11Iris wouldn't get in the pool. She said it was too cold. Jared thinks she's just a wimp.
Jared got all huffy when a bunch of morons in a Jeep drove by and shouted derogatory things about Japanese people at Iris. Iris felt his outrage was quite endearing.
One morning, they heard jackhammering that continued all day. Jared called the front desk about it, and was told that it wasn't a jackhammer at all, but a cement mixer. Jared became indignant, and went on a mission to have the hotel admit that it was indeed a jackhammer. About four in the afternoon, he finally spoke to a resort executive who confirmed that it was a jackhammer, that they were repairing one of the pools, and that it would continue for the duration of our stay. Jared couldn't decide if he felt vindicated or ripped off.
Iris and Jared visited the Grand Wailea Spa - a world-class , full service spa, where Michael Jordan likes to get massages, but leaves the facials for Scottie Pippin and Vinnie del Negro. There, they got a duo massage. Jared's masseuse was a very competent woman in her forties. Iris' was an extremely attractive man in his early twenties. She couldn't relax because whenever he'd whisper "how does that feel?" she kept expecting him to do something sexy.
The car rental company ran out of the standard blue Ford Escorts. So we ended up with a big green Cadillac with shiny gold rims. Jared and Iris - big pimpin'.
Lastly, Jared didn't get as much sex as he had expected - which made this the "lamest honeymoon, ever" in his opinion. Although Iris thought that was an extremely harsh judgment, and that he was too grumpy for sex, she was happy to return home.
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Jared and Iris' house was a boxy, postwar tract home. The single bathroom was so small that if someone opened the door while someone else was washing their hands, then the hand-washer would be pushed into the toilet. The detached garage had a broken spring that held the door shut. As a solution, the former owners mounted a regular door directly onto the broken garage door - complete with screen door - so they could still access the garage. Behind the garage was something Iris called "the murder shack". It was basically a roof that attached precariously to the garage's wall and the back fence. There was a roughly-made padlocked door on one side. Both Iris and Jared attempted to walk through the murder shack, but couldn't do much more than stand in the doorway and stare through the cobwebs at the creepy darkness. There was a washer in the garage, but no dryer. Instead, there was a steel pole in the backyard, covered in ivy, that used to serve as one end of a drying line.
The very first night in their new home, Jared removed all the screen doors. "Sooooo ghetto," he kept muttering to himself, as he hoisted and discarded of the screen doors next to the murder shack. The murder shack would have to go, too, but they would hire someone to dismantle it - after all, Jared and Iris were notorious wimps for creepy buildings and spiders. Kyle, Marco, Julia and Marco's on and off girlfriend, Nia, were there. Kyle entertained himself by running in and out of the garage door, shouting redneck-inspired remarks at us, like "get off mah land," and "where's mah moonpie?" Marco liked lifting heavy objects, as did Roy, who liked to believe he could play football with the Niners, if he only had the time. So they helped unload boxes. Iris' mom, in turn, unloaded the boxes and proceeded to organize the contents in the tiny house's meager storage spaces. Because her method followed no logic, many of Jared and Iris' belongings would be discovered in unlikely places over the course of three years.
By now, the house was quite lived-in. Marks of Jared's displeasure were scattered about the house: he didn't like the ugly brown ceiling fan in the kitchen, but they didn't buy a replacement light fixture - so bare wires poked out from a hole in the ceiling; He didn't like the ivy-covered steel pole, but they hadn't yet thrown it away, so it lay, in a tangle of withered brown vines, behind the garage, where the murder shack once stood; a former cement pathway lay as a pile of rubble at the base of the enormous deck. The incompleteness of Jared's beautification projects deeply alarmed Iris' mother. Could the man complete even the simplest of projects, or would their home eventually become a demolition heap? They wouldn't find out until later that she kept trying to predict exactly when her daughter would come to her senses, and leave her husband.