Free Good Oil by Laura Buzo

about. We just said a letter ‘about my dad’, didn’t we? That could mean anything. Plus, it could go on forever, starting from my earliest memory of him and finishing with the manner in which he said goodnight to me last night.
    I can be a pretty wordy lass (you may have noticed), but I seem to be struggling here. Let me tell you about my friend Penny’s dad first. It might be easier for me to describe my dad by juxtaposing him with another one.
    Having been friends with Penny since Year Seven, I have had ample time to observe her dad. He works at your uni. He used to lecture in history, but now he does something to do with coaching overseas students. He likes it.
    When I first met Penny, I noticed that every day she’d pull out a lunch box. In it would be two sandwiches made from white bread, a piece of fruit and four cruskits with vegemite and margarine. Sometimes the sandwiches would be peanut butter, sometimes ham and lettuce, sometimes cheese and tomato but the tomato was packed separately in foil so it wouldn’t make the bread go soggy. She was often ambivalent about the cruskits and let me have them. Eventually I asked her how come she always had this packed lunch – surely some days you just can’t be bothered making it. I have those days. Or some days I’m running late and don’t have time to make it. ‘My dad makes it,’ she said. And he does. Every morning he makes lunch for her and her brother, Jamie. Get this – when I sleep over on a school night, he makes it for me too!
    One time I was sleeping over at Penny’s and we were at the kitchen bench making brownies. Her dad comes in, puts an arm around her, hugs her, kisses her cheek and says something like, ‘What’s my girl making today?’ And when I’ve been over on weeknights, he kisses Penny’s mum when he gets home from work. Like, open-mouthed and with feeling. Did you ever see anything like it?
    On the mornings when Penny’s dad has to be at university early, he gives Penny and her brother a lift as far as the uni, and they join their buses from there. On the days that he works from home, he gives them a lift to the bus stop at Maroubra Junction to save them the twenty-minute walk.
    On the weekend he potters about the house in overalls, fixing this and that, washing all the school uniforms and hanging them out to dry. Penny’s brother, Jamie, plays on a soccer team – well he did before he got sick recently – and Penny’s dad coaches the team! Seriously. One night a week he and Jamie go off to practice at Lambert Oval and they play against other teams on Saturdays.
    One night I was sleeping over at Pen’s and we decided to go to a movie. Once there we decided to see a double feature instead of a single and were home two hours later than we said. Penny’s dad was waiting up in the living room when we got back and sprang to his feet saying ‘Where were you girls?I was worried. You must call if you are going to be late.’
    It’s not hard to figure out that these things made an impact on me because it’s very different over my way. For starters, my dad is away a lot. He is a director. Plays, TV, film. One of the best. There is not a whole lot of work in Sydney, so he has to go where the work is. This means that up to four, five months of the year he is away and it’s been that way for as long as I remember. Directing a play in a different city, touring with a play, doing an episode of a TV show on location. Last year he went to Perth for three months at a time to teach at WAPA and he has a semi-regular gig teaching at a drama school in Singapore. When he is home he’s out rehearsing a lot, or in his study going over scripts and notes. Or worse, he’s between jobs.
    You’d think that when he’s away it would be harder for my mum, as she’s essentially a single parent. But, in truth, there’s less tension at home when he’s away. As you might have gathered from my Betty Friedan ‘moment’ the other night, my mum does almost