Unprepared

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“Fritzy, Daria, and Me,” Story 1.

2022.

It had been a long flight, exhausting not only from having to fly through Atlanta, but also from the seat mates I had acquired there. Five friends, Southern Belles, heading to Italy.  They had spent a year preparing; two months doing a language intensive. Two sat next to me and three behind. They were so excited that every utterance by one had received a four-fold chorus of “Bless your heart!” in reply.

“How long are you staying?” I asked the one in the middle seat next to me.

“Nine days!” Arabella beamed.

Nine days? A year of planning. Two months of language lessons? For nine. Damned. Days?

“How long are y’all goin’ to be thar?” she asked.

“Two months.”

“Oh my word! How long have y’all been preparing?”

“Um, two weeks.”

 “However will you manage?” she asked in horror, left hand fluttering over her ample chest. “Oh, or are y’all fluent?” 

“Nope,” I said breezily, “I always figured that if you can order beer in German, coffee in Italian and dessert in French you’ll be just fine in Europe.”

Stunned silence. I leaned in conspiratorially.

“But God help you,” I confided, “if you only know how to order beer in Italian, coffee in French, and dessert in German.” I leaned back.

“My,” Arabella sucked in breath, probably at the blasphemy, “goodness,” she exhaled.  A polite half smile appeared on her face. “Well, bless your heart,” she said before turning back to her aisle-side companion and ignoring me for the remainder of the flight.

Mere hours later in a little cafe near the Spanish Steps my phone buzzed. It was Fritzy.

“What?” I didn’t even bother with hello. She was calling to give me more tips on European hookups for middle-aged Aussie women, I knew. 

We’d gotten a bit sozzled last week and she’d concocted a whole imaginary scenario for me to sleep my way around Italy with increasingly wealthy and handsome Italians. I think she had me ending up with a Count on the Riviera. And the sex, well, she had given up describing it and just threw up her hands in an increasingly exaggerated way saying “Oh, my God, the sex!”

“I only just got here,” I said, a bit defensively for having not yet found the street sweeper with the long broom who begins her imaginary story.

“It’s Dar,” she said.

Daria? Daria wasn’t even there that night. She was in Fremantle, visiting her mum. Mrs Wainwright had dementia, but was  in fairly good physical health, I thought.

“Did she die?”

The silence went on for a little bit too long. 

“Who told you?”

“You just did.” Maybe I needed another espresso. “Daria’s mum? Did she die?”

“No,” said Fritzy, “not her Mum.”

My blessed heart began to liquify. 

*****

Fritzy sat on the bonnet swinging her legs, not in a casual way. I could hear the “thunk, thunk, thunk” as her heels jabbed metal.

I silently handed her the chocolate Paddle Pop before damage to the rental car’s grille also ended up on my credit card.

Fritzy opened the end, tugged on the stick, and it came straight out of the ice cream, which remained wedged inside the paper. She sighed very deeply, placed both parts on the bonnet next to her, and resumed staring out  across the Busselton foreshore. 

“Howerugh..” I said. What had nearly escaped my lips was “How did that happen?” but I caught it and swallowed it back whole. Fritzy gave me a side eye. She knew what I had nearly said. Our hold on ourselves and each other was about as solid as that Paddle Pop stick’s hold on the ice cream right about now.

I held out my ice cream to her. She didn’t even look; just sighed again. I unwrapped it and gingerly pulled it free from its paper.

How did this happen? How did any of this happen? We were both sick and tired of the question.

Six days ago – six days!- I had landed in Rome, and by now I should be in Perugia. Instead, I was standing in the carpark of the Busselton Jetty mindlessly eating a banana Paddle Pop, waiting for the RAC to open the rental car inside which one of us (or both of us or neither of us) had accidentally locked the keys.

Trios aren’t supposed to work. Especially trios of teenage girls. There’s always the shifting loyalties, the opportunity for the weakest to join forces with just one other and topple the third. Then, tomorrow, a new alliance forms and the battle goes on. “Trios are the most sinister and manipulative friend groups,” our sociology professor had said, “especially in females,” he added, as if female humans had more in common with female sea turtles than they did with male humans.

But we had never been like that. We three, we happy three: Fritzy, Daria and me. See, it even lilts off the tongue, skipping along like carefree schoolgirls. Not that we ever skipped. 

But we sneaked together (parents’ cigarettes or even booze, but never condoms because we were sure they must count those). 

We shrieked together (generally at the pimply boys taking the tickets at the Luna Park rides we were far too old for, but the boys gave us handfuls of free tickets in exchange for the hope of a pash session on the Tunnel of Love). 

And we freaked together (at exams, at the fear that no-one would invite us to the Law Ball,  and at periods that were late by perhaps thirty minutes but that was plenty enough time to freak out).

Now thehappythreeFritzyDariaandMe was irretrievably, inconsolably, incomprehensibly broken.

I didn’t know if I could even operate as a single, let alone as a duo.  

The RAC van was approaching, and I wished it wasn’t. Despite the coldness, the disjointedness, the collective numbness and grief that should be shared but somehow just refused to co-operate, I knew that being stuck, locked out of a blue Toyota Camry with my morose, uncommunicative, unyielding friend was better than what lay ahead. The bloke from  the RAC would unlock the car. Fritzy and I would get in and continue driving south. And we would have to face it.

Ten minutes later we pulled out of the parking spot and the chocolate Paddle Pop slid off the bonnet.

“Couldn’t save it,” I said, although I knew I shouldn’t have.

Fritzy slammed on the brakes.

“Either,” I added, knowing I really, really shouldn’t have.

Fritzy jammed the gear stick into first, flattened the accelerator and immediately smashed the clutch and the brake. We jumped violently back into the parking spot. The bloke from the RAC started to get back out of his van. When Fritzy yanked her door open, slammed it shut, and stormed away he decided better of it and quietly drove away.

She will probably throw the keys off the end of the jetty and catch an Uber to the airport, I thought. And I would deserve it. But I had stopped time again. That was all that mattered. I put my seat back and closed my swollen, stinging, jet-lagged eyes.

“What happened?” everyone had asked. The other guests at Peg Leg’s forty-fifth birthday party, the ambos, the doctors, me (from Rome),  neighbours, onlookers, people walking past with their cinnamon labradoodles, and finally Daria’s  brother, Tom. We all knew what had happened, but we kept asking anyway.  Daria had just dropped, glass in hand, smile on her face, funny tale on her lips, four decades supposed to be ahead of her. 

There was nothing more to add, and Fritzy had taken it all, answered them all, and asked herself the same damned question I had just asked her in the most cowardly, passive-aggressive way: Why didn’t you save her?  You were in the room. Why didn’t you save my friend, my heart, us?

I blew out a long breath. I was a jerk. I knew it. Fritzy had been on the other side of the room, but even if she hadn’t, it was most likely Daria was dead before she hit the floor. I was a really big jerk.

“I’m a jerk,” I said seventy-three minutes later when Fritzy returned. At least she still had the car keys.

“You’re paying for lunch,” she said, needlessly, and took the exit to Margaret River. 

*****

I had paid for lunch and the four bottles that clinked in the back seat all the way to Cape Leeuwin.

A gale almost blew me back into the car as I stepped out, and Fritzy wrestled her door closed. We battled our way to the lighthouse and I poured a plastic cupful each. Which way should we raise our glasses? To the Indian Ocean on our right, or the Southern on our left? Where are you, Daria? 

A particularly vicious gust threw my hand towards my chest, spilling the pinot noir.

“Careful,” said Fritzy.

I dropped my hand to my side, and a few more drops found the ground. “I don’t like pinot anyway,” I said.

Fritzy stared at me. “Really?” I nodded slightly. “I hate it,” she said, also lowering her glass.

This seemed to be absurdly important information. “Why do we always get a bottle of pinot, then?” I asked.

Fritzy shrugged. “Dunno. Maybe Dar liked it.” She looked straight at the point where two oceans meet.

“Then she can have it,” I declared, cocking my right arm, cup barely upright. “Here’s to you, Daria,” I hollered, and threw the wine into the wind.

Daria did what she had always done, and threw it straight back in my face. Daria never let you get away with anything. From a table in the mortician’s she could command the elements, and this surprised neither of us. 

With red streaks falling from my eyebrows and off my nose onto my shirt, I turned to Fritzy for help. Fritzy and I could rely on each other for cover. 

Fritzy pulled back her championship-winning left arm and pitched her own cupful into the teeth of the gale. “Have another, Daria!” she yelled. The wind, at Daria’s behest, hurled it back even more furiously. Most of Fritzy’s wine ended up on me. 

“Damn you!” I screamed, aiming another cupful into the wind, with the same result. 

We heaved cup after cup with increasing fury until, with the last, Fritzy screamed “Damn you to hell, Tom Wainwright!”

The dregs hit me square in the chest and I didn’t flinch. Yes, damn you to hell, Daria’s slimy little brother. He was the reason Daria was being buried in Fremantle, a place where she had never lived. He was the reason I had dropped my espresso in Rome and caught the first flight back to Melbourne. He was the reason Fritzy had walked away from a really good commission this week so that she and I and Daria could fly to Perth together. Because he, the weasely little toad, had treated his sister’s body like a piece of furniture he was having shipped.

He was the smug little knob who met us at Mrs Wainwright’s door this morning and told us that his mother wasn’t up to seeing us, as if we were selling vacuum cleaners instead of paying our respects. He was the one who looked surprised when we asked for the details of the funeral and replied “It will be a private family affair.”

“Right,” I’d said, “but where and when?”

“It will be a private family affair,” he had repeated, as if to simpletons. 

“But she’s our family,” Fritzy had said, shocked and quiet, to the door he had already closed in our faces.

The wind continued to whip our damp bodies. I shivered.

“He’ll give her a funeral she would have hated,” Fritzy said.

“And we’re out here pissing into the wind,” I replied.

Fritzy looked at the bottles behind us. “Chardonnay?” 

I held out my cup for more ammo.

We threw two bottles of chardonnay into the elements, cup by cup, cursing and damning and hexing everything and everyone that had hurt us, let us down, or just pissed us off. Politicians of every stripe and jurisdiction, boys who had copped a feel, that sociology professor who had an affair with Peg Leg instead of either of us, which lead us to cane toads, officious bureaucrats, ceiling mould, and sweet potato on pizzas.

With the final cupful I condemned to hell “All the poo owners of poo-coloured ‘poo’ dogs,” and collapsed onto the wine-soaked grass. 

I opened the Shiraz, poured a glass and took a large sip. I ached all over. It began in the centre of my chest and flowed into every nook of me: physical, mental, emotional. It was delicious. Relief does not come when our hearts finally heal. It comes when we stop trying to hold them together and just let them break. My liquified heart was somehow still beating, and I luxuriated in the pain.

Fritzy sat and held out her cup. I filled it, put the bottle between my knees, and my left arm around her shoulders.  The wind dropped and the silence bounced around us. The sun had dipped low enough to turn the sky a fiery pink. It reminded me of the colour of Daria’s hair during first year Uni. 

I raised my cup to the Indian Ocean. “Goodbye, darling Daria, you gorgeous, gorgeous, girl. I will always love you.”

Fritzy raised hers to the Southern Ocean. “Rest in peace, Daria, our heart and soul. Send us strength to live without you.”

We clung to each other, shivering as the sun descended into both oceans. 

“Ready?” Fritzy finally asked.

“No,” I said, and stood up anyway.