Have Mother, Will Travel: A Mother and Daughter Discover Themselves, Each Other, and the World

by Claire Fontaine

  I push my way toward the pool of light on the bridge I recognize. “We should have left earlier!” I call back to Mia.

  No answer. I twist back. “Mia?” It’s too black to see anything. I call her name again as people bash into me on all sides. “Mia!” No response and nothing but blackness.

  I turn and quickly shove the last few feet to the bridge. There’s a small mound of bricks in a pool of light. My heart starts pounding as I climb up and turn around. Pretty young women do disappear in foreign countries and this part of the world is full of human trafficking, but I know I’m getting worried out of proportion to reality.

  I keep calling her name. There are thousands of people around us and it’s almost pitch-black. It’s a long fall off the bridge and a short fall into a sewer. It’s a huge city and we’re a couple of miles from the hotel where we’re to meet our teammates for dinner. And, stupidly, I have all the money and the phone.

  “Mia!”

  My jaw starts to clench, my armpits prickle, my mouth is going dry. I’m starting to get the same mushy stomach feeling I got when we were canvassing a bad neighborhood for signatures a few years ago and she disappeared between two houses for a few seconds, long enough for my lizard brain to kick in. The part of me that still remembers how it felt when she was missing as a teen, either literally or figuratively. I try to calm my breathing. I had no idea the residue of our history could stay so long in my body.

  Mia’s voice rings out, “Mother!” and she suddenly rushes into the light below me. I’m so relieved my knees feel soft. “Why didn’t you follow me?” I snap and I’m immediately sorry.

  “The car was there! Who told you to keep going without me? Stop yelling and let’s go,” she says sharply.

  Her anger surprises me, but I’m too shaken to respond. We hold hands and don’t say anything else as we retrace our steps through near-blackness through the river of humanity. Twice we almost tumble into the sewage ditch; we trip over people’s wares on the ground. We pass a circus of sights popping out of the darkness: a boy under a hanging lightbulb in a tiny blue barbershop cutting an old man’s hair; a man stitching by candlelight; a young man standing on another’s shoulders in a sea of boxes; the red glint of a goat’s eyes; a teenage boy’s T-shirt that reads BOOBIES MAKE ME SMILE!

  We finally reach the big main paved street, which is patchily lit. It’s a slow-moving mass of vehicles bordered by bikes. My backpack strap hooks onto someone’s handlebars. I’m yanked along as I try to wrestle myself free. I needn’t bother; the rider actually shoves me free. Mia grabs my hand to balance me as we skirt a blanket full of old shriveled limes and finally make it to a store display window with three feet of open space.

  Smack! Something like a rock hits my calf. I stop as another slams into my rib, hard. Those petrified ancient limes. The adults around the blanket are snickering. Mia and I exchange a surprised look.

  I grab Mia’s arm and hurry us both on. “Let’s go before they throw something bigger,” I mutter, disgusted and furious. Those weren’t kids. It was adults that threw them. For no reason. And right now I want to throw them back.

  I hate this feeling. Fury in others is scary enough to me; in myself, it feels sickening.

  That was like Cirque du Soleil in hell.” I throw my pack on the hotel room floor.

  “I’ll take a quick shower and then run you a hot bubble bath,” Mia offers. “You still look like a deer in headlights.” She peels off her damp clothes as she heads for the bathroom.

  I flop onto our bed and pull up my shirt. A bruise. I’m sweaty, my feet are filthy from the streets, the rotten meat smell seems to have lined my nostrils, and my head is still ringing from the noise. I reach for a pillow and the softness of it against my skin instantly almost makes me cry. Fragrance, softness, and cleanliness are suddenly, fabulously, ridiculously wonderful. I listen to Mia’s shower, notice my folded laundry.

  I like to think I don’t take much for granted in life. I look around and realize that we take almost everything for granted. We have no idea how much. Oh, yes, we all appreciate our good fortune in having food, freedom, family, good health.

  I look at our room and see treasures beyond the imagining of half the people in the world. Books, pillows, candy, a mirror, a camera, contact lenses, shoes, freedom from parasites, electric lights and clean underwear, for God’s sake. I can refuse a meal simply because I don’t like the taste, take a hot bath, have quiet—or entertainment—every single time I want them, and stop them when I don’t. I can control the number of people I’m with, read past sundown. Leave, I can leave. Or come. I can decide.

  “I’ll never complain about my house again,” I murmur.

  It’s cliché, we all know it in our heads, but tonight I get it in my body, my senses. It’s as if the contrasts of Nepal have seeped into me: the comingling scents of fresh sheets and rotten meat, the luxury and silence of the room and the honking far below, relief for my daughter’s safety and nerves still taut from that awful moment of fear.

  I could not have imagined that that degree of fear could remain in one’s cells so long, so pure in its remembrance! What a perfect predator fear is, all the more ruthless and clever for knowing all the soft spots, the thin scabs. What better camouflage for the memory than the body? Especially a mother’s body.

  So much of motherhood is tied up in our bodies. Long past pregnancy and nursing, we feel our motherhood viscerally. We wear the medals of pregnancy forever: varicose veins, C-section scars, our softer breasts and bellies. Our bodies respond to our children with a degree of courage, fear, joy, anger, or pain that only they can elicit, no matter how old they are.

  My body’s ability to mock time, and my own will, worries me; I don’t want my memory swinging a baseball bat at me out of the blue; or affecting how I am with Mia. I have to think these subterranean sense memories have unconsciously colored my relationship with her.

  I’m glad it was dark and she was far enough behind me that she couldn’t see it. The main reason we’re here is to see each other anew, beyond our history.

  Fold-up seats on an airplane are cute at an air and space museum. Less so when you’re boarding a thimble-size jet about to fly you over the jagged Himalayan Mountains to Chitwan National Park, a protected Nepalese park near the Indian border. By an air carrier that goes by the name Yeti Air, no less. Why the Nepalese chose to name their sole airline after a large, hairy, man-like creature (who, according to folklore, is quite fond of the bottle), I have no idea, but it’s hardly comforting, like traveling on the Werewolf Express.

  Two hours later, we’ve traded one iffy form of transportation for another: the back of an elephant. I assumed that riding an elephant would be akin to riding a very, very big horse but there’s nothing remotely horse-like about sitting in a raja-style carrier atop the world’s largest land animal. No mane to grab, no reins, and certainly no five-foot fall to the ground should something go wrong.

  We’re loaded onto the elephants in pairs, along with a scout standing atop Sandra the elephant’s rump and a driver sitting behind her head. His sole means of steering this two-ton beast is a small stick, and his feet, which are tucked into the space behind the elephant’s ears to tap her in the direction he wants her to go. My mom and I lean our backs against each other to create a mutual backrest and clasp the sides of our bassinet as Sandra lumbers across a shallow, muddy river. My mom, of course, is wearing a formidably large hat with the strap tied snug beneath her chin so that she has to tilt her head and squint in order to see anything.

  Within minutes we’re swallowed up in thick jungle. The dense tangle of brown, olive, beige, and black filters the incoming sunlight to a hazy glow beneath the foliage. There’s a feeling of struggle in the jungle; vines cling to clusters of vegetation, weeds entangle themselves with shrubs, moss creeps along tree trunks. One form of life covers another in a slow race for light and air.

  A firm swish of Sandra’s trunk pulls aside a final curtain of moss and we emerge into a bright
expanse of sweeping grasslands beneath a cloudless sky. The other tourist-clad elephants amble into sight, parting grasses tall enough to tickle our dangling legs.

  We pass several rhinos that are so ugly they’re actually cute. Like the elephants’, their hide is a tough gray-brown, cracked and dusty, but from certain angles they’re almost dainty, with tiny round ears that wiggle and plates of skin that come together in scalloped folds like a petal skirt.

  Besides rhinos and deer, tigers reside at Chitwan, but sightings are so rare that seeing one wasn’t much on my radar until our guide’s eyes widen and he starts shouting out rapid-fire Nepalese to the other guides. My mom and I lurch every which way as he whirls Sandra about-face, urges her forward several paces, then pulls her to an abrupt stop, turns her to the right, moves her forward, spins her to the left. The other elephants are turning in similar circles like a clumsy troupe of whirling ballerinas.

  The elephants zero in on a large clump of marshy grasses, and though the elephants outnumber—and certainly outweigh—the hiding tiger, they’re nervous, pawing the ground and trumpeting. They close in tighter and tighter until flecks of orange begin to appear and stripes suddenly materialize as he walks out into plain sight.

  He’s majestic, long and lean, pure muscle rippling beneath a glossy coat of stripes. A tiger’s only natural enemy is an elephant, but he’s not that intimidated. He’s reluctant to leave his territory and stays, pacing back and forth in a fifty-foot radius, expressing his annoyance with a series of long, low grunts and growls. After about five minutes, he’s had enough and saunters off, the stripes from his coat slowly becoming indistinguishable from the streaks of brown and green grasses.

  After a moment of awe and quiet, we all break into a chorus of amazed comments, and our driver is grinning like a small boy even though he’s been working here for years now.

  “Always exciting,” he says.

  “How often do you see tigers here, is this common?” my mom asks.

  “Not for two months now. But I think this tiger same one we see before. Maybe tiger not very smart,” he laughs.

  The herd separates and each elephant and its entourage take off in different directions. We settle into a contented silence, taking in the changing colors of the landscape as it turns from day to dusk, listening to the shushing of grass in the wind, and inhaling the cool, damp air. The setting sun radiates soft pinks and purples and the mist rolling in has blurred the outlines of trees and mountains, making it seem as though the grasses grow straight into the sky. The whole scene is one of muted beauty. We arrive at our tents and say very little to each other as we watch the sun sink behind the mountains.

  How strange to think that barely two weeks ago I was squeezing my way into subway cars and shouting above music to friends at a party. Driving into camp today we passed young men and women who will likely never travel farther than their village. I wonder what they think when we pass them, if it puzzles them that we come from so far away to see what seems mundane to them, if it makes them angry or resentful, if they find us amusing or stupid.

  How radically different their notion of “life” is from that of an American teenager texting friends about the latest song from an indie band in Iceland. For each, the other’s life is almost impossible to fathom. Funny, I feel that way about my own life. How I lived ten years ago is so wildly different from how I live now that when I see old photos of myself, it’s like looking at a strange girl in a foreign landscape. My life then feels more like a faraway dream than an actual memory.

  Much of my life has been a dichotomy: a nightmarish childhood with my biological father versus a magical one with my mom and Paul, dropping out of high school and running away versus going to Georgetown. And within the last few years, speaking one day to audiences about abuse and addiction, then changing hats the next as a publicist raving about the hottest new diet book to magazine reviewers. I sometimes think if I were cracked open I would look like an archeological dig site, different layers containing remnants of different lives.

  Before it became my default mode, compartmentalizing was a conscious choice I made; it was how I helped myself move forward. Coming home at seventeen, I immediately realized that I couldn’t just talk openly; references to “the program” or “Czech Republic” were followed by dropped jaws, strange looks, or fifty questions. Then I’d really be in a pickle, because the honest reasons that I was there included running away, felony charges, and—the biggie—sexual abuse. I had no qualms about sharing any of this, but people’s reactions tended toward pity, discomfort, or a fascination that made me feel like a circus act. So I opened up a drawer and tucked that period of my life away.

  It also made it easier to adapt. The less I thought about “the program,” the easier it was to stop saying “Excuse me” to everyone I walked by, asking for things in German (which we had to learn in the Czech Republic program; it enabled us to become bilingual, and it prohibited us from making run plans given our limited vocabulary), or panicking if I found myself alone with a guy (staff had to be present or we’d get in major trouble).

  When it came time for me to transfer to a university college, I chose somewhere deliberately outside of my comfort zone. People often assume that comfort eases transitions, but in my case comfort spelled boredom and boredom often spelled disaster. So I went somewhere where no one had a background even remotely like mine, somewhere where people wore monogrammed blazers, rowed boats, and interned on the Hill. I went to Georgetown.

  Being around people who compared internships rather than months sober gave me a totally new frame of reference. It kept me on my toes by forcing me to look forward and dream, rather than look back and reminisce. It also created a pattern of filing away the parts of myself that weren’t relevant to my present surroundings.

  Compartmentalizing contrasting facets of myself became my default drive; I filed the teenage Mia in a different drawer from the college Mia, who was in a separate location from the publicist Mia, who was miles away from the author Mia.

  In a weird way, I almost feel like Nepal herself is nudging me to examine how I operate by showing me a completely different way to successfully exist; nothing is compartmentalized here. You can’t take note of the art without noticing the misery surrounding it. You can’t look at people squatting in the streets or children digging through garbage without simultaneously seeing beautiful saris or intricate carvings on ancient buildings. Fragmentation is a first-world luxury that is physically impossible here; there is no rug under which to sweep ugliness and suffering.

  It’s a dangerous thing, to divide yourself, to break off bits of yourself until there’s no solid core. We are, after all, just the sum of our total experiences, each one lying beneath us like a brick in the foundation of a house. To be selective, to block out portions, is to destabilize the very ground on which you stand. And, indeed, I’m just now acknowledging how disjointed I feel. No wonder I was furious with my mom for asking why I left my life; it struck a nerve with the part of me that knew I didn’t just come for her. For a long time I’ve ignored the part of myself that knew I needed some serious time for reflection and examination.

  Like a horse that didn’t know it was cold until someone covered it with a blanket, this spreading calm and self-awareness is like an old friend long forgotten. I can’t remember the last time I felt this peaceful. In acknowledging this feeling of wholeness, I’m also forced to acknowledge that while compartmentalizing myself once helped move me forward, I’m long past that point.

  One of the few things I remember from high school science was that when we see white, we aren’t seeing an actual color but the reflection of all visible light in the light spectrum. In other words, if even one color from the light spectrum was missing, we would never see the color white.

  In cultures throughout the world, white is symbolic of purity and peace, and what is peace but a joining of contrasting or opposing forces? For me to find inner peace I must invite and embrace the extremes and contrasts of my
life. Perhaps more than anything, it is this that I have learned from the Nepalese.

  Men here have their saris, too. The van-taxi taking us back to Kathmandu is, like many, entirely painted with brilliant designs and scenes. They’re feminine-looking and beautifully executed, like trucks in drag. Some are simply a riot of brilliant swirls and patterns. Others feature deities: Shiva smiling in a forest; elephant-headed Ganesh amid a sea of aqua and purple paisley. There’s the occasional Communist slogan, REVOLUTION IS MY NAME! One sports the goddess Kali, with her many arms and her long red tongue stuck out. She has Shiva pinned beneath her feet, several men’s heads dangling from her belt, and the words ROAD KING! painted beside her.

  Even the dashboards are festooned with garlands of flowers so thick that the men drive through a daisy-bordered world—with their pals. Most taxi drivers, including our driver, have a pal or three up front.

  Which is all fine and well in town, but terrifying when they horse around and slap each other while the van is careening down a teensy, twisting, badly paved road with no guardrail, suspended over thousand-foot drops. Mia’s been white-knuckling my forearm for miles.

  More nerve-wracking is when he screeches to a stop to pick up a friend in the middle of the road—hey, Kapil, what luck to find you walking at the base of a mountain out here in the middle of nowhere, hop in! Trucks behind us swerve around and hit the horn, waves are exchanged, all while nearly killing us all. Then he turns the AC from his sweating passengers to him and his pals. Who are all wearing long sleeves and vests.

  Mia’s this close to being motion-sick when the driver pulls into a kind of rest stop with picnic tables in a small wooded strip between the road and mountain. Thank God, because after he’s gone to the john and eaten lunch, he drives slowly enough to allow Mia to relax her grip and go to sleep.

  Rural Nepal goes by in vignettes: families working in their gardens, little girls twirling their yellow skirts with their heads thrown back in front of colored wooden houses, four women in matching turquoise saris around a sewing machine on a peach-colored porch, brown thatch-roof huts, hovels dug into the mountainside. Little girls and boys in uniforms hurry along the road to schools with names like All Heavens Girls English School plunked in the crop fields. Little boys in rags walk in the ditch between the mountains and speeding cars, or along the top of a low wall a thousand feet above a river. Women bend to bathe and fill buckets with water from a spigot poking out of the mountain.