by Sachi Parker
That just goes to show how out of the loop, how utterly clueless, I was about sex. I knew it was fun, I knew I enjoyed it, but I didn’t understand the mechanics of it, the implications of it, or the powerful omnipresence of it. Sex was all around me, and I just never saw it.
For instance, there was a handyman who worked at the motel, an older guy who was seedy looking and a bit creepy. He was always hitting on me, but I didn’t really pick up on the signals. I wasn’t interested in him, so I assumed he wasn’t interested in me. It was only when he cornered me in a guest room and, in what I assume was a gesture of seduction, opened his pants and showed me the crabs around his penis, that I realized his true intentions.
I quit the motel that very day and moved to the nearby ski resort of Perisher Valley. Here I was a ski instructor by day and a waitress by night. The ski-lift operator was an American named Jay, who was a little older, in his mid-thirties, and sort of a hippy-dippy type, with long hair and a beard. Jay lived across the hall from me, in the rooms above the restaurant. I was rooming with a fellow waitress, Katie.
One night after work I came back to my room and found Katie in bed with a guy, having boisterous sex. Without missing a beat, she turned her head to me and said, “Get out!”
I hurriedly shut the door and found myself in the hall. I was exhausted from my shift, and now I had no place to sleep. So I knocked on Jay’s door.
“Sure, you can sleep here tonight,” he said. Unfortunately he had only a twin bed. He seemed like a gentleman, so I assumed it was safe.
And it was. We both climbed into the small bed, and Jay spooned me from behind. I remember I had two long braids at the time, and he held them as he wrapped his arms around me. We stayed that way all night, and nothing happened.
This seemed unremarkable to me at the time, but in retrospect I realized that Jay had acted with exceptional decency (and restraint). When I went back to Australia years later, I made a point of visiting Perisher Valley and thanking Jay for that night. He told me it had taken every bit of his willpower to hold back, but I was so innocent, he just couldn’t take advantage of me. So Jay goes into the small pantheon of Nice Guys.
I wish I could put Luke in that class, too, but I can’t. He wasn’t such a nice guy, as I found out a little too late.
• • •
LUKE had once been a sheep rancher, but now he was a vintner—he owned a thirty-seven-acre vineyard in Pokolbin, in the Hunter Valley, the wine area of New South Wales. We moved there in the spring of 1976. Like much of Australia, it was starkly beautiful: rolling hills with mountains in the distance. The house was a two-story with a veranda, and while it was reasonably modernized, there was no indoor bathroom; we used an outhouse. There was also no dryer, so the laundry had to be hung out on a line to dry. I grew to love the smell of the clean air-dried sheets and clothes. Plus, there were chickens on the property, so we always had fresh, warm eggs.
Yet, it was a lonely place, in the middle of nowhere. The wind was always blowing. Still, it was the kind of life I enjoyed, simple and elemental. I was happy there.
Except when I was working at the nearby wine factory. Now, Luke was a proud man. I’m sure he would have balked at seeing his wife work—but I wasn’t his wife. We weren’t married yet; we hadn’t even set a date. That being the case, he saw no reason why I shouldn’t earn my keep. So he got me a job working on the factory line, putting labels on wine bottles. It was droning, stultifying work, and I hated it. I was ready to blow my brains out, but I did it for love.
• • •
MY anorexia had continued unabated all this time, and by now I was down to eighty-two pounds. Yet it wasn’t enough. I still felt that I was too fat. I needed to lose more weight.
I picked up a book called Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution, which had been published just a few years earlier. I was delighted to see that I could eat all my favorite foods with this diet—steak, eggs, bacon—and was guaranteed to lose weight. How cool was that?
So I went on the Atkins Diet, and gorged myself on protein—and immediately, I started gaining weight. I couldn’t figure out what was going wrong—what kind of a stupid diet was this?—but I was enjoying the food too much to stop. Before long, I was back to a normal weight, and I was never anorexic again. You could say Dr. Atkins saved my life.
I don’t mean to minimize in any way the seriousness of anorexia. It is a terrible, ravaging illness, and in its own insidious way a form of suicide; I was extremely lucky to escape it when I did, without any treatment, and I feel an immense empathy for those who struggle with it.
I was also lucky to find Robert. Robert—who was French, and whose name, therefore, enjoyed the elegant pronunciation “Ro-BEAR”—was the chef-owner of Robert’s, a first-class restaurant down the street from the vineyard. The minute I arrived in Pokolbin, I went down to Robert’s and got myself a job as a waitress. I’d paste labels at the wine factory in the morning, and then hop on my bicycle and ride down to Robert’s for the lunch and dinner shift. Between Dr. Atkins and Robert’s rich gourmet cooking, I got healthy very quickly.
Robert’s attracted all kinds of customers: Australian ranchers, wealthy visitors from Sydney, tourists from around the world. Robert and his wife, Sally, were superbly accomplished restaurateurs. Their food was star quality and a little expensive. It was always amusing when some of the locals came in to order pub food. Once they got a good look at the prices, there was many a hasty exodus.
One fine day four cowboys sauntered in and took a table. They were fresh from the fields, dusty and sweaty, and already a few pints in. They looked over the menu and, without blinking an eye, settled on Chateaubriand for four. “And make it well done,” said one of the cowboys.
Now, there are a couple of ways to cook Chateaubriand: rare and medium rare. Anything beyond that is inviting disaster: the meat shrinks to nothing, and the quality is ruined. I tried to explain this to the cowboys. “You know, Chateaubriand is supposed to be pink. If you cook it too much, it spoils the whole experience.”
They didn’t care. “We want it well done.”
“Well, maybe you should order something else well done. Like a sirloin or a rump steak.”
They grew a little testy. “We want Chateaubriand.”
“And we want it well done.”
I smiled brightly. “Okay, I’ll talk to the chef.”
I really didn’t want to talk to the chef. Robbie was a sweet, delightful man, but he was also a classic temperamental Frenchman, and très passionate about his food and his reputation. He would cook his dishes the right way or not at all.
He fumed as I explained the request to him, his cowboy boot tapping petulantly on the floor; Robbie always wore cowboy boots in the kitchen. “I tried to steer them to something else,” I told him, as he glared at me. “But they want Chateaubriand, and they want it well done.”
Robbie swallowed his outrage and gave a Gallic shrug. He then proceeded to make the Chateaubriand exactly the way he wanted: medium rare. Then he poured an extra layer of Béarnaise sauce over the sliced meat, so they wouldn’t notice.
When I brought the dish to the table, sumptuously prepared and beautifully presented, the boys were generally unimpressed. One cowboy spooned the sauce aside contemptuously and looked at the slice of meat in dismay. “What the hell…? This meat is rare. We want it well done!”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but the chef says it will ruin the dish…”
“We don’t care! Who’s paying for this? We want it well done!” They sent it back to the kitchen.
Robert was not pleased, but he grudgingly accepted that he wasn’t dealing with informed gourmands here. He put the Chateaubriand back in the oven and cooked it to an arguable medium. Any more than that, and he wouldn’t have been able to live with himself.
I crossed my fingers and brought the compromised Chateaubriand back out to the cowboys. Still too pink. They rejected it in unison: “We want it well done!”
I timorously returned to the ki
tchen with the meat. By now Robbie had reached his limit of understanding. “They want it well done?” he exploded, his neck veins popping. “I’ll give them well done!” He took the individual slices of meat, threw them on the floor, and stomped on them, one by one, with his cowboy boots. “There! There!” he screamed. “Well done! Well done!”—and he launched into a string of French obscenities as he stomped, stomped, stomped. I didn’t understand what he was saying, but I knew exactly what he was saying.
Then he scooped up the meat and threw it back into the oven, and he cooked the slices until they were black and charred and looked like hockey pucks. “There. Now it’s well done.” He drizzled on some token béarnaise sauce and handed me the platter. “Give it to them.”
I was horrified. I couldn’t serve this mess to them now.
“Give it to them,” Robbie insisted.
I nervously placed the charred Chateaubriand on the Aussies’ table. “Here we go,” I said cheerfully. “Well done!” Then I quickly retreated to the safety of the kitchen.
The cowboys leaned forward, studied the blackened meat curiously, and inspected it from all angles. Then they started eating. We all watched from the kitchen door in disbelief.
They loved it.
• • •
I was so happy at Robert’s. Sally, Robert, the whole staff—they were a real family to me. That’s why I worked two shifts, to be honest. I would rather have hung out there than gone home to my fiancé.
I want to be fair to Luke. He was a very sweet and thoughtful guy when he wasn’t drinking—but he was often drinking. It was part of the culture out there, and Luke was nothing if not cultured. He had a very short temper, and was prone to explosive outbursts.
I first appreciated the extent of his volatility one evening when I was sitting at the kitchen table and he walked out of the bathroom. “What’s this?” he asked.
He was holding something by the tail—it looked like a white mouse with a blotch of red on it. I looked closer and realized, to my mortification, that it was a used tampon.
“What’s this?” he repeated, dangling it right in front of my eyes. “What’s this?”
“That’s mine…” I said meekly.
“I know it’s yours!” he screamed in my face. “Do you know where I found it? Do you? On the edge of the bathtub.” He spat the word out, to underscore the egregiousness of the offense.
“Oh. I guess I left it there.” I reached for the tampon, but he pulled it away.
“Is that what you guess? You guess you left it there? I guess you did, too. I know I didn’t leave it there.” He was looming over me, swaying slightly, as if he couldn’t contain the anger roiling within him.
“Okay, well…” I reached for it again, and he flung it across the room.
“Don’t touch it. It’s disgusting! You think I want to look at that after I come home from a hard day at work?” He was reminding me of my father, asking questions that I wasn’t supposed to answer, and then waiting for me to answer, and then hoping it would be the wrong answer so he could attack me again.
I knew there was only one thing I could say that would satisfy him. “I’m sorry. I’ll never do it again.”
“You’re goddamn right you’ll never do it again! Leaving your female shit lying around, as if you owned the place. You show me no respect. No respect!” He overturned the kitchen table, the dishes and silverware clattering to the floor around me. Then he stood waiting, hands on hips, as if daring me to say anything at all in my defense.
I didn’t. Because, in a way, I understood. He was a man, he was a proud product of his chauvinist rancher society, and he shouldn’t have had to be exposed to inferior womanly things. It was insulting and emasculating.
And I was a product of my society, which had taught me to be submissive and accepting, and protective of the male ego at all costs. So I just wept quietly, and kept my head low. After a moment, I heard him sigh with disgust, and mutter, “Clean up this mess.” He stalked out of the house and headed for the vineyards.
I know I should have bolted then and there but this was my first serious relationship, and I didn’t know any better.
So I stayed with Luke. I don’t know why. It wasn’t for the sex, because we didn’t have much. When we did, it was fast and furious. Mostly fast. Not a lot of foreplay: ten seconds, maybe. “Brace yourself, baby!” Wham, bam. “Now feed me.”
Then I’d hop out of bed and make him steak and eggs. Anything to make him happy.
• • •
ONE day, in my continuing aspiration to be the perfect housekeeper, I was cleaning up Luke’s bedroom, putting away his laundry, when, in the bottom drawer of his dresser, I found a sheaf of letters, hidden away. Curious, I took them out and started reading.
They were love letters. Sexy, impassioned love letters. To Luke.
From Miki.
I was staggered. What? My Miki? The evil stepmother? She was sending love letters to my fiancé? How could that be? Was he in love with her? Could such a thing even be possible?
I read the letters in disbelief. They were stuffed with high-flown romantic sentiments along the following lines: “My dearest love…” “My one and only…” “Every time the sun sets, I think of you…” There was some explicit sexual stuff in there, too. Just the thought of Miki and Luke engaged in such intimate couplings, even on a fantasy level, made me positively nauseated.
I felt sick in every sense. It was like being hit by a train. My heart was pounding so hard I thought it would burst from my chest.
How had this happened? Maybe Miki had caught sight of young Luke years before, on the business trips to Weewaa. Or maybe they’d first met in Hawaii. Is that why she was so happy that we were getting married? Because it would give her more opportunities to see him? For that matter, had she set up the whole thing herself? Did Dad know? Was he somehow involved?
My mind was racing, all kinds of crazy questions were popping into my head. I never found out the answers, though, because I never confronted Luke. I didn’t dare. I carefully replaced the letters in the bottom drawer and closed it—and never said a word about them.
I wasn’t angry. That wouldn’t have been cool. I almost felt that it wasn’t my business. They were sophisticated adults, after all, and this is what sophisticated adults did: they had affairs, they kept secrets, they did shockingly naughty things. Who was I to pipe up and say they were wrong? No, I was too embarrassed and scared to do anything.
Now I understood. I understood why Miki would make unexpected visits to our home, traveling thousands of miles on a whim. At the time, I’d thought it sweet of her, if a little odd. I also now understood why we were always getting invitations from Dad and Miki to join them in Hawaii, or Greece—to the yacht, the island, the chalet in Italy: all places from which I’d formerly been excluded. I had thought it was because we were such a fun, attractive couple. Now I’d watch Miki and Luke together, though, and I’d see the little flirting glances and accidental touches. What had once gone undetected was now so obvious. I wondered, whenever Luke went out for a smoke or a breath of fresh air, if a rendezvous was in the offing, if one of those feverish acts of passion described in the letters was about to be enacted offscreen—and I would watch Dad’s reaction, to see if he knew, or cared.
Dad never let on one way or the other. He was the master of secrets.
• • •
I lived with the violence and the betrayal as long as I could. The tipping point, I guess, was Melbourne Cup Day. The Melbourne Cup is Australia’s biggest thoroughbred horse race; it’s practically a national holiday. They call it “the race that stops a nation.” It’s held on the first Tuesday of November (coincidentally Election Day in the United States), which is mid-spring in Australia.
On Melbourne Cup Day 1976, everyone gathered in Cessnock, a neighboring town, to watch the race at the local pub. I’ve forgotten the name of it: the Dirty Dingo, or something like that. All the wives and girlfriends were dressed in their holiday best (cr
eam-colored dresses and stylish wide hats) to celebrate the great day. The only hitch was, we weren’t allowed to enter the pub. In fact, there was a sign outside the pub door: “No Dogs or Women Allowed.”
We had to enter through a separate “Ladies’” entrance, and wait upstairs. While the boys were downstairs watching the preliminary races, drinking pints, and getting rowdier and rowdier, the ladies were sipping tea and having a Tupperware party. It was absurd, and excruciatingly dull. I’d rather have been pasting wine labels. I hung in there as long as I could, but finally I couldn’t bear another minute; I had to go home.
I came downstairs and stepped out on the porch, and stopped dead. There was a spring rain falling. Actually, it was more like a monsoon. Heavy sheets of rain were pelting down, making the dirt road a muddy, coursing river.
Unfortunately, the parking lot was behind the building, and I was in my Melbourne Cup dress and high heels. There was no way to get around to my car without getting drenched and ruining my shoes, unless…
Hey, I could just cut through the pub. Why not?
Well, because there was a sign: no women allowed. The sound coming from inside the pub was deafening: loud music, drunken laughter, shouting, and screaming. It sounded as if they were wrestling kangaroos in there. How would they react if I barged in on their party? Would there be a riot? Maybe they wouldn’t react at all. Maybe they were all too smashed to notice. I was only cutting through, anyway. As I looked at the rain beating down relentlessly, I couldn’t see any other choice. So I opened the pub door…
And suddenly—silence. Everything stopped: the music, the TVs, everything. Just like in the movies. Every eye was staring at me with outrage and anger.
I realized right away that I’d made a mistake. I’d violated the sanctuary. I was an affront to their maleness. I should have backed out immediately, but I couldn’t. This will last only a moment, I thought, and then they’ll go back to their regular carousing. Surely I wasn’t worth missing the big race for.