No Sex in the City (2 page)

The four of us met at a protest at Sydney University, which is where we all studied. I think it was about student union fees, or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or overpriced food on campus. I can’t remember exactly because we seemed to be protesting about something every month. There were some guys standing near us who weren’t taking it seriously, talking throughout the speeches. When one of them made a comment about the speaker’s breasts, we simultaneously blasted them. They didn’t know what had hit them, being ripped to shreds by four girls from different directions. The four of us had a laugh afterwards, introduced ourselves to each other, and quickly became the best of friends.

So it’s only natural they’re the ones I email. It’s been a while since we’ve all been free at the same time for a catchup.

Oi! Lisa, Ruby and Nirvana,

Okay, so we’re all on the ‘Where is The One hiding out?’ quest. (Don’t deny it, Lisa. I know you must be too.) Are they lost in Ikea, desperately trying to find the exit? Are they being questioned at Sydney Airport while being filmed for
Border Security
? Have they fallen into a manhole? Are they delayed on a Tiger Airways flight?

I’m out of answers!

Are you finding it increasingly hard not to self-combust after yet another failed matchmaking experience, either of the traditional kind (Nirvana and me), or the setting up by friends/eyes locking across a crowded room/etc kind (all of us)? And I bet my life that, like me, you’re all sick to death of hearing people call you ‘old-fashioned’, ‘prude’, ‘frigid’, ‘picky’, ‘fussy’ (the list goes on).

As you can tell, I need to vent. So I hereby declare the official and virtual inauguration of the No Sex in the City Club.

Our first meeting is on Friday, 8 p.m., Chocolate Spice in Newtown. Come along with your emotional baggage, horror stories, impossible checklists, twenty-something angst and an appetite for a high-calorie emotional-eating pig-out session. If you’re dieting (that means you, Nirvana – no points calculators or carb-to-protein ratios allowed), positive, optimistic or in love, don’t bother showing up. Only those who can truly indulge in a proper dose of self-pity (and comfort eating) are invited.

Love Esma

PS. I miss you guys. It’s been two weeks. What’s that about?

I work at a recruitment agency finding potential employees for various clients, predominantly in the pharmaceutical industry. It’s Friday and I’m on my way to my last appointment for the day, at a pharmacy in Bondi. It’s two in the afternoon and the traffic is killing me. I turn up the music in my car (a bomb of a Honda Civic that is the bane of my mum’s existence as she can’t understand why I’m nearly thirty and still haven’t managed to save up for a ‘nice-looking’ car). Pearl Jam blares out of the speakers and I instantly feel calm. Until a truck veers onto my side of the road. I swerve out of the way and slam my hand down hard on the horn. The truckie sticks his head out of his window and yells, ‘Ah get ova ya PMS willya!’

‘Learn how to drive!’ I yell back.

The traffic light changes and the truckie blows me a kiss and continues in the opposite direction, leaving me fuming.

I just want to get the appointment over and done with so I can get back on the road before the real traffic jam begins. I live about an hour’s drive away from Bondi – when there’s no traffic. If I get trapped on the motorway in peak hour I’ll never make it home in time to get ready for tonight and drive to Newtown to meet the girls.

When I finally arrive at the pharmacy I take the liberty of parking in a staff car space. I quickly apply some lip gloss, get my file in order, smooth out my hair and hurry in through the front door to meet Mrs Goldman, who ushers me to the back room for our meeting.

‘Like I told you on the phone,’ she says as she pours me a glass of chilled water, ‘I want someone hard-working and honest.’

‘Of course,’ I respond, smiling broadly at her. ‘That’s the least an employer can expect. I’ve short-listed four résumés for you to review. As you specified, they are all recent graduates with excellent qualifications.’

‘And Jewish,’ she adds.

I blink at her.

‘Jewish only,’ she repeats, holding out her hand for the résumés.

‘Er ... well ... that isn’t really appropriate,’ I say.

‘What do you mean?’ she snaps. ‘Is being Jewish inappropriate?’

‘No, I didn’t mean it that way! I mean it’s, well, it’s unlawful to discriminate on the grounds of—’

She waves her hands at me and cuts me off. ‘Don’t talk to me about the law,’ she says. ‘People do this all the time. You go to Cabramatta and everyone working there is Vietnamese. Are you telling me that’s pure coincidence? You go to Lakemba and they’re all Muslim. Work with the rules of life, Esma, not against them. Find me a Jewish graduate. Most of my customers are Jewish and I want somebody who understands their needs.’ She snatches the résumés from me and looks at the one on top.

‘Huh!’ she exclaims. ‘You think an old Jewish bachelor is going to ask
Indira Singh
for Viagra? He wants to ask Naomi Kreutner, who can then go spread the word and
bang
, he’s back in the dating scene again.’

The way I see it, asking Indira Singh would protect the old fellow’s anonymity. Wouldn’t he prefer that to having his local community knowing he was throwing back Viagra?

Oh well, who am I to argue? I’ve been a virgin for twenty-eight years. I’m not exactly an expert on Viagra.

Mrs Goldman flips through the résumés and hands them back to me. ‘Not one Jewish name,’ she says with a sigh. ‘Back to the drawing board, Esma.’

‘I can’t advertise in a way that discriminates against non-Jews,’ I say.

She flashes me a condescending smile. ‘My dear, nobody is asking you to break the law. I pay you to be creative in the screening process. Ask the right questions and you will work it out. And don’t feel bad. People do this all the time.’

‘Really?’ I mutter, knowing full well that she’s right.

‘Of course! It was only yesterday that I was talking to a friend who’s started a waxing business. Most of her clients are of a Mediterranean background, so she needs an assistant who knows how to rip off that kind of hair. Most of the Anglos, well, you couldn’t make a tiny plait out of their leg hair. And still they complain!’ She stands up abruptly. ‘Don’t disappoint me, okay?’

I smile warily and collect my things. ‘I won’t,’ I say, conscious that my boss will kill me if I lose this contract, given that the Goldmans own five pharmacies across the eastern suburbs and have only just come on board as a new client.

The traffic on the way home is bad but not shocking. I call my boss, Danny Blagojevic, and give him a blast about Mrs Goldman.

‘You’re overreacting,’ he scolds. ‘She’s the client and it’s up to her to hire whoever she wants. It happens all the time.’

‘I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,’ I mumble.

‘Like she said, it all comes back to the screening process. Just specify that speaking Hebrew is a bonus. Advertise in the
Jewish News
. Use your imagination ... So how’d your family date go the other night?’

I almost hit the car in front of me.

‘
Excuse me?
How on earth do you know about that? And it wasn’t a
family date
.’

‘I heard you on the phone. So the guy was fresh off the boat, hey?’

‘I’m really not sure what you mean by that, Danny,’ I say. ‘Are you referring to European settlers?’

He chuckles. ‘If you want to hook up with an asylum seeker, that’s your call. But how’s he going to afford a ring or house when he’s locked up in a detention centre?’

‘That’s offensive, Danny.’

‘When are you going to realise it’s not the eighteen hundreds?’ he presses. ‘They had the sexual liberation movement in the sixties for a reason, you know.’

‘Oh, give it up,’ I say mildly.

What I really want to say is,
Shut the F up, Danny!
But self-preservation wins out.

Let me explain. Danny’s a forty-year-old spoilt rich boy in an unhappy relationship (‘My wife married me, put on ten kilos and has been a bitch to me ever since’), who opened the recruitment firm when he was twenty-three and has since refused several offers to buy it for over a million dollars. He likes his expensive clothes, expensive watches, expensive cars. He’s a pretentious prick who can turn on the charm one moment and viciously cut you down the next.

The thing is, I’ve never been in his bad books. In fact, for reasons that elude me, I’m his favourite. And it makes our relationship excruciating.

‘I told you, you’re crazy to want to settle down,’ he says. ‘Marco’s a top bloke. I’ll set you up with him – you can have some fun, and Jesus, if it works out and you’re that desperate for commitment, he might even call himself your boyfriend. But trust me: you don’t want to get married. Only masochists choose that path.’

‘Not everybody is unhappily married,’ I say. ‘So don’t go projecting your failures onto the rest of us.’

‘Ooh, see, that’s why I want to set you up with Marco. You two are never lost for words.’

‘Have a great weekend, Danny,’ I say.

‘Yeah, that’s frigging unlikely given Mary’s forcing me to go furniture shopping with her.’

I want to tell Danny where he can stick his furniture shopping, but he’s my boss. There’s only so much I can say without crossing the line. And as annoyed as I am by his constant remarks about my way of life (not drinking, making up excuses to get out of after-work partying sessions at the local club, wanting to settle down with a Muslim, volunteering to help ‘queue jumpers’), I’ve never taken him on about any of it. I need this job too badly.

Because I have a secret.

About two years ago, my dad’s ‘gambling for fun’ turned into a serious addiction. He hasn’t been near a fruit machine since, and is slowly trying to get his life back on track. The thing is this: I’m part of the ‘back on track’ plan. And nobody, including my mum or my sister, Senem, knows about it.

I only know because I came home from work early one day to find Dad alone, sobbing in the lounge room. Before then I’d only ever seen my dad cry when his mother and, later, his father passed away.

‘Dad?’ I said, shocked. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Our house,’ he said. ‘Our house.’

That’s when I noticed the letter in his hand. I walked over to him. It was from the bank, advising of the arrears on a loan. Our house had been used as security against the loan. The letter warned that the last two monthly repayments had to be paid within seven days or enforcement steps would be taken. I almost cried out when I saw the outstanding balance: just under one hundred thousand dollars. I remember the burning sensation that came over my face, as though I’d stuck my head in the doors of a furnace.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked, desperately trying to remain calm as I sat down next to him.

‘Your mother doesn’t know,’ he choked out. ‘Neither does your sister. Nobody knows. This is between you and me only.’

My mum, who defies most of the usual stereotypes about migrants, housewives and Muslims (the trifecta), has nonetheless always been happy to leave Dad with the responsibility of managing the finances. Since migrating from Turkey, she hasn’t done a single day’s paid work, preferring instead to be a housewife. She’s happy to let Dad be responsible for paying the bills and mortgage. Dad has had lots of jobs but for the past ten years he’s mainly worked as a cleaner at a hospital. I always thought that this must work for them, because I’ d never known them to fight about money.

I nodded and he took a deep breath, wiping his eyes with the back of his sleeve. I’d never seen him so vulnerable; he seemed defeated and helpless. Then and there the dynamics between us shifted for good. I was still his daughter, of course, but suddenly I was also his confidante.

I’d grown up to believe that my parents were infallible; I was their daughter and respected them as wiser and more experienced. That didn’t mean I wouldn’t argue and fight and attempt to shift the power balance when it suited me, but there was always a line – drawn out of respect, deference and gratitude – that I would never dare cross.

Every word Dad uttered that day threatened to erase that line.

‘I never meant for this to happen,’ he said, speaking to me in Turkish. His voice was thick with shame. ‘It was just for fun at first. When I was with my friends at the club I was happy. One thing led to another and we tried the fruit machine. You win once and you think,
Why can’t I win again?
I couldn’t stop. Like my smoking.’ He let out a small, cheerless laugh. ‘The cigarette burns down to a stub and I look at it, surprised by how quickly it’s gone. So I reach for another cigarette, thinking I’ll savour this one, but then in another second I forget I’m smoking. It’s become so natural to me that I hardly know I’m doing it. That’s how the gambling was.’

I sucked in my breath. ‘Are you still gambling?’ I eventually asked.

‘No, thank God I quit. I met somebody at the mosque ... he’d gone through the same thing and he’s helped me. And I haven’t gone near a machine for two years.’

‘Two
years
... How have you kept this from us – from Mum – for so long?’

He stared down at the carpet. He hadn’t looked me in the eye since he’d started speaking. ‘There are many things that even the closest of people can hide from each other. Being deceitful is easier than being honest, especially when the other person has such trust in you.’

I tried not to cry as he spoke.

‘I took out a loan against the house, but I’ve missed a couple of payments. That’s why the bank is now chasing me. And this is why, Esma ...’ He turned to face me then, grabbing my hands and holding on tight. ‘I
need
you, darling. I have no one but you to depend on. I
can’t
lose this house. Your mother would never forgive me. It would destroy her – the betrayal, the shame.’ He squeezed my hands. ‘I need to ask you to please help me pay the loan.’

Dad went on to explain how he’d taken extra shifts at work but that it was getting very hard to meet the monthly repayments. He needed my help. He also needed me to keep his secret, even from my sister, Senem. He didn’t want Senem’s husband, Farouk, to know. It would mean losing face in front of his son-in-law.