Parking

Early in transition, and I think I am managing. I have just parked next to a twin cab ute. I’m facing a building site that is throwing up dust, which drifts away in a summer morning breeze. The sun’s heat immediately begins to press into the tiny cabin. I push the door ajar. I pop down the sun visor and fold out its vanity mirror. I begin my makeup. I have always done this in a bathroom, but there was no time before school drop today. I need a blob of foundation, obtained by tipping a small amount from the bottle onto a scrap of notepaper I find lying in the console. I struggle to get the cheek blush right without enough distance to the mirror. I muck it up on one side – the first time I’ve ever done that. Have to patch over it with more foundation. Finally, it is more or less sorted. The liquid lip colour has almost run out. I’m as done as I’m going to be.

The phone rings.

“Hello”: this is my new one-word greeting. One word, because I can’t decide the next one to say. I don’t have one name anymore. It seems untenable. But that is how things are just now: untenable.

The voice at the other end does not have any small talk. It wants to deliver a message. “I just want to say that what you are doing is a good thing, and you are a better person as a result”.

It is my ex-wife. The same ex-wife who had been bewildered, furious, bitter, bereft and despairing as our marriage disintegrated; emotions all of which made sense to me. They matched the pangs of guilt that I felt every day.

Her words today are nothing like that. However, my reaction to her message is as visceral as it is unexpected. I throw the phone across the car. It bounces and settles, as I convulse with sobs, face squashed to the glass of the driver’s side window. My body shrinks me shut. I curl up awkwardly, wedged between steering wheel and seat, and cry and cry.

From the phone I can just hear “…it’s good that…” “…hello?” then a sigh and a tiny pip. It leaves silence; well, not silence because I am still snivelling. And it rings again and I can breathe deeply enough to manage to pick it up and say, “yes, hello”.

“You are doing well, you are a good person…” She exercises a gift not to pause or ask me why I stopped talking. She speaks unhesitatingly, unlike my halted strangled tones whenever something deeply emotional was at the centre of conversation – like the breakdown of our marriage. She speaks directly in a matter-of-fact style that hides her emotions. She gives affirmation that comes out of the blue.

“Thank you”, I finally manage to muster. And again, more easily. “Thank you.” I breathe, once, twice, feeling my chest expand, relaxing, and in so doing, paradoxically, tightening against unfamiliar bra straps. The call ends.

I dry my eyes and look at myself in the little fold-down mirror. The car is fiery now, the sun is strong, the builders and contractors who favour this over-the-kerb parking come and go. My eyes are red and watery but my foundation is industrial, apparently, so is completely intact. I open the door to the air, swing my long legs out in their pointed heels and step across the dirt-encrusted concrete with the weight on the balls of my feet until I reach the road.

A wry smile twists my face as I cross the street and approach the building opposite. I am merely headed for the pavement and the two blocks to my preferred café. But it looks – to everyone else? To me? – as though I am marching toward the front door of a professional suite belonging, of course, to a psychologist.

I walk straight past it. My only rendezvous this morning is with a barista. I don’t need a psychologist. Not today. That appointment will come.