In that discussion, whose essential aspects are both ancient and philosophical, and concern identity and belonging, my own story gleams. It is the paradox of Theseus’s ship. If gradually you replace a ship’s components until nothing of what is left—not a nut, not a bolt, not a bucket, not a thread of the sail is the same as before—is it still the same ship? For fun, we could say that this process takes place over seven years, the same length of time they say it takes the cells that make up the human organism to renew themselves. But we could also imagine the components being replaced not over time, but all at once. And that we also move the ship, having it sail across, say, the Atlantic instead of the Mediterranean. Is it then the same ship or a new one? I think about that a lot.
every morning the indian gentleman at the motel reception desk gives me a coupon for the diner next door. It’s exchangeable for some greasy but good breakfast tacos served in a plastic food basket lined with greaseproof paper. Outside the diner, which is surrounded by a low white fence with a creaking gate, the regular customers sit and suck the life out of their cigarettes. They fall silent as I come through. Pursed lips, cowboy hats, heads turned. Hello, honey. They can tell I’m not from around here.
The girl in the brown apron asks if I want “tea” again. Yesterday, when ordering tea with my breakfast, I was unsure about asking for “a cup of tea.” The norm here is iced tea, sweetened or unsweetened, served with a straw in a frosted plastic beaker. You want it hot? Yes, please. She came back in with some boiled water and a dusty sachet containing something that colored the water purple. The milk came separately, cold, in a big mug.
Today I ask only for boiled water. Charge me for tea, I tell her, but I’ve brought my own. I pat my plastic bag with its tea infuser and tea from Perch’s tea shop in Copenhagen.
After she brings the water, she lingers at the table to see what I do.
She says: I want to know how tea works.
I sound like a poem. Tea is leaves, I say, like tobacco. People who drink tea like tea just as much as people who drink coffee like coffee. I think about having the words printed, a little verse emblazoned on T-shirts, tote bags, mugs, a line of tea-lovers’ merchandise, then plop the infuser crammed with tea leaves into the water. Like a drug addict I feel the calm spread within me as the water begins to cloud. When you’re away, habit becomes your home, perhaps even your religion. Behind the girl, the tv forecasts seventy-nine degrees Fahrenheit.
At the next table is a man in a shiny, worn-out denim jacket, with long, jet-black hair parted down the middle. He looks like an American Indian. He seems absorbed by my crazy experiment. You’re not from here, he points out. He wants to know where I’m from. I say: In a way, I’m from here. I put the sentence out in front of me like a blind man prodding with his cane on an unfamiliar sidewalk. His eyes tell me I need to explain. Solemnly I say that my great-great-great-grandparents and everyone who came after them are laid to rest in the soil beneath us. Apart, that is, from my dad and me. Back then, the town was nothing but a few planks laid across some mud, I say. And now here I am, drinking my own tea with a Hyundai rental car waiting outside.
The man writes his name in my notebook. Her-nan-dez. He hands it back to me with thumb prints all over the page. He has lived and worked in Lockhart for twenty-five years. Originally, I’m from San Antonio, he says. He pronounces it Santonio, the way people do there, and starts telling me about the canals and Fiesta, his mother and grandmother, as if the place existed only in some distant dream rather than just an hour’s drive from here. I get the feeling that it’s not so much the city he misses, but the time that has passed since he left it. Once again: time. We can never go back to who we used to know, or who we used to be. Of all forms of exile, the one from childhood is the most difficult.
The motel owner wants to know what my breakfast was like. Good, I tell him. The place was full of living people. And the food? Great. He wants my honest opinion. The diner belongs to his sister, and she wants to know how she might improve things. Maybe they could widen their range of teas, I tell him. He tells me he considers tea to be far too serious a matter to be left to others. I make my own tea in the morning, he says. I will make a cup for you as well. You like it with milk and spices, like we drink it in India? Shall we say 7:30?
The next morning at a quarter past seven, the chunky beige plastic apparatus beside my bed starts to ring. In my ear is the voice of the motel owner. Good morning, ma’am. Your tea is ready.
I put some clothes on and go out onto the walkway. The horizon is red, and the air already smells of charcoal and fire. Lockhart is waking up. My way around the building to reception takes me past a room whose windows are blocked out with aluminum foil. This is where the motel owner lives with his wife, whom I have yet to see.
As soon as the motel owner sees me he ducks behind a curtain into the aluminum-foil room out back and returns with a steaming mug of spicy tea. I take it in both hands, a little piece of his homeland in a delicate china mug decorated with a red-breasted songbird, a robin perhaps, with a metal lid to keep its contents warm.
I remain standing with the mug in my hands. He tells me his name is Deepak. There’s a quiet melancholy in his voice, which pads softly through everything he says. He came here from Delhi to become a lawyer, but failed his big exam, the bar exam, the one they fail in movies. Now he stands at life’s opposite end, watching strangers pass through his reception. His dream has changed. Now he has plans to sell the motel and find a small farm with his wife.
What about your children, don’t they want to take over?
His reply is prompt: I wouldn’t want that for them. It’s 24/7.
For twenty years, he and his wife have split the days and nights between them. She sleeps in the daytime behind the aluminum foil, their paths cross twice a day in reception. His dream is modest: he wants them to spend the rest of their time together, sharing the same hours.
Don’t get me wrong, he says. Fate has been good to me. His children have done well. One is a doctor, the other a lawyer. Both are looking at the kind of lives he wanted himself. Now all he hopes for is that everything will come to an end while the going is good.
Everything?
The family line. I tell my children not to get children, he says. This surprises me. I tell him that where I come from it’s quite normal for people to ask others why they don’t have children. As if children were something one gets the way one gets an accountant or a fridge or an education, an item on a shopping list, rather than the result of a great many complicated circumstances. Like forest fires and freckles, I say. It’s unusual to find someone who asks the opposite: Why have children?
But if life has been a success? he says. The way he sees things, his children are riding the gilded waves of evolution. For them the challenge consists not in making life better, but in not spoiling it.
But what would having children spoil?
It’s a gamble. You never know which children you get, he says. Or: They would have American children. American children have no attention span, they have abbreviations, adhd, that kind of thing. Not being able to sit still on a chair, not being able to concentrate or look a grown-up in the eye when they’re talking to them. Better not to have children.
American children. The pain of immigration in a nutshell. You swap one continent for another, and your children become strangers.
i need to extend my radius. An email from my dad mentioned the people in Buda. I have no idea who they might be, only that they’re some family, a female cousin and her children who are busy restoring an old mill. Looking at the map, I see that Buda isn’t far away, maybe thirty minutes in the car, and no need to take the interstate. I have no other plan than to keep my foot steady on the gas pedal and get there and back unhurt. A walk through the town on my thin leg before heading home. Form an impression, extend my radius.
I put on the black elastic support I bought in Denmark, which I’ve been using every day, and timidly approach the car, adjusting the seat
three times to find the best position to operate the pedals. I take a deep breath. Start the engine, release the brake, and pull out toward Route 183.
The roadsides are dotted with small blue flowers; the prairie is full of them and I sense what a wonderful sight it would be if only I could turn my head to look, but instead I keep my eyes fixed firmly on the road ahead. The broken yellow lines down the middle vanish beneath me, beneath me, beneath me. They are the timepiece of road travel, tick-tock, tick-tock, behind me, behind me, stretching ever on into the horizon. I’m on the road, driving …
On the way into Buda I stop at a green sign, a place Her-nan-dez from the diner enthused about. If you are going to Buda, you must go see Cabela’s, he said. What’s Cabela’s, I asked him. Just a big store full of great stuff. You’ll see the sign just by the highway. Great big green sign.
Inside, I’m greeted by a man in an orange vest behind a tall counter with a sign on it: Firearms Check-In Station. But who would take sand to the Sahara? Cabela’s turns out to be a mammoth gun store. The walls are covered with hunting trophies, the mounted heads of deer, antelope, gazelles, more species than I even knew existed. The store itself contains rack upon rack of rifles, shotguns, pistols, new, used, and antique. At the far end, they even have a shooting range where you can try them out before buying. The checkout, which looks like any supermarket’s, has three dedicated lanes only for guns: Firearm checkout.
I go looking for downtown until I realize this is it. A T-junction across from the railway station, two restaurants, and a junk shop with a sign outside: Antiques Mall. The most prominent building is the railway station, an old Western-type structure made of wood. The trains no longer stop here, but occasionally a freight train trundles by, an endless rumbling of wagons. A short distance away, on the other side of the junction, a squat water tower like a giant insect surveys the town and its population of 11,416. This, in all its humility, is Buda.
I ask a passerby for directions to the old mill. The definite article, as if it would be familiar. The man looks blankly back at me. The old mill? He turns around and stares out into infinity, but no, he’s never heard of any old mill. Sorry, ma’am.
How naive of me to think I could just turn up and ask someone who lives here. Naive to even imagine that just anyone would know my dad’s people in Buda. Perhaps it’s for the best. I’m too shy to show up out of the blue anyway. Best to wait until he’s around.
The restaurant I go over to on the corner is the only one whose door is open. A lady in a checkered shirt is busy putting chairs up on the tables. I hover in the doorway. She looks at me. She looks like someone who needs a nap, I think to myself. I probably look like someone who’s hungry.
Lunch ends at one, she says, and closes the saloon doors.
My stomach rumbling, I wander around the surrounding streets, a quiet residential area of wooden houses and flat lawns with the live oak that is everywhere in Texas.
A driveway full of people comes into view, people sitting and eating at tables with tablecloths on them. While some choose an afternoon nap, it seems others make good use of their front yards. I go over and find a table. When my dad was at school, he told me, he sometimes ate the most wonderful lunches in the living room of a Mexican family. My grandmother made $300,000 baking cookies in her kitchen. Texas is full of these stories.
I catch sight of a waiter with a tray of three bright strawberry margaritas that he puts down in front of one, two, three shaven-headed men. They lift their glasses, fingers heavy with chunky silver rings, and chink them together. At another table, three ladies sit drinking iced tea through straws that gurgle when they get to the bottom. They are immaculately dressed in short jackets, their nails long and manicured, hair blow-dried and fixed like tv anchorwomen, blue, purple, pink, hairdos as big as cotton candy.
My accent arouses interest. Everywhere, I meet with the same uncomplicated friendliness. Where are you from? Whenever someone asks, I venture the same answer. From here, I say with enthusiasm. I’m from here! I’m like the Americans I once met in Iowa, who in their best Midwest American tried to tell me they were Danish. We’re Danish! We’re Danish! Our ancestors came and settled. We have recipes at home for æblikayyy and liverpostayyy.
The lady in the junk shop seems genuinely interested. She wants to know who these relatives are to whom I so boldly refer. I mumble something about the old mill. I mention the people in Buda. Yes, yes, but who? What are their names? There’s one called Gay, I think. Oh, I know her. I’ve been friends with her daughter Celia for thirty years. Now, lemme call her up …
Five minutes later I find myself standing in an open barn across the tracks from the water tower, waiting for Celia. Leaned up against the back wall is an old hand-painted wooden sign that must be fifty feet long: Buda Mill & Grain Co. I’d walked right past the place earlier, the words ‘the old mill’ preventing me from noticing it. A mill. In my mind it was a winged wooden structure on top of a green hill or beside a gently babbling brook. But instead of a picture postcard, the mill is two huge corn silos constructed out of metal sheeting, now rusting at the joints, and scattered around them are barns, not of wood, but of corrugated iron, with sloping roofs.
There’s a raw beauty about these structures, the wind whistling through the metal.
They stand on the ground, bleeding their rust, their longings, their wild dreams.
Celia reminds me inexplicably of my mother. She comes in a silver sports car, lively and intelligent, with a nervous energy that tells me she’s a doer, always engaged in some project, always working to make things happen and make things better. She shows me around the buildings, the bare structures that for now are just there. So that’s kind of fun, she says every time she tells me about some plan for the place, a restaurant here, a wine bar there, a microbrewery over there, a yoga studio right here, parking lot over behind those trees.
Her face is creased with smile lines, her bright blue eyes see things as yet unrealized. The people in Buda are building a whole new town here. They’re working on getting the trains to stop again, and not only that: We’re trying to move the station, she says with a laugh, and points toward where they want it moved to, which, not surprisingly is just across from the mill project. So that’s kind of fun.
Celia is not involved in the mill herself, her daily work is in the Methodist church, but her sister and her sister’s son are fully involved in the project along with their mother. Right now, her sister is in New Mexico and their mother at home in poor health.
She tells me about her grandfather, Grandpa Ruby, who bought the mill back in the day. Five minutes ago, I had no idea she even existed. Now we’re on our way back to her silver sports car to go for ice cream sodas at the old drugstore on the other side of the station. We’re family now.
Ruby. Now it dawns on me who the people in Buda are. Celia is the grandchild of the choleric highway king who failed to get my mother to drink whiskey the time she was pregnant with me.
She too is gradually figuring out where I belong in the scheme of things. So what was your last name?
Clark.
Oh, Clark! Was your mom a brunette?
She used to be, yes.
I remember her, she says. She was here with your dad?
That’s right.
I remember her. She was sunbathing on the Ruby Ranch in a bikini. The boys just wouldn’t stop talking about it.
She says no more and I decide not to mention the Tennessee Williams Night. We drive over to the other side of the tracks for our ice cream sodas.
when i was a child I sometimes asked my dad if he believed in God. I don’t recall his replies, only that they were always balanced. God is an idea, he said. Ideas exist. Therefore, God exists. Something like that.
It took a while for me to realize that this was my dad telling me gently that he did not believe in God, at least not in the way people who believe in God normally believe in God. He was not presenting to me any proof of God’s existence, but a defense of ide
as. My dad believed in science and the human mind, and that they could take us places.
There are, as far as I can count, forty-three churches in Lockhart: Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Evangelical, Episcopalian, African Methodist Episcopalian, Church of Christ, Mission churches, Catholic churches, Baptist churches, and so on, no fewer than eighteen variations of Christianity. All rather dizzying when, like me, you come from a country where one size fits all, where you automatically belong to the church that happens to be closest, unless you actively choose to belong to another instead or opt out altogether.
For that reason, I simply assume that the church opposite my grandmother’s house was the one the family used. I tell my dad it was locked. Another European habit, assuming that churches are open and wanting to go inside them, if only for the aesthetics.
Which one is our church then, I ask him, and by our church I mean the church Gussie and the family belonged to, it being unthinkable in Texas that a person should not belong to a church.
First Christian Church, says my dad, on the same street, West Antonio Street, but the other end, up near the square.
And what kind of a church is that?
Oh, it’s vanilla ice cream, says my dad, meaning: pretty bland.
What about the Methodist church? I’m thinking of Celia.
That’s vanilla ice cream too.
Actually, they are all vanilla ice cream, he says after a moment. Except the Baptists.
What’s special about the Baptists?
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