by Wendy Dale
(Fuck.)
On the drive over to my aunt and uncle’s house, my sister helped me piece together how I had wound up in the United States. She had wanted to help me out of my dire financial circumstances but hadn’t had any money to send so she had gone to my aunt and uncle for help. Somehow the phrase “boyfriend freed from prison followed by starvation in war-torn Colombia” had sort of slipped out of my sister’s mouth, and my uncle had readily handed her two hundred dollars and then secretly plotted to get me back to the United States. Knowing I would never willingly leave Francisco behind, he had found my Achilles’ heel, an unwavering devotion to my siblings.
Heather, for her part, remained innocent of the lie perpetrated upon me, mostly because she had been completely unaware of what was going on. She had been in Arizona visiting our sister, Catherine, when Bob called her up with a message consisting of limited information: “Wendy is coming home. You have to get back here.” And once she had arrived in West Virginia, the damage by then had already been done.
Looking back, the fact that my uncle was capable of this should have come as no tremendous surprise. He had always gone out of his way to make everyone in his family feel insignificant in order to make his own sense of self-loathing seem small in comparison. He had once been a respected photojournalist, but his best days were behind him and my aunt Trish’s lucrative corporate law position was now the primary source of income in their family. My sisters and I never understood how such an educated and determined woman could become so submissive in his presence. He criticized the way she drove, her sense of direction—even her ability to make the right purchases at the grocery store.
He had a wardrobe full of Dockers and Polo shirts, knew a few gourmet cooking tips, and engaged in a constant stream of yuppie activities to cover up the fact that he was born unsophisticated and provincial—which was only interrupted by his outbursts of acting unsophisticated and provincial. Over the stove as he stirred pots of coq au vin, canard aux champignons, and spaghetti alla puttanesca, he would rant about how women should never be allowed to drive, how niggers were destroying the city.
I wondered how my sister was able to spend so much time in his presence, but they were the only relatives living anywhere near Vassar. Based on the other coast, I had been forced to endure Bob only on three visits (he had married into our family and was Trish’s second husband). Each time he had made my skin crawl. On one especially trying visit, he had regaled my sisters and me with the shocking tales of his sexual exploits—knowing that my uncle gave great oral sex was a detail I would have been happier not knowing.
However, when I had first heard about my sister’s “accident,” my dislike for him had taken a backseat to Heather’s well-being. I was so distraught with grief that I had nearly forgotten how I felt about him.
In Cali, I had been forced to wait helplessly for nearly a week believing that all earlier flights were booked. The truth was that my uncle had been stalling until he and my aunt could leave town, hoping that a few days in Heather’s presence would calm me down a bit. However, entrusting this responsibility to a person I had expected to be dead wasn’t exactly great planning on their part.
My first few days at their house, they kept calling up Heather and asking if it was safe to come home yet. My sister would tell them the good news that I was getting calmer and calmer and the bad news that their wine collection was growing smaller and smaller.
A day after my arrival, I had been poking around an uninteresting-looking storage room packed with boxes and old clothes, not expecting to find anything of note. I was simply bored and had run out of places to rummage in the rest of the house. I don’t know why I chose to peek into the carton in the middle of the room. But when I did, it was as if I had been witness to a miracle. I could actually hear the ta-dah music in my head (the same sound my Macintosh makes when I start it up) as a ray of white light shot its way through the window, illuminating the green glass bottles filled with red and white wines. Happily hauling one of each flavor with me upstairs, I concluded that if someone had to kidnap me, at least it had been accomplished by the only members of my family who purchased their alcohol in bulk.
That day and on every day to follow, the only escape I had from the misery of my daily reality were the drinks I began pouring for myself at ten in the morning, which sped to my bloodstream even quicker with the aid of a pack of cigarettes. My muscles constantly ached, my throat was hoarse, and my stomach burned, but in a strange way the pain pleased me. It felt oddly appropriate.
I was pretty satisfied with the quantity of my drinking, but after a period of seven days of sustained inebriation, the blurred figure in front of me with my sister’s voice was starting to get a bit worried.
“Wendy, alcohol has turned into your reason to get out of bed in the morning.”
“That’s not true,” I said, defending myself. “At least not since I keep my tequila on my nightstand.”
My sister (who was, after all, a Fulbright scholar and felt the need to adhere to some standard of societal decency) took a deep sigh and insisted on trying to get me to see the light (and unfortunately she wasn’t referring to the ray of light shining down on the Chardonnay in the basement). “Wendy, I think you need to take a good look at the situation you’re in,” she insisted.
“Okay, this is what is happening: I free an innocent man from prison and then Bob comes along and kidnaps me. Wait a minute— aren’t you supposed to be dead? Ghost Heather, would you please bring me another margarita?”
I thought that summed up the situation rather nicely.
I was desperate to make contact with Francisco. After days of failed attempts, he finally picked up the phone. I had planned to tell him everything, but once I heard the reassuring sound of his voice, I decided against it. In a long distance relationship, you never bring up any subject that can’t be completely covered in one phone call. Waiting to continue a conversation at a later time is too painful. I didn’t want Francisco to worry. So I sketched the barest outline of the plan my uncle had managed to carry out and assured Francisco that my sister was fine. Once I had laid out the basics, the only thing left to talk about was my desperation so I hung up the phone as quickly as possible, in order to keep Francisco from hearing the fear in my voice.
I would figure something out, but in the meantime I needed Francisco to focus on his own problems: surviving in Colombia without resorting to anything illegal. I had a nagging fear that the only thing preventing him from making a drug run had been my presence, and I couldn’t bear the thought of losing him again to another prison.
Francisco’s biggest character flaw was that he had an incessant need to please. He wasn’t firm in his beliefs; he shifted his opinion to mesh with that of whomever he happened to be hanging out with at the time. When I had been with him, this had worked in my favor (perhaps I had even taken advantage), but now that he was deprived of my influence, I worried about what he could get himself mixed up in. I needed him to be patient the same way he had held out when we had been separated before.
Over the next week, we sent e-mails frantically back and forth, and the continual contact helped to reassure me. Francisco’s letters were filled with affection and encouragement, and it appeared that things were going relatively well for him. He had begun work as a cabdriver and was barely earning any money, but he had taken in a roommate in order to augment his income. I wasn’t sure how I felt about a stranger living in our house, but at least he was finding a way to manage for a while without me.
How I would face my aunt and uncle was a stress that constantly weighed down on me. I didn’t really blame Trish—Bob constantly manipulated her to get his own way—but I wasn’t sure how to react when I saw my uncle. I was filled with violent fantasies of punching him in the face, but I knew I would never actually carry them out.
When my aunt and uncle finally did walk through the door a week after my arrival, I repressed the urge to be aggressive and difficult and resorted to being diplomati
c (any foreign-service agent will tell you this means behaving well and drinking as much as possible). Had I been dealing with a rational man, I might have tried to talk things out, but I planned to flee Bob’s house as soon as possible and knew I would never speak to him again—ours was a relationship that didn’t merit saving.
In silence, I wondered what my relatives’ plans for me were. I had no money. I had left my belongings behind in Colombia: my clothes, my computer, my irreplaceable writing samples. Did they really expect me to simply forget about these things and my boyfriend and live happily ever after with them?
Having never fully thought through the consequences of their actions, now they found themselves bewildered by a situation they didn’t begin to know how to handle. They tiptoed around me, hoping that not mentioning the issue would make it disappear on its own. In the meantime, I was acting as if everything were fine in order to keep conflict to a minimum—but the pretense weighed down on me and I longed to escape. I had arrived in the country with just thirty-five dollars, which had now dwindled down to less than twenty (spent mostly on cigarettes), which meant that the only way back to Cali was to find myself a job.
I spent several days scanning the want ads and then called up a temp agency that specialized in bilingual positions, figuring it would be a relatively easy and commitment-free way to make a quick buck. After polishing up my résumé and tailoring my experience to make it look like I’d spent my entire professional life as a Spanish-speaking secretary (screenplay writing with Manfred became “skill at writing bilingual documents”; conversations with Francisco became “translation experience”), I informed my aunt and uncle of my plans to go in for an interview. They seemed relieved at the prospect of my gainful employment: Getting a job was surely a sign of my nascent sense of responsibility—though my uncle couldn’t resist slipping in a dig: “Oooooh, twelve dollars an hour. That would be quite a step up for you.”
On the subway into D.C. with my sister (she knew the city much better than I did and I was relying on her to get me around), I rehearsed the upcoming meeting in my head. It had been years since I’d gone in for an interview for an office job and I was trying to remember the helpful tips guidance counselors had imparted to me so long ago. There was something about being immaculately dressed, showing a positive attitude, and being sure to leave your chewing tobacco at home. (I went to high school in the Midwest, okay? This was the kind of stuff you had to tell kids over there.)
As we got closer and closer to our stop, it occurred to me that my answers still needed a bit of fine-tuning. For example, in response to the query, “So, what is your least favorite part about working in an office?” my gut instinct would choose to say: “The working part.” Interviewing wasn’t like that word-association game where you mentioned the first thing that popped into your head—or even the fourth or fifth thing. The trick to getting a job was simply to lie shamelessly.
In spite of my preparations, there turned out to be a few obstacles at Telesec Temporary Services that I just hadn’t been expecting. As I walked through the glass doors of the twelfth-floor office adorned with potted plants, the receptionist oh-so-cheerily handed me a stack of forms to fill out, apparently trying to set an example of the courteous demeanor and optimistic outlook characteristic of all the company’s temps.
“Did you need a pen?”
I knew this was a trick question. Showing up without a writing implement would count as the first strike against me, a sure indication that I was unprepared for secretarial work and pen ownership in general. Luckily, I had thought of this minutes before when I had spotted the broken-off tip of a number two pencil on the floor in the corner of the women’s rest room.
“I have a pencil, thanks,” I said, clinging to my tiny stub of lead.
What followed was a grueling two hours of filling out forms, taking computer software tests, and watching industrial videos in which nonprofessional actors with Colgate smiles explained what a bright future awaited me in my new temporary life. Finally, I was ushered into another room for my oral interview, where I was joined by the office manager.
After a few preliminary easily answered questions, I came upon my first real roadblock when I was expected to explain the unaccounted time on my résumé. Not having a pat answer prepared, I resorted to the truth: I was still trying to account for it but it had something to do with living in Colombia.
At this point, had the woman conducting my interview been your typical temp-agency employee, I probably would have been ushered out with a suspicious smile, a handshake, and a plastic “thank you for your time.” But there were several things I had going for me: I typed seventy words per minute, I was one of the all-time high scorers on the English grammar test (and the woman seemed so excited by this that I just didn’t have the heart to tell her that I ended a large percentage of my sentences in prepositions), and when my interviewer found out that I had spent time in South America, she nearly hugged me, asked if I knew her home country of Venezuela, and insisted on conducting the rest of the interview in Spanish. So two days later when she called me up to proudly announce that she had a position for me, it wasn’t going to be at a boring insurance company or telemarketing firm as I had feared. I was to begin work at the prestigious Inter-American Development Bank (basically the Latin American version of the International Monetary Fund).
The job turned out to be as much as I could have hoped for. It was mostly South and Central Americans working there and the whole place had a Latin atmosphere, which meant I spoke Spanish all day and wasn’t expected to get a whole lot accomplished. Besides, it was the finals of the World Cup, and since in Latin America all development work takes a backseat to soccer, my biggest responsibility was screaming “Brazil!” every time “our team” scored.
So for the next two weeks, I managed to put on panty hose, a guise of respectability, and a fake smile. In return, I got a paycheck—not enough to get me back to Colombia—but enough to help me flee the house that had become my prison.
Gainesville, Florida was famous on several counts: It was the birthplace of Gatorade, it was the home of the University of Florida Gators, and it even once boasted a well-known serial murderer. However, I wasn’t really a big fan of fluorescent drinks, reptiles, or people out to kill me, so there didn’t seem to be a lot drawing me to the place.
My friend Michael begged to differ. He was one of my oldest friends and the best thing I’d gotten out of a miserable year of high school in Montana. Over the course of a week’s worth of lengthy phone chats made secretly from my aunt and uncle’s balcony (drinking had a way of making me indifferent to the financial consequences of long-distance calls), he had been insisting I come stay with him and his wife for a while. Their home was small but it had an extra bedroom. I could stay months if necessary—whatever it took until I got the money to return to Cali.
It was a simple matter to quickly pack my bags, wish my sister all the best in Peru, and manage a disingenuous but cordial-seeming farewell with my relatives. Then it was a quick flight to Jacksonville and a slightly longer shuttle ride to Gainesville, and by the end of the day I had arrived in a humid, tree-filled city where everything was named Gator. There was Gator Gasoline, Gator Books, Gator Car Wash, Gator Insurance, and of course lots of Gatorade. And there was my friend Michael sporting a blue-and-orange Gator T-shirt, the same as I had remembered him: warm and funny with a smile that had a way of erasing all the years.
It had been a long time since I had last seen Michael. After graduating from college, he had moved to some remote country in Africa so I had been forced to content myself with the occasional postcard or news from secondhand sources about what was going on with his life. I hadn’t heard anything from him for several years when an envelope covered in stamps from Namibia arrived at my apartment in Los Angeles. Michael was asking me to be his “best man” at his wedding. I desperately wanted to fly out to Africa for the ceremony, but the announcement had arrived too late—I had already purchased a nonrefund
able ticket to visit my parents in Honduras.
Michael and his new wife, Sharon, a slender and graceful black South African, had returned to the United States a year later and had settled on Gainesville practically at random. They had wanted to live in a university town—both of them eventually hoped to complete their master’s degrees—and Gainesville offered the added advantage of humidity. Having spent the past few years in arid Namibia, Sharon wanted to experience the rain.
I arrived on their front steps pretty much resigned to being miserable until I saw Francisco again, but goodwill diffused its way through their tiny home, infecting me in the process. I settled in to the sky-blue room they had painted in anticipation of my arrival and was amazed at how far out of their way they went to make me feel welcome. Over the next few weeks Michael raced ahead of me every time there was a cash register in sight, paying for any purchase even when I was picking up personal items at the drugstore. Sharon started showing up with small gifts for me—on different occasions, I received a shirt, a purse, shorts, lotion, and sweet-smelling shampoos. Apparently, the idea of two lovers being separated by a continent was a story that struck a cord with her, and as we huddled around the kitchen table over her exotic homemade curries, she would press me for information about my relationship, reveling in all the romantic details of my meeting Francisco in a prison. On a few occasions, she even dragged me down to the Western Union office and handed over a handful of twenty-dollar bills to be wired to Colombia to ensure Francisco’s survival.
I was embarrassed at their generosity, but reluctantly accepted the money. By now Francisco’s precarious situation had become a source of continual worry. Instead of earning a salary, cabdrivers lived off of the money handed over by passengers. Unfortunately, the rental fee Francisco paid to the owner of the vehicle often exceeded what he made in a day. Day after day, I could feel him losing hope. I kept reassuring him that there was an end in sight, that I’d be returning to Cali with money, that we’d move to Bogotá where the economy was better and we’d quickly find work. He just had to hold out a little while longer.