Saving the World

by Julia Alvarez

  As the garage door rumbles open, the floor shakes under her feet—Richard is home! Quite the metaphor, she thinks. Quickly, she puts her journal away, glancing around as if to remember this moment in case it proves to be memorable: the moment before everything changed for the worse. Please, she pleads to all the things in her room: posters of some of her book covers; maps of the island; the homeland flag draped over her computer; her collection of virgencitas—as if these objects could guarantee her safety in the world. She closes the door and hurries down the stairs.

  “Wow!” Richard’s face lights up as he steps through the garage door and finds her waiting for him on the other side. “A personal greeting!”

  Alma feels a pang. Has it been that long? Usually, she calls down, “I’ll be right there.” But by the time she turns off the computer, puts her work away, and makes her way downstairs, ten, fifteen minutes have elapsed, and the zing is gone from her greeting.

  “Hey,” she says, pressing herself into him, not wanting, for the moment, to be a separate person, a person he could betray or discard.

  He folds his arms around her, laughing into her hair, but after a moment, when Alma doesn’t pull away, he grows still. “What’s the matter?” he finally asks. Sometimes he surprises her. Alma will think that Richard has checked out, gone to that fantasyland where—if the talk shows and those old misogynist Thurber cartoons are to be believed—husbands in long-term marriages go, but let Alma change one little thing in Richard’s routines, put his running shoes somewhere else, use a different cup for his coffee, and he notices. “Something happen today?”

  Alma had planned to tell him everything right off, but she finds herself delaying the moment. First, let him be reminded of what a good life they have together: a drink before supper, maybe supper out, maybe sex. It’s as if this new savvy self has splintered off, the smart wife who plays her cards right, uses magazine-article ploys to keep her man happy. (Dress up in something sexy; invite him for a date in bed.) “I’m fine,” Alma murmurs into his chest. “Why not? I have a wonderful husband.” She pulls back to look him in the eye. Maybe saying it will be like holding a crucifix up to Dracula in the old movies. If Richard is not truly a wonderful husband, he will turn into a puff of smoke in her arms. “Right?”

  He is looking at her quizzically, not totally convinced by this new lite version of his moody wife, then nods. How hard the last few years have been for Richard: losing both parents, sinking into depression (even if he refuses to call it that); then, finally, in the last few months beginning to rally, only to have his wife lag behind, a gloomy reminder. She takes his hand and leads him up the short flight of stairs to the main room, invites him to sit while she fixes his drink—wishing she didn’t always forget what goes into a martini—then pours her own pedestrian glass of whatever wine is already open.

  “A toast,” he says when she sits down. “To new adventures.” He winks before drinking.

  Suddenly, Alma realizes that she’s not the only one with a secret to report. The last time Richard came home with that sheepish smile and a toast to adventure, he had just bought a boat. He had gotten it for next to nothing from a colleague leaving for Ethiopia.

  “But you don’t know how to swim,” Alma had reminded him. On their first date, Richard had confessed that his dreaded way of dying was by drowning. He hated even watching pirate movies. Now he was going to sail the seas?

  “Not the seas, just the lake.” He had grinned, pleased with himself. “And it’s a motorboat, not a tall ship.”

  Alma had gone along with it, why not. Let him enjoy being a boat owner. Better that than a mistress, she’d thought, a thought that now glides across her consciousness like some evasive and deadly microbe on a slide.

  “So, what’s up?” She studies his face, the heightened color in his cheeks. She has always loved how coloring betrays him. Unlike many Americans whose faces seem so deadpan when compared with Latin faces, Richard’s is … not exactly expressive but transparent. Alma has always believed she can see right through him.

  “Okay, here’s the deal. If you agree, only if you agree—and I told Emerson I had to run it by you—we can go live in the DR for a while! Wait, wait, don’t say anything yet, let me finish. HI just got this really exciting contract to start a green center in the mountains. And Emerson’s asked me to supervise the start-up. Five months max on site. That’ll take us through the worst of winter. You won’t have to plow the driveway,” he teases. This is a gift he is offering her, a chance to return to her native land, to get away from everything she has been complaining about in his country.

  “You’ve been saying that you really feel like you need to go back to recharge yourself. How you need some downtime to just find out who you are anymore.”

  It sounds like her. Richard wouldn’t invent talk like that. Alma sighs, speechless before this incontrovertible proof of her own petty self in full complaint.

  “I thought you’d be excited.” His face has fallen, the color draining. “I am, I am. It’s just that I’m working on my novel.” Moving involves distraction, meeting new people, reinventing your self again.

  “What do you mean? You can write anywhere.” Why do people always assume this? Why does Richard assume this? He should know better. Last summer in an effort to resuscitate her saga novel, she had painted her study bright salmon to bring the tropics to Vermont. Within a week, she painted the walls back to off-white because the new color was drowning out her characters. “Oh, Alma, don’t you see? This is just the change you need.” When Richard is so sure, he is the husband equivalent of those salmon walls, drowning out her qualms. “You could get away from all this.” He waves his arms, meaning, she knows, the world of book biz, the faxes and phone calls, the plague of e-mail, Lavinia gently but firmly reminding her that the saga novel is overdue.

  “We can easily fly to see your parents. It’s closer to Miami from there than from here.” Richard’s voice has turned plaintive. He is running out of arguments, and she is still not convinced. “And David and Sam and Ben will love to visit. Do you realize they have never been to their stepmother’s native country?” Alma doubts that this bothers her stepsons as much as it does Richard. “Oh, Alma, please think about it, please?”

  Were she to think about it in her present state, the thought would get lost in the moody mazes of her mind, like Mamasita in the entrails of customer service. Too many ifs, ands, buts, and worse-case scenarios popping up. And Richard doesn’t really want Alma to think about it. He wants her to say yes.

  He leans forward, takes her wineglass, sets it down, then cups her face in his hands. Those strange blue eyes that will never seem totally real look softly down into hers. It always shocks her to find a mother’s cherishing gaze on Richard’s face. Something she never knew from her own mother, and which she never thought could come from a man. He kisses each eye closed, then tenderly kisses her mouth. Maybe he, too, has been reading the glossy magazines at the dentist’s office. “How to Make Your Wife Happy.” “How to Get Her to Say Yes to Your Fantasies.”

  Richard gives her the specifics. “HI’s been selected by this company, Swan, to help them with a sustainable project in the central mountains of the Dominican Republic. It’s totally off the grid,” Richard says excitedly, as if not being able to run a hair dryer or toast a bagel were attractive features of the assignment. “No electricity. Solar panels and wind power.” He anticipates her objections. “Enough to work a pump and lights and a few other necessaries. I mean, no one, not Lavinia, not Mario Whateverhisnameis, could get to you there.”

  Alma wishes Richard had not brought up her nemesis. Still, it does cross her mind that this would be a chance to prove how authentically Latina she is: up on a mountainside working with poor campesinos. How to live your life as a reaction to other people’s projections on you. Alma shudders. It sounds like childhood all over again.

  “It’s a chance to save those mountains and communities,” Richard goes on. HI will be working with a cooper
ative of campesinos in establishing the first eco-agricultural center in the country. “Swan’s already opened a clinic there, up and running. It’s a happening place. A real chance to make a difference.” In addition to its ongoing team of consultants, HI will provide on-site management for the first phase of the green center. “That’s where I come in,” Richard adds. These projects always sound so good. Like descriptions of apartments in rental ads: French doors, which end up being tacky sliding panels that let in the wind midwinter; quaint alcove off kitchen, which means a closet has been converted into an extra room you will be charged for.

  “Why doesn’t HI hire a Dominican manager? Use local talent?”

  Richard is nodding so vigorously that even though he hasn’t spoken a word, Alma feels interrupted. Of course, he agrees with her! He was the one who introduced her to this whole eco-agri-social-justice-sustainable green movement, which is the raison d’être of HI. Before Richard, Alma always thought of conservationists as a fringe group who had never fully recovered from having gone to summer camp as kids.

  “You’re absolutely right!” Richard concludes when Alma falls silent. “That’s exactly what HI suggested. But remember, this kind of ecomanagement is a new concept. It needs to be modeled. That’s why there’ll be a local intern … and then me.”

  He has already in effect chosen this mission. For Alma to try to dissuade him would be to put a pinprick in his balloon. To shipwreck his expedition. He has to go and play out his dream. Who would he become if she cuts off his wings? Who would she have to be to do such a thing?

  “When you say ‘off the grid,’ how off the grid do you mean—a hut, a dirt floor?” She has seen poverty back home and it is not a pretty thing. “How about medical care? What if you get AIDS?”

  The look of incredulity on Richard’s face almost makes her laugh out loud with relief. He could not be that good an actor.

  “Why would I get AIDS? You mean from being in a third-world country?” He makes quote marks with his fingers. It is a term he disliked even before he met her. One of the things Alma found attractive about him on their first date.

  “Come on, I’m not that stupid. It is my country, you know.” She feels a competitive need to remind him of her authority over all things Dominican. True, he knows many more facts about her native land and can answer dinner-party questions about the size of the population, the gross national product, the amount of aid flowing into the country. But she has got the language and the intuitive feel for how that world works. If he ends up on a desolate mountain farm, surrounded by campesinos, he will need her help, for sure.

  “So why would I get AIDS?”

  She can feel his gaze trawling her face for an answer. “I had this weird call today,” she begins, then blurts it all out: the woman’s accusation, the curse at the end.

  “When was this? Did you get her name? How did she say she knew me?” Richard is cross-examining her, as if she were the guilty party.

  Suddenly, Alma is aware of how ungrounded her suspicions will seem with so few details to back them up. She remembers reading an article about magical realism, the writer saying that the only way to convince a reader that there are elephants flying in the sky is to use details, to say that there are seventeen elephants with garlands of yellow flowers flying in the sky. Why didn’t she even think of asking the woman’s name, especially since the whole issue of names had come up? “She called me Mrs. Huebner. She pronounced it right.”

  Richard has been heading toward the phone, as if to confront the caller, but now he turns to confront her. “You’re not telling me you believe this, are you?”

  After a slight pause, Alma shakes her head.

  “Good.” He has to have noticed her hesitation, but he is letting it pass. He doesn’t want to risk not going on this DR project. Knowing Emerson, owner and director of a highly successful green consultancy company, international troubleshooter par excellence, who doesn’t suffer hesitation and delay easily, Richard probably has until tomorrow morning to make a decision. A bad fight could ruin it all. “Did you call anyone else?” Richard asks, picking up the phone and punching in some numbers.

  “Why?” And then Alma remembers Helen’s telling her about a way to call back a missed call, a feature Helen often uses as she can’t get to the ringing phone fast enough on her walker. Richard will be annoyed if he knows that she called Tera. He does not like Alma sharing their personal problems with a best friend who will influence her thinking. She shakes her head, then nods.

  But Richard is already barking into the receiver. “Hello? Who is this? Paul? Paul Vendler? Oh, Paul, I’m sorry, I was just checking something on our phone.” Richard turns and gives Alma a withering look, all the more unpleasant for the discrepancy of his pleasant tone of voice. “We’re fine, fine. Sorry to bother you. Things okay? Good, good. Same here. Sure will. Hi to Tera.”

  Richard puts the receiver back slowly and stands with his head bowed, as if he were praying over it. He is not one to lose his temper in any way that would register on the Latina telenovela scale Alma is familiar with. But after a decade together, she can read anger in the tight jaw, the big ears that seem to darken and perk up, the thin line of his mouth stretched tight when he finally lifts his head. Maybe he will risk a fight tonight after all. Then stomp off in a huff for five months to the Dominican highlands.

  “I tried to tell you that I had made a call,” she says lamely, not sure which of her sins he is finding most unpardonable: her talking to Tera, her equivocating about it, her mistrusting his fidelity, her not being overjoyed about his virtual acceptance of an assignment that holds her over a barrel: either she must desert her work or be parted from him for almost half a year.

  “When are you going to get it through your head that I adore you?” he says finally.

  Alma feels suddenly weepy with gratitude. Her wonderful, faithful, deserving compañero! Of course, he should go where his joy and passion lie, and Alma must not interfere.

  Richard comes to her, puts his hands on her shoulders. That cherishing look is in his eyes again. “I have never, ever, been unfaithful to you, even for one moment.” The repetition reminds Alma of their wedding ceremony. Richard’s favorite uncle, Dwight, an older, bald, Lutheran minister version of Richard, had flown out from Indiana to marry them. Uncle Dwight had asked if she, Alma de Jesús Rodríguez (a name his Midwestern mouth found hard to negotiate), took Richard Huebner to be her lawful, wedded husband, detailing each vow in a loud, slow voice as if Alma might not fully understand English.

  “I do,” Alma had said quietly. After two decades of rootlessness and many true loves later, she had no idea what it meant to say forever to anyone about anything. And any exuberance would have been tempered by the thought of her stepsons, brave boys standing by their father, his three best men, a clean, scrubbed look about them, their blond hair still wet and showing comb marks. How could they be happy at a ceremony that marked the end of their original family?

  “Let’s play it low-key,” she had told Richard as they planned the wedding, which was, of course, the way Huebners did things anyhow, she was discovering. It was her family she had to control: her dramatic, emoting sisters and cousins; the showy displays of nuestra cultura; merengues and boleros on a boom box; the lavish spread of spicy, tasty food brought to Vermont over distances; everyone talking too loudly, kissing and hugging too much, reminding the boys they were now familia and had to learn Spanish. Poor guys. No wonder they hadn’t pushed to visit their stepmother’s native country afterward.

  “About this offer of Emerson’s,” Richard reminds her. Alma has always admired Richard’s ability to stay focused on his goals. How he can draw up a five-year plan and a ten-year plan for their lives, everything prioritized. “Now you write up yours,” he has urged her. And Alma has sat at the table, feeling muddled as to where to start, the same pressure she feels at New Year’s when she tries to come up with resolutions. Finally, she is more of a fatalist about life than Richard. What will be won�
��t be anything she has any control over. Why even tempt the fates by revealing what would hurt most for them to deny her.

  When the phone rings, they both jump, startled by its intrusion. “Let the machine get it,” Richard suggests.

  Alma nods, but as the ringing continues, she remembers that the machine did not kick in this afternoon. “Something’s wrong with it,” she tells Richard now. The power outage last night probably tripped the mechanism and it has to be reset. “It’s okay,” Richard says, shrugging off the caller. “They’ll call back later.” But he, too, tenses each time another ring comes. Fifteen rings, a lot of persistence there.

  “Your mother,” Richard guesses. It’s true that Alma’s mother will let the phone ring and ring as if her call, like a baby’s cry, will be taken seriously and attended to if she persists. But Alma has already spoken to her mother today about the underwear order. This must be the AIDS woman calling back. She wishes now that Richard had answered it. His transparent face would have told all. Instantly, she feels bad at how easily she loses faith. She burrows into his chest, as if trying to get away from herself again.

  “Hey.” Richard is pulling at her gently. “So what do you think?”

  Just make believe I’m not here, Alma is thinking. Just carry me strapped to your chest wherever you go. She listens to the beating of his heart, steady and strong, a blacksmith’s hammer decisively hitting the anvil.

  “You okay?”

  Alma nods into his chest. When did this happen? When did she lose the independent warrior woman of her twenties and thirties, the writer who loved solitude? She has become domesticated, a Mrs. Huebner, like the woman caller said. “Richard love,” she might as well come clean. “Have you ever like totally wanted to just let go of everything, shed it all, and find out what’s left?”

  He looks down at her, one eyebrow raised, no doubt wondering what troublesome maze this non sequitur might lead him into. “Sure,” he says finally. “Why do you think this project is so appealing to me? I’m always writing and talking and consulting about this stuff. This is hands-on. I get to do it myself for once, you know?”