Sisterchicks Down Under Page 2

  “Cute,” I said with a smile. “But the hobbit definitely needs to go.”

  Mad Dog let out his guffaw laugh. “You’ll have to clear that one with Mr. Barry, the landlord. What do you think of the garage?”

  The tiny building that was separate from the main house had a window in front with curtains. It reminded me of the toolshed my father had built in our backyard when I was a girl. My two sisters and I wanted to turn the shed into a playhouse, but Dad never let us.

  “The garage is cute, too.” I turned my attention to the main house. The bungalow appeared to be freshly painted in a soft shade of celery green with white trim around the two front windows. It was much smaller than our home in Tustin, but I could make this cottage into “our” place for three months.

  “You think this will work for you?” Mad Dog asked.

  “Yes.” I nodded and looked to see if Tony agreed. He did.

  “You got a good woman, Tony.” Mad Dog reached into the back of the van for our luggage. “Last week a guy who came down here from Canoga Park left after ten days on the job. His wife said she couldn’t live in such primitive conditions. She said he had to decide between her or the job. He picked her.”

  “Good choice.” I looped a shoulder bag over my arm and reached for another bag.

  Mad Dog looked at me with his eyebrows raised. “If you say so.”

  I headed for the front door and was at the doorstep when Mad Dog called, “Kathleen, over here.” He was standing by the garage’s side door.

  I stumbled through the grass and past the lantern-holding, smirking hobbit and wondered if the house key was hidden in the garage. Or maybe Mad Dog wanted to give us the full tour before we went inside the house.

  He opened the garage’s side door. Tony stepped in first. I followed, and the lights turned on. Literally.

  This was it. We were “home.”

  Barely breathing, I dropped both the shoulder bags and stood in the middle of our garage apartment. The single room came with a bed covered in an overly bright floral bedspread, a corner table, two metal patio chairs, a sink, an armchair, a hot plate, and the prized feature—a dorm-sized refrigerator.

  “Bathroom is back there.” Mad Dog pointed to a door that looked as if it should open to the backyard.

  I looked at Tony. He wasn’t moving. Or blinking.

  With quiet steps, I wove my way through the furniture to the closed door and opened it. The newly built bathroom/laundry room/storage room/closet space was nearly half the size of the entire garage apartment. The room had been beautifully finished and was by far the nicest part of the apartment. The white curtains fluttered as a cool breeze came through the open window and coaxed me to breathe again.

  I looked at the bathtub, my usual place of retreat and reflection in times of stress. The inner sanctum was defiled by a wooden drying rack propped up inside it. Over the rack was draped a pair of men’s briefs. Not just any briefs, but giant-sized briefs.

  The cry of distress that had been welling up inside me came out in two unexpected words. “Jumbo briefs!”

  “What?” Tony came over to me.

  I pointed and blinked so I wouldn’t cry.

  “Who would’ve left their underwear in here?” Tony asked.

  “They look a little too large to belong to the garden hobbit,” I said in a pathetically squeaky voice.

  Mad Dog cracked up, his cough-laugh bouncing off the walls. “You keep that sense of humor going, Kathleen, and you’ll be fine.”

  I pressed my lips together and felt my heart swell with empathy for the wife from Canoga Park. Perhaps she had been the tenant in this toolshed before us. Her departure might have been the reason Mad Dog was able to find a place for us. Perhaps the jumbo briefs were her husband’s and had been left in their hasty departure.

  “You paid the first month’s rent already, right?” Tony asked.

  Mad Dog nodded. “I had to grab the place as soon as it opened up, since nothing else is for rent in this neighborhood. You’d have more options if you decided to buy a car.”

  Tony glanced my way. Our discussions about simplifying life during these three months had sounded so noble and appealing when we were in California working out a plan. We agreed that we needed to do this without the expense of a car. Obviously both of us thought the amount we had set aside for rent would have resulted in a lot more living space than it had.

  “What can I do to help you guys settle in?” Mad Dog asked. I recognized in his voice a commendable effort to put a positive spin on the situation.

  “We can take it from here.” Tony stepped into the other room and checked out the premium unused space under the bed.

  “You’ll need some groceries.” Mad Dog apparently wasn’t willing to leave so quickly. “I can drive you to the store, unless you want to walk down to the dairy. That’s what they call the corner market around here. Or, hey, I know a great place for fish and chips. You have to eat fish and chips your first day here. We could all drive there now.”

  Tony looked at me, and I returned his numb gaze. I wasn’t ready to sit with another seat belt around me for any reason. Even if food was waiting at the end of the journey.

  “Do you want to stay here, Kath? I’ll take a run with Mad Dog to get some food.” Tony opened the refrigerator, as if sizing up how much space he had to fill. His mind was always editing, arranging, and adjusting to fit the parameters of a given situation.

  Once Mad Dog left, I would let Tony know that too much information had been edited from our housing arrangements. This place was not going to be okay. Not for ninety days and ninety nights. Not when Tony was the one who would be going to work every day, and I would be the one sitting here with nothing to do.

  We don’t have to stay here. We can find another place. This is just for a night or two. We won’t even need to unpack. This is very temporary.

  “Anything you want me to bring back for you, Kathleen?”

  I mouthed the word chocolate.

  My knowing husband nodded. “Anything else?”

  “After the chocolate it doesn’t matter.”

  Tony and Mad Dog opened the door to leave, and there stood our landlord with his large fist raised, as if he were about to knock. He was huge. Gigantic enough to fit into the briefs occupying the hallowed bathtub space.

  In a deep voice with a New Zealand accent, Mr. Barry boomed out his greeting. Then he ducked the way I remembered Gandalf ducking to enter Bilbo Baggins’s house in the Shire. Mr. Barry seemed to fill the room. Suddenly the joke seemed to be on me. I was the hobbit!

  I tried to keep my jet-lagged self from bursting into laughter. Not a friendly chuckle sort of laugh. Welling up inside me was the sort of unladylike, explosive laugh that accompanies any truly successful preteen girls’ sleepover.

  I couldn’t hold it in. The laughter spilled put. I couldn’t help it. I’d never before met a giant’s underwear before I met him.

  “Jet lag,” Tony said graciously.

  I composed myself, and Mr. Barry told us all the important specifics of the apartment, including trash pickup and making the next rent payment. I only half listened, confident we wouldn’t be here by the time the trash was ready for pickup.

  As soon as all the guys left, I flopped onto the surprisingly comfortable bed. My head was pounding.

  How many days do we have before Tony starts work? Three? No, wait. What day is this?

  We flew out of LAX on Tuesday night. We lost a day when we crossed the international date line, so that made today Thursday. At least I thought it was Thursday.

  I am so lost. What are we doing here?

  I promised myself that regardless of what day it was, before Monday arrived, Tony and I would be settled in a real nest. All I had to do right now was float a little longer.

  Tony and Mad Dog returned with a bundle of newspapers that Tony placed on our tiny table. He pulled back the pages. In the center were half a dozen large pieces of breaded, deep-fried fish and a mound of French fries
. The excess oil from the fish and chips had soaked through the thin paper on which the fish were separated from the layers of daily news. I found the odor of the oil on the dried newspaper ink inviting.

  “Here’s the malt vinegar.” Mad Dog pulled several small plastic packets from his back pocket. “You have to try it with the vinegar.”

  I sat in the armchair and enjoyed the fish and chips while Tony unpacked the groceries.

  “I’m not sure where we’re going to put all this food,” he said.

  “I told your man he was buying too much,” Mad Dog said.

  “Tony all we needed was some snacks, milk, and Cheerios to get us through breakfast tomorrow.”

  “Did you say Cheerios?” Tony held up a package of what looked like little red-skinned sausages. “This is what they call cheerios around here.”

  “No cereal Cheerios?”

  Tony shook his head.

  “Oh.”

  Three months without my favorite breakfast food felt almost as shocking as the first sight of this garage apartment. It was all I could do to keep from crying. Over cereal. Or maybe it really was the jet lag. My throat hurt, and one of my ears hadn’t popped yet. I just wanted to go home.

  Mad Dog left after the fish and chips were devoured. Tony leaned against the closed door and looked around. “Well, what do you think?”

  I told Tony every single thought down to my opinion of the obnoxiously bright floral bedspread that dominated the room.

  Tony selected that problem as the first he would attempt to solve. “You think it’s too bright? Really?”

  I was fired up and let my words fly. “It’s so blazingly bright that I feel like we could gather around and roast hot dogs in the visual heat it gives off.”

  “Or roast cheerios.” Tony grinned.

  “That’s not funny.” I clenched my jaw

  “Kathleen, relax! It’s just the name of a breakfast cereal.”

  “Apparently it’s not! Not in this country, at least!”

  Tony laughed at my fury, and that was his mistake.

  To retell all the things that were said and done during our first two weeks in that toolshed apartment would have no redeeming value. I will simply confess that the worst in me met the worst in Tony, and I don’t ever want to go through an experience like that again.

  The conclusion was that we weren’t able to find alternate housing. We didn’t buy a car. Tony “stopped by” the studio within five hours of our arrival in Wellington, and I became a studio widow much sooner than I’d expected.

  My survival therapy included many long, hot baths; every variety of Cadbury chocolate available at the corner dairy; a stack of magazines; and a lot of sleep in our comfortable bed with the bedspread turned to the plain side. I refused to eat any cheerio sausages, and I cried every day.

  At the end of the second week of my extravagant self-pity, Tony came home on a bicycle. My project-energized husband had stayed his course during that horrible first two weeks with a fresh sense of definition and fortitude. I had been legitimately ill with a terrible head cold the first four or five days after our arrival and slept as much as I could. After I was better, I still wasn’t “better.”

  “I got a bike.” Tony wheeled it into the only open space by the sink and refrigerator.

  “So I see.”

  “One of the guys gave it to me, because he bought a new one over the weekend. I thought you and I could buy another one and go for rides together.”

  I had no words to express to Tony what a bad idea that was. A bicycle wouldn’t “fix” what I had. I hadn’t ridden a bike since I was a kid. Why would I want to start again now?

  “Did you go out this morning?” He motioned toward the stack of magazines beside me. I was still in my pj’s, nestled under the covers, but Tony knew the only way I could get more magazines was by walking to the dairy.

  “No, I already had these,” I said defensively.

  He came closer, scrutinizing the headlines and pictures on the covers. “What possible value do you gain from reading this sort of stuff?”

  What Tony didn’t realize was that he was talking disrespectfully of my friends. And in front of them, no less. The people in these magazines had been my only companions since we had arrived.

  “Hey, do I start criticizing the way you spend your day the minute you walk in here?”

  Tony raised his eyebrows but quickly edited his usual comeback. We’d already had this argument. A couple of times. He spent his days profitably, immersed in his dream job. Me? I had no reason to get up in the morning. In seventy-four days we would leave here, and I’d get back my life. But for now, the only option I could see was hibernation.

  Tony positioned himself rigidly against the counter and lowered his voice. “Kathleen, listen.”

  I steadied myself for the worst. Whenever he edited his thoughts to a two-word sentence, and my full name was one of the two words, I knew it wouldn’t be good.

  “What do you need?” he asked.

  “Not a bike.”

  “What then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He seemed to be working very hard to get the next sentence to come out of his mouth. When it did, I knew he meant it.

  “Do you want us to go back home?”

  My first thought was, Yes! Then some long-buried competitive seed inside me sprouted, and I thought of how I’d barely lasted longer than the woman from Canoga Park. I could do better than that. Much better.

  I stared at Tony but didn’t give him any feedback with my words or my expression. This man, who was looking at me with sincere tenderness, had sold his father’s rare coin collection to buy my engagement ring. He had been there for me every moment during our two miscarriages. In our wedding vows, I had drawn from the book of Ruth and promised, “Where you go, I will go; where you live, I will live. Your people will be my people, your God will be my God.”

  And now he was willing to give up his dream job to restore my sanity.

  I hated what I had become. Instead of an adventurous mama bird on a three-month sabbatical from work and routine who soared through new experiences, I’d tucked my head under my wing and folded up inside myself.

  Blinking away a tear, I looked down at the magazine beside me. Details of a celebrity’s messy divorce were splashed across the front.

  “No.” I shook my head and met Tony’s gaze. “I don’t want to leave. We need to stay here.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I nodded, and with a firm voice I said, “Yes, I’m sure.”

  Tony looked as if he were trying to mask his relief and select his next words carefully. “Okay. Then if we’re going to stay, and we both agree about that, what do you need to make this time in New Zealand work for you? You have to tell me what you need.”

  I paused. Not a single thought came to mind. Whenever my friend Patsy went on autopilot like this at work, she would say “This is why they put the word pause in menopause.” Were more changes happening inside me than I realized?

  “I honestly don’t know,” I said at last. My voice was more tender than it had been in two weeks. “I don’t know what I need.”

  “What about doing some travel while we’re here? Mad Dog went to Christchurch a few months ago. It’s on the South Island. He said it reminded him of Oxford, in England. You always wanted to go to England. You could go with a tour group or something. There’s a lot more to New Zealand than Wellywood.”

  “Than what?”

  “Wellywood. That’s what employees at the studio call Wellington because it’s a little Hollywood.”

  I realized Tony was even picking up lingo from the locals. The only local I’d talked to besides Mr. Barry was Mrs. Patel at the corner dairy, and she was from India.

  “Look, Kath, this is how I see it.” Tony reached for my hand. “It doesn’t matter to me if you go on a tour. My point is that, for as long as I can remember, you’ve poured out yourself and your time for everyone else. I’ve felt bad that you’ve
had to work for us to get by financially. You know that.”

  “I wanted to work. Besides, we live in an expensive part of the country.”

  “I know, but I thought that coming here would be a good thing for you, too. It wasn’t supposed to just be for me. I never thought this experience would empty you. It was meant to fill you.”

  All the anger in my heart dissolved. I told Tony I wanted to be there for him the way he had always been there for me. He told me our marriage was more important than any job in any corner of this green earth. I knew he meant it. I also knew I could do a whole lot better at adjusting than I had. I hadn’t even tried.

  The next morning, with the warmth of my best kiss on his lips, Tony boarded his shiny new bike and took off for work, whistling like the happiest man in the world.

  I took a shower, dressed, made the bed, opened the windows, and thoroughly cleaned our neglected living space. Then I took on the challenge of washing our garments from the previously untouched mound of dirty clothes. The garage laundry room didn’t come with a dryer; so I filled a basket with the wet items and headed for the backyard.

  It was nearly noon and a beautiful, sunny day with a softness in the air. I made my way to the umbrella clothesline in the unfenced yard and pinned up our clean clothes. The saying, “airing your laundry,” took on new meaning as I realized that, when you hang your clothes out to dry, you really do have fewer secrets from your neighbors.

  “Wondered when we’d be seeing you.” Mr. Barry’s deep voice startled me.

  I spun around. “Hello, Mr. Barry. How are you?”

  “No complaints.”

  “Is it okay with you if I use the clothesline today?”

  “I don’t mind, if you don’t mind.”

  “I was wondering, Mr. Barry. Is there a place nearby where I can get a coffee?”

  I hadn’t had what I considered a decent cup of coffee since we’d arrived. I didn’t want to sound like a whiny American who was going through separation anxiety from her favorite barista, even if that was the truth.