by Pam Houston
I return to the trough and hack my way to another tiny river, and then another one, learning quite a bit about the various properties of water and ice in the process. Once I get the little rivers started, for instance, they deepen and widen and hasten on their own, just like I learned in geology class. Two cubic feet per second turn into twenty with a little more sun and little more coaxing. In three hours I have ten outlet rivers carved into the ice surrounding the trough, and I am starting to develop blisters on my blisters. But the sun is still up and snow is in the forecast and I love my old nervous horse, so I cut five more rivers around the far edges of the ice just in case the pond gets even bigger.
PART FOUR
Elsewhere
Kindness
Junior year of college and my best friend, Mary, and I wanted to go to the Bahamas (as exotic a place as we could imagine) for spring break. Mary didn’t have much money, and I had less, but I talked one of the rich kids in the dorm into letting me clean his room for a hundred dollars.
I had to do seventeen loads of laundry (all polo shirts, oxfords, and khakis) just to get to the floor, and the boy invited several of his friends over to “watch the maid work,” but it was worth it. We put enough gas money to get home in the glove box and parked the car at the Ft. Lauderdale airport with $235 between us. In an hour we were sitting on cases of ketchup in a cargo plane high above the Atlantic on our way to Andros Island, our first mission—a free flight to the Bahamas—complete.
The pilot had been friendly, but the customs official in Andros took a much dimmer view of two American stowaways. He demanded we pay full price for our tickets, which was more money than we had. After hours of negotiating, he agreed to let us work off our debt with the crew that was paving the island’s main road. We didn’t even know what it meant to do roadwork, but we didn’t much care. Our adventure wasn’t twenty-four hours old and we were in the thick of it already.
In Andros Town we got all the grouper, peas, and rice we could handle for a twelve-dollar donation at a Baptist church dinner, and when we told the Bahamians about our deal with the customs official, the Baptists told us about the once-a-week mail boat that would be leaving for Nassau at 7:00 a.m.
“He’ll be none the wiser,” the man who had cooked the grouper said. “You girls don’t need no black tar in your hair.”
We slept under a diesel generator right near the docks so we’d be sure to hear the boat horn. Just after dawn we were awakened by a small pack of Bahamian boys who couldn’t have been much over twelve, but they were brandishing switchblades and they wanted our sleeping bags.
“You see,” Mary said, disguising her fear well enough to fool everyone but me, “if we gave them to you, then we wouldn’t have them.” She shooed the boys away and we packed up and boarded the mail boat for five dollars each. It occurred to us that if he wanted to, the Andros customs official could make our reentry into the U.S. challenging, but since we had no idea how we’d be getting back to the mainland anyway, we decided not to dwell upon it.
The men and boys that surrounded us the second we disembarked in Nassau were aggressive enough to make us hitchhike straight out of the city. We weren’t at the side of the road two minutes when a Bahamian picked us up. His name was Dennis Lightbourne and he was a cadet in the Royal Bahamas Defence Force. He told us in short order we were putting ourselves in grave danger hitchhiking in Nassau, and he would take us directly to a beachfront home that had been left in his care. We could stay there for as long as we were comfortable, and, since he was on extended leave, he would fetch us each morning and show us the island, deposit us in the late afternoon to get cleaned up for dinner, and then pick us up again and take us to one of a dozen restaurants where Dennis and his closest friends always ate free.
We spent the next seven days like that—snorkeling in hidden coves, meandering through passageways of long deserted fortresses, eating more lobster and grouper and conch fritters than we thought we could hold. Any time we tried to pay, Dennis wouldn’t hear of it. He was an ambassador for his country, he said, happy to do his part. We trusted him completely, and he never gave us any reason to doubt him. The only money we spent that week was on the present we gave him when we left: a necklace made of rare flamingo shells. He had told us they brought whoever wore them good luck.
My mother was still in the obstetrics wing of the hospital, and already frantic to go to a party, when she pulled Martha Washington’s name off the babysitter’s bulletin board, called her up and asked her if she’d come watch me for the night. The way Martha always told it, it was love at first sight, which was lucky for me, because even when they were sober, my parents were not much interested in being parents, even by the standards of the time. We met when I was two days old, and Martha died later the same year I met Dennis Lightbourne, and some overwhelming percentage of the good memories generated in the two decades between all have Martha’s face in them.
Martha had a sister named Mildred whom she lived with in an old brownstone in downtown Trenton, and a brother named George who died in the war—the first war, Martha always said, as if there had never been any wars before that one. Martha had been married once but the only thing she ever said about it was that it “didn’t take.” She was stubborn and sturdy, and she did things like take my hand and step out in traffic with her arm raised to the stop position like a traffic cop. When the inevitable brakes started screeching and horns started blaring, she’d yell, “Don’t give me that crap, I used to work for the motor vehicles!” It was the midsixties, and no one was going to run over an old lady and a little girl, no matter how much they wanted to get down the road.
Martha played card games with me: gin rummy and canasta and something called casino where the ten of diamonds was called Big Gus and the two of spades was called Little Casino, and you got a point for cards and a point for spades and a point for each ace you held when the hand was finished. She let me try on her costume jewelry—a donkey with a ruby for its eye, and a little gold Christmas tree with semiprecious stones for ornaments. We made forts out of card tables and blankets, and she’d crawl in there with me for séances and tea parties, even though she was approaching seventy. She was every bit as good as an imaginary friend, only visible, touchable. It was my mother I could never bring fully into view.
Before my father married my mother, he had won the dubious title of most eligible bachelor in Trenton, New Jersey, though it was more for his tennis-playing ability and Buick convertible than emotional stability or money in the bank. My parents were sophisticated, worldly, each brilliant in their own way, but because of the drinking the rules of behavior in my parents’ house existed in a swirling vortex, the consequences of breaking them often involved violence and sometimes there was violence for no traceable reason at all.
At Martha’s house I was loved even when I made mistakes, which I didn’t often, because the guidelines were so clear. Be helpful, tell the truth, do unto others. It wasn’t as profound as it was miraculously consistent. Take your dishes to the sink, clean up your Legos, think about the other person as often as you think of yourself.
I spent about half the nights of my childhood at Martha’s, which was a good thing because I never got much sleep at home. At her house I slept so soundly that one night, when someone broke in and set off the burglar alarm and it went off for twenty-five minutes and the cops showed up with their sirens blaring and then came inside to take pictures and drink a pot of Martha’s coffee, I slept like a rock through the entire thing.
“Your parents aren’t bad people,” Martha would always say to me. “Your mother just suffers from a lack of self-respect and your father suffers from a lack of . . .” She always paused there, as if there were too many options. Sometimes she settled on “generosity of spirit,” and sometimes it was “imagination,” and sometimes it was “well, maybe your father is a bad person after all.”
On my birthday each year, Martha would make me a cake. (My mother didn’t believe in birthday cake and would go so
far as to put perfume, bubble bath, and eventually apricot acne scrub in my Easter basket.) The cake was always layered, vanilla or lemon, peanut butter fudge or German chocolate. She always went out of her way to make it look just like it had come from the grocery store because I had one time spoken too enthusiastically about being at a little friend’s party and being served a perfect pink IGA rose.
After we had cake, we would pool my allowance and her pillow money, go down to the grocery store, buy as much food as we could afford, and take it to the food bank. We did this on Christmas and Thanksgiving and Easter as well. She’d say “Pam, do unto others is really only the beginning.” It took me a few years to understand she was telling me the big secret people like my father didn’t know: that the best part about giving is not what you might get back but the actual giving itself. When I am in need of an endorphin rush, a spring in my step, a feeling of peace, a good night sleep, I can get it faster and keep it longer by giving than by any getting there has ever been. I know for most of you, this is Humanity 101, but I had to actually learn it, and were my father still alive, there would be no way I could explain it to him that would make him believe it was so.
Whenever I tell the story of Mary and me in the Bahamas, or a different story where a stranger steps in and saves me from either dire circumstances or myself, I am invariably told I trust too easily, that Dennis Lightbourne or his equivalent had ulterior motives, that Mary and I are lucky we didn’t end up dead. I am often told by the people closest to me (and often in anger) that I’m more likely to trust a total stranger than someone I have known for years. I am saddened by the fact that it’s true. There was little kindness in the house I grew up in, and even less trust, and I learned quickly to ask for it elsewhere—from my fifth grade teacher, a pretty lifeguard at the public pool, a stranger in a parking lot.
Martha’s arrival forty-eight hours after my birth and her dedication to my well-being for the last twenty years of her life had made me understand that if I entered the world believing in the existence of a Dennis Lightbourne, it wouldn’t be very long before one appeared. As often as I got myself into a tight corner, some light-borne thing appeared to bail me out, which was handy, as Mary and I would need several more such visitations to get us back to college from the Bahamas.
Martha made me French toast with maple blueberry sausages in the morning and chocolate milk with real Hershey’s syrup and grilled cheese for lunch. We went to the New Jersey State Museum (could it possibly have been weekly?) and saw the same show at the Planetarium over and over again. What I looked forward to most each year was the week Martha took me to Seaside Heights, at the Jersey Shore, where a friend let her borrow a house. We’d spend every morning at the beach, come home for lunch and then go back to the boardwalk for the afternoon. Martha would buy me all the tickets I wanted to ride the rides, but usually I didn’t need them because the old carnies who had the afternoon shift on the Himalaya, the Tilt-a-Whirl and the Zipper all wanted to flirt with Martha. When I climbed out of my teacup, they’d just push me back in the direction of the ride and start it up again. There was hardly anybody at the boardwalk on a weekday afternoon except for them and me and Martha, and I’d go around and around while “Honky Tonk Women” and “Maggie May” blasted from the tired old speakers. On the way back to the cottage each night, we’d stop at Dairy Queen, where I’d get a Mr. Misty Kiss, lime or raspberry, and we’d run from the mosquito truck that sent huge clouds of poison gas into the moist, salty sky.
Martha would let me swim in the ocean as long as I did it right in front of the lifeguard chair, and she’d stand there with her cotton pants rolled up, calf deep in the surf, and watch me. Whenever I tried to get her to come in with me, she’d say, “No, I can’t do that, honey. Your Martha is too old and feeble.” Martha didn’t seem old or feeble to me, especially when she took me to the senior’s aerobics class she taught at the Y, or when she was yelling at my father, “Jesus, Bev, that’s not the way you treat a child.” My mother had told me Martha was born in the century before our century and that our century was three-quarters over.
The house in Seaside Heights was piled high with true crime books. I was allowed to sleep on the screened-in porch where it was cooler, and some nights I’d read until Martha saw my flashlight under the covers and came out and gave me hell. I told her (politely) it was her fault because she was the one who had taught me how to read, at two and a half, by paying me a nickel every time I read a road sign, or a cereal box, or a new book meant for somebody in the first or second grade. She bought me a Dr. Seuss book called On Beyond Zebra, about the twenty-six letters that came after Z, and all the creatures whose names you needed those extra letters to spell, and I think that’s where I first got the idea language was infinite.
She taught me to swim and dive that way too, a nickel for the length of the pool, a dime for jumping, a quarter for diving headfirst. She taught me to hold the door for my elders simply by standing behind it for as long as it took me to realize I had left her on the other side. She taught me all the golden and goldenish rules my parents mostly did not subscribe to. She taught me “I’m sorry” when said sincerely can be the two most useful, most powerful words known to man. Maybe most important, she taught me love could be unconditional, some people did keep their promises and gratitude is an appropriate response to almost everything.
On lobster night in Seaside Heights, we’d go down to the fish market and Martha would buy three 1¼-pound lobsters, and she’d ask the man to cook them up. He’d give us sliced lemons wrapped in tin foil and melted butter in a plastic container and then we’d cross Highway 35 and walk home. Martha would spread about five tons of newspaper across the kitchen table and we’d dig in like Viking queens, lobster juice up to our ears. I didn’t understand fixed income back then, or social security, or Medicare, but I heard my parents say the words, and I knew enough to understand our yearly lobster feast was no small thing for Martha.
After her first stroke, Martha told me she was ready to die, that she’d had eighty-six of the best years anybody could ask for and she was ready to go. She said, “You’ve got to promise me one thing and that’s that you won’t come to my funeral. I want you to remember the good times, without mucking them up with the bad.” Four days later the next stroke took her voice and left her silent, scared and sad for three more years.
I made good on my promise, though my mother called me “Heartless, as cold through and through as your father,” and my father said, “If I can be there when they put the old battle-axe in the ground, so can you.”
After our week in Nassau, Mary and I figured we had just enough money to take the mail boat to Bimini where we’d catch the puddle jumper back to Florida, but we figured wrong. First, we didn’t anticipate the hurricane that would hit, turning the twelve-hour sail to Bimini into thirty-six of the most gut churning, white-knuckled hours of our lives. Next, we didn’t count on the fact that while the mail boat docked on North Bimini, the airport was on South Bimini, and the boat taxi fare between them was thirty dollars apiece. Finally, we didn’t realize Bimini, in those days, was run entirely by drug money, about as safe as Central Park after dark. We wouldn’t be sleeping under any diesel generators there, and if we couldn’t get ourselves to South Bimini, we wouldn’t be getting home.
I’ll remember forever the cook on the mail boat, how he walked across the rain-slick decks, against the crazy pitch of that flat-bottomed tub, carrying plates of peas and rice to even the sickest passengers. He sang the whole time. He told us it would cure us, and either the peas and rice, or the singing did. I’ll remember forever the harbormaster who broke the rules to let us hang out on Bimini’s private docks so we could stay off the streets. And I’ll remember the Coast Guard guy who walked past with a plate of grilled grouper, saw the way we eyed it a little hungrily and invited us to dinner. He and two friends were on a three-day pass, and we sailed with them on their twenty-seven-foot catamaran back to Miami the next morning under perfect sunshine and i
n front of a big following sea. They even drove us to our car in Lauderdale. We never even had to clear customs. We got back to school two days late with almost a hundred dollars to spare.
Sometimes when I tell this story I put it all down to being pretty and brave and just foolish enough to be lucky. But I’m thirty-five years older now and considerably less pretty. There’s not enough luck in the world to explain all the gifts I’ve received since then, all the strangers who’ve come through for me when I trusted them with my life.
There was the couple in Botswana who ended their safari three days early to drive a seriously malarial me hundreds of miles to a hospital. There was the backcountry skier in Utah who came upon me cursing what I refused to believe was a broken tib/fib and who skied the three miles back to the road with me in his arms. There was the Parisian woman I met in the Luxembourg Gardens who took me home and fed me after my money and passport had been stolen. There was the Fijian woman who caught me crying in her garden and then, without one word (she spoke no English and I spoke no Fijian), led me by the hand onto her patio, sat me in a chair and served me tea. There was the Tibetan monk who gave me a ride on his tiny, tiny pony over a 17,000-foot pass in Bhutan because I was having chest pains that could have been just altitude or could have been a heart attack. And this is all not to mention the ranchers in Creede who’ve pulled their trucks out of alignment getting me out of snowdrifts, or saved one of my animals in the middle of a frigid night.
It’s been thirty-five years since Martha died, and in that time I have mentored a goddaughter, a stepdaughter, and several hundred creative-writing students of all ages. I think I can say not a day has gone by when I haven’t thought of Martha, when I haven’t invited—sometimes effectively, sometimes less so—her patience and wisdom into my own demeanor, when I haven’t stopped to think What would Martha Washington do?