The Current Rate of Exchange

By Jacqueline T. Lynch

Rose, a tall, bumbling American woman travels to New Zealand to re-establish ties with her late mother's family and begins the adventure of her life.  If she can survive it.

Armed with old family letters, she retraces her mother's footsteps as a young woman during World War II as a government agricultural worker—or Land Girl—and a war bride when Rose's father landed in New Zealand with the U.S. Marines.

The Current Rate of Exchange is a humorous, heartwarming, and poignant tale of what it means to reconnect, to discover, and to forgive.

Rose unexpectedly becomes involved in the family problems of her cousin Nora; her sudden romance with the handsome, troubled manager of the family farm wasn't on the agenda, either.

If you like the romance of travel, the adventure of unexpected delights—and the delight of unexpected romance—pack up your dreams and follow Rose on her quest for closure.  But will she be able to retrace her own steps home without repeating mistakes of the past?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jacqueline T. Lynch
• Release date: Aug 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781502220899

Jacqueline T. Lynch

Jacqueline T. Lynch has published articles and short fiction in regional and national publications, several plays, some award winners, one of which has been translated into Dutch and produced in the Netherlands.   Her several books, fiction and nonfiction, are available in eBook and print online.  She has recently published the first book on the career of actress Ann Blyth – Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star.  She writes a syndicated newspaper column on classic films: Silver Screen, Golden Years, and also writes three blogs: Another Old Movie Blog (http://anotheroldmovieblog.blogspot.com)  A blog on classic films. New England Travels (http://newenglandtravels.blogspot.com)  A blog on historical and cultural sites in New England. Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. (http://annblythactresssingerstar.blogspot.com) website: www.JacquelineTLynch.com Etsy shop: LynchTwinsPublishing --  https://www.etsy.com/shop/LynchTwinsPublishing?ref=search_shop_redirect

Book preview

Rose, a tall, bumbling American woman travels to New Zealand to re-establish ties with her late mother’s family and begins the adventure of her life.  If she can survive it.

Armed with old family letters, she retraces her mother’s footsteps as a young woman during World War II as a government agricultural worker—or Land Girl—and a war bride when Rose’s father landed in New Zealand with the U.S. Marines.

The Current Rate of Exchange is a humorous, heartwarming, and poignant tale of what it means to reconnect, to discover, and to forgive.

Rose unexpectedly becomes involved in the family problems of her cousin Nora; her sudden romance with the handsome, troubled manager of the family farm wasn’t on the agenda, either.

If you like the romance of travel, the adventure of unexpected delights—and the delight of unexpected romance—pack up your dreams and follow Rose on her quest for closure.  But will she be able to retrace her own steps home without repeating mistakes of the past?

***

CHAPTER 1

Rose intended not to look back, but her hand slipped on the doorknob and gave her one last involuntary look at her mother’s kitchen. The floor needing washing. She wouldn’t have chosen that for a last memory, but it would remain stubbornly in her brain like the half a dozen commercial jingles, and memories of most of the embarrassing things she ever did, the usual things that came to mind just before she drifted off to sleep.

Forget it, just forget it, Rose thought, knew that it was way too late for wishing, and stood on the back steps a moment, watching the weak autumn morning sun make crystals of the dew on the clotheslines, the shed roof, the bare gray tree branches. The back yard had wall-to-wall carpeting of wet, once beautiful maple leaves she had not raked. She pulled the back door shut with a defiant, heavy slam, jiggled the doorknob to check the lock, and wished once again she had not punched her sister in the nose yesterday and knocked her unconscious.

Refusing to dwell on anything anymore, she hefted her two suitcases, put them in the car, and drove over the speed limit, over the state line.

Massachusetts became Connecticut.

Connecticut Welcomes You. Rose read the sign out loud, as she always did, in a ritual as equally comforting as it was stupid, and would inevitably announce in a clear, strong, TV announcer voice, Massachusetts Welcomes You on the other side of the divided highway on the way back, if there was any way back, which at this point in November 2002, seemed unimaginable.

The highway led to Bradley International Airport. She left her car in the long-term parking lot with a long goodbye look the way some people leave their dogs at the kennel. The little American flag taped to the antenna, shredded by the wind, looked as battle-torn as if it might have been placed on the parapet of a tiny Fort Sumter. She noticed this for the first time, out of the corner of her eye as she walked to the shuttle bus. Like the floor that needed washing and the leaves that should have been raked, the flag begged for her attention. Determined to ignore all demands upon her, she would think only about going forward for as long as momentum carried her.

A security officer pulled her aside to stand in the ready-for-crucifixion position to be wanded by the young man by the metal detector who asked her if he could.  She agreed with pragmatic realization that she was not leaving this spot unless she said yes.  He wanded her, and asked her if he could tap her ankles with the back of his hand.  She said, Sure, as if she were looking forward to it.

He asked if he could touch her hair. She said, Sure, and bent down for him. He patted her thick hair, not unlike a fussy and dissatisfied stylist. With the stealth of a ninja, he suddenly swiped the metal detecting wand across her chest once more, but the beeping sound would not be silent. It occurred to her, and perhaps even to him, the culprit could be her under wire bra.

He wiped his itchy nose, hollering over his shoulder,

I need a female pat-down here!

She swallowed, smiling weakly in what she hoped was an expression of complete innocence at the short young woman with the surgical gloves. A quick, intimate, and thorough grope, during which she let her mind wander during the patriotic physical assault, as she did through all the stressful moments of her life, from long ago high school math tests, to being dumped by her fiancé two months before the wedding. She could not even pay attention long enough for his emotional expressions of heartfelt regret. Wandering, mental or otherwise, was her escape mechanism and she knew this, and felt bad about it.

What is wrong with me? She thought again, catching herself mentally composing a grocery list while the security officer slipped her latex-covered fingers into the waistband of Rose’s jeans, under her arms and along the warm crease under her breasts.

Okay.

Okay? With the same kind of relief, as if she had been told the operation was a success and she was not going to die, Rose passed on to her gate.

As they were boarding, a security officer with no discernible expression on her face pulled Rose aside again, wanded and asked her to remove her shoes.

After another brief interlude of humiliation and inherent accusation of guilt, the airport cop told her to have a nice day.

The ground morphed into sky. She sat back, her seatbelt snugly guarding her pelvis, and tried to have a nice day.

She pulled her passport out of the back pocket of her jeans to look at it again. Her photo was only a little better than her driver’s license photo, in which she had her mouth open and one eye closed, with a tilt to her head and a crooked, rather lurid smile that seemed to indicate the Registry of Motor Vehicles was a really happenin’ place, man. Not once in her whole life had she ever been ready for the flash. Her mind had probably been wandering for that brief uncomfortable second.

This photo, her United States passport photo, showed her with both eyes frankly and deliberately open, a little too wide, protruding towards the camera, making her look either enormously surprised or else a very excited and deliriously happy victim of a thyroid disorder. Her mouth closed, firmly, as if in repentance for what her eyes were doing. Her full name was printed on the facing page: Rose Genowefa Chleb, date of birth: May 1, 1965.

She put it in her back pocket again. Rose took a deep breath to calm her nerves. Normally a calm flier, this time she seemed unable to shut out the migraine-inducing whine of the jet engines through blocked ears, and an omnipresent sense of doom. The young woman in the window seat next to her, curled up in the arms of Morpheus, her oily forehead leaving a psychedelic design on the small window where her face had rolled after the plane banked.

Rose’s mother used to say things like that, like being curled up in the arms of Morpheus. Her mother had read a lot. Her mother’s expressions, like the commercial jingles and the embarrassing moments were things Rose always remembered. And now the dirty kitchen floor.

It was good to have a quiet seatmate. She felt a sudden swell of affection for the unconscious woman.

However, in her acute state of hypersensitive irritation, Rose could clearly hear the hard rock peeing bass and static from the sleeping young woman’s earphones. Soon, it became louder to her than the gravel voice of the man across the aisle talking to nobody she could see about the details of the outboard engine of his new boat. It seemed louder than the two foreign exchange students behind her reading all the ads of the airline magazine aloud to practice their English.

Louder than the jet engine hum she could feel through her feet and discern even through pressure-blocked ears. More pervasive even than the omnipresent sense of doom.

Rose could take it no longer. She quietly leaned over and carefully examined the volume control knob on the arm of the young woman’s seat. Forgetting she was looking at it upside down, she turned it the wrong way.

A blast of obscenity rap banked a shot off the girl’s cerebellum and careened the young woman to traumatic consciousness. She shrieked a half-dreamed four-letter word and ripped the earphones off her head as if they had been tentacles of the monster trying to eat her brain. She looked up at Rose with eyes as wide as the ones on Rose’s passport photo.

Rose was about to apologize. Instead, what came out was, That always happens over Ohio.

She added a quick, sympathetic smile.

The young woman blinked, looked around, and fell fitfully back to sleep. Rose felt bad about it until the final descent over Chicago, when bigger guilt descended and she suddenly wished again she had not sucker punched her own, much older, sister in the face and sent her to the emergency room. She thought again as the aircraft wheels pounded to the ground and they lurched against the force of their ground speed, that just because some people deserve a punch in the face doesn’t mean you should go ahead and punch them in the face. This was, for her, a kind of a moral to the story. Civility was important to Rose, even if only arriving as an afterthought. She marched through the wandering cell phone users embarking and disembarking, talking as they walked. Or walking as they talked. Rose vaguely inspected the mall shops and kiosks of the O’Hare terminal without really looking at anything at all. She found herself in front of a rest room, so she figured she might as well go in.

Opening and closing and flushing and swooshing new sterile covers over the seats like that, completely automatic, Rose was enchanted, which she had always suspected was just another word for easily entertained. Were they really sterile? Like Q-Tips in a just-opened box, were they really sterile? Or straws from McDonald’s when the paper is pulled from them. Sterile? She had her doubts. It was too much a miracle to expect to be real. Still, the ladies’ room itself counterbalanced her fanciful suspicions with dull, basic, and therefore comforting reality. The women entered the room and eventually left it with deft swipes at their hair, sharp glances in the long mirror, quick comments taken out of context, and above all the sharp tap of heels on tile, the humming fans, the deep hollow swooshes and the clicking of lipstick caps, the soft chorus of simultaneous urination did more than anything to calm Rose’s nerves. It was reassuring proof that life goes on, no matter what. Even in the last days, at the End of Time, Rose hoped there would still be time enough to find a ladies’ room. If not, it would be the first thing she would ask for when she got to heaven.

The conveyor swept her through the long passage to the next concourse, with neon tubing decor and a pinging Muzak background that sounded like HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, a movie she had always disliked. She kept conscientiously to her right so people could pass her on the left, people who were late and rushing, people who were impatient with the slowness of the people-mover, or else people who just had a bug up their ass about standing still for a minute, unlike Rose, who had no expectations of ever being first at the finish.

She watched a young mother lift her baby away from the warmth and protection of her body so that a security guard could grope it. The guard was gentle, the baby laughed, the mother looked ill.

Rose patted her own body for reassurance. The letters were still in her coat pocket.

She pulled her navy blue passport with the gold eagle on it out of her back pocket again to look at it. It was beginning to retain the curved shape of her bottom. She had renewed it a few months ago, with a sudden notion that must have found its way into her head through a whisper from the angels. Such an outlandish enterprise had not occurred to her before, and then one dark moment in her mother’s bedroom became illuminated with inspiration, by the first feeling of selfish need and desire she had allowed herself in a very long time. She renewed her expired passport. She stood against the plain backdrop pinned on the wall of the mall photographer’s, and looked that camera in the eye.

There was still a lot to do after that, but that was the first moment when she knew, she knew it would happen. Once she made the decision, though somehow it still seemed to have been made for her, the rest was just a matter of booking the flight and counting the days.

Strange, she thought, that now when the time had arrived for being sharp, making decisions and navigating her way through this enterprise, she felt a drowsy numbness overtake her. Like the conveyor, it took her to a different place without requiring much effort from her. She re-read her tickets and passport, again, for comfort, but that was all.

This next plane was larger, three seats abreast, and she was in the middle. The man to her left ate his slab of lasagna methodically, finishing it completely down to the sauce stains in the plastic container before moving on to his salad in the plastic cup, then to his cellophane-wrapped cookie, then to his milk, then to his coffee which the stewardess had poured with a steady hand into a plastic cup over Rose’s head. Rose watched her, not as much out of concern for herself as being mesmerized, like watching a magician’s trick, which she always hoped would turn out wrong, wanting proof of the reality behind the illusion. She wished the pouring would fumble, like there being no rabbit in the hat, no chicks in the coat pocket, though the thought of being scalded by hot coffee as a consequence did not matter to her. Reality always carried consequences. You just had to take them.

She offered a sigh up to the little reading light above her, and barely touched the sort-of chicken in her own plastic dinnerware, wishing instead she could sleep.

The man on the aisle seat kept leaning over her to watch the lightning out the window, to which the man meticulously slurping his coffee was apparently oblivious. The aisle man refused supper. She thought it was supper. She didn’t really know what time it was, meaning to her, New England time, already lost in the vortex of time travel, the only real time travel available to humans: changing time zones and the chaos to their bodies.

She wished she could sleep, but the seat belt sign kept pinging off and on two minutes after whenever the plane would lurch. Once or twice, through the lightning in the window, she observed small lights from Midwest towns far below, about which she knew nothing.

Big country, init? she said to the aisle seat man, who nodded vigorously, distressfully, with his mouth tightly closed, as if he were trying not to vomit.

She turned to the window guy. He had finished his meal and now watched the action film on the small screen above two seats ahead of them, his hands folded neatly on his tray, which he kept lowered over his lap in case there was anything else coming by to eat.

She had not opted for earphones, planning instead to sleep. However, not having earphones meant she had to stay awake to read their lips. This was a very violent movie. She did not like violent movies. The people who made this movie should have some sense pounded into them.

Forget it.

They landed on the other end of the continent, in another climate, and at another time several hours in the past with bile-regurgitating force on a moist tarmac.

The mass of commuting humanity seemed larger and more chaotic at LAX than at any airport to which she had ever been. Parts of the building looked to be under renovation. No surprise, something somewhere was always under renovation. Being under renovation was an acceptable excuse for a mess. Perhaps, after all, her life was only under renovation. She would have liked to be able say there was an excuse for the mess, and perhaps wear a sign around her neck that said: I am currently under renovation for your convenience. Please pardon the mess.

Rose found her gate. The voices were very loud in the echo chamber of her mind, animated, impatient, laughing, saying goodbye with embraces and crying. Nine o’clock on a misty California evening, but it was midnight to Rose, because she was New Englander, where it rained harder.

"Miles to go before I sleep," she quoted Robert Frost in her head. Then she heard a Down Under accent. She turned to the two young people, probably in their twenties, checking their boarding passes. The girl laughed and softly said something into her purse, looking for something, while the boy answered and scratched the edge of his green Australian passport against the new stubble on his cheek.

For an instant, Rose roused herself and remembered why she was taking this trip, and felt surprising sudden homesickness again for the place she was going, a place to which she had never been.

Unexpectedly, as if they had read her thoughts, they turned their heads back in her direction and glanced at Rose, continuing a conversation in soft tones that was only to do with them. A brief glance, no more than a millisecond in time, but it was enough to make Rose quickly cast her eyes away from them, uncomfortable, embarrassed and ashamed for no reason other than it was acceptable to feel this way in her society. Don’t stare, she had been taught from childhood. Don’t look as if you noticed. Noticing is rude, yet the public address announcements kept telling her to be observant and watch for suspicious behavior from others. Her conscience battled with the moral irony.

Rose looked down the long concourse through tired, blurry eyes. A scuffling, orderly column of people traversed the concourse, up and down, like they were all children lining up for Field Day at school under the eye of Catholic nuns, wanting to feel free and have fun but too intimidated to break out of line. Only travelers on their way, coming and going in the undercurrent of tension. No families hugging them goodbye, not here in the afterlife of beyond the security checkpoint. No stragglers running for their flight, cursing and slipping through the door to board as the harried airline boarding person waved them on without checking the boarding pass. No panhandlers, or people wanting to save your soul. It was not as she remembered from her travels in the past.

At last they boarded the largest plane Rose would take on this trip, a brontosaurus with jet engines, and she stumbled back to economy with the other steerage passengers and livestock. She had the window seat. She took off her shoes and put on the slipper socks given her by the stewardess, who looked to be in her fifties and a veteran of many flights. Rose thought this stewardess must have some stories to tell, yet there was an expression of self command on her heavily made up face that seemed to infer that she never told any of them.

Can I ask how tall you are? said the woman who sat next to Rose, out of breath from stowing her suitcase in the overhead but still having the energy to notice everything interesting around her. Rose marveled that the woman had zeroed in on her first.

Six feet tall. Rose muttered, well used to the question. Neither the question, nor her height, had ever bothered her.

Does that bother you?

Why?

Well, being so tall, the woman said, meaning of course, duh.

Nope. Being rude ever bother you?

If I thought you’d be so uptight about it, I wouldn’t have asked. Then she left an obscenity addendum.

Sure you would. People like you are born with some kind of gene that makes you insensitive and stupid, with incredibly big mouths. It’s a real handicap, trouble is, the rest of us who have to put up with you are the ones that need the support group.

Shut up. Shut up, shut up, shut up. You’ll be stuffing her down the john if you don’t just let it go. Forget it.

The woman glared at Rose as hard as she could, and sat down with rigid grace, as might a ballet dancer impaling herself on a sword, and drew sharp, controlled snorts of stale cabin air through her flared nostrils. The aircraft doors closed, the cabin pressurized, and Rose’s already blocked ears dove to murkier depths of pressure and deafness as the 767 heaved itself into the dark sky over the dark ocean.

The cabin had a large screen that would continuously show films, sitcoms, a documentary on chimpanzees in a cage tearing up bits of polystyrene, and occasional data on how soon they would land, which was not soon at all. The digital numbers clicked the countdown: 11 hours and 59 minutes to go. Rose tried to believe they were in God’s hands now.

Waiting to board, she had noticed an elderly man and a young boy dressed in the tradition of Hasidic Jews. They had stood at the windows facing the black sky pierced only by the lights of landing planes, rocking with short, abrupt movements and sending their prayers out over the tarmac. She wished now they were sitting with her, instead of the nosy woman. She imagined they would exude a sense of peace and serenity, because they had just been on the phone to God. She liked being with people who knew what to say, with no hesitation or awkwardness. Her prayers to God were a lot like her phone calls to friends; she rambled on about nothing important and never knew when to hang up. She always had a nagging feeling she was calling Him at a bad time.

She glanced over at her new enemy and wanted to make up with her, but she did not. She thought again that she really should not have punched her sister in the nose yesterday. Yesterday? No, now it was the day before yesterday.

They were advised to buckle their seat belts over their blankets. They were advised to pull the plastic window shade nearest them because the sun would rise early as they flew straight into tomorrow. They were not advised on how to stay sane until that time.

Tomorrow was still a long time coming, even when it was being chased.

Rose struggled through insane exhaustion after the second film had played, but she still could not sleep. Her body was too large to be comfortable in economy, and she was never good at sleeping sitting up, unless in seventh grade math class. There, she could fall asleep easily. Anguished that she did not know what time it really was because time had ceased to exist.

The dryness of the cabin caused Rose to drink a lot of water. Once, while in the plane’s restroom, she caught a hideous glimpse of her dehydrated self in the mirror.

So, this is what I’m going to look like at seventy-two, she thought. Then she smiled with bittersweet memory. I look like Babci, she thought. Yes, the same pale blue eyes, the shape to her nose and cheeks. Babci. God rest your soul, Babci.

At some point, they crossed the International Dateline, but balloons did not drop from the ceiling. Rose noted the irony; she had intended to