Rebecca Handler

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

Nonfiction

Little Aussie Shop of Horrors

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One gift that comes with moving to a new country is the ability to play with identity. No one here knows me. I can be anyone I want. I recently donated my Banana Republic work slacks to Good Sammy’s, and I am considering lavender hair. I am drinking flat whites. Last week, someone asked me for directions, because apparently I look like I live in Perth.

But one thing will stop me from a complete transformation. My mouth.

Four out of five dentists agree. I have the teeth and gums of a 94-year-old man who hasn’t flossed in 50 years. Except I do floss – twice a day in fact. I have excellent dental hygiene habits. I have adopted the electric toothbrush lifestyle. I wear a night guard to bed, blatantly ignoring the well-established link between sexless marriages and mouth apparatus. I have a weird mouth in a it-stresses-me-out-I-don’t-want-to-talk-about-it way.

Interestingly, my dentist appointments in San Francisco always seemed to coincide with high self-confidence days. I’d waltz into the clinic, joke with the receptionist, and settle into the chair with People Magazine thinking, I’ll be out of here in 25 minutes. Fifty-five minutes later, I’d be getting a lecture on grinding and acid build-up, and making an appointment to come back for fillings.

Back in December, I had a four-hour deep teeth cleaning. The only consolation was that I could bring DVDs to distract myself from the coal mining operation happening in my mouth. Six Gilmore Girls episodes later, my mouth was numb and bloody but apparently… cleaner? Later that day, the pain medication I took made me throw up. It was a magical day all around.

We have been in Perth for more than three months now, and, BECAUSE I AM DEEPLY DEDICATED TO DENTAL HYGIENE, I booked family teeth cleanings. The clinic I chose is in a neighborhood called East Perth, which overlooks the Swan River. I figured in such a picturesque location, the dentist would be too distracted by the black swans to make me feel inadequate.

After the dentist treated both girls in 30 minutes (“Nice brushing, good on you!”), she turned to me cheerfully, “Your turn!” I told the girls, “Mom will be right back,” and then advised them to watch the Godfather trilogy.

Dentists everywhere have the same sigh. It is a disapproving, slightly exasperated sigh. I always hear it when the dentist is poking my gums with that unbent paper clip on a stick. It is a sigh that asks, “Do I need to get out my plastic jaw to show this moron how to floss?”

I left the office with a $33 tube of something called tooth mousse. My evening routine now consists of applying tooth mousse before popping in my night guard. Meow.

I don’t mean to sound disrespectful. The dentist in East Perth was great. She even made the girls latex glove balloons. But, and I ask this with the utmost respect for the profession, do dentists tend to exaggerate?

For years, I’ve been telling myself that America has irrationally high standards for what constitutes a healthy mouth. But now I know for certain. I can dye my hair purple and grill shrimp on a barbie, but I am who I am. Apparently there’s a reason dental records can identify a body.

Something Awful

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Last week, two Australian men were executed in Bali. Ten years ago, they tried to smuggle a massive amount of heroin out of Indonesia. As a result, they have spent the last decade in a Bali prison, awaiting an execution date, appealing, then awaiting another execution date.

Everything about this is awful – trying to sneak drugs out of a country that will kill you for doing so, waiting ten years to be shot by a firing squad, boarding a boat to a special island dedicated to executions, and deciding whether or not to wear a blindfold when you are killed.

Since we arrived in Perth, I’ve gotten to know the faces of Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan – their crime, their lives in prison, their appeals, and finally, their executions. The West Australian newspaper prints its cover story headline in such a large font that I won’t leave it out for the girls to see. So I keep the paper in my bedroom where I read their stories with shameful curiosity.

I thought of Myuran and Andrew when we recently toured the former prison in Fremantle. Like Alcatraz, the Fremantle Prison is a tourist destination. We learned about some of the prison’s most famous convicts and escape attempts. We sat in the cramped cells and visited death row. We looked out the tiny windows, up at the watchtowers, and imagined how we’d escape. Feign illness? Steal a guard’s uniform? Dig a hole? Sarah, our Tig Notaro lookalike tour guide, relayed every fact and fable in an enthusiastic whisper, as if we were all sitting around a campfire. “Some people say they’ve seen the ghost of Moondyne Joe wandering the streets of Fremantle.” It was a sunny day, and after the tour, the kids frolicked in the prison yard.

People become stories and prisons become playgrounds. Something so awful can’t last forever.

192

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On Monday morning, a truck holding a big, blue shipping container pulled up in front of our house. Three guys – Small Shorts, Big Man, and Missing Tooth – trudged across the front patio. Small Shorts, the sprightliest of the bunch, mumbled, “We have your things.” He handed me a clipboard, a pen, and a grid displaying numbers one through 192. “Check ‘em off as we yell ‘em out.”

It turns out our lives fit into 192 boxes. Clothing, books, pillows, chairs, robot costumes, linens, Lowell Junior Prom 1990 champagne flutes. We haven’t seen this stuff in four months. And here it is, our very own episode of This Is Your Life, hosted by Grumpy Moving Men Who Want to Get This Done as Quickly as Possible.

Over the next four hours, I heard “Thirty-two!” to which I replied, “Please repeat that,” because I couldn’t understand their strong Aussie accents. I thought that after awhile they’d start enunciating to save time, but these guys were not wearing t-shirts saying Ask us to compromise. I saw Missing Tooth crack a smile once, when he said eighty-seven and I heard lady heaven. Two points, Missing Tooth. Zero points, Expat.

I wanted to read the side of each box before it entered our house to make sure Den Footstool was not going to the bedroom. This annoyed my new friends, as apparently all three have interior design degrees. Small Shorts: The box says plastic containers so I put it in the kitchen. Me: But it’s the plastic containers from the office, so please move it to the office. Small Shorts: groan, sigh, stupid American.

My mother is here in Perth visiting us, and she offered to put things in kitchen cupboards as Big Man was unwrapping them. Big Man told us that he had just gotten back from a month in Thailand and he wishes he were still there. But instead of pretty ladies and lychee martinis, Big Man was in my kitchen, unwrapping Mason jars and sighing. My mother can usually get anyone to talk, but the two of them worked in silence like railroad workers at the tail end of a 16-hour shift. After the kitchen boxes were empty, Big Man summed up the experience. “That was a nightmare.”

Speak the Truth Moving Company was supposed to unpack all of our boxes, but when I began to visualize stacks of unwrapped artwork and piles of sweaters laying around the house, I told them to stop. Plus, I didn’t want Missing Tooth touching my bras. “You can leave now,” I said. “Just leave the rest of the boxes to us.” I signed the forms and watched as the container that we’ve been waiting for drove out of sight. Then I walked around the house smelling things.

From a hotel room in Bali

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Do you know what Alanis Morissette is up to lately? She’s doing lots of interviews, talking about connectedness and purpose. Apparently she was inspired by a trip to India. I know this because I am presently in Bali, sharing a hotel room with my two daughters. They go to bed early, so I am spending quality time with my friend, Internet.

Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill album was released in 1995, the year I was supposed to graduate from college but instead was waitressing at Legal Seafood and doling out meds at a psychiatric facility in Somerville, Massachusetts. I was listening to a lot of female artists who were pissed off and addicted to heartbreak – Ani DiFranco, Juliana Hatfield, Veruca Salt, and the wonderfully irate Alanis Morissette:

And every time you speak her name, does she know how you told me you’d hold me until you died, till you died. But you’re still alive.

My daughters and I were at the beach earlier today. It is hot in Bali and the sun here is best friends with the sun in Perth; they are like Kate Winslet and the girl who is not Kate Winslet in Heavenly Creatures and want to kill us. The ocean in Nusa Dua is calm and warm. It is the kind of water that inspires the word lap. Our bodies sank into the sand and the warm water lapped at our feet.

Since we moved to Perth in January, my mother has been mailing me her issues of The New Yorker. In the table of contents she circles her favorite articles and sometimes adds little notes like “Read!” and “Who knew?” She and my father used to do this for each other, and I love that she’s doing it for me now. I brought two issues to the beach today and after I was lapped out, I plopped down to read an article about invisibility.

After awhile, I looked up to see my girls playing in the water. Simone looked red. I grabbed the SPF 50, walked over to her and said, “I’m here to remind you to put on more sunscreen.” Walking back to my beach chair, I sang to myself:

And I’m here, to remind you, of the mess you left when you went away.

Just now, in the dark, I watched a video of Alanis singing You Learn a few weeks ago in San Francisco. She looks happy.

I am 41 years old and I am in a hotel room with two sleeping girls who have their own soundtracks in front of them. When they are heartbroken or pissed off, perhaps they will find comfort in a song. I hope it’s a catchy song, because it will come to them, 20 years later, on a beach with their children.

Singapore

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The last time we came to Singapore as a family, Willa was six weeks old and Simone was living out her prior life as an electric eel. Dave had been accepted to INSEAD Business School and we decided to take the plunge.

It was 2005. Our first night, I tried to put Willa to sleep on a chaise lounge at the Hilton Hotel on Orchard Road. In keeping with my semi-detachment parenting philosophy, I was hoping my newborn would fall asleep near me and not on top of me. Willa had other plans. She screamed until, in a sleep-deprived hallucination, Dr. Sears came to me and commanded, “If your baby doesn’t sleep on top of you, she will have trust issues and fail math.”

Ten years ago, Singapore was finding her voice. Would she be a sophisticated cosmopolitan city or a hipster historic fishing village? Construction cranes were ubiquitous and trees were being shipped in from Seattle. Singapore felt lost, but then again, so was I. My husband was in school and I was nursing a baby while watching Globe Trekker from the 18th floor of a condominium tower called Heritage View.

It is now 2015 and Singapore appears to have found her voice. It is a bold, confident voice and it is saying, “Neener neener. My government has more money than your government.” This place is on fire. There are spectacular displays of architecture everywhere you look, including giant metal flowers, humongous vertical gardens on the side of skyscrapers, and the Marina Bay Sands casino which… holy shit.

 

THERE ARE THREE TOWERS WITH A FUCKING SHIP ON TOP. My friend Christina, a long-time Singapore resident, rationalizes this building as part of what she calls Small Country Syndrome. Like Dubai, Singapore is getting all Elon Musk on the world, disrupting everything we think we know about gravity and engineering. In the last ten years, Singapore has strutted into the Lamborghini dealership and said, “I’ve got a world to impress. Give me one of everything.”

Seeing what a city flushed with cash can do in a relatively short amount of time is nothing short of awe-inspiring. The facelift is impressive. But thank you Singapore, for keeping some of your saggy bits – your cheap taxi rides, your dirty delicious hawker stands, your old men nose-spitting on the street, and your humidity. You were my home for eight months, and these are the bits that are seared into my soul.

Returning to Singapore for four days was like seeing an old boyfriend who has totally gotten his shit together. I felt sad that I didn’t get the best out of him, but thrilled that he’s finally wearing a clean shirt.