SCENE: A couple sits at the table eating breakfast. Jonathan has not had his coffee and it’s apparent. Wendy, who doesn’t drink coffee, is amped up and maybe a bit agitated.
WENDY (pulling opening up her computer): So, look at this house I found in the Pelion. (Shows Jonathan the screen).
JONATHAN: Huh?
W: Guess how much?
J: ?
W: Two hundred bucks. A month!
BACKGROUND: The couple lives in Sofia, Bulgaria, where Wendy teaches high school and Jonathan is a freelance journalist who works for American publications writing about American things. W, as you might have surmised, is the main breadwinner, her job providing housing and health insurance and a regular salary. They had decided to move back to the States, where J would get a job. But after the job search turned up nothing, and W was offered a good job in Santiago, Chile, she felt she couldn’t say no. By this time, W and J had started dusting off their Spanish skills, started collecting the documents for their visas, and had watched Anthony Bourdain’s show on Chile, which made J hungry.
J: Huh? So … you wanna go there for spring break or what? Wait. Are you saying…?
W: It’s stupid, I know, I just … Something’s shifted.
J: Gulp (Unsaid thought: Sometimes being married to W is like being a blindfolded passenger in a really fast car piloted by an erratic driver who gets in one lane, floors it, and then decides, at the last minute, to take another route entirely—i.e. a “shift”—which is thrilling and fun but can also give the passenger, i.e. me, psychological whiplash.)
W: I don’t think I can do the Chile thing.
J: Oh. Well. Okay. Then don’t do it.
W: But I have to (agitation level increasing rapidly). How else are we going to pay the rent, the girls’ tuition, the health insurance? What about saving up for the future, or to buy a house? It’s never gonna happen if we keep living like this?
J: I don’t know, I mean, if we move back to the States I can get more freelance work for sure and I bet I can find a decent job and we can I dunno live in a van or, okay, the Silver Bullet, since we can’t afford a van.
W: But the house is in Greece!
J: Well, yeah, but I can’t … I don’t know. Look, we’ll figure it out. You don’t have to take this job.
W: Of course I do. I’m just processing, okay?
J: Oh. Okay?
(Conversation ends a little tensely and J and W both go to their respective workstations on opposite ends of their apartment).
***
(Weeks go by, winter turns to spring, and the couple has officially started the process of acquiring a visa for Chile, which turns out to be far more grueling than expected and the timing of all the bureaucracy screws up J’s planned trip back to the States to do some reporting and get some more freelance gigs. Also, the couple discovers that they can’t take the pet bird, Plato, to Chile and that getting the dog, Lada, there will be nearly impossible. Wendy’s heartbroken and feels trapped. Jonathan feels helpless.)
W: I need to go to Greece for the weekend.
J: Huh?
W: I need to see the house.
J: House?
W: The rental! The one I showed you.
J: Rental? Oh. But I thought … ?
W: I just need to go and see that it’s unrealistic. Get it out of my system.
(More time passes. Jonathan’s income prospects are looking up. And Wendy finally receives the physical contract from Chile—the mail is rather slow in Bulgaria. Seeing it in that form is enough: She notifies the school that she’s not going to take the job, after all. The future remains rather uncertain. W goes to Greece. J’s phone rings.)
J: Hey. How’s the house?
W: (Agitated again but in a different way) It’s amazing. Two minutes to the sea. It has olive trees that produce and we can harvest them and take them to town and get them milled into olive oil and a lemon tree and … I’m paying three months rent now and we’ll sign a longer lease later. Hello? Are you there? What do you think? You don’t sound too excited.
J: No, no, it’s not that. It’s just that my neck is a little sore.