Columns from The Weekend West

Ros Thomas 29/11/2014 Ros Thomas 29/11/2014

Dressing Down

I thought I’d arrived early, but to my dismay I was unfashionably late. A warehouse frock sale waits for no woman. The hall opened at 9. It was now 20 past and the building was heaving with bargain hunters.

I’m normally a prudent shopper, but my commonsense turns to compulsiveness when my favourite brand is discounted by 70-percent. I paused in the doorway to absorb the arresting sight of a hundred women on a shopping assault. A flock of twenty-somethings swooped past me and descended on a table of $20 jeans like seagulls on fish ‘n chips. I scampered over to join them.

Ros Thomas 22/11/2014 Ros Thomas 22/11/2014

Wooden it be nice?

I was mother to two sons before I became mother to a daughter. A mother of sons knows that Stegosaurus had a brain the size of a walnut. She knows buttons in lifts are for pressing, all at once, so passengers can appreciate the identical landings on every floor. And she knows it’s impossible to pass by a construction site without stopping to gawp.

But when I visited a school fete last weekend, it was my four-year-old daughter who spotted the carpentry tent first. “Hammers!” she shouted to her brother, and the pair of them darted off into the crowd.

I dutifully followed, lugging a bag of second-hand books, a tomato seedling and two half-eaten clouds of fairy floss wrapped around grimy sticks. “The Joy of Wood,” said the sandwich board propped at the tent-front. “$2 per child. No experience required.”

Ros Thomas 15/11/2014 Ros Thomas 15/11/2014

Forget Me Not

Something about her was different. She looked smaller than I remembered. The hunch of her shoulders had become more pronounced. Gone was her trademark copper rinse, her hair now blowsy and grey. “Auntie G!” I called, spotting her several trolley lengths away in Coles. She was holding open a freezer door, studying a shelf of frozen peas, but didn’t react. I parallel parked my trolley and leaned over. “Auntie G!” I repeated, touching her lightly on the shoulder.

She jerked around and stared at me. “It’s Rosi,” I said, sensing her confusion. Perhaps I’d frightened her? She gave me a wan smile but no glimmer of recognition. I began to feel uncomfortable. What should I do next?

Ros Thomas 08/11/2014 Ros Thomas 08/11/2014

Under the skin

We’ve become an unlikely pair of confidantes, the icecream shop lady and I. But regularity breeds familiarity. And small children are good conduits for conversations with strangers.

Her name is Paula. In a hot-pink polo shirt, she’s a splash of colour against the stainless steel coffee machine. Her ice-cream parlour is tucked into a Fremantle laneway. Opposite her shop, a terracotta Neptune mounted to a wall dribbles water from his lips into a tiered pond. My kids beg for coins to drop in the wishing well.

Paula is always chirpy and energetic. We swap stories as my two connoisseurs paw her glass cabinet, arguing the merits of Chocolate over Bubblegum. I tell Paula about my first job as an ice-cream scooper and how my arms would ache. She tells me about growing up in Mount Magnet in the 60s; how her dad became shift boss for the Hill 50 gold mine. How her ex-husband, father of their daughter, had been a proof-reader for The West Australian.

Ros Thomas 01/11/2014 Ros Thomas 01/11/2014

Farewell, my friend

I’m not one for living in the past. But the death of a long-ago friend has marked me in strange ways. Our friendship blossomed during a summer of waitressing in 1985, the year I turned 18. We shared the breakfast shift at the North Cott cafe, overlooking the beach. Her name was Jan. Her name-tag said so.

She was twelve years older, fit and tanned, a single mum to two girls. I’d pull up to the cafe at 6am and see her dilapidated Volvo 240 parked skew-whiff out front, windows open and a pack of Sterling Ultra Milds on the front seat.

Ros Thomas 25/10/2014 Ros Thomas 25/10/2014

Flushed with Romance

My husband fancies himself as a romantic. He likes to remind me that before we met, he was lauded as a ladykiller. He says this with a straight face while reclined on the sofa with his knee rug and the cat. I want to query whether he’s being facetious or ironic, but I hold my tongue, because he’s on a roll. “Empathy,” he announces. “That’s what women want. George Clooney and I know this. A man who listens to a woman is a rare and miraculous thing.”

I stifle a snort but he’s not finished.

“We’re quite alike, you know, George and I.”

“You mean apart from the tummy?”

But he’s not listening. His homily over, he’s re-engrossed in the sports pages.

Ros Thomas 18/10/2014 Ros Thomas 18/10/2014

Good Enough

Everyone I know tells lies about motherhood. On bad days, we lie about how rewarding it is. On good days, we lie about how burdensome it is. We lie to ourselves that we know what we’re doing. We lie to each other because we don’t want to be judged as second-rate. And we constantly compare ourselves with other mothers, praying we measure up.

When my first son was a baby, I couldn’t reconcile my zen-mother fantasies with the shambolic woman I faced in the mirror at 5am. That first year, I existed in a Neverland of wakefulness. I would slump on the floor beside his cot, my right arm wedged between the slats, trying to lull him to sleep. I patted my baby’s rear through a mound of nappy until my shoulder ached and my shins were numb from kneeling on the floorboards.

Ros Thomas 11/10/2014 Ros Thomas 11/10/2014

In Another Life

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to be anymore,” said a woman’s voice. I swivelled to take in the two 50-something suburbanites at the next table. A busty redhead was resplendent in purple. Her friend, a diminutive blonde, was listening attentively. The cafe buzzed with the mid-morning coffee crowd.

“I don’t know whether to be a walk-over or a ball-breaker,” I heard the redhead say. And then she caught my eye and harrumphed: “Now there’s a topic for your article!”

I was startled to be recognised, preferring to be an incognito columnist. But the redhead smiled and shuffled her chair towards me. “You know what?” she said. “I’m 51. Divorced. Worked all my life, own my own place. And the single men I meet? They want a maid. A hooker. Or their mothers!”

Ros Thomas 04/10/2014 Ros Thomas 04/10/2014

Old School Ties

She weaved through the crowd towards me. I grinned and waved. I hadn’t seen her since I was 17 and now I was 46. Yet here we were at our thirty year high school reunion and she’d hardly changed. She looked softer than I remembered. Her hair was shorter. It suited her.

She squeezed in beside me at the bar. As I puckered up to greet her, I saw her eyes dart down to my name badge and back up to meet mine. In that instant, I realised she had no idea who I was.

My school-mate tried to recover her composure. “Ros!” she said brightly, but my ego had already collapsed. Our conversation lurched into a catalogue of our offspring and then we floundered. I made a lame excuse about needing the bathroom and fled.

Ros Thomas 27/09/2014 Ros Thomas 27/09/2014

On with the show

When I was 11, Mum and I moved into a duplex in Graylands. In 1978, the posh people of Claremont liked to call Graylands ‘the wrong side of the tracks.’

It was hemmed in between bushland and the railway line at Karrakatta. My nearest park was the cemetery. But it was the maximum security mental hospital that gave Graylands its ignominious reputation.

In those unenlightened days, Mrs Watson, who lived in the front duplex next door, would refer to the hospital in hushed tones as the “lunatic asylum.” Mr Wheeler, the Vietnam War vet from two doors down, liked to spook me by pointing out some bloke swaying up our street towards the corner bottle shop. “Reckon he’s escaped from the loony bin?” he’d whisper.