At the last minute Ro lost her nerve. If it hadn’t been for Alby she would have ducked out the back and snuck home.
In the lead-up to the show it was Alby who was nervous, changing her mind over and over about how to do her hair and which of many moustaches to choose. The basic penguin suits were fine, if a bit tighter and more moth-eaten than twenty years earlier when they wore them to women’s balls.
‘We should strap our breasts down,’ said Alby.
‘You’re kidding?’
‘No. I mean it. I’ll get those wide crepe bandages.’
‘Jesus, Alby. The whole fifties butch number?’
‘Yeah. None of that liberate the breasts stuff.’
‘That was feminism,’ Ro protested. ‘Not having to wear a bra.’
‘Too floppy.’
Ro went on protesting, but she allowed Alby to experiment on her with different sorts of strapping. The experience was surprising, titillating. Transgressive Act Number 5462. Ro tried it out in the Mall, a flat-chested stroll from Pulteney to King William Street. She slouched and took long steps and stuck her chin out in a don’t-mess-with-me way. She was considering taking on three punks near the Silver Balls when she spotted Maddie, and swaggered over to her. She hadn’t seen Maddie for a while.
‘Hi Maddie,’ she growled, hoping to make her jump.
‘Oh, hi Ro. What are you doing in town?’
‘Practising.’
‘Practising what?’
‘Passing.’
Maddie looked at her more closely. ‘Oh, the drag kings. Want to have coffee?’
Deflated, Ro settled for a cappuccino.
‘Didn’t you notice I look different?’ she asked, sucking froth.
‘The mo?’
Ro thrust her chest out. ‘No breasts.’
‘Oh my god, Ro. What have you done?’
‘Relax. Nothing drastic. It’s bandages.’
Maddie subsided in her chair. ‘I haven’t seen you for a while. You never know these days.’
‘Not me. I like my breasts. Well, sometimes.’
‘What’s the drag thing about? It’s so …’
‘Un-feminist?’
‘Once you would have hated being taken for a man. Wouldn’t you?’
Ro thought about it. ‘I used to hate it when people in shops called me sonny. Gerry copped it all the time, of course, being tall. She was always being mistaken for a man.’
‘Yes. We talked about it once.’
Ro was surprised. ‘Did you?’ She hadn’t thought of Maddie and Gerry as friends.
‘Yes. On the beach. It was a party. Christmas maybe. She asked me why I wasn’t swimming.’
‘Weren’t you?’ Ro had never noticed whether Maddie swam or not.
‘No. Couldn’t get bathers to fit in those days.’
‘You could have swum in your shorts.’
‘I didn’t have shorts, Ro. Have you ever seen me in anything but a skirt? Or loose pants?’
It was true. Maddie was always covered up.
‘But if you wear a skirt,’ Ro said, ‘you have to put up with people commenting on your hairy legs.’
‘Or shave them.’
‘I hate that. Why should we pretend that women don’t have hair on their legs?’
Maddie shrugged. ‘Then you have to put up with the comments. You can’t have it both ways.’
‘Anyhow what did Gerry say?’ Ro asked.
‘Stuff about body image. Gerry knew it was a paradox. She wore men’s clothes but she hated being taken for a man.’
‘Men’s clothes are more comfortable.’
‘Yeah yeah, I know. And better made. And cheaper. And short hair is more comfortable. And more practical. And of course we don’t wear make-up. But we do not, DO NOT want to be mistaken for men.’
Ro laughed. ‘It hasn’t happened to me since my hair went grey. Maybe I’m missing it. Is that the attraction of drag?’
‘Playing with it, I suppose.’
But on the night, with a boisterous audience out beyond the lights and a buzz backstage, Ro had never felt less like playing. She turned pale and clearly was going to faint or be sick.
One of the drag queens, all eyelashes and feathers, took over.
‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘Put your head between your knees.’
She sent Alby off to get a glass of water and sat beside Ro patting her back.
‘It’s stage fright,’ she said kindly. ‘Everyone gets it. You’ll be fine when you get out there.’
Ro wasn’t exactly fine. Her legs felt as though they’d been anaesthetised and her head wasn’t attached properly to her shoulders. She heard the drum roll for their entrance and managed to stumble on after the other five. The footlights were dazzling and the audience invisible, but she knew that every dyke she’d ever met was out there in the audience laughing. This was very different from the anonymity of Rundle Mall. They were laughing at her. And all the gay men were probably bored stiff, scornful of drag kings, waiting for the queens to come back on.
The others shuffled her along between them and Alby muttered instructions under her breath. Ro pressed the top of her middle finger against her thumb, said to be a cure for nervousness, and concentrated with all her energy on not falling off the stage.
The relief when she heard the closing bars of the music was colossal. She didn’t hear the cheers and hooting. All she cared about was getting away.
Backstage, Alby was jubilant.
‘Fantastic,’ she crowed. ‘What a high. No wonder these queens keep doing it. When’s the next show? I’ve got a new idea.’
She dug Ro in the ribs. ‘Worth it, wasn’t it?’
Ro sat down, smiling weakly, but Alby was oblivious to her lack of enthusiasm. She was already choreographing a show for the six of them. They should start out formal and strip down to singlets, stubbies and Blundstones. Do a tap routine. Like Tap Dogs but all women. They could get political, take on the pollies, all the suits in fact. Business men, administrators, bankers. She was bursting with ideas.
Ro didn’t have the heart to say that it would have to be a routine for five instead of six. She had discovered that life on the boards was not for her.
There was another result of this harrowing experience. She was grateful for the kindness of the drag queen backstage and went to thank her. Didgy was in the process of stripping off her eyelashes. Ro watched fascinated as the flamboyant Didgy Tarlis transmogrified into the balding mild-mannered Steven.
‘How did you go?’ Steven asked.
Ro shuddered. ‘Terrible. I didn’t know whether to faint or vomit.’
Steven laughed. ‘I remember that,’ he said. ‘It gets better.’
‘Nah. Not for me. I think I’ll stay in the audience.’
From that small beginning a friendship grew. For the first time in twenty-five years Ro found herself with a man friend. Now when she and Alby went swaggering round town, Didgy sashayed alongside them.
Ro’s attachment to separatism, in the heady early years, had been more principle than practice. She realised early on that there would always be compromises. There were neighbours and shopkeepers, fellow students, fellow workers. You might simply be telling the male bus driver off for sexism, but you were engaging with him. Even in a convent, Ro imagined, there would be visiting priests.
In any case, even the most fervent separatists had secret exceptions. Fathers, brothers, friends. And sons. Sooner or later it all came down to the question of mothers and sons.
Then came AIDS, a moment of reckoning for separatists. Ro’s preconceptions were shaken by compassion for gay men. Now, Steven was Ro’s first HIV-positive friend. She saw his daily struggle, his gallantry. She admired the campy refusal to be serious that would once have driven her nuts. And having taken that step with one man, she couldn’t ever be so dismissive again. What if Anne’s Brett, for example, was a young Steven?
Perhaps, after all, it was in women’s interests to help men sort themselves out. Exactly the position she had always argued so vehemently against. Women putting their energy into helping men.
She was pleased with this turnabout and felt that it was enlightened. The magnanimity of women. But when she outlined it to Steven he hooted.
‘Very noble,’ he said. ‘But a bit late. Where were you ten years ago when we were all dying?’
He saw that she was crestfallen and took pity on her.
‘Actually, I’ve always had gay ladies as friends,’ he said. ‘Ever since I first came out.’
Gay ladies? Was that what Ro was now? she wondered. After all the fine rhetoric of the radicalesbians she was reduced to this. Gay, which was for men, and lady which was not for feminists.
Well. It was a new century. A new millennium. She could be a gay lady.
Alby’s only doubt was whether to be a gay lady or a het man. A trans man.
‘It’s not new,’ she told Ro. ‘Just more open now.’
‘Open as in let me open up your body with my little scalpel?’
‘I’m not talking surgery.’
‘Drugs then. Why on earth?’
‘Don’t you remember people coming back from the States years ago and talking about testosterone? Buying it on the street in San Francisco. All these dykes were experimenting with it.’
‘I thought they were mad,’ Ro said crushingly. ‘It’s testosterone that causes most of the world’s problems.’
But Alby wasn’t crushed.
‘I reckon I’ll try it,’ she said. ‘But the thing is I’m getting peri-menopausal. Do you think I can transition?’
Ro was six years older than Alby. She looked back across the chasm that was menopause. How quickly it fell away, that world of blood and pain and hormonal storms. A war zone.
She sighed. ‘Want me come to the doc with you?’
Alby’s timing was out. The trans movement was not yet a revolution, in Adelaide at least. The theory was there, and the pioneers. And the centuries-old experience of the midwives, all the babies born with ambiguous sex. Nevertheless gender was seen by all but a handful as strictly two-way. Not performance, not fluid, but fixed at birth.
Sympathetic doctors were rare. Alby couldn’t find anyone enthusiastic enough about the aspirations of a middle-aged lesbian to supply her with the hormones she needed.
At first she was downcast. She dragged Ro along Brighton beach, striding into the teeth of a winter gale, scarf and coat flapping. They came back to the car with red cheeks and chapped hands, relieved to clamber in and slam the doors.
‘Well,’ said Alby now that they could hear each other again, ‘it’s okay. I’ve decided. I don’t want their chemicals, anyhow. Who knows what the side effects are? Woman have been cross-dressing and passing as men for centuries without needing testosterone. I’ll do the same.’
‘Just like that?’
‘Maybe. For performing anyhow. I’ve been talking to Steven about a double act. He reckons we should try Melbourne.’
Ro’s heart sank. She had lost Julia to family life. She couldn’t lose Alby to Melbourne.
‘Don’t go,’ she said. ‘I’ll be your audience here. I’ll come to every show.’
‘Come to Melbourne with us,’ said Alby.
But Ro couldn’t. She hated to admit that she wasn’t game for an adventure. But she wasn’t. She liked her flat. She liked her job at the bookshop. She liked Sunday lunch with her mother. She had a mortgage. She was grown-up at last. She could join her friends in conversations about interest rates and superannuation. She didn’t want to move.
‘When did we get so serious?’ she asked Julia.
‘What do you mean? We’ve always been serious. Oh god, all those bloody meetings. Protests. Anti-this, anti-that.’
‘I don’t mean that. I miss all that.’
‘What then?’
Ro frowned. ‘Work, I suppose. Mortgages. Staying in one place. Being friends with the neighbours. With men.’
‘I thought you wanted that.’
‘I do. I’m not complaining. I want my life to be rich and varied. But I miss, I don’t know, the fire in the belly.’
‘Being young.’
‘I know it wasn’t all good. A lot of it was bloody painful.’
‘And stupid.’
‘But intense. The endless possibilities. We could do theatre or make posters or learn the saxophone or go and be self-sufficient in the country or study engineering. We expected to do everything.’
‘You never expected to study engineering,’ Julia objected. ‘Too much maths.’
‘I expected you to do it for me. So I could be proud.’
‘Lucky that I did it before fees hit.’
‘Fees for university. That’s one of the things that happened, that made it all change. Australian politics took a swerve to the right.’
‘Everyone thinks their own youth was special.’
‘But ours really was. Wasn’t it? Up until, I don’t know, mid-eighties?’
‘Until economic rationalism.’
‘You know, I wonder … we were so committed to changing everything, including ourselves. Is that why our relationships didn’t last?’
‘You didn’t believe in relationships anyway. Such an oppressive idea.’
Ro grinned. ‘I’ve been listening to Ferron. Remember Ferron? Ain’t life a brook? It’s so sad. You pretty much have to break up with your lover when you hear it, even if you were fine before.’
Julia laughed. ‘Thanks Ferron.’
‘The one sure thing. That nothing lasts.’
‘You think our lives were made up of unstable chemicals. Explosive. I wasn’t unstable.’
Ro looked sadly at her. ‘Perhaps it was me. I didn’t have the right DNA for stability. Or something.’
‘This is sounding like an interview on your hundredth birthday.’
‘That’s exactly how I feel. I think it’s Alby going off to Melbourne. And me not going with her.’
Maddie sailed down the aisle between formal dresses and ladies’ tops. She loved op-shops. You could be whatever size you wanted and no snooty saleswoman looked down her nose. As she passed she ran an experienced eye along the racks. She could spot a good fabric at three metres.
She was on her way to crockery. One day, she believed, a matching saucer would appear for her favourite cup. Twining violets.
But today she was distracted in babywear by a tiny jumpsuit in rainbow colours. Its much-washed companions were faded pink and blue, stained white and lemon. The rainbow garment lay among them, an exotic jewel. Maddie scooped it up.
At home, with purchases strewn across the bed, she looked more closely at this treasure. It had been lovingly hand-dyed, but hadn’t ever been worn. Who had made it? Perhaps a grandmother-to-be, an aging hippy? In which case, had the daughter rejected the present? Or was it rejection by a daughter-in-law? Poor grandmother.
But it might be worse than that. Perhaps the baby died.
Maddie spread out the jumpsuit on her bedside table and thought about babies. She adored babies. As the years passed she found herself wondering more often how it might be to have her own baby. The idea warmed her gut in a way that was part sex and part animal.
Was it too late?
She didn’t bother to discuss it with her friends. Ro didn’t believe that anyone should have a baby, let alone a forty-five-year-old lesbian. And Ro wasn’t the only one who might react badly.
For once in her life Maddie found it hard to sympathise with Julia. Julia had been handed three children on a plate, though of course it wasn’t as easy as that. And they weren’t babies.
The logistics of getting pregnant were bothersome. There were clinics now in Sydney and Melbourne, Maddie had heard, but they cost a lot. And presumably you’d have to stay there for weeks. Or come and go often, which would also be expensive.
There were more old-fashioned methods. But the men that she knew were either gay or happily attached. Probably you could pick up a man somewhere. But where?
She let the idea fade into the background. One day. Perhaps.
The jumpsuit lay on the bedside table for weeks, merged into the usual litter of books and jars of moisturiser. Maddie noticed it one evening and shook the dust out. She thought of putting it away. But instead she laid it out carefully on the pillow, and considered it as she dressed for dinner with cousins visiting from Sydney.
They had a friend in tow when she met them at the restaurant.
‘Hope you don’t mind,’ they said. ‘Carlos is at the conference and he was going back to an empty hotel room.’
Maddie smiled her comfortable smile. No, she didn’t mind.
During the evening, as the conversation ebbed and flowed, she wondered if this was it. Fate had intervened. She liked Carlos.
Maddie was not one for schemes and plans. She preferred a fuzzy view of life. Things generally turned out however they turned out. So she made no attempt to manipulate the situation, to flirt with Carlos. But if he happened to be staying an extra couple of days and would appreciate a guide to Adelaide, then well and good. And if one thing should lead to another and they should happen to end up in bed, then even better. And if she should happen to conceive …
But at this point, reality took over. The heterosexual world had changed in the twenty years since Maddie had last been part of it. Sex might be casual, but it wasn’t unsafe, not with this man anyway.
‘Um … you don’t need to bother with that,’ she said, as Carlos tore open a condom.
He regarded her with grave courtesy. ‘But I prefer,’ he said. ‘You don’t mind?’
She didn’t, by that stage. The sex was good, another thing that had changed in twenty years. Here was a man who understood and cared about her body, as well as his own.
Perhaps it was because he wasn’t Australian. Or perhaps …
She gave herself up to it.
All week Maddie floated, feeling extraordinarily pleased with herself.
She went round to pick up Anne for book group. But Anne was running late, so Julia put the kettle on.
‘You’re looking very mellow,’ she said, handing Maddie a cup.
Maddie could not resist. ‘I had a lovely weekend. A little affair.’
‘Good for you. Who with?’
‘No one you know.’ Oh, what the hell. ‘It was a man actually. In town for a conference. ‘
Julia laughed. ‘How wicked.’
‘That’s what I thought.’
‘Are you going on with it?’
Maddie considered. No baby. But a male lover.
‘Maybe. In a casual way. He’s gone back to Sydney.’
Julia was thinking too, remembering past inquisitions of errant sisters. ‘You’d better not tell Ro.’
‘I’m not going to tell anyone. And don’t you either.’
Before Julia could answer, Anne rushed in. ‘So sorry, Maddie. Are you ready to go?’
‘What’s the book?’ Julia asked, as Maddie gathered her things.
‘Written on the Body,’ Anne said. ‘Jeanette Winterson.’
‘Interesting,’ said Julia. ‘I believe she never lets you know the gender of the lover?’
Maddie scowled at her.
‘Have a great discussion,’ Julia said sweetly, and kissed them both goodbye.
Expensive or not, Maddie managed a number of trips to Sydney in the next few years. It was not great love, or even grand passion, but she always came home feeling good about life. When Carlos decided to move back to Chile their parting was as kindly as their affair had been. Maddie was sad but not heartbroken.
She gave the little jumpsuit back to the op-shop.