DRAG AND THE DRAMA QUEEN

Brisbane 2008

My brother-in-law pulls a photograph out of his wallet. It is a picture of a girl in a bikini. She is pretty in a glossy-magazine kind of way. Long legs, blond hair cascading down a perfectly tanned back. No cellulite anywhere on her body, no stretchmarks, a breezy summer face. He shows the photograph to the boys, his brothers. My husband leans over and takes the photo out of his hand. They are alike in some ways, the three brothers. They are tall and share strong features, chiseled jaws, long bones. En masse they are impressive, like young stags, sparring, locking horns, showing off. The three of them nod at his photograph, and his other brother rummages in his own wallet. Another photograph, another swimsuit model, this one his own. I glance at the pictures, their beautiful leggy girlfriends, and I feel sad for my husband. No photograph in his wallet, his chubby dark-haired wife slouching back toward the couch where her book is waiting.

There is a photograph of the extended family. The parents, the aunts, the three boys with their respective partners. A summery beachside photograph and all of them grinning in their pastel shirts and shoestring straps and boardshorts. I am the odd one out. I am overdressed, in a black gown. I look like I have been transported there from another planet. I am an alien amongst them, the foreigner. We laugh about this photograph. “One of these things is not like the others,” my husband says. I laugh, but I am sad for him, my husband with his attractive family and their attractive extended family, their bikini girlfriends reading their glossy magazines and sunning themselves on deck chairs, and me.

 

 

I am approaching my fortieth birthday. I do so with a sad drag of my feet, walking toward the disappointment of my unmet goals. And then there is the dislocation between my appearance and my actions. I feel like a drag queen, strutting a rampant sexuality that is just an overblown façade. Smoke and mirrors and not particularly thick smoke at that.

In the cruel light of day I really can’t bear to look at myself. That is the problem with stopping to think about it all. In the moment of sex there is nothing but forward motion. There is pleasure, the active taking of pleasure and then giving back and everything is in motion. Now, with the light and the stale sheets still damp, there is a pause and I am left with myself and I am ashamed. This is what other women feel, I am sure of it. I see the signs of it in their eyes as they fail to meet my fierce gaze.

In my own head there are indigestible clues.

I walk past a group of boys who sit spotted and ugly in the drunken gutter. I hear one of them howl like a wolf and yell out, “Dog.” It is only a moment later that I realize he is referring to me. The moment lodges in my brain like a blood clot.

The fetid drunken homeless man shambles past and looks up at me, blurry eyed, his breath a nightmare as he spits out the word “Fat” and moves on. Another clot forms, throbbing in my temple.

The group of men at the pub who point at me and call out, “There’s your girlfriend,” and splutter laughter to each other. A hook in my head that could catch fish.

I am unlovely. I am overweight. I am strident and combative. I do not wear matching underwear. I do not wear perfume or makeup or work out in a gym. I have grown older as we all grow older and there are still kids to grow up into that teenage moment of desirability.

I stand amongst the stained sheets wishing it were darker, wishing there was no mirror in the room, wishing there was still flesh pressed up against mine because when it is all kissing and sucking and touching there is no room for looking or pondering over those brainhemorrhaging kernels of derision lodged in my memory.