He didn’t. He took out a novel. It’s got a secret compartment hiding an ice pick! The book fell open to reveal a fifty-dollar note. No secret compartment, no ice pick (I should never have gone to see that bloody film. Basic Instinct was taking over my life—everyone was Sharon Stone). And just like he had done with his letterhead, Cyril slid the bill across the table towards me. I didn’t take it, though. I gave him a long fixed look. Smiling, I told him that this job was not right for me. Cyril backed down and I hightailed it out of there before he dangled another carrot. Or pulled out an ice pick.
I rushed home and wanted to call Reuben, but I knew he’d be in a meeting. So I called Ralph, who had no modelling assignments that week.
‘Oh good, you’re home. I’m coming right over.’
‘Are you okay?’
‘Yes. No. Sort of.’
‘Ruthie, what’s happened?’
‘I’ll tell you when I get there.’ I hung up before he could ask any more questions.
Ralph’s door was open when I turned up ten minutes later. He was waiting there with a worried look on his face. As we sat at his kitchen table, which had no envelopes, no books and no ice picks, I babbled out the whole story.
Ralph ralphulated. He listened patiently, rubbed the bristles on his chin, looked skyward, went silent for a bit, and then ...
‘Hmm ... fifty dollars gets you a blow job, you know.’
Ralph. In all his depth.
‘Seriously?’ His response lightened the moment but it also stunned me. ‘That’s all you took from this?’
‘Well ... no. Of course not. It’s just the first thing that came to mind.’
‘Waaait a second. How do you know the current market value of a blow job?’
‘Er, um ... I’ve heard. I ... I’ve read it.’
Yeah. Sure you have.
Maxi, Vette and I laughed at the memory; Ralph winced.
‘So, Brill. What’s a blow job worth in today’s market?’ asked Maxi.
‘I’ve no idea. I don’t have to pay for these things. What are you charging these days?’ Ralph smirked.
‘You two can pick this up later. What I wanna know is why didn’t I walk out of these situations straight away like I should have?’ I directed this at Ralph.
‘Er ... well, look at the environment you grew up in. Craziness.’ He made a cuckoo sign with his finger. ‘That was normal for you, you got used to it, became numb to it. And when you’re numbed out to a situation, you can’t move because you can’t think and you can’t feel. You stay stuck in it.’
‘Mm, explains why I stayed home for so long.’ I thought about this for a bit. ‘Your home environment wasn’t so great, and I know you had your reasons for staying, but you’re fairly well-adjusted.’
‘Are you kidding? You think obsessive-compulsive behaviour is a sign of being well-adjusted?’
‘But you’re cured. You’re even counselling people with the condition.’
‘Sure. But if a patient turns up with a missing limb or finger, let’s just say we’re looking at some serious damage control. One of my colleagues is helping me deal with that one, though.’
‘Ruthie, you seem to think we’ve got it figured out or are better than you,’ said Vette. ‘We haven’t and we’re not. We might have come on in leaps and bounds in our professional lives, but look at our personal lives.’
Maxi elaborated. ‘Yeah, Freud here prefers the company of women but can’t commit to one—’
‘I’d rather you call me Jung. And get it right—not “can’t” commit. Won’t. Not until I connect with my Twin Fla—’
‘Okay. Freud, Jung, can’t, won’t—whatever. Don’t is the operative word.’ Maxi turned towards me. ‘And you might have had your Lances and Cyrils as clients, but I’ve been dating them!’
We all laughed at the absurdity of our respective realities.
‘Why do we do this?’ asked Vette. ‘How do we end up in these situations?’ We looked to Ralph for the answers.
‘Because you leave home and search for your family.’
‘Huh?’ Maxi expressed all our confusion.
‘Unconsciously.’
‘That’s not an answer.’
‘Well, think about it. Your first relationship with a woman is with your mother, and with a man, your father. It more or less lays the foundation for how you relate to women and men socially.’
Maxi, Vette and I all pondered this one. Then Maxi said, ‘Hmm ... probably why I spend so much time with people who are off their tree. And date them. People who aren’t really “there”.’
‘Oh, God, a lot of reality in the last couple of days!’ Vette lamented. ‘First I get to see why I’ve been looking for Mr fairy tale perfect; now, I’m getting why he’s always a much older version ... who ends up leaving me.’ She shook her head.
‘And I guess your theory explains why I ended up working with Maude!’
Ralph’s words had opened our eyes. And I’d just made the conscious connection between Sylvia and the harpies. And gorgons. It had probably taken me this long to see it because she was so in-your-face (forest, trees and all that). And then all at once, I could see the Sylvia doppelgängers: apart from Maude ... Zelda, Miss ‘Kishma’ Parker, Mrs Russo, Zola, Mrs Antinous, and a host of others. ‘But ... hang on. That theory doesn’t always hold water. I’ve got a fantastic relationship with Maxi and Vette. They’re nothing like Sylvia!’
‘Sure,’ Ralph said. ‘But it’s not cut and dried. There are other factors too. Remember what we talked about ages ago, you know, about the nature versus nurture debate?’
We? You mean ‘you’. And how could I forget ... Όχι. Εμείς δεν το συζητούν. Μπορείτε rabbited σε γι 'αυτό.
‘Some of the dark forces that control Sylvia might have been small in you to start with, but the way she’s treated you has fed them, and at the same time, diminished what’s powerful in your nature.’
After Ralph’s chichi display by the pool the day before, he had just re-established himself as a member of the intelligentsia. He went on. ‘The relationships you attract aren’t necessarily going to be carbon copies of your parents. Sometimes it’s just an aspect of them that you’re drawn to in another person.’
Other names flashed in front of me: Dee, Charmaine, Rose, Hermione. ‘Geez. It’s punishing, isn’t it?’
‘It can feel that way. But it’s also an opportunity to see your weaknesses and do something about them.’ Ralph stared at me after he said this, transmitting isn’t that what this holiday is supposed to be about? He added. ‘The strong relationships you have, like with us, they’re the ones that support you while you learn what you need to from the ones that feel like stand-ins for your folks.’
Ralph, Maxi and Vette also had their share of ‘stand-ins’, but for all their challenges, the three of them seemed to take everything in their stride, whereas things often felt forbidding and catastrophic to me. Ralph had been right twenty years before when he implied I did just fine as a drama queen.
‘I know you’ve all got your issues, but you guys seem to cope so much better than me.’
Vette smiled sympathetically. ‘We weren’t wrapped in cotton wool.’
Nor were she and Maxi made to feel less capable (or deserving) than their brothers. And Ralph could not be any less capable than his (no one could). As we all got lost in our own thoughts, I reflected on my earlier career trajectory in relation to Myron’s.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO:
PIECES OF WORK
Myron was Sylvia’s great white hope. She’d bought him a toy medical kit when he was three, a toy microscope at five, a human skeleton anatomy model at six, a human heart model and a plastic skull with brain when he was seven. Of all the toys, Myron loved the skull the most. He was only interested in its teeth, though. Still, like a good boy, when he finished high school, he fulfilled Sylvia’s expectations and went to med school. But then, all her grooming came a cropper when Myron rebelled. He actually rebe
lled! He dropped out after a year—he hated medicine. Myron had become increasingly tooth-obsessed.
‘Odontophilia,’ Ralph had said when I told him.
‘What?’
‘It’s a tooth fetish. Myron has a tooth fetish.’
‘Isn’t that a bit strange?’
‘Um ... we’re talking about Myron.’ Ralph had a point. ‘He probably gets a hard-on watching someone eat with their mouth open.’
Ecch! This is something I didn’t need to know about my brother. But the odontophiliac ended up enrolling in dentistry and becoming Sylvia’s disappointment. What a joy this was for me to be relieved of that role, even if it was only temporarily. Her disappointment evaporated five years later—Myron still graduated as Doctor Roth. With his sensitive gag reflex, though, no way would I let him hover over my mouth. And I didn’t want a dentist who could so insensitively shatter a child’s illusions about the tooth fairy.
I kind of followed suit with my career choice when I became a dental nurse. Same field; no prestige; didn’t matter. I didn’t need a higher education. I was ‘just a girl’. According to Sylvia’s life plan for me, I would get married, have children and remain a hausfrau like her. Nothing wrong with this if that’s what you aspire to, but I don’t think even Sylvia did. She had shown promise at school. She often told us how smart she was, and we witnessed this: she could say cook, clean, wash, iron and ‘What am I; your bloody slave, Joe?’ in seven languages. Sylvia never realised her potential, so, by extension, it meant I wouldn’t even be able to see the glass ceiling, much less break through it. My first job was good training for Sylvia’s projection of my lot in life. It was in a sweatshop. Sort of.
I was only eleven years old and in Grade 6 at school when Merilyn Wauchope, a girl in my class, and I were appointed staffroom monitors. The stint lasted for three months. It meant that during this period, we were to clean up the staffroom every day after the teachers had finished their lunch. They called the arrangement ‘an honour’.
‘This is in recognition of your outstanding work,’ said Mrs West, our teacher.
My chest puffed out with pride. Yet, students who had misbehaved handled the morning tea shift. For them, cleaning was a punishment; for us, it was a privilege.
Merilyn and I were invested with such responsibility. We had to clear the table, wash and dry the dishes, replace the tablecloth with a fresh one, reset the table for the next sitting (morning tea the following day), and sweep the floor. The table was a long one, which accommodated about twenty-six staff members. The shock when we entered the staffroom each day didn’t diminish with time. The working conditions were socially unacceptable: one long, long hour; no pay; toiling in schmutz.
Half-drunk cups of coffee and tea had the occasional apple core floating in them, or they were stuffed with once white cloth napkins discoloured by the dregs. Ashtrays overflowed with lipstick-stained cigarette butts. The tablecloth, spattered with orange juice and squirted tomato seeds, was strewn with sandwich crusts, orange peel, biscuit crumbs, dried tea leaves, the odd chicken bone, and, on one occasion, a pubic hair (I was yet to sprout pubes, so at the time, I just thought it was from the head of someone with very curly hair). And my parents entrusted my education to this wildlife?
I’d never seen such mess, but I was good at the job because I knew a thing or two about cleaning. I had to do it at home from a very early age. For Sylvia, this was a moral imperative. But it was also a biological one. She said her demands were justified on account of her pushing both Myron and me out of her vagina, although she didn’t actually say vagina, nor did she say pawpaw (this rationale of hers was as close as she got to acknowledging that she had genitalia. Any reference to sexual organs was in relation to someone else’s). And where Myron yielded, God knows I argued against this:
‘Why should I?’
‘I carried you for nine months. I gave birth to you.’
‘But you didn’t want me in the first place!’
‘It doesn’t matter. I still had you!’
The upside is that we got paid—two shillings a week pocket money. Even as a seven-year-old, I figured that once I earned enough, I’d move out of home. And we earned it by setting and clearing the table, doing the dishes every night, and polishing our bedroom furniture once a week. Because I was a girl, I had the additional tasks of hanging the washing out when I was tall enough to reach the line (Sylvia wound the hoist down to its lowest position), bringing the washing in, baking a cinnamon cake every Saturday afternoon, and cleaning up dog shit (we had pets from an early age). None of this felt like an honour. From age twelve, it drove a desire to become a schoolteacher so I could have someone else clean up my mess. The desire waned after that second year of high school—having Miss Parker as a teacher was enough to put me off not only teaching, but also actually finishing school. I left before my Matriculation year and applied for a job at the dental hospital.
‘It’s a teaching hospital. You do realise you could end up working with Myron,’ Ralph warned me.
‘Maybe. But it’s a small sacrifice for a woman in uniform.’
‘What?’
‘I just really like the idea of wearing a uniform. You know, for that sense of pride and belonging.’
‘You’ve been wearing one almost every day for the past eleven years, except for school holidays. Did it make you feel proud and as if you belonged?’
‘Um, well, no ... but this’ll be different. I’ll look like a nurse. In my uniform with its cap, I’ll be representing a profession.’
‘Hmm ... I do like nurses. And other women in uniform. French maids. Cheerleaders ... ’ Ralph’s voice turned husky and he started breathing heavily. ‘Naughty constables. Friendly skies flight attenda—’
‘I thought you said you only look at Playboy for the articles.’
‘Er, um, I do. I do. But some of the articles come with pictures, so you can’t avoid them.’
No, of course you can’t. What a himbo!
‘But hang on. I know you originally wanted to be a schoolteacher so someone else could clean up your mess. And I get why you changed your mind. But you’ve picked a job where you will have to clean up after people.’
‘I know. And I’ll have some mess to clean up, but not body waste like general medical nurses do.’
‘There are plenty of career choices where you can wear a uniform but don’t have to clean up body waste or any mess.’
‘Sure, but this one ... this one has a certain nobility to it. It’s like I’ll be doing my bit for the war effort.’
‘Ruthie. It’s impressive that you want to contribute to the greater good, and it would be a really noble cause if the war hadn’t ended over twenty-five years ago.’
‘Well, it hasn’t in my house! And what about the war in Vietnam? It’s still going. What about the returning vets?’
Ralph started breathing shallowly. He turned white.
‘Ralph. Are you okay? What’s wrong?’
‘Uh ... amputees.’
‘Oh. Well ... that’s not an issue for me.’ But the recognition factor was. I craved recognition; I didn’t end up getting it, though.
I loved the job in the beginning. I felt important walking around the hospital in my shapeless blue uniform and starched white cap. And all went well until an ex-military patient cleared his throat and hoiked phlegm into the spittoon. I hyperventilated as I relived the trauma of that experience in the back of Joe’s car. What if this patient had overshot? What if a gust of wind had come through the clinic window unexpectedly? The war effort would have to do without me.
Luckily, I was handed an out. I finished off the year in the orthodontic department, and I enjoyed it (kids don’t produce and hack out thick mucus the way grown men do). Then, Dr Fuckface offered me a job in his new private practice.
It wasn’t his real name; it’s what all the nurses in the orthodontic clinic called him. Each one had been assigned to him; each one had left his cubicle in tears after half an hour. According to th
e head nurse, Dr Greg Scholtz was intractable, impudent, stupid and disruptive (where had I heard those labels before?). So, Dr Scholtz and I got along like a house on fire. He left the hospital; I accepted his offer and went with him. And the hours I spent in his practice made me feel like I wasn’t an ugly duckling; I was a swan that had found her flock. I worked for Greg for six years, but then he and his family flew north. They moved to Sydney. He asked me to move too and come work for him. I couldn’t do it (or, wouldn’t). I couldn’t/wouldn’t leave my infested nest (and I didn’t want to leave my friends, especially Ralph). This decision remained one of those what-ifs. I got another job with another orthodontist.
Dr Jed David Evans was a big, loud Texan. He’d immigrated to Australia ten years earlier, got married and had three boys. The eldest son was Jed Evans Jr., the middle son was David Evan Evans, and the youngest son was Evan David Evans. Why-oh-why? Dr Evans came from a country with lots of people, so there were lots of names to choose from. And his field, where all of his patients were children, presented him with so many possibilities. It really didn’t need to be double or nothing.
‘So let me guess, Jung,’ I said to Ralph, ‘going on your theory, I was drawn to Evans because of my issues with naming. Looks like he also had naming issues!’ I laughed. Ralph didn’t. He observed something that had escaped me.
‘I’d say it had more to do with the names he called you.’
Dr Evans rarely called me by name. Mostly, I was ‘girlie’, ‘missy’ or ‘madam’: ‘I need you to take some impressions, girlie’; ‘I need you to go to the bank for me at lunchtime, missy’; ‘Make another appointment for Eric in six weeks, madam’.
I thought about it for a bit, then asked, ‘Are you trying to say this is related to the fact that Joe used to call me missy, too?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Mmm ... Evans spoke to other staff members the same way. And his wife. And his female patients, come to think of it. No one seemed to mind, though.’
‘What about you; did you mind?’
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