by Laura Smith
—
Kerry was from the United States but had spent most of her adult life abroad. The three of us became close, cooking together and doing yoga in her living room, having long chats on humid nights while bugs hummed outside. She didn’t say so at first, but I sensed there was something painful in her past.
One night, we went around the corner to the Soi 38 night market, famous for its pad thai and khao soi. Sitting on the crowded street at one of the small outdoor tables next to the food stalls, Kerry told us about the end of her marriage. Her husband had worked in international business. They had lived all over the world, on three continents, working and raising their daughters. But then they moved back to the United States. Not long after, they divorced. The constant moving from country to country had stopped her from seeing that something was amiss. I was anxious to know, was it some vital flaw in the relationship or something that had built up over time? Who had left whom and when had their troubles begun? She didn’t seem to know. The divorce was like a large-scale weather event, unpredictable and obliterating. It arrived without warning and left a permanent sense of trauma in its wake. I couldn’t tell if this was because of something Kerry wasn’t telling us, or if the end of a marriage, generally speaking, doesn’t translate to outsiders.
“I never would have imagined it,” Kerry said. “We were just like you.” I remember thinking, But you couldn’t have been like us because you got divorced. Sitting across from Kerry, with the curried vegetables congealing on my plate, I dismissed her story because I believed that people who got divorced had inklings all along. Maybe this won’t work out, but I’ll give it a shot anyway, I imagined them thinking. If the ends of other peoples’ marriages surprised them, it was because they weren’t observant enough. But Kerry was observant. Her husband was a whip-smart businessman, she said. They were, according to Kerry, just like us.
—
In that first year of marriage, P.J. and I were inseparable. I realized that though I had lived my life constantly surrounded by people at loud dinner tables, in schoolyards, and in classrooms, I had always felt alien on some level, moved by things that did not move others. Until meeting P.J., I had felt cloaked in an otherness that no one seemed to notice. I had close friends but had the impression that some deeper closeness was missing and that it was my fault. But with P.J., my sense of isolation seemed to lift.
One day after running in the park we went to our usual lunch market. It was hot and I felt so sapped of energy I barely ate. I wanted to go back to the apartment, but we were planning a trip to Chiang Mai, in the northern part of the country, and since it was almost the king’s birthday, a national holiday, we were concerned that tickets might sell out. We decided P.J. would go to the train station to buy the tickets and I would go home to rest and shower.
As I walked alone from the market to the Skytrain, I looked around at the neatly dressed women in pencil skirts and men in slim business suits. The train’s sleek body approached on the monorail. The doors opened and I felt a blast of air-conditioning. An eerily calm recording of a female voice came over the loudspeaker. She seemed to be not so much announcing the next stop as welcoming us to the pinnacle of modernity. “Nana. Phloen Chit. Thank you,” she said in English and Thai. “Have a nice day.” As the train slithered above the sweltering streets, I realized I had not been alone for a single minute in the last month.
P.J. and I went to the grocery store together, worked at a table across from each other, ran together, and at night when we curled up to sleep, I heard him breathing next to me. Without a physical home, P.J. had become my home. Alone on the train, I felt entirely dislocated in ways that were both thrilling and frightening.
—
Before leaving, we had ambitious plans to travel all over Asia to places as far flung as Indonesia and Nepal. Once we were there, however, our freelance assignments were more sporadic than we had hoped. We needed to be more cautious with our money, so we could only travel to places where the flights were cheap. Nepal and Indonesia were out. We decided to go to Myanmar for a month around Christmas—a cheap forty-minute flight from Bangkok.
Not long after we arrived, I was biking down a dusty road near the reddish-brown temples of Bagan to meet P.J. at a restaurant for lunch, and I got the chills. At the table, I felt a sudden, disconcerting, hollow pang in my stomach followed by more chills, and I knew that I was going to be sick. P.J. asked me with total earnestness, “Do you need a horse cart?” The normalcy and ease with which he suggested it suddenly reminded me of how far from home we were. “Remember our old grocery store?” P.J. would ask me with a laugh in the weeks after my illness. Imagining perusing the aisles with our shopping cart, searching for granola bars, twelve-grain bread, and yogurt was absurd. The lives we used to live seemed a figment to us now, like something we had dreamed up and recalled only vaguely. The time difference made it difficult to keep in touch with our friends and families at home. When we were free in the evenings, they were just starting their workdays and vice versa. We talked to them less and less.
One night we stayed in Taunggyi, the capital of Myanmar’s Shan State and headquarters of the Eastern Command of the Tatmadaw, the army. The newspapers said that Myanmar, or Burma as it used to be called, was inching its way toward democracy, and travel books heralded a golden age of travel in the “untouched” country. But there were few signs of this in Taunggyi. As we entered the city by car, we passed vanloads of soldiers holding assault rifles. They stared straight ahead, stone faced, as if looking through us. We passed a large sign that read, “All those who oppose the union will be crushed.”
Though we continued to work—by now mostly on freelance assignments for an education blog—we were also tourists, and this fact made us uneasy. We didn’t want to be vacationing in a place where the government was engaging in ethnic cleansing in regions of the country where travelers were not allowed. We hoped to justify our presence by volunteering and doing amateur reporting, which of course was a very naïve idea. We contacted a local environmental organization and asked if they needed help with outreach. They said they did. That night we went to dinner at a noodle shop with a woman we met through the NGO. I noticed a group of men at the table next to us with whom the waitstaff seemed particularly preoccupied. The woman recoiled when she noticed one of them. In a hushed tone she told us he was a “businessman,” that he owned an airline and was very powerful. She speculated that he was there to meet with government officials, as that was the only thing that could bring him to Taunggyi. “The rules that apply to everyone else,” she said, quickly returning to her soup, “do not apply to him.” Later she and one of her colleagues would say something disparaging about the Rohingya people who live on the border with Bangladesh. They are stateless, which leaves them vulnerable to drug trade exploitation, human trafficking, and ethnic cleansing. Her shrugging dismissal of the Rohingya left me feeling like I had walked into the wrong bar and found myself sharing drinks with Nazi sympathizers. P.J. and I shot each other furtive glances. Where were we?
Outside our hotel window that night, starving gangs of stray dogs barked viciously at each other, occasionally erupting into excruciating yelps. At the end of the month, as we sat in the airport waiting to fly back to Bangkok, we looked out the window and saw fighter jets taking off. I felt relieved but also guilty to be leaving. It had just been a visit, occasionally nightmarish, occasionally beautiful, and it felt extravagant to come and go as we pleased. While we were there, I had been gathering information for an online magazine article I wanted to pitch to an editor I knew, but the piece had fallen apart, and I was glad to be able to drop it. I wasn’t sure I wanted to think about Myanmar anymore.
After landing in Bangkok, we went to a fancy dumpling place with our friends who worked for an aid organization. Bangkok is cheap, and though the couple had modest salaries by American standards, they could live in sprawling high-rise apartments and didn’t think twice about inviting us to a
Michelin-starred restaurant. We had misunderstood the invitation, imagining that the “dumpling place” would be a cheap low-key outing. We arrived in flip-flops and casual clothes; the rest of the clientele was in business attire. Our friends suggested ordering a bunch of dishes to share and we agreed, not wanting to seem cheap or constrain their experience. They proceeded to order what seemed to be the entirety of the menu. “Yes, we’ll have two of those. No, make it three.” I mentally tallied the bill, each item intensifying the sinking feeling in my stomach. My mind was elsewhere during dinner, and when I looked over at P.J. I knew his was too. The servers were perfectly unobtrusive—invisible and anticipating our every need before we were aware of having it—ferrying out a succession of gorgeously arranged dishes.
After we finished eating, our friends suggested we go see Life of Pi in 3-D at one of the mall theaters. There was a fashion show going on in the lobby. When the movie was over, we walked out of the mall into the night air. All around us, the city’s electronic billboards flashed in disorienting pulses of light. It was too much. The night had been lavish in a way that felt unjustifiable. I was irritated with our friends for not realizing our financial situation (never mind that we had agreed to everything), but also for how casually they enjoyed the evening’s extravagance. As we walked out of the mall, P.J. and I were nearly clinging to each other. The culture shock of our return was far greater than anything we had felt coming from D.C.
Something changed after Myanmar. After a few weeks in Bangkok, we went to Vietnam, and it was there that P.J. realized he didn’t want to go to law school. Each acceptance letter that landed at his parents’ house gave him an ominous feeling. He suspected he had been motivated to apply by peer and family pressure and the promise (or illusion) of prestige rather than any actual desire to be a lawyer. Now, so far away from home, we began to feel that we could be whatever we wanted, and that if we disappointed friends and family, they would just have to get over it.
P.J. told one school he would not be coming. Then he told another. With each refusal, he seemed lighter. We could go anywhere, be anything, and in that breathtaking moment before we chose any one path, we were following them all.
—
We ran out of money in Laos. Even with our remote work for the education blog, we only had enough for plane tickets back to the United States, and we weren’t ready to go back. I had been accepted into a graduate program at New York University based on my proposal to investigate Barbara’s life. Class started in the fall, but it was only spring and it seemed unwise to return to the United States penniless and have to wait around for a few months. We contacted our old boss at an American boarding school in Switzerland. We had worked there together the summer after college, teaching English, coaching sports, and organizing activities. It was a ritzy gig—free room and board in a small town with breathtaking mountain views. Best of all, they paid for round-trip airfare. Did they have two last-minute positions for us this summer? They did. We flew back to Bangkok, arranged our visas, and soon were on a plane flying over the Swiss Alps. I’m not sure we stopped long to marvel at the breathtaking ease with which we had been relieved of our financial troubles. It was much easier to wag our fingers at friends than to interrogate our own indulgences.
—
We flew back to D.C. at the end of the summer to see our families before the move to New York. P.J.’s parents had a barbeque in honor of our return. It was a sunny, late summer day and I was apprehensive about the gathering. In the four months after P.J. made his decision to forgo law school, we had hardly talked to his parents at all. Their reaction had been disbelief, followed by anger, and then an icy silence. Or was the silence ours? It was hard to say who was shunning whom. Now, one wrong word and the barbeque could quickly devolve into anger and resentment. I knew everyone would try very hard not to talk about it, but anticipating all that trying, the not saying, and the forced cheeriness left me feeling depleted before we had even arrived. Driving to the house, I scowled at the neighborhood. Everything suddenly seemed alien to me. The lawns were too manicured. The plants in the gardens were at perfectly measured distances. “When are you moving back?” people asked. Never, I thought.
My fear of the looming conflict, my prickly dissatisfaction with everyone and everything around me, made me unable to see that they were asking because they missed us, not out of some desire to control us—though I do think there was a sense that by leaving the family’s orbit, we had been led professionally and morally astray. Our travels had somehow both widened our world and constricted it, making people who hadn’t experienced the things we had seem impossibly remote from our circle of two. P.J. and I stood on opposite sides of the deck in different conversations.
“What was your favorite part?” someone asked me.
I thought of the time we had been sitting in a coffeehouse in Saigon watching an old man in a wheelchair holding a baby, being pushed by a young woman—three generations strolling down a crowded street. But it seemed like a cliché. Girl goes to Asia, sees people living more vibrantly. American life = bad. Asian life = good. The scene of the man in the wheelchair was my idea of people living intimately together—with real connections—when really, that family probably had their own share of misunderstandings. Maybe the old man had berated his son for not going to law school and so they were no longer speaking, and the daughter was forced to care for her father alone, resenting both her father and her brother. I wanted to believe that people in other places had perfected the art of being satisfied, that my disconnection was a problem of geography—not of being human.
I looked over at P.J. and could tell he wasn’t really listening to his conversation either. The fact that everything in our lives had suddenly become alien had wrapped P.J. and me more tightly around one another. I thought the distance from our families was a marker of how much we had grown. We had made a fertile little world of our own. We were alone together.
—
Two days later, we drove a small U-Haul to New York. P.J. found work as an education consultant for an organization with a flexible work schedule. Our lives had an aura of impermanence. We subleased a tiny studio apartment on the Upper West Side and paid our rent in cash at the request of the woman we were subletting from—a person we never saw but who occasionally sent us frantic text messages asking for part of the rent early. The greatest appeal of the arrangement was that it was month to month, and we could leave should something better come up. I would finish my degree, but who knew how long we would stay in New York? I sold our Cuisinart for twenty-five dollars to a man on a bicycle. P.J. left his trombone at a friend’s. We told family that we didn’t want physical objects for Christmas. We had a single cooking pan because where would we put a second one when we left? We were like people in a hot-air balloon throwing things over the side to make sure we could stay aloft. Knowing that we were light footed, that we could embark at any moment on some unforeseen adventure, was as important as actually going.
Our apartment was so small there was only room for our bed and a small table. The window looked out at a brick wall. When we wanted to know the weather, we had to crouch under the windowsill and crane our necks skyward.
“It’s cloudy,” P.J. would say, and I would dress for rain.
Sometimes I would jokingly say to P.J., “I’m going into the other room,” before walking into the bathroom. The apartment didn’t have a fridge so we bought a mini fridge, which we could reach from bed.
While some people professed approval for our wide travel, flexible work schedules, and unencumbered living, it always came with a wink and a nod. “Yes,” they said to us, “have your adventures while you can”—meaning, of course, that they would have to end. Whenever I mentioned getting rid of furniture or appliances, people would say, “You’ll want those things later.” This “later” loomed. Sometime in the near future, circumstances or perhaps people would conspire to trap us. I imagined this threat to my freedom as a
large wolf lurking in the bushes waiting to pounce, and felt that if I let my guard down for a moment I would wake up in a house I didn’t want, in a neighborhood I didn’t want to live in, doing things I didn’t want to do. I would sit in my car in traffic and then stare at computers all day in fluorescently lit rooms where the only sounds were the tapping of keyboards and the occasional polite cough. At night I would fold laundry, organize drawers and closets, and pause to wonder when this had become my life.
This threat was a shape-shifter, morphing into whatever anxiety most haunted me at the moment. Sometimes it was a disapproving family; other times it was financial necessity—a medical procedure that would need funding. Sometimes it was a child whose needs, for reasons I couldn’t quite imagine, couldn’t be met except by moving into the suburbs and working in a job I hated. When I told P.J. about these specters of my future entrapment, none of them sounded quite right. I could not pinpoint what it was that I was really afraid of. On some level I had failed to understand what people were telling me: you will want those things. It wasn’t that someone was going to force me into a life I didn’t want; it was that what I wanted would change. And that was the scariest possibility of all.
EIGHT
In 1931 Barbara and Helen had run out of money. They moved to Manhattan, so Barbara could look for work while Helen finished her book about their sea voyage. Barbara found a job as a secretary at the Personal Research Federation, which analyzed employment trends. She and Helen had rented an apartment in a large brick building in Morningside Heights, overlooking Riverside Park. Sabra finally rejoined them, but the reunion was not what Barbara had imagined. “It was almost a terrible experience, if you want the real truth,” Barbara wrote to a friend. “I rushed to her with my heart wide open, and my soul ready for the balm I felt she’d give—and the beautiful dream melted, and I found a little child—a darling little child, to be sure—who took all I could give, and gave almost nothing in return.” The sisters seemed baffled by each other. Barbara wrote that Sabra’s boundless energy overwhelmed her and Helen, and that “Sabra is rather ‘separate.’ There aren’t many excitements to share, and I guess she finds me a rather dull lump most of the time!” Sabra began to appear less and less in her letters.