FOURTEEN
On a hot, dry Sunday two months after the race between Tracy and Vera, I wandered up to Sorrento back beach for a swim. Ambling along the ocean road, I listened to the rustling hare’s-tail grass that grew in mounds at the sides of the path. I uprooted a few spears and stroked the soft tips against my cheeks. Navigating the vast car park that overlooked the beach, I saw Tracy and Jordan. They were some distance away, near the toilet block. Jordan appeared to be using a short hose, attached to an outdoor public shower, to wash the sand off Tracy’s body. As I watched her manoeuvre her limbs under the squirting water I realised they were back together again. Jordan was carrying Tracy’s wetsuit for her. I hurried down the cliff to avoid being spotted.
I was never sure why Tracy forgave Jordan that fling with Vera. She may have weighed things up and realised she missed Jordan more than she despised him. Maybe six weeks apart was too short a time for Tracy to move on. And a cloud of doubt remained about the genuineness of Jordan’s interest in Vera. He was much less attentive to her than he had been to Tracy. When Vera approached him in the corridor I saw him raise his eyebrows in surprise, as though he couldn’t quite remember who she was. And when Vera took the liberty of hugging him, he smiled ruefully and looked around to see who was watching. Things were certainly flagging between them when the milk bar shocker occurred, an event I can recount because I was there to witness it myself.
At school we could get lunchtime passes to visit the local milk bar to buy necessities, such as newspapers, tissues, dry biscuits, cough lollies and biros. The corner store also sold the whole gamut of confectionary available back then. We weren’t supposed to buy that stuff, mind you, but we often did.
Judy and I had agreed to accompany Lynne to the milk bar. She wanted to buy her mother a birthday card and a box of Red Tulip Chocolates, the dark chocolates with the red ribbon. When we girls pushed through the door of the milk bar, Jordan was standing at the counter with his wallet open. Well, well, well, glamour boy was out and about on his own for a change. He turned around nervously. And when he saw the Mornington Grammar uniforms, he blushed.
It didn’t take us long to realise why. Sitting on the counter, impossible to miss, was a giant packet of Modess pads. Jordan picked up a newspaper and covered the packet. We correctly assumed that Vera had sent Jordan running down the street to make this obscene purchase. The boys we knew would rather die than buy sanitary pads for a girl.
News of the tacky purchase spread like a virus, thanks to us three gabby girls. Jordan launched a counterattack to clear his name. His mate Bill was sent as an emissary to our class to tell us that Jordan had been reluctant to comply, but Vera had insisted. A few days later the same emissary informed us that Vera had been dumped.
‘Shocker, shocker, shocker,’ Judy castigated under her breath as we passed a friendless Vera in the corridor.
I found myself feeling sorry for Vera. If she had been bleeding a lot on the day, and unexpectedly – which sometimes happened to us girls – she probably didn’t feel like walking to the shop to get the pads herself. There was nothing worse than going for a walk with blood pooling between your legs. She probably felt like sitting behind a closed toilet door till Jordan whistled from round the back of the toilet block to let her know he’d returned. The pads could then be transfered from under his jumper to under her jumper, away from the eyes of perving students, such as Lynne, who shadowed Jordan all the way back from the milk bar like an undercover agent and observed and relayed the transaction to the rest of us.
Even now I would never dream of discussing the milk bar shocker with Jordan. However, I did quiz him about the race between Tracy and Vera.
It took Jordan a while to work out which particular race I was talking about.
‘Oh, you mean the mock race? I honestly thought Tracy would win,’ he said good-naturedly.
‘Did you drop Tracy for losing, or what?’
‘Oh God no, she dropped me. Or words to that effect. She told me to piss off.’
‘Why’d you go out with Vera then?’
He shrugged. ‘Everyone expected it.’
‘Oh, get lost.’
Jordan swallowed hard.
‘Well, if you must know, I quite enjoyed being with someone new for a bit.’
‘But Vera was so pushy.’
‘The Pav was fast!’ he said cockily. ‘In more ways than one.’
‘Oh, you didn’t sleep with her? Ugh.’
Jordan laughed. ‘Didn’t I tell you pavlova was my favourite dessert?’
‘That’s revolting. How could Tracy take you back after that?’
He narrowed his eyes and murmured, ‘Tracy and I never talked about stuff like that.’
Maybe not. But surely Tracy would have heard about it from somebody else.
Jordan smoothed his chin and lower cheeks with his hand. Something was mushrooming in his mind.
‘What, what?’ I demanded, tugging on his frayed woollen sleeve.
‘Mm … Probably shouldn’t tell you this,’ he hesitated, ‘but Tracy was staying a virgin till she married.’
They’d never slept together? Really? Yet it would have to be true – what guy admitted he hadn’t gone all the way with his long-term girlfriend? Naturally I’d assumed otherwise. We girls were under nearly as much pressure as the boys to lose our virginity, to prove we weren’t frigid or undesirable. Girls weren’t supposed to be virgins beyond the age of sixteen or seventeen; that was the folk gospel of our day. The blazer boy from Peninsula College had tried to seduce Tracy when she was only thirteen. Even if you didn’t have a boyfriend, you were expected to experiment, get drunk and join the clan. Our education in the late seventies was a sexual rather than a sentimental one.
‘Sinning is grouse, you should try it,’ advised a senior girl after she emerged from the gum-tree circuit bushlands and stopped in front of us Second Formers to put her underpants on. Her partner-in-sin then appeared, his shirt hanging out, brushing twigs from his maroon jumper.
‘Did you just see what I saw?’ Judy asked, eyebrows raised.
‘Oh my God, no pants, no pants,’ Lynne giggled.
‘I bet Tracy isn’t a virgin these days,’ I told Jordan.
‘Well, I wouldn’t know,’ he replied vaguely.
If the two of them had never had sex, then how could I rank myself lower in Jordan’s estimation than Tracy? Still, it might explain why they had been able to remain close friends for so long.
Anyway, it was pointless to keep comparing myself with Jordan’s high school sweetheart. It was like trying to compare what a person felt for their first dog with what they felt for their current dog, way down the succession of dogs, when they’ve already loved and lost half a dozen pets, but still want a dog for company nonetheless.
Yes, I was the dog at the end of the line. Or I wanted to be, silly as that sounded.
I don’t know if Tracy and Jordan finally called it quits at school, or if that happened in those fault-ridden years when we scattered like marbles to our various uni halls, utilitarian flats and dilapidated share households. According to Mrs Breeze, Tracy celebrated her twenty-first birthday somewhere beachy in Thailand. And Jordan was reportedly over there with her. So were they a couple then, or just good friends? Jordan reassured me that he parted from Tracy ‘ages ago’ and he hadn’t seen her ‘in yonks’. I was vain enough to imagine myself secure. And their relationship had made my own with Jordan seem that much more enchanted. Yes, I was part of their history too.
My final sighting of Jordan and Tracy together took place at the Rosebud pool in the weeks following our Sixth Form exams. They were sitting at a plastic table near the pool kiosk, sucking on Sunny Boys. I pretended not to see them, and if Tracy saw me she chose not to call out. I bought a paper bag of hot chips and headed back outdoors. I had a boyfriend waiting for me poolside, a uni student I had met at a party a few weeks earlier. After eating his chips and wiping the salt from his lips, this guy, Rory, was going to summon the guts to tell me we had nothing in common and he didn’t want to see me anymore.
‘I never felt I was better than you,’ I would respond, speaking my mind honestly without intended spite. At that moment I felt myself immeasurably superior to this ugly guy. What kind of subhuman wears board shorts with pictures of tugboats and anchors on them? I was more attractive, smarter and deeper than Rory. It hurt like hell that he was dropping me, but I’d done myself a disservice by succumbing to the advances of a science student in the first place.
‘Not better. Just different,’ Rory said in his own defence.
As we made our miserable way to the pool exit, I caught a glimpse of Tracy and Jordan swirling around in the shallow waters of the toddler pool. What were those two grown urchins playing at? Hmm, probably staying out of my vicinity, if the truth be known.
That was the summer of 1981. I ran into Tracy at an undergraduate party in Prahran one night a couple of years later. We were nineteen and twenty then. Everybody had crammed into the kitchen and the chatter was deafening. Tracy seemed subdued and uncharacteristically withdrawn, not just towards me but to everyone. She obviously wasn’t happy. And she’d lost her looks. I’d never noticed her physical flaws before. Her eyes were too big for her face, especially with all that kohl eyeliner on. Her figure was nothing but a straight shift, a vertical muscle, with no hips or boobs to speak of. Sure, I was being supercritical, but heck, what did she have going for her that I didn’t?
That night we had seemed more distant than ever. For starters Tracy and I weren’t Sorrento girls anymore. Cherie had moved up the peninsula so I could be closer to Monash Uni. My mother had achieved her professional pinnacle and was now the principal at Black Rock North Primary School. In the meantime I was navigating my way in and out of adult sexual relationships (lots of disappointments, lots of tears) while conscientiously completing my Arts degree. I moved into residential halls for a year, but came home half the week for Cherie’s meals and her comforting shoulder.
When I turned twenty-one, Cherie bought a two-bedroom villa unit in Chelsea as an investment property. I moved into the unit and began paying Cherie rent. I coveted my perceived independence and, with a rush of enthusiasm, began my Honours’ thesis on giddy behaviour in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing. By midyear I’d waded through so many scholarly articles that I’d forgotten my own fresh responses to the plays.
Perhaps I should have backed my initial impulse and written a thesis on the New York poet Diane Wakoski. I knew her short poem ‘The Conjurer’ off by heart. It’s the one that goes:
The willing believer takes his lady’s hand,
Not because of her tricks,
But because of her.
He likes to say, ‘I take this lady for her tricks’
But only because
The record looks better that way.
I had discussed the possibility of a Wakoski thesis with the head of department at the end of my third-year studies. ‘Ah yes,’ he said, inclining forward in his big leather chair, ‘The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems! But you do realise there are very few secondary sources on Wakoski, as yet. Most of your ideas will have to come from you.’
Without knowing it, that show-off of a literature professor scared me away.
I withdrew from honours and graduated with a straight bachelor’s degree. My next step was kind of predictable. What had worked for Cherie would work for me. I backtracked and enrolled in a Bachelor of Education to train as a primary school teacher.
‘One more lamb to the slaughter,’ my uni friend Felix predicted, shaking his head and pretending to slit his throat. We were sharing a meal of chickpeas and potatoes at the uni coop. Jumping to my own defence, I promised Felix I’d survive a year in a tough school and prove him wrong.
Right now I was waiting to take up just such a position. But maybe I could still evade that fate. I could go back and complete my honours thesis or do some kind of master’s preliminary. Wakoski would be waiting. As soon as Monday I could visit the English Department and enrol part-time. That would distract me from thinking about Jordan.
Without realising it, I had picked myself up off the grass and was walking down to the water’s edge on Portsea beach. I stepped into the cool sea and let the swirling wave suds lather my feet and ankles. That felt better. But my top half remained as hot and dry as an Egyptian sphinx. Tucking my skirt into my undies I waded out deeper. The skin of my legs tingled and my torso bristled. A wave approached, and I turned protectively as it hit me like a whip, drenching me from behind. My body temperature was dropping fast. Another wave slapped me on the back like an over-enthusiastic friend.
Slap and drench, slap and drench. The manic water was flushing down my underpants. My nipples had turned piphard. Slowly the water became warmer and kinder. I stood there facing the beach, holding my satchel above my head to keep it dry. Looking like a bloody moron. ‘Worth it, worth it, worth it!’ I crowed. Who cared that my clothes were soaking wet? Not me. The time for banging my chest and lamenting– I’ve spoilt my whole life – was over. It would be hours, days, weeks, months, maybe even years before I could accurately assess the consequences of the decision I was going to make this afternoon. But after recharging my flat battery in the foaming sea, I was in the mood for some comic absolution. Not bad for a morning’s work, Beth, I kidded myself. You’ve managed to take Tracy’s blow on the chin.