and as we passed the turnoff for a shopping center, she invited us to picture a four-burner stove.
“Gas or electric?” Hugh asked, and she said that it didn’t matter.
This was not a real stove but a symbolic one, used to prove a point at a management seminar she’d once attended. “One burner represents your family, one is your friends, the third is your health, and the fourth is your work.” The gist, she said, was that in order to be successful, you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful, you have to cut off two.
Pat has her own business, a good one that’s allowing her to retire at fifty-five. She owns three houses and two cars, but even without the stuff, she seems like a genuinely happy person. And that alone constitutes success.
I asked which two burners she had cut off, and she said that the first to go had been family. After that she switched off her health. “How about you?”
I thought for a moment and said that I’d cut off my friends. “It’s nothing to be proud of, but after meeting Hugh I quit making an effort.”
“And what else?” she asked.
“Health, I guess.”
Hugh’s answer was work.
“And?”
“Just work,” he said.
I asked Pat why she’d cut off her family, and with no trace of bitterness, she talked about her parents, both severe alcoholics. They drank away their jobs and credit, and because they were broke, they moved a lot, most often in the middle of the night. This made it hard to have a pet, though for a short time, Pat and her sister managed to own a sheep. It was an old, beat-up ram they named Mr. Preston. “He was lovely and good-natured, until my father sent him off to be shorn,” Pat said. “When he returned there were bald patches and horrible, deep cuts, like stab wounds in his skin. Then we moved to an apartment and had to get rid of him.” She looked at her hands on the steering wheel. “Poor old Mr. Preston. I hadn’t thought about him in years.”
It was around this time that we finally entered the bush. Hugh pointed out the window at a still lump of dirty fur lying beside a fallen tree, and Pat caroled, “Roadkill!” Then she pulled over so we could take a closer look. Since leaving Melbourne, we’d been climbing higher into the foothills. The temperature had dropped, and there were graying patches of snow on the ground. I had on a sweater and a jacket, but they weren’t quite enough, and I shivered as we walked toward the body and saw that it was a…what, exactly? “A teenage kangaroo?”
“A wallaby,” Pat corrected me.
The thing had been struck but not run over. It hadn’t decomposed or been disfigured, and I was surprised by the shoddiness of its coat. It was as if you’d bred a rabbit with a mule. Then there was the tail, which reminded me of a lance.
“Hugh,” I called, “come here and look at the wallaby.”
It’s his belief that in marveling at a dead animal on the roadside, you may as well have killed it yourself—not accidentally but on purpose, cackling, most likely, as you ran it down. Therefore he stayed in the car.
“It’s your loss,” I called, and a great cloud of steam issued from my mouth.
Our destination that afternoon was a place called Daylesford, which looked, when we arrived, more like a movie set than an actual working town. The buildings on the main street were two stories tall and made of wood, like buildings in the Old West but brightly painted. Here was the shop selling handmade soaps shaped like petits fours. Here was the fudgery, the jammery, your source for moisturizer. If Dodge City had been founded and maintained by homosexuals, this is what it might have looked like. “The spas are fantastic,” Pat said, and she parked the car in front of a puppet shop. From there we walked down a slight hill, passing a flock of sulfur-crested cockatoos just milling about, pulling worms from the front lawn of a bed-and-breakfast. This was the moment when familiarity slipped away and Australia seemed not just distant, but impossibly foreign. “Will you look at that,” I said.
It was Pat who had made the lunch reservation. The restaurant was attached to a hotel, and on arriving we were seated beside a picture window. The view was of a wooden deck and, immediately beyond it,