The Winter of Our Disconnect (6 page)

It’s funny the things you cling to when you whittle down life to its barest essentials. Thoreau found he absolutely could not live without a volume of Homer in the original Greek. For me, it was really, really straight bangs.

 

THE LAST NIGHT, 10:17 p.m. As I write these words, a mere two hours from the start of Operation Hellhole, a full-scale media binge is under way. The girls are stalking a newfound hottie through the many mansions of MySpace, goddaughter Maddi (here on holiday) is taking nourishment from her Sidekick in gulps, and Bill sits becalmed and, I fear, benumbed before his computer game. It’s that hi-def gladiator one again: enormous men with tiny heads, slavegirls in push-up bras. There’s a whole lot of smiting going on.

A bit of grumbling on the way home from Gracetown today, but it’s hard to fight properly after two weeks of holiday. On arriving home, Anni found the strength for one final (or so I hope) tantrum. “What you’re asking us to do is not fair. You’re not even asking. You’re just telling!”

I “acknowledged concerns” because I thought it was a good mediation strategy, but also because she’s right. She announced dramatically that she would “have to move to Dad’s—but I resent it!” All sparked by my refusal to delay The Experiment till tomorrow afternoon, thus allowing her to dry and straighten hair after swimming in the morning.

Am not without sympathy, but implied strongly that the decision was out of my hands. Have given impression that the mains power is “being shut off” (i.e., by the electricity company) rather than admitting that I am turning it off myself. I am a coward. But I am an experienced coward. I know the kind of pester-power this could generate. Like, enough to light up the whole frigging neighborhood.

Made peace by reminding her she was free to straighten at friends’ and neighbors’.

“But, Mum, wouldn’t that be against your own rules?”

Not at all. At least, I don’t think so. Hang on. Don’t these people realize I’m just making it up as I go along? You know, like parenting itself.

Had planned to discuss everybody’s expectations-slash-forebodings of the Big Boring Journey ahead, but chickened out. Am afraid asking them to think ahead in too much detail could be disastrous. They have been remarkably, uncharacteristically acquiescent so far. We want to keep that thought.

For myself, I anticipate missing the most:

I went to the discount hardware store for supplies on the morning of January 4, trying to remember Thoreau’s words: “Simplify, simplify!” Okay, it wasn’t that much to remember. But it was harder than it sounds because I actually love hardware, and the more complicated the better. I can spend hours cruising for DIY stuff: shelving, knobs and fittings, power tools. Picture-hanging tackle is a particular weakness, and so, for some reason, is the fixative aisle—you know, glues, pastes, clamps, fillers. (Please don’t tell me that’s a metaphor.) As I wended my way toward LIGHTING, past ramparts of storage bins and leaf blowers, and down a seemingly endless aisle of hose fittings, I recalled Thoreau’s advice: “Let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand. Instead of a million, count half a dozen; and keep your accounts on your thumbnail.”

Clearly, the man had never gone shopping for flashlights at Bunnings. Lantern-style, high-beam, fluorescent tubed, pocket-sized, solar-powered, waterproof, touch-sensitive, even head-lamp style (just the thing for reading
Walden
in a mineshaft). I spent a good forty-five minutes fretting over my choices, but in the end I think Thoreau would have been proud. Or at least not entirely disgusted. I saved my receipt—because Thoreau saved his receipts, and printed them, which is how we know exactly how much he spent to build his humble one-room house, down to the last nail and board ($28.12½). For what I spent on six lanterns, a box of candles, some large matches, a lot of batteries, and an ice chest ($240.81), Thoreau could have built a convention center.

On the way home I stopped at the deli for the largest bag of ice I could find ($3.75), which I used to fill the ice chest. I stocked it with the essentials: milk, cheese, eggs, a bar of Lindt 70 percent cocoa solids dark, a cucumber, and a pretty decent Margaret River Semillon Sauvignon Blanc. (“I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man,” Thoreau had written. Yes, well. I am a woman.)

It was midmorning by now. I sat at the kitchen table and, watching the curtains stir in a weak sea breeze, reflected happily on all the chores I could not possibly get done. On a normal morning, if I wasn’t at work toggling between my e-mails, my sound editor, the voice mail on two phones, and my customary six open tabs on Internet Explorer, I was at home toggling between the vacuum, the iPhone, the hair straightener, and three Word documents in varying degrees of undress. I’ve always considered mornings to be my most productive time. Thoreau did too, but in a somewhat different spirit. While he was at Walden Pond, he wrote, “Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.” Glancing at the $75 pile of batteries on the kitchen table, it occurred to me that simplicity was deceptively complex. The stillness was good—now that I’d experienced perhaps twenty minutes of it—but it was also, frankly, just a tiny bit spooky.

 

 

It was Sartre, I believe, who observed so gloomily that “life is elsewhere” (and he was living in
Paris
at the time). He was wrong, of course. Life is never elsewhere. And convincing yourself otherwise—that you are fate’s victim, or prisoner, or terry-cloth hand puppet, even—only underscores the point. That’s one thing my not-entirely-self-imposed exile Down Under has taught me.

When I told my Australian boyfriend I’d follow him to the ends of the earth, I had no idea he’d take me so literally. We were in graduate school at NYU, finishing our respective doctorates, when Ron, a Sydneysider, was offered a job in Perth, Western Australia. If it hadn’t been for that job offer, we probably never would have gotten married. We certainly would never have settled in Perth—a move that, from my perspective as a New Yorker (even an idealistic New Yorker, helplessly awash in the dopamine-scented haze of young love) felt more like a transfer to the lunar surface.

When we divorced three years later, it was hardly what you’d call a bolt from the blue. He was an Anglican priest who enjoyed golf, tennis, and vintage port. I was a kick-ass feminist intellectual who excelled at chain-smoking. It was never gonna happen. Our geographical differences were equally irreconcilable. He was overjoyed to be back in his own country after four years in New York. As for me, as much as I appreciated the clean air and gorgeous beaches, I knew I could never in a billion years call Australia home.

That was twenty-four years ago. LOL.

In the meantime, I remarried—a doctor this time—and had three babies (but not necessarily in that order) with alarming alacrity. The kids were four, two, and six months old when we broke up. My first divorce had been sad but amicable. This one was a conflagration. With an Australian as the father of my children, my chances of moving back to the United States were now as remote as Perth itself. I’d followed my heart to the ends of the earth, all right. And now I was stranded here.

That was fourteen years and several lifetimes ago. I look back at those days when I wished my ex-husband would get run over by a bus and feel pretty ashamed. I realize now that migration to a third-world country would have been fine. Kidding, people! He was, and very much still is, the father of my children. I remind myself of that every day of my life. The kids love him, and he loves them, and whatever the differences between us, that should be good enough for me. It’s not. But at least I recognize that it should be. Like that half-done quilt I’ve had stuffed into a bottom drawer since my eldest started middle school, I’m working on it.

Death, it is said, concentrates the mind wonderfully. So, too, does having sole charge of three kids under five. In the early years, like many another single parent, I clung to my professional identity like a baby to an umbilicus. I started writing a weekly newspaper column about my kids. I started writing books about gender and family life. And I started planning. (Up until this time, I decided, I’d lived in the here and now perhaps a little too successfully.) I formulated a five-year plan to get us stateside. Six years later, I revised that to a ten-year plan, and then a fifteen-year plan. In the meantime, the lioness’s share of my energy went to parenting my children: one sticky, sleep-deprived, extraordinary day at a time. I reminded myself that if home was where the heart was, then by any real reckoning I was already back in Kansas. Some of the time, I even believed it.

All this backstory matters, because, in a funny kind of way, being ... well,
cut off
has been such a central theme for me. You might almost say that going off the grid has been the story of my adult life. It has certainly served as the wellspring of my IT attachment issues. Simply put, digital media have made it possible for me to live in two places at once—Australia and America—in a mind/body split so sustained and ambitious, it makes Descartes look like a cheese grater.

When I arrived in Western Australia in 1986, an airmail letter from New York took two weeks to arrive. (“You needed special onion-skin paper, special stamps, special stickers,” I tell the kids in a quavery voice. “Seriously, we’re talking one step beyond sealing wax and a signet ring.”) Trans-hemispheric phone calls were like Woody Allen’s joke about the meals at the Catskills resort: They were terrible and you never got enough of them. Annoying three-second transmission delays ensured plenty of awkward silences and inaudible cross-talk, and an eerie, swishing echo that lent conversation all the intimacy of a Jacques Cousteau special. In fact, “conversing” was a misnomer. Basically, you gurgled. And if the party you were speaking to recognized it as
your
gurgle, you were satisfied.

There were even bigger problems than the four-week turnaround to find out how your two-month-old nephew was (now that he was your three-month-old nephew). The
New York Times
crossword puzzle, for example. Like Rapunzel pining for rampion, my craving for it grew so intense that my worried husband was forced to forage for it—in one case, in the U.S. Consulate General’s office on St. George’s Terrace. It’s a kindness I have never forgotten.

Today,
The New York Times
is my homepage. I read it on my iPhone on the train to work. I do the daily puzzle then, too, if I feel like it. But there’s really no rush. Because as a premium crossword member, I have access to more than four thousand other puzzles, and solutions, from the
Times
’s archives.☺

How can I begin to explain how such innovations have changed my life? I stream NPR’s
Morning Edition
live in my bedroom (albeit in the late evening the previous day, owing to deep time-zone weirdness). I listen to a gazillion U.S. podcasts through my car radio—including almost every program broadcast by my “home” public radio station, WNYC. WNYC! On the Kwinana Freeway, heading south over the Swan River. Past the suburbs of Dog Swamp and Innaloo, and the aspirationally titled Perth Entertainment Center!

I can talk to my family via e-mail, Facebook, IM, or Skype, instantaneously and in real time, whenever I want to. With webcams, we can pretend we’re all in the same room, let alone the same hemisphere. (Which, come to think of it, is maybe why we don’t do it that often ...) I can call my sister’s cell phone on Long Island from my cell phone in Fremantle. I can order American music, books, and DVDs direct from Amazon. I can download American television direct from iTunes—occasionally going to heroic technological lengths to do so (by purchasing a U.S. iTunes gift card on eBay in Australian dollars from some guy in Spain, as I did recently).

Before the Internet, getting books from the States—or even from Sydney or Melbourne—was a long-haul operation. A shipping delay of three to six months was standard. No exaggeration, the words “sea mail” make me nauseated to this day. Today, I can get an e-book as fast as anybody, anywhere—in about a minute. The first time I tried it, I literally wept for joy.

For an information junkie in exile like me, the dawning of the digital age has been like the arrival of a rescue ship.

Even on the occasion of my first encounter online—back when “websites,” so-called, consisted largely of dense pages of alphanumerics—I knew instantly that my world, and by extension THE world, had shifted on its axis, irreversibly. The chill that went down my spine was the same shock of recognition I felt the morning I met my husband, the day I watched my son play his first game of water polo, the moment I beheld my firstborn’s face: that there was life before this moment, and then there would be life after. And I know that sounds pretty dramatic. But ... that’s the point.