Wellington’s summer continues to behave like a bad boyfriend: abruptly showing up in a muscle shirt and aviators, taking us to the beach, palming lotion on our backs and whisking us off on a jet-ski to do figures-of-eight before cozying up over a seafood platter, snogging us to within an inch of our lives and then vanishing for six days with his phone switched to Do Not Disturb.
What an arsehole!
On the plus side, amid the southerly winds, fag ends of showers and thirteen-degree highs, I sat in a blanket and finished my thousand-piece jigsaw.
Can you make out the lunatic nun, staggering in the street having visions? The bug-eyed guy being burned at the stake? And Anne Boleyn with her neck on the block, wishing the axe-man would get it over with?
Well, these tableaux characterize the last three days of my beach holiday, when I slowly withered into a papery husk of dehydration and wound up pushed into the Coastlands Mall medical centre in a complimentary wheelchair. I mean, I could’ve walked. It’s just I might’ve behaved like the nun. And there was something so nice about giving up the fight against headache, nausea and dizziness, and letting some big rubber wheels do the work. It was all very am-dram, darling. I feel almost embarrassed, now.
Soon after getting home to Karori, I bumped into my mate Cynthia in the supermarket. I told her about the dehydration, and she said, startled, “But it wasn’t even hot.”
I know! Right? It wasn’t even HOT!
Reflecting, though, this could have been the central problem. When there’s only one sunny day in every five, you throw everything at that one day. The giant shining orb in the sky sends you into a complete tizz. You urge your family to tumble outside, make it snappy, we haven’t got long, let’s make it count!
You go for a 12-kilometre bike ride, let’s say, feeling vaguely regretful when your son tips the last water in your bottle over the back of his neck. But you don’t register you’re thirsty, because you’re desperate to exploit these precious few sunshine hours!
You get off the bike and swim in the sea. It’s so cold you only make it as far as your crotch. It feels somebody tipped a tray of ice cubes into the gusset of your pants. You leap out of the freezing water and flop into a garden beanbag, where you sit in full evening sun and accept a glass of Prosecco. You forget to drink water after this - there’s too much still to do!
You play six rounds of boules, smashing your husband four games to two. You then go to bed in a retro bach that swelters all night and the next day you start feeling a bit off, but you can’t understand why. Eventually you’ll start seeing jigsaw-shaped people from Tudor times floating across your eyeballs. Men in ruffs. Horses in capes. A glistening ham hock on a plate. The ham hock looks like you.
By then it’s too late - you’re a shrunken head with straw for arms. But a kindly Scottish doctor will tell you it’s possible to “drink your way back to health” right there in the clinic, without needing a drip; you slug five consecutive cups from the watercooler and start feeling your toes again.
Full health is miraculous, like a new beginning! You love everybody and everything! You’re not sorry at checkout to leave the coast - you’ve had too much of a good thing. It’s time for Cinderella to quit the ball. You tell the prince it was fun while it lasted, and he can keep the shoe; cheerfully you drive over Transmission Gully and back to the city, under a gruel-coloured sky.
Mid-January now, with a fortnight before school resumes, and you can smell the mania in the suburbs. It’s uniform-buying time, where schools issue never-ending lists of essential items with prices that make you yelp, or perhaps even moo. You wonder how it can be that such things cost so much to make when they’re basically an acrylic V-neck, two polyester blouses and trousers so cheap, they let off blue sparks when the legs brush together.
Oh, sure, you can economize (we’ve all filled in scuffed shoes with black Magic Marker; we’ve all let down seams and cuffs to their threadbare fringes), but horse-trading on Facebook for secondhand blazers is like The Hunger Games for middle-aged women. The savagery for a bargain is terrifying; the stress of bartering over bundles would age you in dog years. Still, I’d trade my looks for fifty percent off.
When you do land a good secondhand deal, it’s better than crack and in fact, the exchange could happen under a bridge. There’s something edgy and desperate about the whole enterprise; the sellers have all the power. You can just imagine an experienced parent with a blunt fringe and glasses, popping open their boot in the twilight and saying, “Middle school? Girl? I’ve got an unlined pinstripe with an iron-on crest and a pre-knotted tie. And you have to take a lacrosse stick. I’ll give you five minutes; then the price goes up.”
Annoyingly, among those most poised for bargains are private school parents. I should know, because not long ago I was one. It doesn’t matter if this community drives late model Range Rovers: if they can nickel and dime you for a pair of culottes, they will. Mind you, who can blame them? Some elite schools charge even for things like merit badges. It’s a terrible disincentive to achievement knowing if your kid gets House Captain, you’ll have to pay another twenty bucks to make this publicly known. You’d rather your kid was average; it represents a saving.
Incidentally, I’ve just passed along two used regulation school bags to a fellow desperado. As they’re on the battered side (let’s face it, a kid would need to open the zips with their teeth), I took them to pieces to scrub them down and found a clump of melted Fruit Bursts in a side pocket, stuck hard to a ten dollar note. Kate Sheppard looked very put out. I placed our most famous suffragist in a cat bowl of hot water with a squirt of detergent and left her to soak. I needed those ten bucks for, verily, it is uniform season.
It struck me as I looked down at Kate in the cat bowl, and she looked back at me, that our most celebrated and admired New Zealand women - among them Katherine Mansfield, Jean Batten, Dame Whina Cooper, Rita Angus, Nancy Wake and Kate herself - the type with Houses named after them in girls’ schools up and down the country, all had at least one thing in common.
Bitchy resting face.
I will pass this wisdom along to my daughter.
Did I mention my family gave me a rice cooker for Christmas?
If I were a feminist artist, I’d have written an angry novel about this by now. Something like All Fours by the multi-hyphenate American Miranda July, which everyone I know is talking about, only not in front of the children. I understand the plot involves a midlife woman not entirely satisfied with her life as a partner and mother, who checks into a motel for kinky sex with a hot stranger. Don’t quote me on that as I haven’t read it yet, even though it sounds scorching, because I find Miranda July irritating for reasons I can’t justify. It’s not personal; I just can’t cope with anyone who talks like it’s open mic night in the big yurt at a spoken word poetry festival.
Listen, this is from someone in a shapeless fleece and exhausted jeans, whose supermarket tote bag says You Are One in a Melon. Nobody with taste agrees with me about Miranda July. And I’m not proud of myself. But what can I do? I’d probably have booed Stravinsky at The Rite of Spring premiere in Paris. For an artist to become legend, there must also be the dimwitted people who throw tomatoes.
Anyway, the rice cooker. It’s general knowledge in our house that three times out of every four times I cook it, I bugger rice up. It comes out too gritty (I serve it anyway) or soggy (I serve it anyway) - this is any kind of rice, using any conventional method. I’ve tried them all.
One evening I happened into the kitchen as my husband was serving the kids some takeaway food, and heard him say, “See, kids? This is how it’s supposed to look. Fluffy.”
“How DARE you?” I bellowed, possibly doing a flounce. Sylvia Plath would’ve got a poetry collection out of this, but honestly? He wasn’t wrong. At some point it was agreed we should research the best rice cooker, but it was something I never got around to shopping for. So, on Christmas morning, I wasn’t disappointed to unwrap it - mainly because I had other presents still under the tree. This was a practical piece of kit that would make life easier and more pleasant. Our carbohydrates were at last to be taken care of! By technology!
If I didn’t feel deflated then, I certainly did when I used it. Okay, I let my kid do the measuring, unsupervised. And yes, I forgot to rinse the rice. But after FIFTY MINUTES of watching the little red circle going around, steam billowing from the slit at the top, and my main dish more than ready, I had expectations of quality. However it turned out, this rice would be better than mine. But I flipped open the lid and found a beach ball of coagulated starch sitting in a scum of foam.
It was inedible. I lumped it into the bin, and it sat there, wetly, like a human brain.
I wonder if tiny disappointments like this, as they pile up, might eventually lead otherwise ordinary women to bank suddenly, and take a different course in their lives. I mean, to cut a new path through rock, you must first feel trapped in the valley you’re in. To have courage, to become an artist, you don’t have to drawl like Miranda July, but there must be restlessness there: you must be dissatisfied with the world as it is. This will motivate you to fly solo into the high cirrus, maybe, or to invent a new style of painting; to lead your people in protest or write yourself into legend, your mouth tasting of your lover’s blood.
There are turning points in every life and possibly, this was mine. I slammed shut the bin and strode along the runway of my kitchen, feeling the thrust of internal combustion, and quickly gathering speed.
I found a bag of microwave basmati and it only took two minutes.
Sorry, I laughed and laughed all the way through this glorious piece. I am sorry for your dehydration, your weather, your bad rice cooking, your expensive uniforms, your irritability with Miranda July (not her real name really? and does she have that glottal fry which NZ young women are trying to imitate and sounds like strangled chickens?), your oh whatever but I am so envious of your fucking fantastic writing. It's just so bloody good. It looks effortless but all the best prose style looks effortless and I know you probably agonise over it. Don't ever stop. You are a tonic.
I do not like Miranda July either and after I read the Guardian interview with her https://www.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/may/12/i-was-in-a-kind-of-ecstatic-freefall-artist-miranda-july-on-writing-the-book-that-could-change-your-life I liked her even less. Smug, self satisfied, superior, selfish...and her silly book All Fours seems very autobiographical, too, and what's more, boring. The same people who recommended it to me also loved Rose Carlyle's The Girl in the Mirror which I absolutely hated with a passion! To describe it as a perimenopausal masterpiece makes me want to put my post menopausal head in a bucket.
Loved the rice cooker story, and the dehydration story, hahaha.
Thanks for the laughs, you are such a good writer :)