The Garden

1993. A sunny Melbourne weekend day.

 

I was sitting in my backyard, my mind wandering under the weight of the heat, when  a sudden slightly panicky  thought  distracted my mind that had been happily absorbed in admiring  my lush and colorful garden - 'I’ve now done everything I can reasonably expect to do in my life -  I am middle-aged, I own my own home, I am in a stable relationship, my son is launched into adulthood, I have reached the top of my career; this is it'. A stable, if somewhat boring life, stretched ahead.

 

It is now 2004. Looking back on my diary of the nineties I read an entry made just two months after that sunny Melbourne day.

 

 'The streets of an American city are arranged as a grid. The are named numerically and surround symmetrical houses and shops or 'stores'. The shoppers at the brightly lit supermarkets make sure that at least three feet separate them from others. Apartments are sprayed with what smells like vanilla essence. Politeness is the order of the city'  - Oklahoma 1993.

 

Ten years have now passed since that sunny afternoon in Melbourne.   My life now is a world away from what seems to me now as a dreamtime in those lazy hazy days of that  late summer in Melbourne,  Australia.

 

In less than one year after that sunny Melbourne afternoon I was walking through the revolving doors of a Fifth Avenue office building in Manhattan where I was working as an IT manager. I was living in Connecticut, a couple of doors away from Diana Ross and opposite the house of the CEO of Proctor and Gamble. I was earning $80,000 US p.a. - a fortune ‘back home’ in 1993. My comfortable clothes I’d worn to work in academia were discarded for stylish outfits from Lord and Taylor. I was drinking coffee rather than tea. And the Melbourne Age had been supplanted by the New York Times.

 

From Melbourne to Oklahoma to Manhattan. It wasn’t planned. I would never have thought that I’d ever realise  my adolescent dream of working on Fifth Avenue, New York. 

 

Yet it happened by chance. One minute a small-time academic in a minor Australian university, next minute an IT manager in America. It wasn’t planned, it wasn’t even subject to any organisation once the path was set. I just drifted into being one of the many Australian expats.

 

The Emailer

It started with the person I now think of as 'The Emailer'. Long before the days of cyber romances  and match.com, before the internet was enjoyed by the general public, it was used by academics, searching USENet forums for their research.  I was one of them. I would correspond with other computer scientists . I was in the rat-race of academic competition.  Publish or perish, I was finishing  a paper on the exciting subject of multi-chromosome genetic algorithms. Fascinating stuff. And in doing so I met my fellow researchers scattered over the globe.

 

Internet romances were not yet known. I cannot even imagine now what it was like, and am forced back to my old diary.

 

'’What’s the weather  like in Melbourne?’, he added to his technical question . Sitting at my desk in my Californian bungalow,   twelve thousand miles from America, I typed in a quick answer to this email message from the heart of Missouri. Some careless response, never to be remembered. An easy innocent answer. Responded to instantly.

 

I kept  answering and he kept replying. Weather questions turn  to flights of repartee, and within three days we are part of each other’s lives. Email, photos exchange hands, phone calls … cards.

 

He is fleshed out in my mind and the characters appearing on the screen describe a person     that seems to be my alter ego. He is my  true soul-mate. He thinks like me. And he is beyond me. Me, but more sensitive - aware, good, interesting, intelligent. A perfect man is created.'

 

Looking back, my former self seems foolish and naïve.  Yet a whirlwind cyber-romance developed at the speed of the bandwidth at the time. As if fated, my genetic algorithms paper was accepted by the upcoming  Fourth Annual Conference on Genetic Algorithms. I arrived in America to attend the conference - at the mid-Western university of Urbana-Champaign in June 1993.

 

The OK State

The conference was followed by a vacation, the vacation by a sabbatical and the internet romance became 'real'. By August 1993 I was living in Edmond, Oklahoma. Oklahoma - all I had known about it was the Broadway musical.

 

 What were the words of the song? 'The corn was as high as an elephant’s eye'. How true. Corn was everywhere. In the air, in the food, in the television advertisements. I was saturated in corn. Oklahoma - 'The OK State' read the number-plate slogans. Oh well, at least they weren’t boastful.

 

But still I was stunned. What a place. I could never have imagined such a world. The Walt Disney comics of my childhood came to life - back to the diary.

 

'The over-sized cup-cakes of Donald Duck comics, the red-roofed barns and cotton candy, the yellow brick road and the Tin Man. I had always thought the America of comics and Golden  Books and Hollywood was an exaggeration, an Andy Warhol-like depiction of a reality not so dissimilar to my  own, but just a little off-centre - as if aliens, observing earthlings had tried to reproduce life on Earth but had somehow gotten it wrong. But I’d been wrong. This was it. This was America...

 

Although in many ways Oklahoma  resembles the Australian outback - red earth, flat, hot, the ways of the locals are far from those of your outback Aussie.

 

The main difference, but a difference that invades all parts of social interaction, is the role of the church in everyday life. Most social activity revolved around the church and it seemed that everyone was a member of one church or another. As a well-brought-up  atheist I was bemused. The daily missives in the form of welcoming pamphlets that arrived in the letterbox alluded to a heaven where we’d meet all our friends and acquaintances, outfitted in earthly clothes and doing their earthy jobs. Heaven was presented  as a simple change in geographical location. Instead of being in Edmond Oklahoma, you’d be in another Edmond, somewhere in the sky, the only difference being that you would be immortal and there’d be no bad people around. Fascinating stuff, but not the world view to hold an atheist from Melbourne.

 

The cyber relationship was developing non-virtual holes and so I decided another life decision was needed. Not ready to go back to Australia - America held a strange fascination for me -  I procrastinated until, when luck would have it, an old childhood friend invited me for a long weekend in Connecticut.

 

The Very Heart Of It

From an apartment smelling of artificial vanilla essence, from the flatness and red earth of Oklahoma,  I found myself in affluent  Greenwich Connecticut. A place resembling a parody of Sussex, England. It was autumn, or should I say fall. Colorful  trees graced the private roads, protected by private guards in the real-estate-privileged Greenwich, Connecticut.

 

I was there for  Halloween.  Greenwich resident Diana Ross gave out CDs as treats for trick and treat and the local children were driven from mansion to mansion in chauffeur driven Mercedes. The poorer families drove their own Lexus….

 

Yep - I stayed! I returned to Oklahoma  just  long enough to say au revs to the Emailer, the Church of the Lone Star and the flat red earth of Steinbeck territory. No more Indian souvenir Trading Posts, no more Pennys department stores, no more Taco Bells. Instead 'strip shopping', tea rooms,  French restaurants, in-house ‘maids’, and a pretence of decorum.

 

I was offered a job. With enough money to leave my friends 'spare room' which was in reality the whole third floor of her Greenwich abode, which was twice the size of the Northcote California bungalow that was fast fading into long term memory. As was The Emailer; but he was more persistent. After visiting me a few times, this Mid-Westerner lad, who had never even been to Connecticut or New York, decided yet again that we were soul-mates.

 

Well I’ve always been easy with that sort of thing. It’s nothing to me. If someone thinks that he is my soul mate, fair enough, who am I to argue. No skin off my nose.

 

So I took the job, and the Emailer-soul-mate. Was my life at last going to settle? My new residence was in Midtown Manhattan. I was earning good money. I had a soul mate (apparently).  Was this not, if not perfect, then as good as it gets?

 

But unknown to the innocent heroine of this story, all was not all it seemed. Behind this good life of job, soul mate and life in America,  forces were at work.

 

The company on Fifth Avenue was about to go into bankruptcy. The soul-mate was about to develop into a serial emailer.  The FBI wouldn’t process my fingerprints - a necessity for a Green Card applicant. The Clinton government of the time was refused its budget and not having a governer general to provoke a constitutional crisis, the Federal workers simply stopped working. After all there was no money to pay them.  So - no fingerprint clearance, no Green Card. And when at last the budget was passed, the bureaucrats of the INS - Immigration and Naturalization Services - where Green Cards were then processed, lost my file.

 

Surely all this was enough to get a good woman down! But not so; this Aussie battler was undeterred by a few minor obstacles. I remembered my school motto - 'Potens Sui' - self control. Just as Balmain boys don’t cry, MacRob girls don’t give up.

 

So while the Emailer typed out his cyber-messages to other unsuspecting women - and there were more now;  the World Wide Web had come to life;  no need to meet a fellow researcher, the world was his oyster - while Chapter 11 was being filed by my employers and colleagues  were being 'let go' left right and centre, while Clinton in those pre-Monica days was trying to get money to pay the workers, -  this stubborn Aussie remembered another woman, a woman from  the silver screen sixty years ago.

 

I wasn’t standing in the deep South in a carrot field, and the Civil War was long past. But I did stand on my apartment’s balcony, and with the background of the never-ending hum of New York,  staring at the skyscrapers, I said  to myself. quite confidently, 'Tomorrow is Another Day'.

 

The Dark Days

It  is not so  easy to pick yourself  up, dust yourself and start all over again, but I was determined. After all, I come from a long line of very strong women. I remembered family tales of my grandmother struggling through the Great Depression in Moama, NSW. Her five  girls growing up without a father or steady income. The last child, called Violet after her mother, my grandmother, had an old orange box courtesy of the Echuca green-grocer as a crib.

 

I remembered my own mother, Hazel, struggling through the fifties, searching for work in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth in the dark days of the fifties. Hazel was not able to stay at school long enough to get her 'Merit' - the eighth -grade certificate of that  time.   

 

I’d come a long way from living in one room with my grandmother, my mother and my brother. I wasn’t about to throw in the towel just yet.

 

The Emailer and I parted ways. I was on vacation in Melbourne, which was fortunate as I was surrounded by friends. It didn’t take long for them to persuade me that I was not suffering from a broken heart, but from several years of accumulated misery of life with The Emailer.

 

I called my boss in America to let him know that I was suffering from a breakup and not in any state to work. No worries he told me - or the American equivalent. Take some more time off, go to the Gold Coast. Take your daughter.  Enjoy life. Don’t worry about work.

 

So that was what I did. My daughter Ebon and I took a plane to Coolangatta and spent five days watching pay TV in our room, with Ebon taking an occasional dip in the pool.  Coolangatta is not my favorite place  for a holiday, and when we arrived it was raining, but somehow it fitted my mood.

 

It rained for three days straight. The day before we were to leave it was still raining. I sat on the balcony musing about the recent events in my life.   I remembered and took stock. I remembered my friends in Melbourne in the past weeks. How they'd all been there all the time and I just hadn't seen them. I remembered how they came forward when needed, and were quite forgiving of the frantic New Yorker, who'd been too busy being a New Yorker on previous trips to really seek them out. I remembered the day before, when renting a car and getting lost in the Lamington National Park, how a local walking along the road with his pet duck, had stopped in the rain for at least ten minutes to explain in necessary detail how to find our way back. I remembered the waiter at a Coolangatta restaurant who'd given us his own personal bottle of wine for free when we wandered in wine-less, expecting it to be fully-licensed.

On the day we were to leave Coolangatta, the sun shone. The place started actually to look like Queeensland. Blue sky, white sand, a bright aqua sea, palm trees ... the works. As I was packing in our room I looked out of the window which gave a full view of the palm-lined sparkling hotel pool.

There was my young adult daughter, frolicking and leaping around like a child in the sparkling blue water, in complete and utter gay abandon. I realised that I'd come home. And not only that - but that any place is what you make of it.

 

The Return

More or less healed, I left the comfort of friends and family, to New York. After all I had a job to do, an apartment to find, a new life to build. There was no way I could continue to stay at the apartment that I’d shared with The Emailer. I took my few belongings and shacked up with an Australian New Yorker on the Lower East Side. Summer 2000 was a hotter than normal New York summer - and that is hot! A heat-wave in Melbourne usually breaks in three days. New York heat goes on for weeks. My friend had no air-conditioning. We sweltered. The air outside was often thick with insect spray as the municipal authorities attempted to curb the outbreak of West Nile virus. The city was heavy with humidity and life seemed normal apart from the heat; but as people sweltered as they waited at subway stations, elsewhere plans were being made, unbeknown to any of us plans whose implementation   would change the face of the whole world, as well as our city.

 

Anyone who has  spent any time on a sofa at friends in New York, knows what a favour the friends are bestowing. New York apartments are small. How did my friend and I manage, with my belongings stowed in every spare space, the heat, the usual difficulties of two people sharing a very small area in an apartment built for one?  We managed well but I know this could only be a very short-term arrangement.

 

The Studio

I could not afford a one-bedroomed apartment, so I decided to rent a 'studio'.  In the movies, studios are big open-space areas lived in by interesting people - artists, writers and such - with chic furniture and room to move. Nothing could be further from the truth.

 

A New York 'studio' bears more resemblance to a small London bed-sit. I found one that seemed better than the rest in a rather shabby area of 'Yorkville'.

 

Manhattan consists of 'neighbourhoods' , areas of several contiguous city blocks that have their own identity. The most famous of these include  the Lower East Side, Chelsea  and Alphabet City. I had never even heard of Yorkville.   But it was close to the transport that I needed for work so I paid the $2,000 finders fee and the $1600 month’s rent in advance, and moved in.

 

I later found out that Yorkville is known for its Germans and its prostitutes.  The German heritage became evident when I explored my new neighbourhood and discovered German stores and restaurants. The prostitutes became evident in the early hours of every morning when I’d awake to the panting noises of my neighbour’s clients.

 

But there were other inhabitants of Yorkville that took a while to make themselves obvious. Mice. Perhaps it had been  the noise of the neighbour’s clients that covered the noise of the mice who made themselves at home in the 6’ by 6’ kitchen every midnight.

 

Was this the place for a professional woman? I thought not. But I stayed and managed and even had friends stay for weeks at an end. Life was not so bad. 

 

The German

Was it because I was living in Yorkville, aka German town that I met up with the man who is now my husband, a German-Australia or an Australian-German.  I somehow think it was, as I  met him on my next holiday in Australia and brought him back to the home of his New York countrymen. A German in Germantown. How apt.

 

And how cosmopolitan. An Australian and a German-Australian living in Manhattan. It sounds quite glamorous and I have to say that those pre 9/11 days living in the studio with my German, with the mice and sex-noises backgrounding the early hours of the night, were amongst the happiest days of my life.

 

There being nowhere to sit, we’d sit propped up on the futon watching telly, throwing the occasional shoe at the mice, who had managed to crawl over the steel wool that the janitor had stuffed in the holes in the wall in line with the landlord’s hygiene policy.

 

It was now the beginning of autumn, 2001. A sunny and pleasant September. The heady Clinton days were fast becoming a fond memory, and apart from a few fiscal-related worries, New Yorkers were just as they’d always been,  spending evenings  eating at sidewalk restaurants or from white Chinese take-out cartons in their apartments. The only thing we were all anticipating was the onset of winter.

 

The Towers

On 9/11 the Towers came down, along with what little care-freedom  that we neurotic New Yorkers had managed to hold on to.  Days of dust from Ground Zero penetrating as far north as Yorkville. Of seeing the missing persons’ posters and flags on every door and façade. National guard security at every bridge and public space. The sky was grey and devoid of planes. The city was in shock.

 

Like Australians, New Yorkers recover  quickly, and sooner than one would have thought, life returned to as close as normal as possible. The planes returned to the sky and security measures were less visible.

 

In those immediate post-9/11 days people would applaud firemen whenever a fire truck passed. Now the only news about firemen is when the mayor closes yet another fire-station due to the city’s budgetary problems. So soon we forget….

 

This forgetting of horror and pain must be an inborn coping mechanism. Just as women forget the pains of labour men and women appear capable of anaesthetising unhappy memories.  After all, life must go on.

 

The Landowner

I too settled down to a new, if much-changed life. Have I come a full circle?  I have left the rented  studio and purchased a pleasant doorman apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.  There is a balcony overlooking the apartment building’s private park.  We even have a washing machine and clothes-dryer - a luxury in this town where people of all walks of life send their laundry off for washing and 'hand-folding', only to get it back several shades of grey darker than when it started its journey.

 

I have had several raises and bonuses and a few trips to Europe and Australia since the dark days. I have even taken American citizenship (while keeping my Australian one).

 

I have few friends still in this city where friendship is a rare commodity. I watch more television and pronounce tomato to rhyme with potato. I say ‘zee’  rather than ‘zed’ and I ‘call rather than ‘phone’ people. I write ‘checks’ and not’ cheques’. I have retained my Australian accent.

 

Except for my closest friends I have lost touch with many Australian friends.  Whenever I return to Australia I feel less  in tune with it than the time before.

 

My present home is New York, NY. So good they named it twice.

 

2004. A sunny New York weekend day.

Instead of a sunny day in Melbourne spending my sunny  Sunday afternoon looking at my wild and beautiful garden, I am now in a sunny Manhattan  weekend afternoon,  staring at the plastic tubs  of pansies and herbs on our balcony, overlooking the private communal garden, on 93^rd Street New York.  

 

A pleasant thought suddenly enters my mind as my thoughts   wander under the hazy heat of  Manhattan’s mid-summer.  I am thinking not of Manhattan, but of two women who lived in Australia many decades ago. I am thinking of the strong women of my immediate family past.