She balanced the world between her long legs, but in her dreams and daydreams, daddy would intermittently appear with the same pained face that she knew as disapproval to remind her that he was shadowing her everywhere she might be; that Ethiopia was not that far removed from his California world that she could hide from him. And in that sexual rebelliousness that was her PCV world, her best friends would also appear in long letters, and she would wish she could forget them, but she could not. Shame was a forceful tormentor to all her innocent pleasures which should have been hers without regrets. The easy Peace Corps affairs, in time, became a bipolar world, voracious in her extended appetites, but laden with guilt; and she prayed that she be able to consciously keep the two apart without losing her mind.
The thought of daddy humbled her and when alone she would cry knowing full well that sadly he would not approve of her “coarse behavior” as he would invade her mind. In all her vulgar fucking, daddy was ever present, compounding her sins and sorrow with the unhappy thought that her white reality had David as her only means of accepted atonement. She knew well that no Ethiopian, no matter how bright or virtuous, how worthy or respectable, could match the sanity of David that daddy would accept. Conceding her neurotic self to the recesses of her lovely mind, she found comfort in the lie that there were only two lovers; that she was fucking Taferra out of love, and David out of daddy necessity only. Unfairly, she thought David stupid for actually believing that he was the heir apparent to her heart. But in moments of clarity, during the darkest moments of her bipolar mind, she knew that she had no huge love for anyone.
“Fuck them all,” she would say. “They’re driving me crazy.”
Six weeks before departing from Ethiopia, Robin found out she was pregnant. She told David of her condition and he was at first stupefied, then confused, and after very little consideration, all too thrilled to share in the great portentous event of the birth of his first child. There was some ambivalence on becoming a father so early in his life, but here was proof positive that his receding hairline was manly stuff. Proud of his physical strength to father children, there was no hesitation at the thrilling prospect of Robin becoming his wife, promiscuous as she was. Recalling that first time at UCLA, to David Calder she was a woman most desirable. He just wished that she had been a little more careful with whom she paired, but there was no longer fear of being dropped from the Ethie PC program, because they’d be going home soon, anyway.
They both politely swallowed the very little pride there was left, and they made plans to marry as soon as they returned to the States.
“I wonder if it’s a boy, or girl?” he would stupidly ask.
“Let it be a mystery to the end, David,” smiled Robin who then gracefully touched her lips on the dolt’s forehead.
For both David and Robin the two year Peace Corps tour in Ethiopia was the turning point in their lives. That experience brought misery to Robin and, soon after his return to the US, great wealth to bouncing David.
She never said anything to Taferra, but she knew that the baby was his. There was nothing to be said other than it would have been a beautiful mulatto. Their two year affair, tender and passionate as it was, she now understood, could never have ended happily in marriage, or in a prolonged pathetic romantic love affair fatefully doomed to tragic failure. Lucid now that her departure was nearing, she saw no room for Taferra in her American world and way of life. He was too delicate to survive outside the bewitching beauty of bloated Abyssinia. He could not be far removed from the miserable dirty little side streets of Addis Ababa that were nightly cleared of garbage by scavenging hyenas. He would have been swallowed alive, as she had done of him, by the anthropophagi of the free marketers of America.
Softly she sang the song he had taught her:
Antchi lidgi, wadda kouchi
Antchi degamo, wadda gini
“I love you too Taferra,” she cried to herself, on the plane, all the way to America.
Years later, when her mind had stabilized into the familiar reality of her traditions, the thought occurred to her that all memories are reworked fantasies, the censored wishes for a pleasant world. She realized that the Ethiopia of her Peace Corps mind was not a geographic location but the remnant fantasy of a twenty two year old easily impressionable American girl; that she could as much return to that faded fantasy as she could once again become twenty two years old.
The fantasy did linger on mostly without Taferra. It was a touching sentiment without hope of realization because it was illusory and, as any psychologist will tell you, illusions are there to fool you; that what once might have been passionate realities, in quick time they fade away into ill-defined fiction, as assuredly as lies tend to become truths the more you continue to repeat them.
“What a fantastic world, to freeze your life into illusions,” she often thought.
*
Though she knew whose baby it was she at the time said nothing to David. She needed a husband to keep the faith with daddy and David qualified; it was a no brainer, that as soon as she got to California she would abort her fetus, which she did right after the wedding.
Stressed out to almost panic condition, for a few days after her wedding to David, she kept throwing up every morning. Everyone happily assumed that she was pregnant, which she miserably was. No one suspected her unhappiness except, perhaps, her father who half-smiled a curious sideward glance as he walked her halfway down the church aisle; but it was much too late to wonder. ‘For better or for worse, in sickness and in health … till death do us part …’ It was a wretched wedding. Throughout the ceremony, and the expensive reception afterwards, Robin kept thinking of the embryo inside her and how to get rid of it. Dumb David was far, far away, from her mind, while Robin was temporarily mired in the Ethiopia within her.
And all her best friends kept hugging her and saying how happy they were for her on her luxurious wedding. Only Sharon felt Robin’s uneasiness.
The day after her honeymoon, secretly, with the help of her friend Myrna, who understood her friend’s condition, Robin had an afternoon abortion in an assembly line abortion clinic in East LA. The morning after her abortion she woke up in a pool of her blood that had warmly soiled her silken sheets. It was assumed that she had naturally aborted though nobody bothered to look. Compassionately, upon seeing the bloody misfortune that had befallen them, David comforted his wife and assured her, not to worry, that the Lord would bless them with more pregnancies.
There never were more pregnancies and though Robin didn’t deserve that fate, the good Lord working in His many ways, and unbeknownst to Robin at that time, and for a long time thereafter, medical second opinion sadly confirmed, time and again, that she would never again get pregnant. She tried to be defiant as daddy would have wanted her to be, but a gnawing remorse painfully cluttered her personality.
Two years after her abortion and still unable to adjust to her post-PC lifestyle, and against her husband’s and every friend’s advice, Robin decided to return to the source of her confusion, like all confused Volunteers want to do.
She bought a ticket to Addis Ababa.
“I have to see Taferra,” she said.
“You can never go back, Robin,” was David’s admonition.
She landed at Bole International Airport in Addis at six in the morning after a long flight from LA via Kennedy Airport. Overwhelmed by the clarity and freshness of the Addis air, she remembered the first time she disembarked at Bole as a PCV and felt the same eagerness and anticipation, as before; that she was doing the right thing to be there.
By the time she got to her hotel, she felt very alone. Though exhausted from the trip she was much too nervous to sleep. Suddenly she didn’t know what to do, she didn’t know where to look. Fear struck her in the midst of a strange African City, when Big Daddy Peace Corps wasn’t there to protect you, or to pluck you out and gently carry you back home in case of an e
mergency. What if something silly happened to her, like falling and breaking her neck? Who would take the time and effort to do the right thing on her dead behalf? She recalled the true story told to her by Taferra of Malcolm X, in fear of his life, being holed up in the same hotel years earlier, when he had fled Cairo after arriving there from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, believing that CIA agents, or somebody equally unfriendly, was out to get him. He holed up for days in the hotel trusting no one, never eating food until reassured it wasn’t poisoned, never going out, until the CIA, or trusted Ethiopian officials, or friends from Washington, or maybe the Peace Corps, assured him all was ten four, and that he could return to the USA, where safety awaited him.
Thinking herself naïve, or worse, succumbing to paranoia, she decided to go out and test her shaky knees.
On the walk to the Piazza, once the meeting place of ‘who was who’ in middle class Addis, excitement set in, mingling with the memory of having been there so many times before. She was hoping for a chance encounter but when she got there she found the Piazza more barren than she wished or remembered, and distraught, she went emotionally dumb. An old waiter in the St George’s Bar recognized her and with joy on his face, with full and happy gestures, was asking her many questions. Overwhelmed by the different reality than the one residing in her memory, she couldn’t utter a word to his cheery welcome.
She felt ridiculously tongue tied. She wasn’t afraid because she too recognized the old waiter but her brain was empty of any words, not even a “tenais talling”, a simple hello. She thought of asking if he had seen Taferra, but there was a long delay in even recalling her lover’s name. She stood before the old waiter, alone, feeling brain naked. After several dumb minutes, she walked away lost in an emotional abandonment of an Ethiopian fantasy that was once a wild, beautiful reality, but now jumbled and obsolete.
With welted eyes she walked away from St George’s Bar. Empty of feeling, she sauntered around the familiar filthy streets recalling and brutally relinquishing every romantic thought of the murky two year affair with an Ethiopian whom she now felt had been rightfully a stranger. Walking in the eucalyptus sweet smelling air of Addis, it became obvious to her that she was in the wrong place with a leftover romanticized hangover for a man who should have never existed for her, hard as she tried to imagine and be kind in her thoughts about him. Their affair had been a short fictitious story whose monotony made for barely existent memories. Taferra, as was all of Ethiopia, had been a fictional figure who one time long ago had been expressed by her wishful young girl’s mind into an unlikely love affair. How unfair she had been to Calder. She had to find Taferra and once and for all get him out of her mind.
After regaining some calmness, and her hands no longer trembled, she took a taxi, to the all-girls Princess Gennet Boarding School where she had taught English as a Peace Corps Volunteer two years earlier. The privacy walls around the school’s compound were as forbidding as she remembered them; they were there to protect the young female boarders whose favorite national pastime, as they liked to remind Peace Corps Volunteer Robin, was sex. When she entered the courtyard of the school, it took only seconds for the students to recognize their former teacher, and there were hugs and kisses and screams of happiness as all the girls rushed her with an enthusiasm reserved only for rock stars.
Again Robin was speechless, this time dumb with happiness, unable to respond to her former students’ stream of unending questions. They are such happy children without a chip on their shoulders, without an axe to grind, she thought. They were as she remembered them: all beautiful, with a tantalizing brown red hue complexion that made each and every face sparkle flawlessly. Such beauty, such exuberant comradery, such girlish innocence, such enthusiasm, such genuine friendship – what lovely Ethiopian qualities, she thought, as she finally reached out to touch her students.
Sadly she remembered her own high school experiences at Magnolia High in Sherman Oaks where she and her three best friends clung together in constant anxiety, lest their friendship, that timidly bound them together, but artlessly lacking the savage passion of endurance, might dissolve in stinking emptiness. That familiar timid love affair contrasted with the fiercely uninhibited Ethiopian welcome she was encountering. She recalled her own high school pathetic football pep rallies every fall, cheered on by dumpy coaches and dumb depressing unimportant high school ‘athletes’ who in monotone, cacophonous voices ‘lead’ the school gang in inane ‘school’ songs intended to inspire school spirit. They were tragic, pitiful acts, tedious in their badly rehearsed annual fall repetitions; Friday afternoon minor celebrations that couldn’t compare to the spontaneous, unrehearsed Ethiopian students’ enthusiasm now rushing before her with yelling and screaming to shower her, their former teacher, with love.
Strengthened by her ex-students’ expression of love, Robin found her way to the Principal’s office, an Indian woman of modest credentials.
“I wanted to ask you if Taferra is still with you,” shyly said Robin.
“Haven’t you heard? Taferra died soon after you left.”
Everyone, including the Principal were aware of the illicit affair between Robin and Taferra. She had silently disapproved then of her staff’s fucking on the side and she now gave the deadly news with relish.
Robin’s brain drained to her stomach and she fainted.
After she was revived, the lethal news continued. She was told that after she departed Ethiopia, Taferra became depressed, and soon after deranged, disoriented in speech and behaviour. He began to use foul language and even verbally molest his students. Whereas before he had been vain, he was now dishevelled and soon became fat from indifference as if malnourished. One fateful morning, as he made his way to school across an open field nearby, he dropped dead. It was said that by the time he was found amidst the weeds by a passer-by his bloated body was covered with millions of flies.
The image was too horrific for Robin’s mind to grasp. The fly infested stinking bloated body was too foreign for her memory of a once beautiful man, for no matter the previous thoughts, a lover decaying in an open field covered with buzzing flies became too appalling, too perverse, an image. She didn’t want to retain anything of Ethiopia.
“How stupid of me,” she said to herself as she walked away from Princess Gennet School, wishing never to return again.
“The whole Peace Corps thing has been an abortion,” she did not fail to see the irony.
The next day, she flew back to Los Angeles, aching only to see her best friends again. Sweet Southern California where the best fiends’ friendship could honestly be sustained by Grey Goose vodka and the many reds and whites of Napa and France.
*
David Calder did tolerantly suffer all Robin’s bullshit because being the son-in-law of Robert Sargent, owner and CEO of Pioneer Bank, was a cool position to be in: his father-in-law graciously had promoted him to Executive Vice President, Human Resources, after his marriage to Robin. After returning from Ethiopia, in his altruistically soaked bright mind there was some ambivalence in his seemingly Peace Corps idealism, and the greedy capitalist contradictory shit, but he was enough of a realist to accept that morality had more to do with politics than with some antagonistic notions of right and wrong. Like sex, everybody was doing it, so he too dropped the altruism and became a capitalist. He also knew from historical accounts that all women everywhere throughout the centuries had been considered morally inferior to men. To think otherwise would have been abnormal. Shit, you could’ve tested David a million different ways, as Peace Corps had done, and he would have always come out normal.
Chapter Ten
Blessed are those lucky few who have nothing more important to do than to just get together and shoot the bull and lick the bone with loving friends. One call here and one call there, and the response is always “Sure, I’ve got nothing better to do,” and off they go. Usually, the place of gathering is not important, though it’s alway
s nice, because the camaraderie is always perfect. Friends loaded with excess love to share with each other thrill at the prospect of getting together one more time. There is no agenda to be touched upon, no planned topic of conversation worthy of anticipation other than the drinks which are a given, and the finger foods which are an annoying cover-up for the drinks. The tall stem crystal glasses are always close to one’s heart giving grace to the friendly digs and disagreements that are coated in loud laughter. It’s all a play, a familiar game, acted out by bosom friends having a good time.
“Do you guys think we’re gay,” asked Kitty as she tipped her clean vodka martini past her newly lusciously crayoned lips. “I mean sort of like Phoebe, Rachel, and Monica?”
She left a thick mauve trace of her lips on the tall stem lip.
“Were they gay?”
“No because they liked fucking men. They were always fucking. Once a week they fucked! But now with the reruns they’re fucking every day, all day long,” laughed Myrna.
“But always off stage, as they say,” said a proper Sharon.
Pretty much all of Sharon’s comments were off the mark, kind of off stage, but even though she wasn’t rich she was the most beautiful of the friends and had been part of the group since elementary school. Anyway, most of the things she said fell into a hole never to return. But they still loved her.
“Well, most fucking does take place off stage,” said a thoughtful Robin who always felt the need to be supportive to Sharon.
“So, we all like to fuck men, Kitty, and therefore were not gay,” said Myrna.
“All of us, except Sharon, like to fuck men, so we’re not gay,” smiled Robin towards Sharon.
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