by Wendy Dale
My mom had raised us to be her playmates. As a kid, I was her buddy, both of us living on a diet of ice cream and macaroni and cheese that I had learned how to cook by reading the package. She’d take me to R-rated movies, giggling at the fact that she could get me in, since she was my legal guardian. And she bought me a pink canopy bed, the kind her mother had always denied her as a kid.
It would have been an ideal childhood had there been an adult to take care of us. In Peru, we’d had the maid to clean up our messes and prepare our food, but when we moved to my father’s dream farm in the backwoods of Tennessee, the responsibility shifted to me. Now living in a sparse trailer, her favorite joke had become: “We don’t need a dishwasher. We have one. It’s called Wendy.”
Up until then, the most difficult challenge I had faced in my life had been choosing between apple pie or coconut cream, but at seven years of age, what had formerly been done by the maid now fell to me. At night it was the kitchen: I’d slide a chair up against the sink so that I could reach the dishes, the counters, and the stove. On the weekends it was the bathroom and my room. And in the mornings, while my mother slept in, I began getting myself off to school alone. It was a two-and-a-half-hour bus ride to Rickman Elementary so I’d be outside waiting at five-thirty after I’d cooked my favorite breakfast, fried hotdogs on sliced bread with ketchup.
At five in the evening, the bus would drop me off outside our trailer, where I’d turn on our black-and-white television, engrossed with American entertainment, which I was seeing for the very first time. I would watch Wonder Woman and the Six Million Dollar Man, doing my chores during the commercial breaks.
When we moved from Tennessee to South Carolina, my father began working long hours—he’d leave before I got up in the morning and would come home too exhausted to do anything other than watch television or fall asleep—so my mother began relying on me for other things as well. There was “Wendy, Heather talked back to me today. How should I punish her?” and “Wendy, Catherine’s arm looks kind of funny. Should we take her to the doctor?” And then there was her concern when she took four-year-old Heather to the dentist for the first time, after having teethed her on licorice. “Wendy, what are we going to do? Heather has nineteen cavities.”
To her, she was just the biggest of a bunch of kids having a good time, and she intended to teach us that adolescence could go on indefinitely. And for her, it did. She was carefree and fun, flitting away her time on soap operas and junk food while I grew into a somber, bookish, responsible teenager—if only to prove that all children eventually rebel from their mothers.
These days, my mother still turned to me for advice on everything from which dress to buy to the problems she was having with her friends while I kept the important details of my life hidden, sharing them only with my younger sisters. I was five years older than Heather, seven years older than Catherine, and I still remembered the years I had longed for them to hurry up and become adults. Now the three of us were inseparable, getting together any time we could, always leaving a trail of secrets, empty wine bottles, and broken hearts behind us.
This Christmas vacation had been slightly different though. In the five days we’d been in Honduras, we’d basically just sat around the house, trapped by lack of transportation and not knowing our way around. My mother, whose strongest maternal instinct was to fill her children with food, spent her time baking brownies and lemon squares while my father whiled away hours polishing minerals in his shop. But my sisters and I were getting restless. Even Rich was desperate to get out of the house.
“Mom, isn’t there anything to do in this town?” Catherine pleaded.
“We could go for a drive,” my mother said.
“You guys don’t have a car,” Heather reminded her.
“How about a bus ride?” my mother suggested.
We’d all seen Romancing the Stone. A bus ride in Tegucigalpa—it had to be interesting.
All six of us walked down the hill out of my parents’ posh neighborhood and into a slightly more modest area where we hailed the first bus that came by. Climbing aboard, I was struck with a severe case of déjà vu—this wasn’t a Honduran bus; it was an old Bluebird school bus imported from the United States. It could have been the very same vehicle that carried me to Rickman Elementary so long ago, assuming that the bus had been pelted by rocks and baseball bats, dragged through a river, and subsequently left to rust and decay. Lots of the seats were missing cushions, most of the windows didn’t open and there was a small hole in the floor through which we could see the street below.
“No fighting, horseplay, or loud talking,” I mock-scolded my sisters, reading from the rules in English that still hung in the front of the bus. “And even though it’s not on the list, I hope everyone understands that no one will be placing their feet through the hole in the floor.”
We’d only been outside of my parents’ house for a matter of minutes and we were already having fun. A simple bus ride through Tegucigalpa was in itself a cultural experience. Rickety cars spewed fumes out into the street. Street vendors hawked fried plantains, pupusas, and fruit drinks. Pedestrians bumped into one another on the street, their arms loaded with purchases. Music and dust competed for space in the air.
Like most Third World cities, Tegucigalpa had imported lots of modern conveniences but had been ineffective at completely blocking nature out. There were computer stores, Benetton shops, and a Pizza Hut, but outside of downtown, many residential streets still remained unpaved, the cries of chickens and dogs filled the air, and majestic green mountains loomed in the distance, making a city of nearly a million seem provincial and friendly.
Just as a “rock-free highway” sign had first clued me in on the foreignness of the place where I found myself, the most revealing part of our bus trip consisted of the strange and funny signs I kept seeing outside. “A friendly reminder for you, Dad,” I said, pointing out the government billboard put up in the interest of bettering the population, reminding them “A woman is a companion, not a slave.” And in the same spirit of honesty was a sign for Flor de Caña, a popular brand of rum billing itself as “Your happiness and old friend.”
The popular pastry manufacturer Bambino promised, “You won’t get cholera with our bread,” while its main competitor was a line of bread products called Bimbo, which claimed to be “always soft, always fresh.”
And driving by the hospital, I couldn’t help but point out that there were three signs: one for emergencies, one for general admittance, and a special entrance just for cholera patients.
We were laughing so hard that our stomachs hurt, but I couldn’t help but prolong the pain.
“Dad, have you seen any other funny signs?” I asked my father as we were nearing the end of our ride.
“Please don’t burn the trees.”
What’s so funny about that?
“Well, your brother went on a Boy Scout camping trip through the park El Tigre here in town. The kids really wanted to make a campfire but they didn’t want to go against the rules.”
“So what’d they do?”
“They burned the sign.”
It was a unique holiday season, to say the least.
My sisters and I had already counted on not having any snow, but learning that we were also to be deprived of a Christmas tree came as a bit of a shock. This had nothing to do with any stinginess on the part of my parents—it was because it was impossible to buy real Christmas trees in Honduras (due to government laws designed to protect the forests) and you couldn’t buy fake ones either (due to what I can only assume were government laws protecting plastic)
“Dad, does this mean we won’t have a Christmas tree this year?” my youngest sister asked, concerned.
“It’s just a different kind of tree,” my dad answered.
This different kind of tree was called branches.
Although it was illegal to cut down pine trees in the country, for some reason it wasn’t against the law to go around yanking off the
branches. So around Christmastime, vendors would set up places along the road where you could go and pick out your cuttings.
Filled with holiday cheer, the six of us headed out of the house to the nearest stand but once we were there, we stood perplexed, wondering how to pick out a good branch. When selecting a nice tree, I knew that you tried to find one without any naked areas, in other words, one that wasn’t missing any branches, but this suddenly wasn’t an issue. You couldn’t pick out a branch that was missing a branch. Branches didn’t have branches; they were branches, for God’s sake!
“How many should we get?” Catherine asked. “Is the price per branch or is there a package deal?” Christmas had never presented these kinds of challenges before.
After a bit of discussion, we decided that we would take three home. However, once we were back at the house, we looked at our purchase, unsure exactly what to do.
“It’s just like having a tree—without the inconvenience of dealing with a trunk,” I said.
“Yeah, maybe later we can sing, ‘O Christmas branch, O Christmas branch . . .’ ” Heather added.
“Maybe we should have bought a stand or something,” Catherine commented.
We tried to rest the branches up against the wall in the living room, but they kept falling over. After several failed attempts, we realized we were going to have to think up something better.
“What if we plant it?” Catherine suggested. “You know, we put it in a pot of dirt.”
It was the best idea anyone had come up with. We stuck our branches in a pot and stood back to admire our work.
Next came the hard part: decorating. We had to find the delicate equilibrium of our Christmas branches. My sisters and I took turns cautiously placing each decoration on, waiting to see if this was going to be the one to tip the branch over again. And after an hour of frustration, we had finally succeeded in deducing the plant’s limits: Three branches could endure the weight of exactly six ornaments.
“It’s like the Charlie Brown Christmas tree,” Heather said gleefully as we watched another ornament topple off and roll along the floor.
Christmas came and went, and while my sisters packed up and headed back to school, I had a few more days in the country, which my mother insisted would be a great opportunity to go to the dentist. I had a few qualms about the whole thing—after all, a country whose leaders put up public-interest signs with the messages “Where there is electricity, there is progress” and “Let’s help eradicate dengue” wasn’t exactly the ideal place to be shopping around for highly specialized medical treatment. The mere thought of going to a dentist in Honduras filled my head with images of unsterilized needles, old-fashioned drills, and inadequately trained staff.
“But you’re only looking at the negative!” my mother scolded me.
“And the bright side would be?”
“This second-rate health care—”
“Yes?”
“It’s really really cheap. The other day I went to the gynecologist. Two dollars, I paid! I’m going to start going more often.”
I reread my travel insurance brochure carefully and as there was nothing in it that allowed me to go to the dentist in the event that my luggage had been delayed for three days, I politely declined.
“Just a checkup,” my mother pleaded. “No one can screw up a cleaning.”
Maybe she was right. How much damage could a little fluoride do? And that was how my dental odyssey began.
“What time is my appointment?” I asked my mother the next day.
“You don’t need an appointment, you just show up.”
“Like Supercuts, you mean?” I asked as I flashed back to the time my mother talked me into going with her to get a haircut and the month that followed of tying my hair back in a bun. “What’s the dentist going to do to me? Just shave a little enamel off the sides?”
“Don’t be so negative. She’s very nice.”
“Nice is important for restaurant staff, airline attendants, and veterinarians. I don’t want her to be nice. I want to know that she’s not going to start inhaling nitrous oxide, go loony on me, and begin drilling all my teeth.”
As it turned out, she didn’t need the nitrous oxide. (I, on the other hand, found myself longing for some, especially after hearing her verdict on the shameful state of my mouth.) The woman must have had bionic vision because she had found cavities in places I didn’t even knew I possessed teeth.
Now in the United States, a dentist would present you with this news and then give you a few days to get used to the idea that you were going to have sit for hours with your jaws open while she jabbed needles, drills, and metal utensils into your mouth. You went to the first visit because you knew it was just going to be the cleaning. Not here. This was the do-it-now-before-the-Sandinistas-invade part of the world. And as Dr. Silvia asked me to open up, just as she would on the next six visits, I found myself silently cursing the Reagan years.
I don’t recall if I ever did get a cleaning, but most of my whole dental experience has been mercifully repressed by my subconscious. I remember big needles, whiny drills, and days of not being able to eat. My gums swelled up, my cheeks turned into round, little balls, and finally, when I thought it was all over and I had been assured that it was my last visit, I got home and felt a suspicious hole in one of my teeth.
“How can you feel a hole in your tooth?” my mother asked. “You told me yesterday that you still hadn’t regained the feeling in your tongue.”
She had a point. So, I ran my finger over the surface of what remained of the upper part of my mouth, and sure enough, there was a Tic Tac–sized opening in one of my upper molars.
Reluctantly, I showed up at the dentist’s office one additional time.
“Dr. Silvia,” I mumbled with as much articulation as possible given the altered shape of my mouth. “I think there is a hole in one of my teeth.”
She had me open my mouth and took a look inside.
“Is that what you’re worried about?” she asked as she inserted a hook-like metal instrument into my exposed upper tooth.
I screamed in pain. “That’s the one.”
“That’s nothing to worry about.”
“It’s not?”
“No, I just forgot to put in the filling.”
I had always sort of believed that we were your typical dysfunctional American family, but the fallacy of this logic began to dawn on me on my last day in Honduras as I watched my mother making cookies with her best friend, the CIA agent. This was not a normal thing to do. Normal parents resided in the suburbs, watched game shows on television, and had jobs. They didn’t hang around the kitchen, baking with spies.
But try telling this to my folks. My parents moved to a country they had never even visited and sold everything they owned to do it. My mother, who lived her life with as little synaptic interference as possible, had figured it would be tons of fun, but my dad had thought the plan through. In typical Richard Dale fashion, he had read a stack of books, pored through magazine articles, and after some final calculations he realized exactly what he would be giving up: middle age spent between the office and the television set, a life of sameness, of growing old with nothing but a résumé and a manicured lawn to show for it. Suburban Tempe was nothing but going to work, buying things, and going to bed. My father had wanted to escape. And he had wanted his children to understand why.
All those years of plate tectonics and fossils and chemistry—as a kid, I had naively believed the lessons were about science—when all along my dad had been talking about life. In forbidding me to memorize and forcing me to think, he had been ensuring that I’d never coast along on autopilot, that I would only adhere to beliefs I had fully thought through. He had made me question everything, giving me permission to pursue life on my own terms.
As I watched my mother and the government official in our kitchen form the cookie dough into little round balls, my dad bounded into the kitchen, anxious to show me the latest batch of opal
s he had just polished up in his shop. He couldn’t wait to extol the virtues of his new diamond-tipped lapidary sander, one of his new projects now that he had eliminated the annoying working-for-a-living part of his life—my father now lived for a living.
It seemed so simple, yet few people were ever able to accomplish it. Was the secret to happiness as simple as buying a ticket to Honduras? If that were the case, surely American Airlines would have taken advantage of this in its advertising campaign. (“We are your ticket to happiness. Low one-way fares to Tegucigalpa.”) Perhaps it was that my parents had had the courage to make unconventional choices, to discard what didn’t matter, separating out what was expected of them from what was really essential.
As my father laid the specimens out on the table for me to peruse, I couldn’t help but imagine myself at his age. When I was fifty years old, would I look back on what I had done and regret that I had traded happiness for stability? I had already let my childhood pass me by. Would I give up my early adulthood just as easily?
I had been so content for the past two weeks in Honduras. I had had fun with my family. We’d all been so distracted by the newness of the place that we hadn’t had time to remember all the old resentments and gripes.
All it took was this simple realization to completely turn my life around. After all, happiness was like alcoholism—it began with a single sip.
Chapter Two
The Only American Tourist in Beirut
Back at home in Los Angeles while I contemplated the sorry state of my life from the safety of my bed, it occurred to me that if there was anyone who could teach me to lighten up and have fun, it had to be my friend Peter. For the past eight years, he had been showing up at my apartment in L.A. whenever I needed a few laughs. In general, his levity-inducing methods were mild, but on occasions when I was particularly resistant to his charm, he wasn’t above resorting to force. When necessary, he would shove me into my walk-in closet, follow me in with a fifth of tequila, and assure me that my freedom could be obtained as soon as I had consumed two shots. I would squeal and plead, realize that I had no chance of overpowering my six-foot-two-inch captor, and finally accept his terms, reluctantly downing one drink and then another.