Christmas in Austin

by Benjamin Markovits

  Though by the time they carried in the shopping together, Paul seemed fine. He said to Jean, who was in the kitchen, “We went to Houndstooth, and it’s almost like—I mean, you can’t actually exaggerate the extent to which …”

  “What are we talking about?” she said.

  “Beards and boots, the whole …”

  “It’s just as bad in London.”

  “As if these people think that drinking coffee is some kind of avant-garde activity. Baristas annoy me, too, I mean the word, it’s like they don’t think that any English word can possibly do justice to the complexity of … And of course all of these places basically look the same, that’s the other thing.”

  Nathan said, “They look like your house, Paul. That’s what they look like.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Concrete and glass. These are your people. Don’t kid yourself otherwise.”

  Nathan went out to get another round of bags. Afterward he walked across the road to Dodie’s house, to say hello. But what he also thought of, what was also on his mind, is the summer before he left for college, when he flew to the Dominican Republic with a kind of Peace Corps program, and came back looking like Paul looked now, skinny and … crazy, with pent-up thoughts and carefully worked out positions and arguments, which … meant he argued with Liesel, off and on, for the last few weeks of childhood, until he caught the flight to New Haven.

  He had bought a bottle of Promised Land Eggnog at Central Market, for no particular reason, and he took it with him now to give Dodie. It seemed like a neighborly sort of thing to do. Except she wasn’t in or wasn’t answering, and he stood outside her door for a minute, feeling phony or foolish. Her house was in bad shape, paint had blistered off the clapboard, and the screen mesh had given way in many places on the front porch. There were splintery little pockets or explosions of loose wires that would let mosquitoes in. The parlor window had an air-conditioning unit propping up the sash—most houses in the neighborhood had centralized systems, but Dodie’s little cottage was a holdover from earlier times, a little bungalow on a modest plot of land. Maybe she was one of these people who didn’t answer the door unless she knew you were coming over. And after a minute he walked back.

  * * *

  The flight to Santo Domingo stopped first in Atlanta and later at JFK—it took thirteen hours, door to door. All he had with him was the army-green Patagonia duffel bag, which he still owned. (Clémence had used it to pack the kids’ clothes.) It was the first time he had traveled without his family, and as the plane lifted above Austin, the flat parking lot of the airport diminishing below him, the lakes scattered between the trees and highways, the suddenly childish-looking architecture of the houses, like so many colored blocks, he felt an onrush of anxiety. A few other Austin kids were on the program (they were joining more in Atlanta and New York), and he knew them slightly from their preparation classes, the first-aid course and form-filling sessions. One of them, Karen Heinz, he had a slight crush on. Her parents were divorced; her mother was an endocrinologist at Seton Medical Center. This was her second time flying out (she had been to Ecuador the summer before), and she had the charm and confidence of experience. They argued from the beginning, about Dukakis, about Tiananmen Square, she had red hair and an angular handsome rather than pretty face; she was big-boned, too, tall and still skinny in those days, but still somehow physically awkward or uncomfortable in a way that only contributed to the force of her personality.

  Nathan had never had a girlfriend; he had never kissed a girl, and part of what he planned for that summer was to make a start on all that before he left for college. He was naturally self-assured and already had the sense, as a tall man, that tall women liked him for it, especially older women, teachers, for example, and other people’s parents—his height made him acceptable on some level. In other respects, though, he was careless in his appearance. He wore Air Jordan high-tops and cheap blue jeans and the T-shirts he picked up from his part-time jobs and extracurricular clubs, like the Summer Research Academy at UT. At that point, he still wanted to be a physicist. With his dark skin and long uncut hair, he looked a little like an Iranian terrorist. He had started shaving, too, but only occasionally, and he normally wore the shadow of a mustache on his upper lip, which somehow contributed to his guerilla revolutionary/high-school nerd appearance. Bill and Liesel both brought him to the airport, their oldest child. She was in tears when he filed down the narrow gate, and he thought, with a rush of blood, Here we go, until the plane took off and he felt the faint faint snapping of the kite string that had, for the past seventeen years of his life, held him in place.

  They stayed the first night at a dormitory in Santo Domingo and spent the next morning receiving equipment containers and final instructions from one of the local coordinators. Then, after lunch, they split into groups and at different times were loaded on to one of the guaguas, or private buses, that Dominicans use to get around the country. Karen was in his group; her Spanish was better than Nathan’s, which was lucky, because they had to change at Constanza and somehow locate the next guagua to take them to their village in the mountains a hundred miles to the west on the Haitian border. When they got there, it was already dark—and cool in the night altitude, and they still had to pitch their tents and find a place to pitch them. There were four of them in the group, two boys and two girls, and they each shared a tent. Nathan, tired as he was that first night, imagined some future when they might organize themselves in couples instead of by gender and hoped in some childish way he was already embarrassed by to pair off with Karen.

  After a few weeks, locals took them in, which often involved extended families moving in together so they could vacate the tin-walled shacks they usually slept in, four or five in a single room. The volunteers tried to refuse but eventually realized they were insulting their hosts and accepted.

  Nathan had never seen such poverty. He could not have imagined it without having seen it, and already, after a few days, all social and sexual thoughts of his own—the summer camp vibrations—seemed to have disappeared. Everybody was too tired, for one thing. It was their job to dig latrines and to teach the locals how to maintain them. You dug a hole at least 20 feet from the house, and downhill and at least 100 feet from any water source. You also had to work out how deep to dig, where the water table was, what the floodplain looked like, and construct a cheap wooden hut around the ditch for privacy, but also to keep out animals and flies—especially flies, which lay their eggs in excreta and spread disease. So the entrance to the shack had to be sealable, and it was important to keep all the surfaces clean. These are the things you had to explain, in second-rate Spanish, to people who had been living in these mountains for generations.

  They were also much better at working hard than he was, especially the old guys—who adopted a nice easy rhythm for any task, which they could maintain hour after hour, while he spent himself in the first ten minutes. Afterward, they ate with their hosts, rice and beans. He was ill at first, with diarrhea, for which he dosed himself from the medical kit, with Imodium and salt tablets. They boiled all their water or added halazone tablets. By the time he flew back to Austin he had lost twenty pounds. They walked for miles every day, across mountain country, to neighboring villages, carrying equipment, shovels, hammers, covering as much ground as possible, digging as many latrines as possible, talking to as many people … Everyone welcomed them, nobody complained, the children played in the dirt roads, he never heard anyone lose their temper.

  When a boy in his village cut himself on a baseball bat (they often used old planks with rusted nails), the cut became infected; Nathan, noticing, cleaned the wound and treated it with antiseptic. The medical kits they had been given in Santo Domingo included hydrogen peroxide, in solution, iodine pills, aspirin, and basic antibiotics—penicillin tablets, along with gauze bandages, needles and suture thread. The wound healed. After that, people started coming to Nathan with other problems.

  So
me of them were treatable. They had been told not to play doctor, but what could you do. A woman came to him complaining of stomach pains—she had seen him preparing his drinking water with those powders. But it was clear that what she suffered from was something else. There was blood in her stool, she looked bone thin, gray in her dark face, she couldn’t eat, she didn’t want to. Karen thought she probably had bowel cancer. He gave her salt tablets, he figured they couldn’t do much harm; she thanked him with such faith, he tried to tell her, you need a doctor. You are the doctor, she said. El medico … no medico, no medico. Medico en … and he tried to think of the nearest town with a clinic or a hospital … en San Juan. But she was too ill to travel—her husband had carried her to Nathan’s house in his arms. Every day for the next two weeks he went to visit her—he tried to make her eat, or drink clean water, and she drank a little. But she died anyway, and her husband apologized to him, with gratitude for all he had done and tears in his eyes; Nathan was seventeen years old.

  This is why they tell you not to play doctor. Other people came for help, from other villages. Somehow it didn’t matter that the woman had died. And still, no one complained, nobody seemed unhappy. He liked walking through the mountains in the morning, toward the next village, with a job to do. He had brought with him a copy of Hemingway’s short stories and The Road to Wigan Pier. At night, in his sleeping bag, in the glow of a flashlight, he read. He went to bed early and woke up early; in spite of the weight loss, he felt strong and well. His Spanish improved; he turned out to be good at making himself understood, at getting his way. He turned out to be competent in other respects, and Karen and the two other volunteers relied on him to work out how deep the water table was and where to dig. He was good with his hands, too, and could build a doorframe so the door stayed shut when you closed it.

  At the end of six weeks, they all met up in Santo Domingo again. He got drunk for the first time, on mamajuana; they went dancing, Nathan sat at a table and watched. Nobody went to bed—the rum kept him awake, but he never lost control, he felt lucid, but also awkward, left out, miserable, and very young. Karen, it turned out, liked dancing, and men kept approaching her; the music was mostly American, synthetic-sounding, Shakedown, Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now, the kind of music he thought she wouldn’t like. The dance floor was outside, under the stars. It seemed like a kind of violence, the level of noise. He could see the beach and the black-and-blue waters beyond it; sexual jealousy irritated him like a rash. At four in the morning he ate mangu, smashed plantain, and queso frito and drank coffee. (He had started drinking coffee in the mountains.) By that point he was fine—people just wanted to sit around and talk.

  The next day they flew to JFK and separated. Some of the volunteers flew on to Atlanta, where they separated again. On the flight to Austin, only he and Karen remained, like survivors. They hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours, they had been talking for the last five, and half-asleep, sharing an armrest, as the plane needled through night skies and the flat grids of human habitation showed their strings of lights, nuzzled a little and kissed. He felt like he was giving in to something, that she knew what she was doing and he didn’t, and that she knew she could make him respond, but he responded anyway.

  Bill and Liesel met him at the airport, and Bill said, “You look like a concentration camp survivor,” and in spite of himself, for some reason, Nathan felt ashamed.

  For the next two weeks all they did was fight, Nathan and Liesel. He couldn’t understand Bill’s short temper—the way he blew up about inconsequential things. When Jeannie left the milk out after breakfast and it spoiled. Everything had to be an argument. Just the level of … luxury, and more or less constant dissatisfaction with the luxury, the levels of daily unhappiness. Why should they live like that? Why should people be frustrated with their jobs? Bill often complained about university appointments, but for some reason Nathan took his anger out on his mother. Bill had the sense to leave him alone, but Liesel took him seriously, she wanted to correct him, she wanted to say: When you escape one set of difficulties, very basic difficulties, like the problems of sanitation and shelter, having enough food to eat or clean water to drink, or even … or even the difficulties of war, you don’t escape … the human capacity for difficulty … which is a good thing … you don’t escape … the problems of other kinds of desire, which are also, in their way, perfectly reasonable desires … Why do you argue with him, Bill said to her, at night, when they lay in bed. Just let him be … he’s going through a period of … Because I worry about him. He will make for himself a lot of unhappiness this way.

  Nathan met up with Karen a couple of times, they saw a movie at the Waterloo Ice House (she picked him up in her car—he couldn’t drive), but he was glad of the movie because it meant they didn’t have to talk. He felt there was something embarrassing about identifying with somebody because of a shared experience, it was demeaning. The second time they ate ice cream at the ice-cream parlor where he used to work, next to Flamingo Automotive; he was perfectly polite, even charming. She was flying out to Pomona in a few days; he was going to Yale. And after a few months at Yale, he adapted or adjusted again. He started going out with an English major, someone he met in seminar—he asked her out for coffee afterward, he took the lead. Because the one real lesson he had learned in the DR, the only lesson he could use back in America, was that women could be attracted to him; he didn’t have to worry about it, he was going to be okay, on that front. But obviously if Paul was going through something like this he hadn’t come out yet on the other side.

  *

  Susie was making lunch for the kids when he came back in. Just something simple, pasta and pesto. Clémence laid the table, Julie and Margot were going to have some, too. David and Jean sat at the far end, toward the backdoor, staring at Jean’s computer. She was checking out property websites, looking at houses for sale in Oxford (Jericho and Summertown and off the Cowley Road) and the surrounding villages (Botley and Marston, Beckley, and Noke). For a moment Jean had to lift up her laptop so that Clémence could spread the tablecloth underneath. “Susie,” David called out. “Look at this.” But Susie was carrying the pot to the sink, pouring macaroni into the colander and couldn’t come—she didn’t want to come anyway, she was still resisting. Ben wandered in from the TV room and asked his father, “What’s that?”

  “Can we do this later?” Susie said.

  “A house.”

  “It looks like a barn.”

  “It used to be a barn.”

  And Clémence came over, with a carrot in her mouth, peering over Jean’s shoulder. “Look at the garden,” Jean said, and clicked.

  “Nice garden.” A lawn, covered in fall leaves, with a kind of balustrade at one end, old stone steps. There were trees and fields in the distance, everything seemed sketched out in pencil, a little blurry, under a gray sky. It was funny to think this was somebody’s actual home, another family’s. Jean, staring at the screen, missed Henrik, and short English afternoons—the kind that get dark at four o’clock.

  “Is that where we’re going to live?”

  “I said can we do this later,” Susie called out, mixing the pesto in and bringing the pot to the table. “Watch out, this is hot. Can somebody get a … can somebody get a …”

  “Trivet,” Julie said.

  “Well, can you get one?”

  “I don’t know where they are.”

  Jean said, “I think you should look at this.”

  “Look at this, look at this,” David said, in his jollying-along voice; his accent, even after twenty years in America, was perfectly English. (Susie sometimes said it was like listening to the radio.) He wore what he called his “peasant trousers,” loose jeans, and a short-sleeved floral shirt that showed off his strong forearms and barrel chest. Susie came over, still carrying the pot in her hands, and he said, “Peach Melba sofas. Linoleum kitchen floor. Isn’t it great.”

  “You know what I see when I see a house like this?” Susie said.
r />   “We’ll take them all out,” David told her. “We’ll put in Essinger-grade uncomfortable Shaker furniture.”

  “I see recently divorced.”

  “Damn,” Jean said. “She got you.”

  “She got me.”

  “Can somebody get a trivet? Can everybody sit down? Where’s Liesel? Ben, go and get Liesel.”

  “Is Cal gonna eat?” Paul said.

  “He’s watching TV.”

  “Well, he can stop watching TV.”

  “Every time I turn it off,” Dana told him, “he cries.”

  The table wasn’t big enough for everybody, unless two of the kids sat together at the end—but Margot wanted to sit next to May, who was perched in one of these Swedish contraptions, a high chair strapped to the table, and Julie didn’t think it was fair that as the oldest child … but Nathan said, “You can sit at the end.”

  “There is room, if Jean moves the computer.”

  “I’m moving, I’m moving,” and she snapped it shut and stood up.

  Paul went to check on Cal. There was a narrow sliding door to the playroom, and unless it was closed you could hear the TV blaring away while you ate, the static quality of a five-year-old set. (Bill always liked to keep the sound turned up; his hearing was going, and the kids left it like that, because everyone was always talking around them.) Cal sat back on the couch, staring, his cheeks looked red and his fair fine hair lay stuck to his forehead. He didn’t complain when Paul turned the volume down. His eyes flickered with the movement of the lights on the screen, and when Paul walked across the rug and sat down next to him, Cal shifted slightly so that he could rest his head against his father’s arm.