“Hey!” I hugged my brother as he was collecting his luggage. “God, you stink.”
“So do you.”
No I don’t. I don’t stink anymore. I don’t get my period. My hair hardly ever gets greasy and I don’t sweat, either.
He looked me up and down. “You look awful, Porshe.”
“Yeah, well, so do you.”
“I’m not joking. You look like a skeleton.”
Usually any comment about my thinness made me happy, but being called a skeleton hurt my feelings. My brother and I were always so jokingly sarcastic with each other, sometimes we took it too far. Usually I would’ve told him that he was being rude, but I didn’t want to bring attention to it. I needed to make the conversation casual so that he would let it go. I had to appease everyone lately.
“It’s just ’cause I’m in my running clothes.”
“You’ve been running already? It’s so early. Why don’t you take a break from it? I think you’re thin enough, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
It was strange that all of a sudden it seemed like I had to lie constantly just to be left alone.
“I know I’m too thin. I’m gaining weight. And I wouldn’t have gone running if I weren’t this jet-lagged. I was going crazy lying there—although your bed is really comfortable.”
“What?”
“First come, first served, Brother.”
I walked into the house through the back door and found my mother in the kitchen.
“Good morning, Bubbles. Do you want some breakfast?”
Jesus.
“No. That man at the café we go to all the time gave me eggs this morning.”
That wasn’t a lie.
“Michael’s here.”
My mother ran to the kitchen door and hugged him.
“Mike’s home! Look, Gran,” she yelled, “it’s Mike!”
“Hi, Ma.”
As I slipped through the kitchen and down the hall I heard him say, “Hey, you didn’t give her my room, did you?”
My brother’s arrival diverted mom’s attention away from my breakfast, thank God, and I escaped into my bedroom where I had lived my teenage years listening to records loudly and smoking cigarettes, believing that neither noise nor smoke could penetrate my bedroom door. It continued to act as a magic shield from the demands of my family, for when I emerged from my room, dressed in long sleeves and a full, long skirt, breakfast was over and I was greeted with easy smiles. No one seemed to care if I was running or eating. I was wearing a lot of makeup, too, and I think that helped.
“Porshe, you wanna go shopping?”
“Seriously?” I said incredulously. “Again?”
My brother had an enviable ability to dismiss any thoughts of Christmas gifts for the family until Christmas Eve, and I was always dragged along to help shop for them. Strangely enough, though, he never needed my help. He had an uncanny knack for finding the perfect thing, the most thoughtful gift at the last possible second. I loathed him for it and admired him for it. Most times, I secretly enjoyed the ritual, too, because it ended with a trip to our favorite pub. The ritual had a rhythm to it: I had to start out with being pissed off and pretend to have my own plans. He’d beg me to help him although he didn’t need it, and I’d grudgingly agree, telling him he owed me a beer. Then it’d end with him asking me to wrap the gifts, which really did piss me off. That was the way it always went. But to my surprise, today I actually was agitated. I was anxiously wondering how and when I was going to eat. I had been waiting for the moment my mother left the house to weigh and eat my turkey, as I wanted to avoid any possible comments that weighing out a portion of turkey might elicit. Then, after that, I thought I could cook and eat egg whites before going to the Hyatt hotel. I had decided to book the presidential suite of the Hyatt and spend Christmas Eve there with my brother to decorate the Christmas tree and to ready the room for our family Christmas dinner the following day. Getting the hotel suite was a gift that I was giving my family, since cooking Christmas dinner in the small kitchen of my mother’s house always seemed to be challenging. But leaving my mother’s house for the hotel earlier than I’d planned was worrying. Traveling and dieting was hard enough, but without access to my mother’s kitchen all day, I began to fret, wondering when I would next eat.
“Why can’t you get your shit together like everyone else? I have plans, too, you know. I wanted to see Sacha today.”
“I’m not going to carry a whole bunch of crap from LA in a suitcase. Come on, it’ll take an hour.”
“No it won’t.” I grabbed my bag, got in the car, and shrugged off my irritation enough to continue the banter. “You owe me a beer.” It sounded fun to say it, but I had no intention of holding him to it. I would never drink my entire day’s calories in a beer, even if it is Victoria Bitter.
“Hey, what do you think of this?”
Michael was standing in front of a full-length mirror in Myer, Melbourne’s largest department store, wearing a purse.
“Who for?” I barely even looked at it. I really didn’t care at that point. I hated shopping—especially department store shopping, and I’d been with him in that store for hours. He’d bought about ten gifts so I’d thought we were done.
“It’s for me. I need something to carry my work stuff in.”
That made me look. My brother, as serious as I’d ever seen him, was checking himself out in the mirror, a thin strap over his right shoulder that connected to a shiny black leather rectangular pouch that was at waist height due to the shortness of the strap. I stared at him, expressionless.
“Guys have bags now! I saw it in In Flight magazine on the plane.” He turned to me and modeled it a little and by his swagger it was obvious that he thought he looked pretty good.
The ground floor of this department store where we were standing sold shoes and accessories. There was a side that sold men’s accessories and a side that sold women’s. The two departments were separated with an aisle. While he was certainly standing near a couple of large satchel-type man-bags, he had picked up a bag from the wrong side of the aisle. I waited for him to realize his mistake. After staring at my expressionless face for many moments, he gestured for me to hurry up with my opinion.
“It’s a purse.”
A look of panic flooded his face as he spun back to face the mirror. He looked at himself and regained his composure, the purse still over his shoulder. He calmly read the tag attached to it.
“Yes,” he said simply. “Yes, it is.”
We cracked up. We laughed so hard we were snorting. Nearby Christmas shoppers saw us laughing and couldn’t help but laugh, too. We left the store and were cracking up all the way to the parking garage, dropping shopping bags as we doubled over. Even after we’d recovered for several minutes, I’d burst out laughing again on our drive to the pub, thinking about my macho helicopter pilot brother wearing a purse. That would set him off again, too, and as I laughed with my brother and drove past red brick Victorian terrace houses and through the eucalyptus-lined streets of my hometown, I felt that I was truly home.
When we arrived at the Great Britain, GB for short, Michael went to the bar and I settled in at a high-top table. I looked around my favorite pub. There was a goldfish above the bar in an old black-and-white TV set and tableaus of mini living rooms, with vintage floor lamps lighting worn sofas and mismatched coffee tables. I never felt more myself as I did in that grungy pub. Bill, an old school friend whom I rarely went anywhere at night without, used to drive me to the GB where we’d meet Sacha and friends from law school. Occasionally I was introduced to girls. Although I was too shy to really do much about it, I loved feeling that excitement of getting dressed to go out thinking that perhaps that night I could meet someone and fall in love. The hope of falling in love was a lot to sacrifice for the sake of my career. Apart from that feeling, I missed being able to relax in public without fear of being noticed, and talking to whomever I chose without worrying about people finding out my big secret.