An incident in Karori

Newsroom

4 days ago

My landlady was a slight, graceful woman who taught at a local school, and when she arrived, she took me to my room and introduced me to her little dog, Eddie, who wagged his tail and followed us as she showed me around her house. She pointed out the framed pictures of her two daughters, one of whom was living in the US. 'You seem perfect,' she said after we took our seats in her kitchen, where she told me I was welcome to help myself to her pantry before preparing dinner for us and opening a bottle of wine.
'To a new life,' she said, as we clinked glasses. The warmth that rose through my body as I drank her wine reassured me as she talked about the differences between Australians and Kiwis, before mentioning her support for New Zealand prime minister John Key. 'We have what you'd call a tall poppy syndrome here, and people don't like that he worked his way up without accepting any help,' she said. I had friends and relatives whose political views differed from mine, and so I chose not to assign too much meaning to her words. This woman had been generous to me, and on my first evening in a new country I was eager for good omens.
She and her daughter were up and about when I came upstairs for breakfast the next morning. Her daughter, a young woman who had just graduated from university, was as friendly as her mother and seemed excited to learn I was a writer. Inviting me to help myself to the breakfast they'd prepared, she talked about her older sister, who was dating a Stegner fellow and had given up her career as a lawyer in New Zealand to work for a nonprofit in America. Both she and her mother urged me to make myself feel at home, and in their company it was difficult not to. 'My other daughter would love to know about you,' my landlady said, as her younger daughter stacked our dishes in the sink. 'She loves to hear about people from different countries.'
Her daughter had left the kitchen when she added, 'I don't know how it is in your country, but here we open the windows to let in fresh air.' Caught by surprise, I didn't know how to respond. 'We do that all the time in my country,' I said, noticing how she was busying herself with the dishes, as though she hadn't heard me at all. 'So Monica, do you mind if you open your sliding door just a little? Just to dry out your room,' she responded, her eyes grazing my face.
I returned to my bedroom and opened my sliding door an inch, hoping to push away my misgivings to the farthest corner of my mind just as I heard a knock on my door. My landlady let herself in, holding a squeegee in one hand and a towel in the other. 'Do you know what this is?' she asked, holding up a squeegee.
'Of course.'
'The next time you take a shower, hose down the walls with the shower head, squeegee them, then use this towel to dry them off,' she said, tossing them onto the bed. 'I want to keep it clean.'
She had promised to take me to their village, where there were two supermarkets and several banks. After I had showered and dressed, I returned to the kitchen, where she waited for me. 'You take your time in the shower,' she jokingly said, grabbing her purse from the kitchen counter. Sensing her meticulousness, I had done a thorough job of cleaning my shower stall, but now I wondered what it was, exactly, that she wanted. But my own confusion was silenced by her insistent footsteps as she made her way to her front door, and I hurried to follow her.
As we drove down a hilly road toward a cluster of shops she called their village, our easy conversation turned to the things I wanted to buy from the supermarket and the neighborhood public library that had a good selection of books. I hardly noticed when she parked right in front of an ATM—her morning cheeriness made me forget about my unpaid rent, and it was when she nodded at me that I remembered what our first order of business was.
She stood a few meters from me, watching me expectantly as the machine rejected my card. I panicked, for I had expected to withdraw the funds I needed from my overseas bank accounts before my scholarship checks came in. When I finally approached her to tell her what had just happened, her face darkened. 'So you don't have my money?' she asked, her voice now a low growl. I rushed back to the ATM, pushing my card into the slot before figuring out that I had to withdraw smaller amounts from different accounts. Though astonished by her sudden hostility, I had no time to let it sink in—I was too afraid to displease her, for I had nowhere else to go.
She smiled when I handed her my rent and bond, and any misgivings I had were washed away by her good-naturedness as she helped me open a bank account and accompanied me to the grocery store. 'You probably have so much more variety back home,' she said to me, as we pushed our cart past shelves of fruit. I could sense that like many older white people I had met in the US, her world remained small. It appeared like she was trying her best to welcome me into it, despite the strain my presence seemed to be exerting on its smallness.
The next day, a truck driver who sped past me while I was walking to the grocery store yelled something that sounded like 'go home.' Upon my return, I told her about what had happened, and she took me into her arms while declaring, 'We love Filipinos here.' It was the reassurance I needed to quiet my uneasiness over what had just happened, or what I perceived to have happened. I spent the rest of my day trying to cast aside its unpleasantness, determined to not let anything ruin the beginnings of what was a promising new chapter of my life.
The next morning, as I prepared my breakfast, she told me that her daughter in the US was upset about the incident. 'She's inconsolable,' my landlady said, her voice gaining the heaviness of syrup. 'She's mad that something like this would ever happen to you.' I knew I was supposed to feel grateful for her daughter's sympathy, and yet her words pressed on me like an odd and uncomfortable weight.
Laughing, I said, 'It's nothing.' Her eyes remained pinned on me, and I glanced away from her as I poured coffee for myself.
'It's not nothing. It's terrible.'
'Yeah.' I was annoyed that she was bringing the incident up again; there was something about her exaggerated tone that made me squirm inside. Did she expect me to be unable to recover from it, when living in a body like mine made me a natural target for verbal attacks like these? Looking back at our exchange, there was something about the way she prodded the wound that makes me wonder if she was waiting for me to offer up my hurt, like a gift, to her.
But I wasn't yet willing to think of it in this way. I took a bus to my university, met my PhD supervisor for the first time, and took a tour of the campus and my new office with my institute's administrator. I sat with my discomfort until it slowly withered. I reminded myself that my landlady had insisted on taking my side, even as I tried to dismiss my own hurt. Her rage made me feel safe in a strange city, though it became increasingly friendly the more I talked to people and ventured down its streets. I bought ingredients for my dinner at a downtown supermarket and took a bus back home, only beginning to notice how quickly my expenses were eating into my savings when I got down at my stop and realised just how expensive my bus fare back to her house was.
She had welcomed me to use her pots and pans, and had taught me to use her expensive-looking range with prongs rising from a flat surface at the push of a button, emitting gas when I turned a dial. Encouraged to use her condiments, I twisted her Himalayan salt grinder over my simmering chicken, not realizing that the cap hadn't been screwed on tight. The grinder fell into the pan, sending bright pink granules scattering all over my dish and onto the kitchen counter just as the front door opened and her lithe, assured footsteps announced her arrival.
'Is anything wrong, Monica?' she asked as she entered the kitchen, perhaps noticing the shock on my face as I attempted to gather myself. 'I'm so sorry. I accidentally spilled your salt.' Glancing at the kitchen counter, I saw that I hadn't spilled that much, and was embarrassed at my own mortification—it was just salt, and surely it was nothing to her.
But then her face darkened, and in a low voice, she said, 'That's very expensive salt.'
She perched herself on a bar stool and folded her arms, her silence issuing an unspoken order as I gathered the pink crystals in my palmand poured them back into the grinder. Was this salt so precious that I had to pour it back into the shaker despite the dirt it may have touched? It wasn't something I would have done in my own household, and yet my movements were not my own as I felt her eyes watching my every move, pulling invisible strings attached to my limbs.
'That's enough,' she said, as I tried to pick out more salt from my simmering dish. She narrowed her eyes and nodded as I apologized profusely.
In my room, out of her sight, my discomfort hung in the air like a low hum. I had seen the same salt at the nearby grocery store, and was sure it hadn't been that expensive. (True enough, a few days later I saw the same brand of salt in the supermarket being sold for about $3.) I had lived in my own apartment prior to coming to New Zealand, and never thought I'd be reduced to a frightened child inside the place I lived.
I could hear her footsteps and then a rapping on my door. 'You're in your room all the time. This is your house. Come out and explore!' she said, throwing her hands in the air. I smiled, thanked her, and told her I was busy attending to schoolwork. 'But you can work in the living room too!' she said, her voice forming a gentle plea. Was she trying to apologise for what had happened earlier? I found myself softening to her, and my panic began to ebb as I picked up my laptop and followed her upstairs. She disappeared into the TV lounge right next to her kitchen, while I made for her living room overlooking the hills. I settled uncomfortably into a sofa, not knowing if I could get any writing done in this room that bore no trace of use. It was dark outside, and I could no longer see the hills outside the living room window, but the L-shape of the house allowed me to peer into its kitchen and TV room, where my landlady sat on an easy chair before a flickering screen. Was I a figurine in her dollhouse, to be bent and arranged according to her will? I had to admit that she had a way with me, and I returned to my room, hoping to get away from this queasy feeling.
The next day she saw me opening the pantry to reach for a canister of sugar. 'When are you going to get your own stuff?' she asked, with a note of impatience.
Freezing in the middle of her kitchen, I answered, 'I thought you told me to help myself.'
'That's because you didn't have anything when you arrived,' she said, her voice a sickly sweet caress. Glancing at the coffee I'd just made with her grounds in my small French press, she added, 'Can't you buy your own coffee? That coffee is very expensive.'
When I returned to my bedroom, I noticed that the bathrobe she had left hanging on my door had disappeared, and when I stepped inside what was supposedly my private bath, I noticed that the bottle of bodywash she had left for me was also gone. I was spending a lot of time in the shower, she said, when I stepped outside the bathroom. 'Aren't you taking good care of that beautiful body of yours?' she asked, as I stood in her hallway with a towel wrapped around me. I didn't quite understand what she was getting at until she said it aloud: 'But power is expensive, Monica, and with your tarrying my bill's shooting up.'
Taken with kind permission from the newly published essay collection Returning to My Father's Kitchen by Monica S Macansantos (Northwestern University Press, $US22), available in selected bookstores such as Unity in Wellington, or as print or ebook version direct from the publisher. The longest essay is about her unhappy experience in Karori. ReadingRoom is devoting all week to coverage of that totemic Wellington suburb. Tomorrow: a stout defence of its supposed charms by Leah McFall, author of the classic work Karori Confidential (Luncheon Sausage Books, 2018).