My accommodation was known as the Prentis Kitchen, a tiny cottage converted from the original early eighteenth-century kitchen behind the house of a prominent merchant. It had heaps of verisimilitude, which meant it was poky and dark. Almost as soon as I got inside the door I would start to cry; the first sniffles giving way to uninhibited sobs that racked my whole frame for hours before I’d fall into an exhausted sleep. I was noisily grieving for all the years bereft of desire and sexual intimacy, and the bitter knowledge that those lost years could not be recovered. Now that I was on the verge of sixty I was sure that the passion I had foregone could never be rekindled.
In this fraught state I had another recurring dream.
I arrive in America with no passport but manage to escape out of the airport onto an eight-lane highway where I wait for a bus that never comes. Then threading my way through the speeding cars I get to a hotel where the desk clerk directs me to a particular room in a labyrinth of subterranean corridors. While looking for my allocated room, I realise that my cosmetic bag has leaked blue nail polish all over me. I dash into the nearest washroom, which turns out to be the male urinal. Reflected in the mirror I see myself stark naked and covered in blue dye, confronted by the shocked cleaning staff. ‘You mustn’t make me go,’ I beg them. ‘I am an illegal.’ This confession triggers hysteria and I try to reassure them I am an Australian who forgot to bring my passport, but they don’t understand what I am saying. I know I will be deported and even if I get home and find my passport it will be too late to get where I am meant to be going.
For days I would not step out the door of the Prentis Kitchen and lay on the lumpy bed weeping and dozing. Because the cottage was off the main thoroughfare and out of earshot of the gaggles of curious tourists, I could get away with this indulgence. Early one evening I was startled out of sleep by the sound of fife and drum. The rhythmic drumming was so insistent it actually drew me out of my self-imposed confinement and onto the street. Here I witnessed an entire army drum corps marching by, followed by General George Washington on his horse, resplendent in the blue regalia of the American Continental Army. This anachronism hit me like an electric shock, jolting me into my professional role. Rather to my own amazement I heard myself announce very loudly: ‘George Washington never came to Williamsburg as a general. He was only a militia colonel and his uniform was the British redcoat.’ What a spectacle I must have provided, bedraggled and tearstained, but other than a few titters of embarrassment on my behalf, the massed tourist audience remained completely unfazed. I might rant as much as I chose, but they simply would not allow the idea that there ever was a time that America wasn’t American.
That performance shocked me out of terminal self-pity sufficiently to take in the marvel of spring that had begun to unfold in the days I had been shut away. The bare trees that lined the streets had burst into blossom and the whole town seemed to be floating on a mist of creamy white, with the occasional streak of pink. So exuberant and profligate was the spring awakening that it was impossible not to be filled with delight. When I walked back to the library the air was thick with pollen and perfume as the massed displays of white narcissus erupted out of the cold hard ground and the trees rioted with seed pods. Most magnificent were the huge star magnolias, with abundant flowers of deep magenta fading to white like an explosion of colour against the milky sky.
From Williamsburg I went to the Institute of Historical Studies at the University of Texas in Austin, where the daily temperature hovered around 36 degrees, with humidity of 90 per cent. My allocated apartment was on the sixteenth floor of a tower block on the perimeter of the campus, with a view of a six-lane highway and high rise cranes outlined against the cloudless blue sky. My first week was spent in the sweaty exertion of buying demountable furniture and lugging each large boxed item across the campus. Sometimes I was buoyant at the challenge and the new skills I was acquiring in assembling the table, the chairs, the desk; other times I just trudged along with tears streaming down my face. The bed base was a terrible challenge. Even though I had it delivered, it was left in pieces, which required unbolting and then rebolting in place. Funnily enough, I hadn’t thought to bring a set of shifting spanners from Tasmania. The young Latino man in the next apartment looked truly alarmed when a strange woman in her late fifties knocked on his door to ask if he would help get her bed together. Once I had reassured him that I was actually a professor at the university, thus not a crazy old woman soliciting sex, he produced a set of spanners and had the bed upright in a trice. Still, he was careful to avoid eye contact if I chanced to meet him in the lift.
The grief that had paralysed me in Virginia was mostly kept at bay in Austin. During the weekdays I could function enough to get to my university office and lose myself in a mountain of eighteenth-century records. Nights and weekends were a problem. In the few hours a night that I managed to sleep, invariably I would find myself sitting beside a highway waiting for a bus that never came, or hopelessly lost in some dark forest. Awake in the isolation of my airconditioned high rise, I became captive to cable television. Flipping between the various 24-hour news channels, I would listen to the same story over and over, endlessly tweaked by a raft of ethnically diverse commentators who all struggled to say something different and insightful. Sometimes on CNN there was the occasional human interest story embedded to give brief relief from the political drama, such as an elderly couple who shared their ramshackle house and trailer with 800 dogs. And every ten minutes there would be a raft of ads, mostly for penis enhancement. My favourite ad was for ‘Restaurant-Inspired Food for Pets’, which boasted such treats as ‘artfully served white chicken Tuscan in coriander cream sauce on a bed of long grain rice and garden greens’. When I couldn’t take the endless repetition any longer I would switch to Ted Turner’s Classic movies where there was always something engaging to watch, day and night. I saw every film that Katie Hepburn ever made and most of Cary Grant’s.
Apart from cursory connection with my university colleagues, I interacted with no one, so I had no idea what kind of a city I was living in, or what it had to offer. It was Paul Kelly who propelled me into Austin’s vibrant music world. He was one of several Australian musicians who came for the famous South by Southwest Music Festival. There was an outdoor party to welcome the Australian bands and because I was a visiting Australian professor at the university I got an invitation. I really wanted to see Paul Kelly, but even so it took all my courage and more to walk into that party. However, the moment I was through the security cordon I felt right at home. There were sausages and chops on the BBQ, served up on white bread, buckets of vodka on ice and mountains of Coopers beer. Paul Kelly played a short set and then a band from Perth called Stem took the stage. This band had been big in the 1980s and all the band members were about my vintage. They played full-bodied rock’n’roll. The driving rhythms, the easy familiarity of Australian accents and the combination of heat and vodka made me throw off the miasma of depression to dance. I danced for hours. Being the only Australian, apart from the musicians and their entourages, I had no shortage of partners.
For more than twenty years I had not danced, however dancing is like riding a bike; the body does it instinctively, without having to remember how. Any branch that isn’t dead will dance in the spring wind, so the great Sufi poet Rumi reminds us. Way back in the thirteenth century Rumi wrote:
Dance, when you’re broken open. Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance, when you’re perfectly free. Struck, the dancer hears a tambourine inside her, like a wave that crests into foam at the very top, Begins. Maybe you don’t hear that tambourine, or the tree leaves clapping time. Close the ears on your head, that listen mostly to lies and cynical jokes. There are other things to see, and hear. Music. Dance. A brilliant city inside your soul!
Dancing dissolved my ego-driven obsessions with past injuries and future uncertainties. It was just being the body, in the moment. After that tr
ansporting experience, I determined to close the ears on my head to the lies of my damaged ego and see if it were possible to reach the brilliant city inside my soul. Given that Austin claimed to be the live music capital of the world there was a lot more dancing to be done. For the next few days I followed the Australian bands to every venue they played, finishing up at the Dog and Duck pub, around the corner from my apartment. Despite terrible apprehensions of making a fool of myself, I found that grey hair was as ubiquitous as cowboy boots at most of these venues. Austin turned out to be a mecca for ageing rockers.
At the Dog and Duck I ran into one of my colleagues from the university, who also loved to dance. Jim insisted that I should experience the real Texas and directed me to an old-style honky-tonk called the Broken Spoke, where the bands played fiddles and steel guitars, the dancing was the Texas Two Step and the cuisine a vile local concoction called chicken-fried steak. I decided to brave it because I had acquired a pair of hand-tooled cowgirl boots in red and black leather. I would never have dared to buy these boots, they were really out there; they were given to me by one of my young colleagues who found that after her pregnancy she couldn’t fit her feet into them. She also took me shopping for a leather swing skirt and a fringed jerkin, though I drew the line at a red Stetson.
Those cowgirl boots did the trick at the Broken Spoke: a toothless cowboy of indeterminate age swept me onto the dance floor to instruct me in the formal intricacies of the Two Step. I also danced with a somewhat more prepossessing cowboy of about fifty, appropriately called Jake, who was thrilled to meet an Australian and volunteered to escort me to the Travis County Rodeo. With the exquisite politeness that was the hallmark of these big Texas men, he reassured me that I had nothing to fear because he would have his wife and daughter with him.
So the next day we all drove in his massive Hummer through the saltbush scrub to the dusty rodeo ground. Here I found a very different Texas. The big arena was packed full of respectful, godfearing folks, all wearing Stetsons. I dutifully stood for the opening prayer and the equestrian homage to the flag, enthusiastically drank my beer, hooted and hollered when the riders stayed on the bucking horses or wrestled the longhorn steers to the ground. Somehow those around could sense that I didn’t belong. It wasn’t just my hollering ‘good-on-ya digger’ to the Aussie cowboys; it was clear to me that my red and black cowgirl boots and leather skirt marked me as alien. Everyone in the crowd, my hosts included, was dressed in jeans and running shoes.
On the way home, out of the brilliant blue sky, we were pelted by hailstones the size of golfballs, which made an alarming racket as they bounced off the Hummer. All around us the saltbush was ripped out of the ground and whirled through the air. Yet Jake drove without any apparent concern, merely observing that we were coming into the tornado season. The tempest was over almost as soon as it began and the air began to steam as the sun melted the large hunks of ice littering the road. In this kind of weather I could see the advantage in having a tank to drive.
Two nights later I was gleefully watching Dick Cheney trying to explain the war in Iraq when the television started barking orders. A staccato voice kept repeating that people in Travis County should go to a safe room such as a basement or else ‘lie down in a ditch and cover your head’. I thought this was kind of funny, but of no concern to me. Given that the programme did not resume, I switched off and went to bed only to be awoken about half an hour after midnight by a load roaring. Not a tornado, surely, I thought, looking out my window. The sky lit up with lightning and there was a tunnel of wind moving across the campus faster than I could ever have dreamed. Just as I was reflecting that the sixteenth floor probably wasn’t the best place to be in a tornado, huge chunks of hail about 4 inches in diameter started bouncing off the balcony and smashing against the windows with a noise like firecrakers. I watched transfixed for about twenty-five minutes, waiting for the swaying cranes to come down, then suddenly it was over and quite calm.
When I got to street level in the morning I was stunned to see that many windows in my building were broken and the big live oak on the corner had been lifted out of the ground like a corkscrew. It turned out to indeed have been a tornado, which had not touched down but sped right over the top of me, cutting a fairly narrowly defined trail of destruction. It also ushered in unseasonable heat when the temperature shot up to the mid 40s and stayed there, prompting many of my colleagues to decamp for cooler latitudes. Jim took pity on me and drove me down to the beach on the Gulf Coast in his silver BMW convertible. We sang a Jim Webb song about Galveston as the hot wind whipped through our hair and stung our eyes.
Stepping outside my comfort zone in this weird environment on the other side of the world reminded me that it was possible to reinvent myself. In Texas, of all places, wearing garish cowgirl boots, I was having the most fun I’d had in many years. Henceforth, I promised, I would do anything that took my fancy, without second thought, just go for it. Easier to promise than to deliver, of course. Lethargy and fear were my ever-present companions. I might sweep them away with one bold move, only to find these resilient monsters gnawing at my resolve the very next day. Why leave the airconditioned capsule of my apartment to brave the heat and the crush of the Dog and Duck when there was a re-run of Play Misty for Me on cable? These twin gremlins even took up residence in my dreams:
I have to get to a special destination but inertia means I miss my appointment. Next day I try to pull myself together and check my diary but haven’t written down times or the names of my contacts and I don’t know where to go. Then I find myself in a university in America explaining about my project to uncover the lives of a group of runaway slaves when a young woman contradicts me and says it is unnecessary, this work has already been done. I get into a heated shouting match with her about how significant and important my work is until I am taken into the woods by some academics to be given a lecture about how to behave. Chastened, I go back into the staff common room and see that a student has written ‘inauthentic’ in pink Texta on the cover of my book. I am hurt by this, but I know she is right.
I was propelled out the door one steamy Friday night by another colleague whose wife came from Cuba. They were determined that I listen to a Cuban band playing under spreading oaks in the courtyard outside the Central Market. The music was splendid and everyone from children to grandparents was dancing, mostly throwing bodies about, except for several couples who were executing daring and elegant salsa moves. They were semiprofessionals who followed this particular band, so I was told. At the edge of the dance floor was a woman in her late seventies, alone and self-absorbed. She wore the most beautiful crushed grey silk skirt and top with exquisite high-heeled silver sandals. Eyes closed, with a dreamy expression, she moved to the salsa rhythm with such a sexy grace and fluid style that little by little all the other dancers stopped to watch. When the music stopped everyone applauded her performance. She gave a brief nod of acknowledgement and went back to sit at a table among her grandchildren.
I was transfixed by this ultimate display of self-confidence. The woman was superb, but then the salsa steps were utterly sexy and beguiling. If she could do it, so could I. Mind you, I had not the first idea how to do the salsa; it looked very complicated. There was nothing for it but to have dance lessons. This was one of the hardest things I ever undertook. My dance instructor was a skinny twenty-two-year-old called David. He was bemused to have a woman of my age as a client and more so to be told that I wanted to learn to salsa without a partner. After the basic steps—quick, quick, slow; quick, quick, slow—David kept telling me to get out of my head and into my body, stop thinking the dance and just let the body respond. I couldn’t do it; I was hopeless. My cheeks were continually flushed with embarrassment as I misjudged a turn or lost the steps. David did his best to conceal his boredom and assure me I was doing fine, when it was clear to me that I was not. Each time I left I would be trembling all over in humiliation and terror. But by about the fifth lesson it suddenly clicked: m
y body heard the music and my hips and feet responded. I could even stop counting under my breath.
Then came the excruciating business of dancing in David’s arms. ‘I know you want to dance alone, but this is a dance meant for a man and a woman together,’ he firmly told me. ‘I promise you, a man will want to dance with you, so you need to know what to do.’ He put his arm around my back and showed me where to place my hand, just above his bicep, and began to move me around the room with a fluidity that belied my clumsiness. ‘Just let go, Cassandra,’ he murmured. ‘Just give over to the rhythm and let your body respond.’ I could feel his breath on my ear. I hadn’t been so intimate with a man for very long time and this one was barely out of childhood. I couldn’t help but think how ridiculous this was, but I made myself remember Rumi’s advice to close the ears that hear only lies and cynical jokes and let the body feel the music. By the time my seven lessons were up I could respond with a measure of sexy confidence to the Cuban band, though I still had a long way to go.
I made friends with a woman who worked in historical archaeology. She invited me to go with her to the Four Corners area of the southwest USA, where Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico meet. From Albequerque airport we drove through the Jemez Mountains which were barely more than hills, really, with dramatic rock faces that changed from rust to red to golden in different light. The whole area was dotted with pueblos that are home to the descendants of the people we had come to research: the Anasazi who built the famous cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon. Moving into Colorado the landscape turned into stark, bone-dry mesas, cut by deep canyons, with the snow-capped Rockies in the distance.
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