Dear Exile

by Hilary Liftin

  LOVE,

  Kate

  SOME WHERE ON THE COAST

  May 14

  Dear Hilary,

  We are leaving behind all our students and all our friends to start again. I realized that for the four months we lived in that very small village there were nineteen funerals because of AIDS, malaria, and diarrhea. On our last day in Ramisi, the hour before we left, a slow and sad procession of everyone in the village buried Mama Abdu’s son in our backyard. I feel miserable because we’re leaving and miserable because we don’t want to stay. Ramisi is a thoroughly unhealthy place, and the town and all the people in it, some of whom are now our friends, are dying. Kiss your family for me, Hilary, because I wish I could kiss mine.

  Love,

  Kate

  P a r t T h r e e

  M a y - O c t o b e r

  NEW YORK CITY

  May 14

  Dear Kate,

  Welcome to your new digs. I wanted this to be there to greet you and to prove that I’m adaptable. I’m relieved that you’ve left Ramisi for good. It was clearly taking its toll on your spirit, not to mention your bodily health. My travails are of the, well, American stock. It’s Monday and I’m at home, waiting for a bookshelf to be delivered. Also, I’m eating caramels and they keep getting stuck in my teeth. Bear with me.

  The happy news here is that my brother and Emily are finally officially engaged. Steven and I talked about where he should do it. Many times. He talked to my mother about it. He probably talked to all his friends about it. But my suggestion won. After much collaborative planning, Steven told her that they were having dinner with me and my mother at a restaurant down near the waterfront. Instead, out by the water, he gave her the ring that they picked out together. While they were having dinner I got dozens of white flowers and put them all over their apartment to await their happy return. I never expected to be part of this particular moment, but it gave me the same kind of joy as being the sole witness at your marriage. That “I’m a very important third wheel” feeling. I’m not a big fan of diamonds, but in all the pictures from that evening (leave it to Steven to bring a camera), Emily’s ring is shining like a Christmas tree light. It looks like a good omen, that ring glowing neon green as if their collective happiness were radiating from it. If it isn’t clear already, the lady said yes. Now I get to hear Emily gushing about how cute Steven is whenever he farts until the end of time.

  I’m afraid I have to fill you in on the hasty abort of my cyberaffair. Are you sitting down? A few days after my online encounter a chocolate bunny was anonymously dropped off at my Soho office. The receptionist’s (totally lame) description of the guy who wouldn’t leave his name led me and a few key work friends to believe that it had to be the cyberlover. Who else would do it? I was being stalked. As I’d thought, anyone my age in NYC with a media job and a penchant for black clothes would have only to ask five of his closest friends if they knew a Hilary and one would certainly say, “Hilary who works at P——?” and the jig would be up. So I was all worked up about that for twenty-four hours until Stack called back and said he was the Easter bunny. False alarm.

  Then Sunday KingX emailed me saying, “Hey, remember me? Contact me soon, we’ll chat.” Now, I don’t want to get too technical here, but when someone sends you an email you get to see his or her name as it has been registered in the system. Through some detailed sleuthing not worth your time (though very Sherlock Holmesian on my part), it became clear to me that it was very likely this guy was someone who works with me. Someone (Lord help me!) whom I know slightly. I crosschecked the ID of KingX and the ID of my colleague and, yes, it was a match, without a doubt. Now, maybe I shouldn’t have checked, but once I even suspected I just had to. I guess I violated the privacy of cyberculture. But, regardless, I discovered that I work with the guy with whom I’d exchanged words that you just don’t use with people you ever expect to meet in person, particularly in an office environment.

  Oh, the embarrassment. So much for anonymity. So much for the continuing drama of a cyberaffair. So much for my job. I was so horrified when I figured it out that I shut my office door and put my head down on my desk, red and giggling. I alternated between that position and pacing the three-foot floor space in my windowless office. Being me, as I like to say, is a full-time job. I was positive that if he hadn’t figured it out already, he soon would. He would see me in the cafeteria and a terrible and true realization would settle over him with all the reality of, of, let’s see—the overhead lighting of a swimwear dressing room? An ex-lover’s journal? A ton of bricks? In retrospect, this seems a little less likely, but I was convinced that I had to clear the air. So I returned his email, writing, “Turns out I was right—we do sort of know each other. We work for the same company. I’m not saying what we did was wrong, but it’s pretty embarrassing under the circumstances. When you recover from this news, tell me something to relieve the humiliation.” That was Monday. By Wednesday I’m thinking that he (a) hasn’t gotten the email, (b) hasn’t recovered, (c) thinks I’m unattractive, or (d) is just plain chicken, but I have not heard back from him. And it turns out that I want some kind of response. I know what you’re wondering. Is he my type? The best answer I can give is that I wouldn’t pick him out of a crowd. (Oh and yes, of course, he lied to me online about what his job is and how tall he is, and lied when I asked him if he had lied about anything. All’s fair in the world of cyberfantasy, but did I lie? What do you think?) So eventually I did hear back from him, something decent about how we’ll keep it our little secret.

  Now we just see each other in the halls at work. Were we a cybermatch? Definitely. But are we a match in reality? We are both too shy and awkward to find out. How do you talk to someone when you’ve had sex with him without ever speaking? And you thought that if you did meet it would be eventual, and carefully negotiated? Next to this a one-night stand is Jiffy Pop. Awkwardness aside, it’s clear to me that I had hoped for something real, not from him the guy I work with, but from Mystery Guy KingX. I was curious about a virtual affair, but I realized that what I truly wanted was for it to lead to a real affair, with a three-dimensional person.

  The only multidimensional person I like lately is Josh Stack, and everybody likes Josh Stack. I’m not saying I like like him or that “everybody” like likes him, but he’s such an excellent boyfriend substitute. For example, yesterday we ate cold borscht and then walked around a little community garden in the middle of the city. We headed to his apartment, where he fed me watermelon and kiwi and a chocolate bunny that was left over from Easter (envious yet?), but in spite of all that I don’t think he will ever be my real-life boyfriend, which both makes me sad and doesn’t. Maybe I don’t want him, but I want him to want me. Are you beginning to grasp the ambivalence here? Also, in the three-dimensional category, I must confess that I lapsed and had sex with Jason on the floor of my new apartment, but it was an accident, I swear. I tripped and fell on him. And then I thought, Kate forbade me to do that. You won’t see or hear his name again. I am resolute.

  Now that you know a little about the floor of my apartment, I’ll fill you in on some of the less stimulating details. There’s a communal roof, and we’re one of the tallest buildings around. It’s like being on a big ship sailing up Seventh Avenue. The building has a doorman, which is a luxury that I never considered before, but the effect is that I feel utterly safe. It has made me realize that in every other place I’ve lived in the city, I’ve visualized an assailant breaking in through the fire escape and attacking me in my sleep. I wasn’t even being paranoid, just practical. But now there’s no fire escape and no dark hallways. I face east. Well, I turn a bit, but the windows in the apartment face east. There are some water towers on the roofs out there, and I look at them as I eat cereal on my new, used steel table. Otherwise, I have very little furniture, but I’m so rarely home that all I really need is the bed. Steven made me a new bed, which is a prize. It’s built of plumbing pipes, and I attached faucets to the two pipes
at the head so the bed looks like a big sink and I don’t have to get up to have a drink. Bet you don’t get that in old Kenya. Choosing furniture is a new, albeit underwhelming, act of self-definition. I like nice, warm bottle greens, with enough metal stuff that no one messes with me.

  Unfortunately, it didn’t take me long to discover that there is a horse-footed woman living upstairs from me, disturbing the peace. She trots back and forth across my ceiling from early in the morning until late at night, dragging heavy furniture across the floor. Just my luck. Still, even this constant interruption can’t shatter my joy at finally living alone for the first time ever. I’m already talking to myself and developing unsociable habits. I do the crossword in the morning with my spoon and pen skillfully held in one hand. I sleep in the buff. I sing too loudly and shower in the dark. No one knows.

  I totally-otally miss you. The end of this letter was supposed to be all about you, but now I’ve taken so long talking about me that I don’t really have room for you. But I’m thinking about you. (I got that from my most Hallmark friend, but isn’t it a nice thing to say? And it’s true.) I want to know how Dave is, please (other than a fearsome snake-killer). Finally, Saturday I went to a party and there was a woman there named Hilary who was wearing exactly the same outfit as I. Life’s little miracles . . . of which you are one, so take care of yourself and watch out for cobras, okay?

  But now let me face today,

  H

  KWALE

  May 31

  Hi Hilary,

  We’ve arrived (as had your letter, thank you). Everything here is better than in Ramisi. The land is lush and productive, there’s more food and cleaner water, and the people are healthier. Neighbors are constantly at our door saying “Hodi!” (meaning something like “I’m about to come in”) and sitting down for a friendly chat. Our house is made of carefully packed mud with a thatched roof and cement floors. We have wooden carved Swahili doors—real art. The bedroom and a sitting room are under the thatching, along with the choo and a storage room, and we’ll cook in the open courtyard. What makes this house wonderful already is that the cement floor extends out past the front wall making a sort-of porch. It’s perfect for neighborhood children to play on with their homemade wire cars, balls of knotted up plastic bags, and rolling tire rims, and we’ve made bunches of small friends already. Right now, David is sharing pencils and drawing goats and matatus with Uba, a precocious and constantly dirty three-year-old, and her slightly older brother Sefu, who always has a serious expression on his face.

  Yesterday morning we were walking around our new hometown admiring all the lush banana trees, led by one of Dave’s new students, Hamadi. (The land here, especially when there’s a full moon, looks exactly like Where the Wild Things Are but without the Wild Things. Maybe Dave could gnash and roll.) Anyway, Hamadi pointed to a gray rocklike thing that I could just make out up ahead. “See that rock?” he asked. “That’s an elephant.” Needless to say, we ran. On the way home, he showed us several palm trees that had been pulled out of the ground the way we would pull up a dandelion. I noticed that elephant footprints are much bigger when you aren’t sure where the elephant is.

  Things are wet hereabouts, it still being the very, very rainy season and all, and living under thatching can be a little moldy, if you can imagine. Although the world is sprouting in a very pleasing way, when our clothes sprout, and we can’t dry them, it is less pleasing. This morning I went to wash up our plastic dishes and thought to myself, I don’t remember leaving bananas out all over them. Then I realized that they weren’t bananas after all. They were rather large, greasy, yellowish slugs. If that doesn’t give you a nightmare, I give up.

  We’re settling in well. I nailed a bunch of nails into the workbench that’s in our kitchen courtyard. Now we have a place to put the rags (so we don’t burn our hands taking pots of boiling water off the fire) and the scoop (that we use to get water out of the big storage vat) and the plastic strainer (through which we pour most liquids to get rid of the bugs, sticks, and dead ants that invariably fall in). That should help the bumbling-around-in-the-dark-trying-to-make-dinner-but-can’t-find-the-candles type of problem.

  Our new neighbor Mwanamisi (mother of Uba and Sefu and three other, older children) came over last night to show me how to make coconut rice, wali wa nazi. Kate, you say, but you already know how to make coconut rice! Yes, I say, but I don’t know how to make friends. So David and I were rushing around trying to make reality match what we realized we had probably said in Kiswahili (“I think I said we’d ‘already’ cleaned the rice and we ‘were doing’ laundry.”). Mwanamisi arrived midway through the coconut-milk-making process and was chatting with us about how to cook it really well, soft and sweet. As far as I could tell, she was complimenting me on what I had done so far, except there was one little part that I didn’t catch, and her tone was less spunky, so I figured I probably didn’t put enough salt in or something. But, all in all, I was pretty excited at not being totally incompetent at cooking. Later I checked on that verb to figure out what I’d done wrong. Here’s what my dictionary said about it. (I mean, I just “haribu”ed it—how bad could it be, right?) “kuharibu: v. injure, destroy, spoil, damage, ruin, demoralize, spoil work, break up an expedition, devastate a country, cause miscarriage, pervert, corrupt.” That’s what I did to the rice. Good thing we like potatoes, eh?

  Last week we had lunch at the house of another new neighbor, Rama. After the meal, he said that he was very happy that we could be friends, he had thought that Americans didn’t like Muslims. Then he asked about my religion. Now often, I’ve hedged about God, because everyone here seems to be very religious, and I’ve wanted to be accepted. I’d let people believe what they wanted about my God-feelings. But this guy had been criticizing his wife (who wasn’t eating with us) and backhanding his kids throughout the whole meal, so I was ready to risk his rejection. I said that I was glad we could be friends too, even though I’m not religious. He was very quiet. “You worship the devil?” he asked. I talked about believing in goodness and in trying to help others, but when I finished, he summed up by saying, “If you are not with God, you are against Him.” He then drew a line on the ground with his finger. “It is simple, you just choose, this side with God, or this side with Satan.” I said for me it wasn’t like that. He shook his head and has carefully avoided me ever since. (He has come to the house occasionally to borrow our hammer, though. I sort of want to tell him it’s Satan’s hammer.)

  We do still have a bit of a water problem (i.e., the pipe that leads to a spigot close to the village is only turned on for several hours each day, if at all), but when we do get some, it’s clean. So, since it hasn’t been on for several days and we didn’t get very much last time, I’m feeling a bit grungy. And you know me and my passion for hot showers.

  We’ve only just started teaching, Dave at a school of only sixty boys and girls a ways up the path, and me at a huge school of about 900 boys, a ways down the path. It’s hard to tell yet how the two will compare with Ramisi Secondary. They do seem better so far. We’re about to go to a harambee at Dave’s school—basically a live telethon only you just give money and don’t get an umbrella with a logo. Everyone sits outside on chairs facing a big table and watches everybody else give money, a shilling at a time. A big donation gets three simultaneous claps. It’s very communal, though it takes forever.

  I’m so happy for you that Steven is engaged. “Sister Emily” has a nice ring to it. Say hi to your cyberboy for me.

  Yours always,

  Kate

  NEW YORK CITY

  June 10

  Dear K8,

  There is a sound in my apartment of air being released. I’m a little afraid. Otherwise I’m having a peaceful interlude. I don’t have a TV and don’t plan to get one. My plants are doing well. In fact, I have such a green thumb that a sponge in my kitchen is sprouting like a Chia Pet. I’m serious. It’s very dada. I’m having a glass of ruby red grapefruit juice, struggli
ng to like it. My mother graciously informed me that my daily orange juice is “high in sugar.” I’m trying to think of grapefruit juice like broccoli rabe or Campari, where you embrace the bitterness. If I drink it every day I will come to like it, I believe. Sort of like having a day job.

  Speaking of which, I’m officially on a job safari. I know I haven’t been at this company long enough, but there’s a new owner and a “reorg” every week and I can’t see when things will straighten out. People at work have been teasing me about needing to go to Attitude Camp. You know how grumpy I act sometimes, just to keep everyone on their toes. But now whenever I try to be cheerful they think it’s a joke. It has dawned on me that I am finally too old to be a prodigy. There is some relief in this, but it also takes its toll on my ambition. Sure, I want success in my field. I want to be respected for my ideas and to earn the freedom to choose my projects. But since I apparently won’t be the first or best at anything, it’s hard to know how fast to go. Still, right now I’m pretty eager to move and so am open to many jobs of the online and editorial ilk.