Farewell My Ovaries

by Wendy Harmer

  She sat and looked defiantly at Meg with two steady green eyes. Unfortunately, this all seemed like such a giant leap of logic to Meg that she couldn’t think of a thing to say, except: ‘Tiramisu?’

  Meg stood and walked to the kitchen. Claire hadn’t finished and followed hot on her heels.

  ‘You know, Meg, it occurs to me that in this life we celebrate stupid stuff like birthdays and the Melbourne Cup. But we never celebrate the things that really matter. I reckon that getting your period should be a great celebration. You know? I mean, you’re a real woman at last! When my Maddie, or your Sophia and Steffie, get their first periods, we should all dress up in red, hold strings and dance around a giant tampon.’

  Meg’s catering instinct kicked in. ‘I’m thinking red cordial, strawberries and pink donuts here, Claire!’

  ‘And then, when menopause comes, we throw all our sanitary napkins, with their stupid wings and sphagnum moss, and our packets of pills and diaphragms and spermicides into a great big bonfire and we leap around in our whopping bras and old ladies undies because we’re free of all that stuff and back to being innocents again. The way we were born.’

  ‘Ooh, this is a challenge,’ said Meg. ‘I’m thinking buckets of gin and dog biscuits.’

  ‘Anyway, you know what I mean.’

  ‘Look,’ said Meg, turning to her best friend in the world and loving the face she saw there, alive with passion. ‘I agree with everything you say. Hey! I’ll be the first one to set fire to my maternity bra, if we can find that much petrol, but where does having sex with Connor come into this evening of female bonding and frivolity? He’s the after-dinner shag, is he? What the hell are you talking about?’

  To be truthful, Claire didn’t exactly know what she was talking about. Considered thoughtfulness and reckless defiance had always coexisted within her in an uneasy alliance. The Libran in her strove to balance these warring forces. But now, as her doctor had so helpfully explained to her, she had come to a time in her life when her emotions were swinging wildly. And guess what? Right now, reckless defiance had the upper hand. All she knew was that she was going to have Connor. Like a new pair of Manolo Blahniks or a South Sea pearl necklace. Like a tycoon banging down a brand new Maserati on his Black Amex.

  She saw herself driving through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her hair, and Connor was in the passenger seat. That was all. She was forty-five, she wanted him, she’d earned him, she deserved him. Done deal. The more she thought about this, the more determined she became.

  ‘I’ve been thinking back, Meg. God, I’ve had an amazing sex life, I really have, and I’m proud of it. Don’t you think it’s funny, though, how most people never get to know what your sexual history is? I mean, they know all your family history and you tell them about your professional career—your curriculum vitae—but they never get to really know all the sexual stuff which is, let’s face it, as influential on you as a person as anything else.’

  ‘You mean like your coitus vitae?’ Meg offered.

  Claire laughed and nodded in agreement. ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Well if I read your coitus vitae, Claire Sellwyn, I would come to the conclusion that you were unable to hold down a steady job.’

  ‘Well ain’t that the truth,’ Claire said ruefully. ‘Over the years I’ve been sacked, made redundant, passed over for promotion.’

  ‘And, let’s not forget, stuffed up so many job interviews it’s not funny!’

  ‘And that’s true too!’ Claire hooted.

  ‘But you’re missing a vital point, dearest,’ said Meg, taking Claire’s shoulders in her hands. ‘And that is that at the present you are in full-time employment. You are married.’

  ‘It’ll be one night. He’ll never find out.’ Claire downed her wine in a defiant gulp and marched out to the deck to find more.

  Meg huffed and turned back to the kitchen bench. She busied herself setting a tray with a coffee plunger and plates of tiramisu and almond biscotti. Jesus! Meg knew she was going to have to be an unwilling accomplice to this harebrained scheme. She knew Claire well enough to know that, once she had an idea in her head, it was impossible to shift.

  ‘I need more information.’ Meg dumped the tray on the table.

  ‘Mmm . . .’ Claire was firing up a cigarette, which meant she was nervous, pissed or both.

  ‘OK,’ said Meg, trying to reason this through, ‘just say we can keep this secret, and I say “we” cos, thank you, you’ve roped me into this now. Just say Charlie doesn’t ever find out. How are you going to make sure that it’s only one night? What if you want more? What if Mr Surfie Boy wants more?’

  Claire inhaled deeply and replied on a smoky outward breath. ‘I’m going to tell him from the beginning that it’s one night and that’s it.’

  ‘And if he doesn’t agree to being used as some sort of warm prop in your satanic ovarian ritual? What then?’

  ‘He’ll agree. What bloke in his twenties wouldn’t? It will be the best night of sex in his life . . . and mine. And if he doesn’t agree, I’m gonna find someone else. This is going to happen. My mind’s made up.’

  Meg could see that it was. And while she had a million reservations and even more questions, she could also see they were all rendered null and void by Claire’s determination.

  There was a long silence before Meg finally acquiesced. ‘OK,’ she sighed deeply, ‘the best night of sex in your life? Well, I think this requires some careful consideration. In fact, given your CV, I’d better go and get some pens and paper.’ Meg was halfway to the kitchen door before she stopped and turned.

  ‘But first I’m going to ask you the big one. If you plan this, doesn’t that automatically mean that it won’t be the best night you’ve ever had? Don’t you run the risk that it will be a giant fizzer?’

  ‘Well, my dear Meg,’ said Claire with a wicked smile, ‘that’s a risk that I am more than willing to take.’

  That afternoon Claire was busy in her kitchen making osso bucco, Charlie’s favourite meal.

  ‘Can I have some cheese and those yellow biscuits with the red bits on, Mummy?’ Madeline darted in to place her order for room service and then rabbit-hopped back to the television set.

  ‘Coming right up, Min Min,’ answered Claire.

  It was an odd nickname for a child with the rather lyrical name of Madeline. It had come from a cherished memory back when she and Charlie were courting. Waiting in the business class lounge at Sydney airport before their first trip to New York together, Charlie had presented her with a tiny, caramel-coloured felt teddy bear. They had laughed, named it Min Min, and pretended it was a Thumbelina child. Afterwards they had strapped the little bear into a child’s seatbelt on their laps, propped it up in diner booths and taken it in their pockets to shows on Broadway. This was their way, subconsciously, of saying to each other ‘I want to have a child with you.’ And it was a lot easier to look after than a puppy.

  Min Min had been everywhere with them since then. To Ireland, all over England, all through the United States from Chicago to Miami, the Bahamas, Bali. And then Madeline herself had arrived and Min Min was tucked into the baby’s bunny-rug on the way home from the hospital. Min Min had then become Madeline’s plaything and was now lost somewhere in the land of Barbie. Perhaps she was sitting in the front seat of Barbie’s campervan or locked in some turret of a pink plastic castle.

  Claire delivered the plate of snacks to Madeline, who was pirouetting across the room in a pas de deux with Barbie from the Swan Lake video. This slender-limbed, graceful little girl had danced straight out of Claire’s imagination and into her life. She adored everything about having a daughter. The hairclips and bangles, plastic mules trimmed with pink fluff, the fairy frocks and endless drawings of princesses with glitter sprinkled on their tiaras. And the ferocious hugs when Madeline’s two bony arms circled her neck.

  Claire regretted that she hadn’t been able to give Madeline a brother or sister. After Madeline had settled into their
lives Charlie and Claire had thought about baby number two. But by this time Claire was forty and the fertility expert told them to be grateful for the wonderful blessing of Madeline and to go home. They did. With Claire sobbing all the way.

  Madeline had indeed been a blessing. When she was thirty-six Claire had doubted whether she would ever have a baby at all. She had resigned herself to being a maiden aunt of her brother and sister’s three kids and gone out and bought a cat.

  It wasn’t until she was driving back from the northern beaches to her flat in Rose Bay with the little apricot Scottish Fold in a box on the back seat that she remembered she had a slight allergy to cats. Caspian sported the most peculiar orange eyes she’d ever seen. The beast had crapped on Claire’s bedside table as a protest at being left in the flat one weekend, and had been summarily evicted. Caspian was now living it large in Surfers Paradise with Claire’s mother and father.

  Claire thought of them with a stab of guilt. She was overdue to give her parents a call, but catching them at home between the endless rounds of parties, card nights, dinners out and evenings at the casino was a challenge. If she waited, Claire’s mother would ring her. All she had to do was get into the shower, be running out the door or sitting down to dinner with guests and her mother would be on the line. June would have put away the best part of a bottle of Cinzano and be ready for a nice long catch-up.

  Thinking of them in Surfers Paradise took her mind to Connor and then inexorably back to the matter at hand. The afternoon’s conversation with Meg had raised a lot more questions than it had answered. Claire saw that figuring out what the best sex of her life had been, and why it was the best, wouldn’t be easy. There were so many variables. Where you were, who you were with. When, how and why it happened. There were the emotions you felt, things you discovered about yourself—about sex itself. Then there were the details which stayed with you. Smells, sights and sounds. She realised she now had a problem of definition and classification on her hands worthy of a professor of etymology at the British Museum.

  And then there was the not insignificant problem of informing Connor of her intentions and inviting him to participate. She decided that she would ring him later in the evening when Charlie was out of the house. He was off to another record launch, providing Claire with the whole night to find the courage to pick up the phone. Thinking of the train of events she was about to put in motion propelled Claire into Charlie’s study. He was sitting in his leather armchair by the window reading.

  ‘Hi, honey. You’ve found a lovely spot to curl up there in the sun.’ Claire was at her pleasing best. She knew that in her floral apron she presented a Nigella Lawson image of domestic irresistibility.

  Charlie looked up and smiled, slipping his reading glasses to the top of his head. ‘Yeah, it is nice, isn’t it? The flowers are coming out on the jacaranda. It’s my favourite time of year in this room.’ It was a warm and peaceful place. The sun on the purple blooms of the tree had washed the room in soft violet light.

  ‘So, what are you reading?’

  Charlie held up his book. The bright pink letters on the cover said Menopause. Claire saw in an instant that it was the same book she had dumped in the bin the previous morning. She could feel her entire body tense and her fists clench with annoyance.

  ‘I don’t want you to go through this alone, Claire. I want you to know you can share your feelings with me. I know that together we can make this a positive experience.’

  Claire opened her mouth to speak, but there were so many things to say that she didn’t know where to begin. Instead she turned on her heel and marched from the room, slamming the door behind her. An echo of the slam the night before.

  Fuck Charlie and his feelings! She wasn’t ready to be ‘positive’. She wasn’t ready to ‘share’. Why did she have the luck to end up with a male who was ‘in touch with his emotions’? While her girlfriends complained that they shared their lives with unreconstructed lumps who could fart the national anthem, Claire could only look on with envy.

  ‘Be careful what you wish for, girls,’ she had said more than once.

  Claire had put forward her theory that men had evolved into taciturn creatures who didn’t share their feelings for a bloody good reason. The first-ever male encounter group on the face of the planet was probably brought to an abrupt end when it was stepped on by a woolly mammoth. When a herd of wild buffalo was charging at a million miles an hour, about the last thing your mates needed to hear was: ‘Whoa, guys, I just don’t know whether this whole male bloodlust thing is making me feel worthwhile as a person.’

  Would the pyramids ever have been built if the head of the road gang had announced: ‘Hey, this is just a total male ego trip. Let’s go weave some baskets.’ Would Captain Cook ever have made his epic voyage of discovery if one of his mates had said: ‘Jim, this relentless drive to achieve . . . Don’t you think you’d be better off spending some time developing your interpersonal relationship skills?’

  Claire thought that there was only room for one person walking around the house wondering ‘Where is this relationship going?’ And that person was her. And right now this relationship was going down a path she didn’t like one bit. Claire made a mental note that one of the elements of a great night of sex was no questions. No caring ‘How does that feel?’ Or polite ‘Would you like some more of that?’

  She recalled that before her marriage her Aunt Elise had passed on a fascinating piece of advice. ‘Now, Claire,’ she had confided, ‘common courtesy is very important in the marriage bed. In the forty years Keith and I have been together he has always said “May I?” and “Thank you”.’ Claire had always thought this was hilarious. Now she could see it wasn’t that different from the way things were with Charlie.

  They ate their dinner in front of the television in silence. Claire could feel Charlie was hurt but to explain her anger would have taken the whole night, maybe the week, and then she would be up to her neck in the quicksand of his feelings again. She had enough trouble with her own emotions. She just wanted him out of the house and, with a curt goodbye, he was.

  After Madeline was bathed and in bed the house fell as quiet as a cathedral. Charlie and she shared a love of music and there was usually some tune wafting through speakers placed all over the house. But tonight she wanted the blessing of silence.

  Claire poured herself a glass of wine, stepped onto the balcony and looked out at the ocean. The house was delicately balanced on the edge of the cliff as if it had been set there by the hand of a giant. To her right was the small swimming pool, a luminescent opal of dark green. On the other side of her the frangipani trees were coming into bud and in a few weeks they would form a garland of intoxicating beauty.

  In the five years they had lived here this wide wooden balcony had been a mecca for friends and family. Every year they gathered for the Dover Heights Christmas lunch, then came back the next day to watch the yachts race by from Sydney Harbour to Hobart. Claire loved to spend time here just looking to the horizon, buffeted by the ocean spray, breathing the frangipani. But tonight she may as well have been looking at a postcard on a pinboard. All she could feel was the insistent gravitational pull of the telephone.

  She took the business card from her bag once more and sat with her mobile phone in her lap. She decided to ring on the mobile instead of the home telephone so Charlie wouldn’t see the destination of the call. She had taken on the role of scheming adulteress already, and the ease with which she did this was both shocking and thrilling.

  What would she say? She wasn’t quite sure. But she did know one thing for certain. Until now she had always been mysterious and playful with her men. Never saying quite what she wanted. Never asking. Waiting for them to make the moves and then artfully playing the cards she was given. However, this encounter was going to be different. This time she was operating with a full deck and would play the game her way, or she would move on to another table.

  She picked up the phone and then oddly enoug
h heard it ring. It took her a few seconds to realise that it was the landline, not the mobile.

  ‘Hello, Claire speaking.’

  ‘Hello, darling! What are you up to? Got time for a chat?’

  Christ, not now! It was her mother, who had a suspiciously cheery note to her voice. She immediately suspected the culprit was a couple of those famous turbo-charged cocktails.

  ‘Hello, Mum. What’s happening?’ Claire sighed and settled in for the duration.

  ‘It’s your father. He’s complaining again about not having a shed.’

  ‘Well, Mum, you know I’ve always said that men are probably genetically programmed to live in a shed. It must be hard on him in the flat.’

  Claire had heard this particular tune before and all the words to it. She sympathised with her father and knew how it had broken his heart to pack up his beloved shed. Forty years worth of accumulated odds and ends, screws and springs, memories and dreams. All taken away from the family home at Roseville on the back of a truck.

  Mother, of course, was keen to see this man-made mountain chucked down the tip. But the children had come to Dad’s rescue, so now it took up half the space in the Noosa garage of her younger brother Douglas. She knew her mother and father would make a trip to visit Doug and, while Mum was visiting the grandchildren, Dad would root through his boxes for the afternoon. She could only imagine what he was thinking as he sat there surrounded by his treasures.

  ‘He’s already taken over the spare room with his power tools. There’s an angle grinder sitting right on top of my ironing board at the moment. He’s lucky I don’t do his underpants with it!’

  This last bit was announced loudly and rudely so Claire knew it was for her father’s benefit. They had been married almost fifty years and she was still squabbling with him. Amazing. Would there ever be a time when her mother and father truly understood each other? Or was this refusal to understand the very thing that kept them together?

  Claire had a theory about why modern marriage was such a chancy thing. Since no one believed in God much anymore, people now expected their husband or wife to give them absolution. And which human being, with all their flaws, was up to that responsibility?