The entire growing season had passed and most of the corn had been harvested when a messenger arrived from the city carrying a copy of the magazine's newest issue for us. Yusuf answered the door, then came back and laid the magazine on the table. I saw myself staring out from the cover with a look of puzzled vigilance, using the tips of my fingers to support the photograph the American had taken of me so many years before. Embarrassed, I cast my gaze aside. “I have to finish the cleaning,” I said, and left the room.
I ought to have been indifferent to the attention, and the bigger part of me was, but the next day, when Yusuf was away, I could not resist leafing through the magazine to look at the rest of the pictures. What was most plain to me was how inadequate they were. I had lived through so much since I was a child, been changed so deeply by the years, yet how little of my soul could be seen in my face!
My moment of shining presence had passed. I had once more turned my back on the world.
That evening Yusuf came storming into the house with yet another note he had unearthed. He would not tell me what was written on it, but his eyes were hard, his face creased with anger, and I could see that something inside him had finally been upended. “Where is the magazine? I will show it to them, and they will see how harmless it is. Then all this madness will be over.”
Two minutes later, he was gone.
By the time he returned, I had already put the girls to sleep. Yusuf 's voice was hoarse, but its tone of quiet confidence had been restored, and I listened as he told me his story. “They were more reasonable than I thought they would be. True, they did not like our decision, but I persuaded them that it was mine to make. Now they merely seem worried that more Americans will begin to track us down. ‘The Americans have more glamorous entertainments to occupy them than my family’ is what I said. In any case, we will not be receiving any more notes, I think.”
And just as he had promised, the notes promptly stopped appearing.
We were given eight or nine days of ordinary household tranquillity, with the girls dashing from room to room and the scent of vegetable pilau spreading out from the kitchen, before a knock came at our door. From my chair, I could hear someone speaking to Yusuf with that strange halting conviction peculiar to Westerners and amateur politicians. “A fellow in the city told us we could find this woman here. We've come to say hello to her.”
I peeked through the curtains to see two men with the close-cropped hair and spotless clothes of off-duty American soldiers. They were brandishing a copy of the magazine.
It took Yusuf several minutes to explain to them why he could not allow them to meet with me. I-understand-sir-but-this, they kept interrupting him, and I-understand-sir-but-that.
Finally Yusuf said, “This is my home. We are not a marketplace. We are not a museum. We are a family, and we wish to be left alone. I must ask you to go away now.”
The Americans did not seem happy to leave. As their boots found the trail to the city, I heard one of them say to the other, “That Abdul better have our money for us, that's all I can tell you. As far as I'm concerned, a deal is a deal, and he broke it.”
Afterward, Yusuf came inside and lowered himself like a tired old man onto the sofa. He sat for a long time with his brow resting on the table. Then he lifted his head to me and said, “Kashar was right. This will be only the beginning. I think we are going to have to move.”
I remember watching as our daughters chased one another around the yard, saying good-bye to the hopper and the honeysuckle vines, to the dip in the earth where the puddle always formed, to the softened black stump where the walnut tree used to stand. We had hired a donkey and cart, and now we were leaving, traveling down the same road that had carried me away when I was fleeing the planes with my grandmother, that had carried me home again with a daughter in my belly and a husband on my arm.
Every road approaches, as the parchments say, and every road departs. We found our way to this small village in the cleft of the mountains, where the firs bomb our house with their long, dense cones and the pond is frozen for six months out of every year. We told no one where we were going, and so far our home has remained untouched by celebrity.
I enjoy watching Yusuf head out in the morning with his ax and his bucket to break through the ice and fetch back our water. There is a window in my room, and now and then, when the girls are playing and no one else is around, I like to stand at the glass and look outside. The sky is so sheer a blue here that I have seen stars burning through it in the middle of the day. It is a wonderful thing to behold.
I have had much time to think about my life, and I have come to believe that on the day the American pierced the air with his camera and the light came pouring through from the other side, the vision I had was no illusion. At that moment, God turned His gaze upon me, and I was captured by it. Some part of me was forever removed from the privacy of all things.
Just last night, I took the magazine out of its drawer to look at the photo on the cover, the one that made me famous so long ago. Yusuf spotted me holding it before my face like a mirror. He bent over behind me and placed his chin on my shoulder. “You are as important to me today as you were eighteen years ago, do you realize that?” he whispered.
“Yes,” I asked, “but am I as beautiful?”
He did not say anything.
After a while, he kissed my cheek and walked away. He knew as well as I do that the girl I used to be is no longer anywhere to be found. She remains only in my eyes, the same color then as they are today, as bare and as green and as deep as the sea.
ANDREA IS CHANGING HER NAME
From the very beginning Andrea saw the goodness of the world as something delicate and unpredictable, a slender green grasshopper that would tighten its legs and flick away from her the moment she brought herself to its attention. Her father spent his evenings carving blocks of wood into hunting decoys. Her mother lay in the bathtub listening to the American Top 40. Andrea sat on the couch watching TV until the sun turned the screen into a square of blazing white foil, then went to her bedroom to play with her horses. Sometimes it rained while she was asleep, and in the morning, before anyone else was awake, she would go outside to inspect the big puddle by the mailbox. She could see a picture of her face in the water, trembling and breaking apart at the edges, but it disappeared as soon as she touched it with her fingers.
When she was ten years old, she returned home from school one day to find a moving van parked at a tilt on the street, its rotund rear tire flattening the grass above the curb. Her father was staggering across the yard with a Civil War chest in his arms, her mother waiting on the porch to take her inside. It came as no surprise to Andrea how brittle her family was, how tenuously made. For years it had seemed her parents were playing a game of make-believe, a game that had only one rule: they would turn away from each other bit by bit while pretending everything was the same. Their divorce was simply the final step in the game.
Andrea stayed with her mother, while her father moved to Colorado. In fifth grade she began to dream she was standing in a field of sunflowers that reached only as high as her knees, which meant she was in love with a boy she had not yet met. In sixth grade she won her school's spelling bee; her first period arrived while she was sounding out the word quotidian. It felt as if a tiny egg had cracked open between her legs. She knew what was going on.
She met her best friend, Rania, in junior high. They sat in the corner of Mr. Bailey's homeroom making friendship bracelets from embroidery thread, knotting them on diagonals so the colors would switch positions: green for the boys they liked, gold for the wishes they made, maroon for the secrets they kept. They spoke every night on the telephone, often for an hour or more. On weekends Rania would spend the night with Andrea, and they would stay up late eating pizza and watching MTV, or braiding each other's hair, or making a list of the ten people they would save in the event of a nuclear holocaust. Alone, Andrea liked to lie on the carpet and read: Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, Kurt
Vonnegut and Henry David Thoreau. She began keeping a journal. She traced the lines on her palm with the tip of her finger. She bought a poster of the Beatles and tacked it to the wall above her bed. On days when she was feeling strong her favorite was John, and on days when she was feeling weak her favorite was George, perhaps because there was a vulnerability to John that she was afraid of indulging without an armor of her own vitality around her.
She turned fourteen the same year her mother remarried. Her new husband was a smooth-tempered, sardonic man named Jon, who brought to the house a strangely wily intimacy that slowly worked to soften Andrea's mother. One Saturday she sat Andrea down at the vanity and showed her how to apply her makeup like a grown woman—a little blush beneath the cheekbones, two contoured bows of lipstick. It was a lesson Andrea followed diligently until she decided that makeup was all so much folly and she no longer needed to wear it. In the summer of 1989, she learned she had been accepted into the arts magnet high school with a concentration in theater. On the first day of class, as she walked into the acting room, a feeling of nervous happiness overtook her; she had fallen upon a conclave of eccentrics. There was the boy with the Watchmen button on his beret, and the girl with the silent film makeup, a flawless white geisha mask of it, and in the desk by the filing cabinets there was me, the skinny boy with the crowded smile and the flyaway hair.
At the back end of the high school, between the library and the cafeteria, lay a pair of carpeted open bunkers called the Pits. Each day at lunch a ring of students would gather in one of the Pits to pray while other students, jocks and cutups mostly, would make a running start and leap over them. Andrea sat in the other Pit with Rania and Carla and a boy known to everyone as Turtle because of the shape of his features and the slow glances he cocked. Sometimes Andrea would let her mind wander, holding little interior conversations with herself during which she pretended that someone had asked her opinion of the goings-on in the other Pit. Even in her own imagination she found herself fumbling desperately for an answer. There was a self-congratulatory exhibitionism to the leapers that exasperated her—but then, when she thought about it, couldn't she see the exact same quality in the prayers?
Finally someone did ask her. She was finishing off the corner bite of a tomato-and-Swiss sandwich when I sat down next to her and said, “So what do you think—would you rather be one of the people praying or one of the people jumping?” It was the first time she could remember me speaking to her outside of class. I was wearing the same thing I wore every day: blue jeans, high-top sneakers, and a button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, a uniform she supposed I had adopted so that I could get away with thinking as little as possible about how my body was presenting itself to the world.
Andrea pointed to the boy with padded headphones over his ears, running through a Lionel Richie song, singing it vigorously, majestically, as if no one were there to hear him. “I would rather be him,” she said.
She was not trying to be amusing, only honest, but her response must have been a clever one, because I smiled and said, “Good answer.”
Then, just like that, I got up and walked away, rattling a ballpoint pen in my fingers. The intercom gave its five-minute warning. She did not think about me for long.
At the end of the day, Andrea always followed the crowd outside to the parking lot, where her bus was waiting in a long file of other buses, their outlines shuddering slightly as their engines turned over. Sometimes, when the light was clear, she would gaze out at the river as she rode across the bridge—at a bundle of sticks fanning open in the current, trailing streamers of brown foam behind them, or at a motorboat carving a white line in the green water. It was beautiful, but the beauty was always the same. She couldn't wait to turn sixteen. One night she was at her desk finishing her geometry homework when her eye was struck by the mound of stuffed animals in the corner. Her bedroom had become a sort of museum of her childhood: too much of her past there and not enough of her present. She began to sift through her belongings, boxing the old ones away. Her dollhouse, her Judy Blume books, her porcupine pencil holder—one by one she said good-bye to them. For a few days, looking at the sparseness of her bedroom, she felt more capable than she had ever felt in her life, stronger and closer to the center of her own experience. She gloried in the feeling, though she knew it would not last.
More and more she was immersing herself in the life of the high school. She joined the French Club and the Drama Club and the environmental club, SAFE, Student Activists for Earth. She started an Odyssey of the Mind team with Robin Crews and Cindy Jenson, assembling a performance based on the seven wonders of the ancient world. She played a street urchin in Oliver! and became a peer counselor. She was getting used to being in the school after hours. There was a sense of hibernation about the building once the other students had left, an atmosphere of stillness and secrecy that made it easy for her to imagine that she was watching it as it slept. She liked to think of herself as a hidden boarder there, creeping out into the hallways only after the sun had fallen.
For years she had spoken to her father only on major holidays, but shortly after the new year, he began calling her every Sunday. He had turned a new page in his life, he said, and he wanted to make things right with her. He suggested that she spend the summer with him in Colorado. “Just think it over. There's a mall less than a block from my house.” He finished with an enticing little rise in his voice: “It has a Baskin-Robbins.” To his mind she was still the five-year-old girl who liked nothing better than a scoop of bubble gum ice cream, who would bruise her lips eating with the pink plastic spoon, who would smile like a ghoul whenever he let her steal the cherry from his sundae. He really didn't know her at all anymore.
That summer, in Colorado, she saw her father every morning before he left for work and every evening after he got home, but because he worked in an office building on the other side of the city, she was left to fill the long sunlit middles of her days on her own. One afternoon she walked to the shopping mall to see a showing of Pretty Woman. The mall seemed bare and pitiless to her, with tinny synthesizer music coming from the speakers and pennies blackening on the bottom of the fountain; the movie theater smelled like mothballs and stale tobacco. She did not go back. Later that week she was walking to the grocery store when she discovered a vacant elementary school some local kids had refashioned into a skate park. That first day, she simply stood on the periphery of the lawn, watching as they rode their skateboards down the staircase railings and hopped like performing fleas over the chains hanging across the end of the driveway. The next day, though, when she returned, one of the skaters asked her if she wanted to make a drink run with them to the 7-Eleven.
“One condition—you stop staring at us and you tell us your name.”
“I'm Andrea,” she said, and then somebody started singing “Candy Girl,” and in less than a minute she had become Andi Girl.
The boy who had invited her to the 7-Eleven was named Justin. He was the quiet skater, just as George was the quiet Beatle, and only later did she realize how much courage it must have taken for him to speak to her. No one had ever really thought of Andrea as funny before, but Justin did. She would drop a joke into the conversation, and he would screw his eyes shut and grin, producing a slow-growing laugh out of the privacy of his consciousness, the kind of laugh that seemed to have a bell ringing somewhere inside it. He began coming by the house to pick her up after her father had left for work. He gave her a copy of his favorite novel, Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man. He took her to the slope behind the Dairy Queen so that he could teach her how to skate, but the best she could manage was to sit flat on the board as it rolled gently to the bottom of the hill.
She had known him almost a month before he kissed her. It was her first kiss, and she was prepared to shrug it off, but couldn't: she felt the entire gravity of her body changing as the two of them experimented with their lips, letting them go firm and then soft, moist and then dry, closed and then open. �
��Wow,” she said, and he began to laugh.
She was having dinner with her father the night Justin attempted to skate the wall behind the shopping mall. He wasn't wearing a helmet—he never did—and no one could say why he fell backward onto the asphalt. He lay there in a loose pile of clothing as the other skaters tried to prod him awake using their shoes and the hard tips of their fingers. Someone flagged a motorist down and convinced him to call for an ambulance. The technician who examined Justin found that he had fractured the back of his skull, chipping the point where its pieces joined together in an inverted Y and sending a splinter of bone into his brain. And while all this was going on, Andrea was dining in a restaurant where the candles on the tables wore hoods of red glass and the waiters carried satin cloths over their arms.
For the rest of the summer she spent part of every day at the hospital. How simple it was to imagine that Justin had only fallen asleep on his back. His chest rose and fell with the compressions of the respirator. Every so often one of his eyelids would twitch. One day Andrea found a hair as long as a cherry stem growing from a pore on his neck. He was not yet shaving, which was why the hair had gone unnoticed for so long, she supposed, and she took it between her fingernails and tried to smooth the kink out of it. The next morning she returned with a pair of tweezers to pull it out. She had lain awake for hours the night before, distressed by the thought that someone else might pluck it before she had the chance. She experienced an odd rush of relief when she saw that it was still there.
Something was making Justin shrink farther and farther into the distance, and she did not know what it was. First his friends quit visiting him, and then his aunts and uncles, teachers and cousins, coaches and grandparents. But not Andrea—she refused to allow him to sink into the bottomless world of her memories. Every afternoon she sat with his parents in the hospital room. “You've been such a good friend to Justin,” they told her. “You truly have, dear. He's very, very lucky to have you.”
The View From the Seventh Layer Page 22