Rebecca Handler

o n e w o m a n p a r t y

Rebecca Handler

The First Day Of The Year

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The woman awoke to shrieking at half past six. Not anything to worry about, just the sound of four girls who had slept on single mattresses all lined up next to one another and were now awake, exhilarated by their closeness and exhaustion. Three out of the four had stayed up past midnight.

She got up from bed, untwisted her nightgown, and shuffled across the hall. “Girls, can you please keep it down? We’re still sleeping. Happy New Year.”

Remarkably they did quiet down and the woman fell back asleep and dreamed of a contraption that was half-oven, half-blender. She roasted beets on the top shelf of the oven and then pulled a lever to transfer them to the blender by way of a small conveyor belt.

A few hours later, she joined her husband and her friends upstairs for Earl Grey tea and banana bread. Her friends have a new puppy. It looks like a stuffed animal with black marbles for eyes. During breakfast, the puppy chewed on an actual stuffed animal.

After tea and clean teeth and sunscreen, the woman walked to the beach with her husband and her friends and the four girls and the puppy. They walked past empty houses that were built during the mining boom and deserted during the crash. The woman shooed flies off her face and laughed at the puppy who kept sitting down in protest.

The beach was called Pyramids. No one knew why it was called this, but they guessed it had something to do with the sand dunes or maybe the shape of the waves. They tossed their hats and towels in a pile and raced to the ocean, except for the one who stayed back with the puppy.

The woman jumped over the small waves and dove under the big ones. Surprisingly, some of the little ones are powerful, and some of the big ones are not.

It was time to say goodbye to the friends and the puppy and pack up the car and forget a few things. The woman’s husband put on a song for the drive home. The woman sang along, “We live in cities you’ll never see onscreen.” She fed her husband French fries from a drive-through chicken sandwich place. The children fell asleep and the woman and her husband talked about dolphins and how sometimes new friends feel familiar.

George Michael

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I was grateful to hear my yoga studio was going to be open on December 25th. After tea and peanut butter toast, I drove through the ghost town that is many cities on Christmas morning. Hay Street in Perth is typically bustling with cafés and businesswomen in pencil skirts. But yesterday I drove down an empty street and parked easily out in front of the studio.

The class was packed. I asked a woman in neon orange leggings to scoot her mat forward.

The owner of the studio, a graceful, muscular woman with bright blue toenails, was teaching. After telling us to “get in whatever position feels most comfortable,” she started the class with a story about her father-in-law who had criticized her choice to keep the studio open on Christmas Day. “Sometimes people won’t understand why you do what you do,” she stated matter-of-factly without a trace of self-pity. “Move into downward dog.”

She worked us hard, and as we rolled up our mats, she put on the song “Last Christmas” by Wham!.

I sang it all the way home and was still singing when I walked in the front door.

“How was yoga?” my daughter asked. She was wearing a blue and white striped nightgown and playing with something called Thinking Putty, which is more expensive than Silly Putty because it’s smarter.

I serenaded her as I kicked off my flip-flops, “This year, to save me from tears, I’ll give it to someone special.”

“Will you make me a smoothie?”

George Michael died hours later. I learned the news this morning from my friend Alex who texted me the “Careless Whisper” video with the comment, “End of an era.”

Alex and I went to high school together, when “Careless Whisper” was the last slow dance before the gym lights went on.

I spent this morning listening to Faith, alternating between crying and singing. My daughters took turns checking on me. “Mom, your face is red.” “Are all of his songs about love?”

Not all of George Michael’s songs are about love, but many of them are about sex, and when I was in high school, his music was just sexy enough for me. “I Want Your Sex” felt daring but polite. “Don’t you think it’s time you had sex with me?”

In college, I saw him perform at the Worcester Centrum near Boston. I went with a girl whose father was a gynecologist who sent her care packages in old Vagisil boxes. We sat in the balcony and screamed every time George Michael shook his butt.

This morning I finished crying and changed into my bathing suit for a family beach outing. Today is Boxing Day, and it is sunny and breezy. My daughter and I swam out past the break where we could bob up and down like marshmallows in hot chocolate. On the drive home, my husband plugged in his phone and played Faith. “I thought you’d want to hear it,” he said quietly. This touched me because Dave was more into Metallica in high school. Windows open, we blared “Father Figure,” about which my daughter declared, “This song is a little creepy.”

I guess it is creepy, but I love it. And sometimes people won’t understand why you do what you do.

Things That You Can Touch Or Feel

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In 1993, between bites of a piping hot dinner roll at Bertucci’s in Harvard Square, my father leaned across the table from me and declared, “When you marry someone, you marry their family.” He revealed this as if it were a carefully guarded secret that had been passed down from generation to generation.

I had been telling my dad about my boyfriend, specifically his mother, a clog-wearing woman who made her own earrings and often glared at me. My boyfriend and I broke up later that year. I still have a childhood blanket of his that my children sometimes use to build forts.

My husband comes from a large family. He has eight brothers and sisters, all of whom live on the east coast of the United States. Recently we pulled the kids out of school in Perth for three weeks and flew across the planet to drink Dunkin’ Donuts coffee in Rhode Island (medium, milk, one sugar). The last time we visited my in-laws was more than two years ago, when Dave’s youngest sister married a gregarious New Yorker with excellent taste in wine and cable knit sweaters.

The nine children and their assorted partners are a diverse lot. We are dentists, poets, accountants, stay-at-home moms, engineers, mail carriers, actors, economists, and students. We have strong opinions. Some of us drink eggnog coffee while others think this is a beverage for monsters. Some of us prefer cranberry sauce out of the can. Some of us believe in God. Some of us feel crushed by the recent presidential election and some of us are more ok with it. (Before our trip, I reminded my daughters that family is more important than politics, and the younger one suggested, “Maybe we don’t wear our Hillary t-shirts on Thanksgiving.”)

Several of the nine siblings have had children themselves, and the kids are just as varied. My eleven-year-old niece recently stood up to a bully at school, and my four-year-old niece likes to throw chairs.

There were 30 of us for Thanksgiving this year, and we descended on my sister-in-law’s house with side dishes and folding chairs. As casseroles slid in and out of the oven, and children chased each other up and down stairs, I felt like I was in a 90’s home-for-the-holidays rom-com. All that was missing was Bill Pullman.

After the feast and the cleanup, we put the little ones to bed, poured ourselves more sangria, and gathered in the living room for the most sacred of family traditions: Pictionary.

I have been playing Pictionary with my in-laws for more than 20 years. We are fiercely competitive. I was infuriated by my brother-in-law’s inability to draw a hot air balloon that looks anything like a hot air balloon, and he chided me for my attempt to illustrate “cold” without including a thermometer. (I drew a stick figure in shorts and then crossed it out.)

At one point, the newest spouse in the group, the gregarious fellow with the sweaters, became enraged by a teammate’s failure to quickly identify the “object” category on the Pictionary card and shouted, “Things that you can touch or feel!” His baptism was complete.

My dad was right of course. It’s no secret that when you marry someone, you gain a family. And if you marry someone who has lost a family member, you respectfully inherit this absence as well. I am honored to be part of this clan. It is one of the greatest blessings of my life. And I am not just saying this to score points. Unless we’re playing a game.

The Boy In The Backseat

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On Friday afternoon in Perth, a family’s car was stolen from their driveway. I learned about it on Twitter. “Search is on for stolen blue Subaru with child inside.”

The parents had left the engine running while unloading the trunk. They had just returned from a vacation. The thief smashed the car through the front gate and sped off. Their three-year-old son was asleep in the backseat.

That day, I attended a middle school orientation with my daughter where, after locating her name on a whiteboard, she ran off to join her friends. Prospective students were given a tour and popsicles. Parents were corralled into a hot gym and told that the uniform shop is open on Mondays and Thursdays. I took a swig from my water bottle and thought about the boy in the backseat.

When my children were three and five, I left them in a car outside of a butcher shop in San Francisco. I was going to run in quickly to purchase some beef for a stew, and would see the car from inside the store. One of my daughter’s favorite songs was on the radio, “Say What You Need To Say” by John Mayer, and so I left the key in the ignition.

I returned to the car a few minutes later with a tenderloin wrapped in brown paper, and noticed a police car had parked behind me. I hopped in the front seat. John Mayer was done and some young female pop star was on. Within seconds, an officer knocked on my window. “Did you just leave your children in the car? With the key in there?” She must have heard the music.

“Yes. Just for a minute. Their favorite song was on.” I stopped talking.

The officer told me she was a mother and that there are crazy people out there. She suggested one of my children could have climbed up front and started the engine. I almost said my kids weren’t that smart but decided nothing about that was funny. She made me promise I wouldn’t do it again.

The blue Subaru was found parked in an alley two hours later, and, according to the parents, the child seemed unfazed and unharmed. The mother reported that he went straight back to pestering his sister. The thief has not been found. I wonder how long it took him to discover the boy, the moment he realized the thing he had set out to do had become something else.

We’re All Invested

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I went to the U.S. embassy in Perth recently for an event billed as “a coffee and a chat with the Consul.” Joshua was delightful but may have been overshadowed by the silver machine in the corner. “Drip coffee!” the Americans exclaimed after leaving our belongings in lockers and walking through metal detectors. The Consul told us, “You can’t have a U.S. embassy without drip coffee,” while distributing stars and stripes ballpoint pens. (Australia has outstanding coffee but it is espresso-based, which explains all the good moods and early morning jogs.) I met a young mother in a green cable knit sweater who described the Republican VP candidate as “a good guy,” and a woman in a Bucky Badger sweatshirt with a Frances McDormand in Fargo accent. When she said, “I liked Bernie, but Hillary can be trusted with the nuclear codes,” I felt homesick even though I’m not from Wisconsin.

The U.S. presidential election is not something that is happening only to America, or only to Americans. The debates were broadcast live in Perth, on at least three channels, and were summarized in the evening news and local paper. A friend here was raised in Sweden and Spain and has lived in Australia for many years. She is troubled by the fact that many Americans don’t vote – voting is mandatory in Australia – and suggested, half-jokingly, that people in other countries should be able to cast their votes. “It’s the most powerful position in the world. We’re all invested.”

I went to a café in Swanbourne with the newspaper and a notebook, and sat next to three men huddled around a foot-long wooden boat perched on the table next to their flat whites. One of them had built the exquisite model and brought it to breakfast in the hopes that his friend could help him with the knots in the sail. As they fiddled with the parts, the builder, a tall fellow in a navy blue sweater vest, said, “But I suppose it’s true. America’s getting weaker and weaker and China’s getting stronger and stronger.”

The knot master frowned and removed his reading glasses. “But this bloke is going to build a wall?” The three of them erupted in laughter. He continued, “In America you’ve got this working poor where people have jobs but they just can’t afford to live. They’re angry, of course they’re angry. But there’s a huge number of people in America now who believe everything they see on telly. It’s scary.” They all nodded.

The third man added, “The phenomenon is not Trump himself, it’s why he’s getting so much support. He just tells them anything they want to hear. It’s totally illogical. Mexicans out! Muslims out! What about the bloody Europeans?” More laughter.

Calling anything a silver lining in this election reminds me of the college party where I ended up with a tube down my throat, overheard nurses whispering about “a waste of resources,” and then called my dad who asked me if it was good beer. But I must say, watching a smart woman patiently and strategically take down an ignorant chauvinist is good beer. I’m just annoyed she had to attend the party with this jerk in the first place.

When I walked my daughters to school this morning, the air looked dusty and smelled like burnt toast. Bushfires are common in Western Australia, especially in the spring when they are purposefully lit to avoid catastrophic blazes in the summer. When I first moved here and smelled fire, I was alarmed. The world was burning and no one was doing anything about it. But now I understand that the smoke soon clears and new growth begins.