only way to get rid of the cyst was to take a week-long course of antibiotics, and if it hadn’t disappeared by the end of that week, I’d need to go to hospital and have a needle inserted into my vag to drain out the excess fluid.
‘I’m sorry, what?’
‘You’ll need to have the fluid drained, if it doesn’t go down on its own,’ she said.
‘Yes, but, I’m sorry – I’m sure I heard you mention something about a needle? In my vagina?’
‘That’s how they drain the fluid.’
‘Write me a prescription for the antibiotics immediately,’ I said. No needle was going to be placed anywhere on or near my vagina.
I spent the week popping antibiotics while I obsessively took photos of my friendly neighbourhood cyst. My sisters got an update every day. Often I’d have the photoshoot lying down on the kitchen floor, because that room had the best light. I really wished there was some kind of online forum I could post the photos on, so I could get advice from women more supportive than my sisters, who had mostly taken to sending me back photos of rotten fish tacos, just to mess with my head.
When the cyst hadn’t gone down after the first week, I demanded stronger drugs.
‘I thought I told you not to mention the needle,’ I said, when the doctor mentioned the needle.
‘Listen, there has to be some other drugs we can try. They can’t have been the strongest antibiotics on the market. What about the ones they use to, like, stop people’s limbs falling off from infection in third world countries? Can I have one like that?’
‘There is no drug like that.’
‘Well if we can put a man on the moon, we can figure out a way to avoid putting a needle in my fucking vagina.’
She gave me a prescription for a stronger antibiotic, which worked. I’m sure I’m now resistant to all antibiotics and one day will die from a minor scratch, but I regret nothing.
At this point in our fun, cocktail banter scene during our fun, adorable network-show that definitely accurately portrays women, I’m sure the three perfect Sarahs would have left me alone at the table, the only woman who does actual disgusting and embarrassing stuff when she’s home alone. I’d like to think, though, that at least one of those women went home to her perfect TV apartment in the perfect TV universe, stuck her hand down her pants, farted on it, then smelled it.
Or at least watched a pimple-popping video. I’d settle for that. Anything but reading Vogue while standing up in the kitchen eating crackers.
With your derrière . . .
The nurse with my favourite Nikes had gone. She had been really pissed off when the enema poo exploded, because she wasn’t wearing a mask and had copped a lot of it right in the face. I heard her bitching about it when I had been slowly wheeling my IV to the bathroom. I just figured she was lucky none of it got on her glorious shoes.
Something something something yeah.
It’s Jack’s Subway Tush.
Fuck. I couldn’t decide what was more torturous: the con
stant dizziness that made me feel perpetually on the verge of puking, or not being able to nail down the words to that stupid fucking song.
I don’t believe anything psychics say.
(I didn’t, until something crazy happened.)
(And I know everyone says that their psychic story is crazy, but this was crazy.)
I didn’t realise how stressful going to a psychic would be. In hindsight, that seems naïve on my part. I’m socially awkward at the best of times, so sitting face to face with someone I don’t know while they hold my hand and stare straight into my eyes was bound to be unpleasant for me. But it wasn’t so much the close proximity with an elderly woman dressed like a mystical hippie that stressed me out. It was my innate need to avoid any kind of awkward confrontation ever that made things really, really hard.
Let me put it this way: when you’re sitting across from someone who’s essentially trying to guess things about your life, and you have trouble saying no to people, you’re going to end up confirming some crazy shit about yourself that is not even close to being true.
I just really didn’t want Mystical Hippie Lady to feel bad. So within five minutes of sitting down, I had invented a dead grandmother called Melissa and got so caught up in a web of well-meaning lies that I felt like I needed to take a nap afterwards.
I sat down at her little table (covered in crystals, but none of the ball variety, which was disappointing, because naturally I expect every new experience in life to resemble a Disney movie), and waited in nervous silence while Mystical Hippie Lady lit a candle with what looked like a lighter that had been purchased at an off-brand 7-Eleven. I can see her now, walking into the store, head held high with the kind of dignity only someone with access to the other side can have. She’d stare intensely at the underpaid counter guy, tap her long fingernails on the counter and declare, ‘Young man, I need something to light the candles I use to contact the souls of our ancestors.’
Every Lie I've Ever Told Page 17