* * *
—
OUTSIDE, the Ford’s red bow is slumped and bleached. The car is a minor celebration in front of an old blocky hospital. None of this went as planned, yet somehow Tom feels fulfilled. He was part of something, if only on the periphery. In the morning, he will give the car to Martha for being the closest, and Martha will sell it to the wrestling coach for a good price and put the money away. It will be enough to buy plane tickets to someplace warm every winter until the baby is grown. She does not need a car—for transportation, Martha has feet and the bus.
Light, heat, now those are worth paying for.
The Cape of Persistent Hope
Mother Land
The African fell asleep just after dusk and woke at dawn. In late summer, when Lucy had met him in Los Angeles, this was reasonable. Long days, short nights. By mid-October, she felt half abandoned. She lay down with him at five in the afternoon, tried breathing exercises, sheep-counting exercises, but what she did instead was worry. Her dead mother rose up over her like a full moon, and Lucy saw ungood developments: dead skin crumbling like old paper, her breasts were dripping from her. Lucy thought of her unmoored balloon of a mother, naked and fat, hovering over the entire earth. Little children would scream and point. Men would turn away. Beauty queens would pray, “Not me, not me.”
Lucy’s mother had moved back to her childhood home of Beirut when she retired but instead of a long life there, her mother had died. Lucy did not see her die. Her sister had gone, and her sister was too good a daughter to compete with. The sister had called Lucy and tried to explain what was happening, but Lucy wanted off the phone. She muted everything that wasn’t her own bright young life.
All summer Lucy had not slept, and the African had, and he woke at dawn and made coffee and ate half a loaf of bread, toasted to a dry crack. By the time she got up, his day was already half over. He was yawning by lunch.
She said, “By solstice, we’ll hardly see each other.”
“It’s natural to rise with the sun.”
“Natural if you’re an elephant, if you’re a caveman.” Lucy flicked the lights on and off.
He did not concede.
“This is something to leave you over,” she told him. “This is a good reason.”
The African opened the refrigerator and took out a jar of Marmite. He scooped his finger and sucked the tar-slick off. He looked at Lucy up and down, as if he was trying to decide how much trouble she was worth. When she was twelve, she had walked from her house to the market with a short list from her mother and it had been peaceful. When she was thirteen, every pickup blew its horn. The drivers whistled. One year, you’re a kid with a carton of milk; the next, you are a body, visible to everyone.
“I have a better idea than you leaving me. I should look in on my house in Africa anyway. Let’s move to the equator. Let’s get day and night even again.”
* * *
—
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN staying home and going far away was keeping her blood in the familiar river or diverting it. Lucy had never before thought about her own city or her own bloodline and the people she could marry who would leave it unchanged. When she told him about her boyfriend, her father said, “An African?” and Lucy comforted him, “He’s white, Dad.”
“A white African?” She felt for the first time the curvature of the earth below her, the idea that she could slip across it like a bead of water, join a different, greener pool.
Lucy thought about the African’s proposition at a café where a group of Scandinavian boys made their foreignness obvious with shorts that were too long or pants that were too short. And don’t they sell any other kinds of shoes in Europe? Lucy thought. But she liked the idea of being the foreigner. She liked the idea that she could succumb, that she could be entirely surrounded, an island washed by unfamiliar waves. She remembered a story she had read as a girl of a white woman on the dark continent, a great adventurer, befriending lions and elephants and members of the various benign tribes. She imagined becoming a new person. She liked the idea of doing something that would make her perfect sister nervous. She would take up making art. A woman artist in a strange land. Dangerous and friendly creatures, dangerous and friendly people, coffee plantations and furious rivers and the story of man. She could get into drinking gin. She could, as a PBS television show had once instructed her, learn about apes and discover what it meant to be human.
She wanted advice and her fingers had dialed her mother’s number before she remembered: dead. “Hello?” said a woman on the other end.
“Mom?”
“Hi, sweetheart.”
“Mom?”
“Yes, it’s me. It’s me, honey. Darlene?”
Lucy almost hung up. She almost said, “Wrong number, sorry.” But the feeling of having a mother on the other end of the line hit her bloodstream like alcohol. “How are you?” she asked, and it was a gift when the woman began to talk about the gardeners and the bald patch they’d left in the yard and then the vomiting cat and then the good deal on those French green beans Dad likes and the dream she had about trying to sweep the kitchen floor with a toothbrush. Lucy held her breath so she didn’t give herself away. She did not say Mmm or Uh-huh or Yes or That’s funny.
“What did you end up deciding about your trip?” the woman asked.
“My trip?” Lucy said, and then without waiting for a reply: “I’m going. I love you.”
Lucy let her head fall into her hands and felt their mugginess, their dirty salt. I’m going, she repeated to herself.
The African bought the tickets that night. Two seats to the other side of everything.
In bed: “You’re not really African, though,” Lucy had said, looking at his big white arms.
“That’s where I’m from. What else would I be?”
“But you’re really European.”
“And before that, we’re all African. Even you, sweet woman.” That was the way with the African—it was one big, plentiful world.
* * *
—
THEY WERE MET at the airport by a driver who told them on the ride home all about the floods last summer and the way the land had changed because of them. “Now it’s so dry,” he said. Lucy looked out the window. Women in patterned cloth skirts, men in jeans. Everywhere, brightly colored plastic tubs in stacks. Children played in a red dirt field wearing their navy-and-white uniforms. Are they poor? she wanted to ask the African. Where should she set her sorry-gauge? The people looked clean and tended to. They looked fed. Lucy wanted to see wild animals by the side of the road, but all she saw were dogs, dozens, ribs and the spaces between, long of tongue.
The house was huge. “My father was a diplomat,” the African said. He introduced her to the staff who all had uniforms and called her “ma’am.”
“Have these people been here all the time you were in LA?”
“Of course. They’ve been with the family for years. It’s normal here to have help and not expensive. Plus you can’t leave an empty house for security reasons.” They sat on the veranda and ate beef stew with a thick pasty mash of vegetables and the local root, and they drank cold beer. “Welcome to Africa,” the African said. He leaned down and pressed his lips to her forehead, but what Lucy felt was his beard, which had grown in over the long day of travel. The sunset was momentary—a sweet flash and then dark. “Time for bed,” the African said. Lucy’s body was unclocked and restless. Her eyes were dry but she wanted more to drink. “Stay with me for a while,” she said, but he had come for the sleep and he wanted to sleep it. He had come for the twelve hours of light, twelve hours of dark. He looked at Lucy like she was asking him to remove a semi-essential body part, lend it to her for no good reason.
“It’s dark,” he said. “We’re already missing it.”
* * *
—
GARDENERS TENDED THE GARDEN. Drive
rs drove. Maids did the wash, changed the sheets every day, mopped the floors. The house was open, what Lucy was sure the African’s mother would have described to her English friends as “gracious.” The big windows looked out at the lawn with its short knots of grass and the jungle leaning in. There were red flowers like big mouths. Lucy tried to pour orange juice and a woman said, “What is it you’d like, ma’am?” She took off her clothes to shower, and they were gone when she got out and new ones laid out on the bed. The first set would be washed, pressed, folded by the end of the day.
Lucy wanted to call someone, but her sister thought she was stupid and that this plan was stupid and Lucy did not want to hear why. Her father was angry that she had left. There wasn’t anyone who wanted to know what it smelled like where she was, what she’d eaten or dreamed.
The daytime was big and empty. The African wanted to help his neighbor rebuild a wall that had been flooded out. Lucy set up a ball of clay in an upstairs bedroom with a view over the trees to the weepingly green hills. There had been elephants living there not long ago. She could easily picture them, searching the earth with their trunks, spiraling good grasses up to their mouths. Lucy put on a white shirt and untied the clay bag. “OK,” she said. “Sculpt.” She wanted to be a person capable of making things, of creating beauty. She made a sticky sphere, hollowed it. She thumb-pressed the bowl, tried to make it big enough to hold something. A stream of ants crossed the windowsill, fat as a rope, liquid almost, searching.
* * *
—
THE AFRICAN RELISHED the even split of the day and night. He felt exactly as rested as he was productive. Lucy hid a sketchbook beneath her pillow, brought it out once the African was asleep. She drew fat-leafed trees and grasses. She drew sky and ground. It looked lush and warm, the kind of place where the air was thick and jasmine-scented, where you were grateful for each sip in your lungs. She wanted to put a person in the scene, someone to appreciate the beauty, but each time she tried, the figure looked flat. Lucy erased and retried, and the paper grew thin.
* * *
—
LUCY WALKED UPSTAIRS in the big house and then downstairs. She sat outside and ate a mango. She wondered what her sister was doing now that she was out of their mother’s orbit. They hadn’t spoken since the end. She went inside and stood in the kitchen for a long time. She wasn’t hungry, but she wanted something. When the African came in sweat-skunky, put his work-proud hands on her butt, she turned and said, “I’m bored.”
The idea was his. The ultimate sculpture project: building something inside, doubling, doubling until a baby uncurls like a fern. It seemed that all he had to do was speak the idea and she was pregnant already. It scared Lucy, how easily it had happened. As if they had been walking all this time under a canopy dripping in embryos. Now that she knew, she was afraid to look up, to raise her hand above her head and accidentally knock another free.
Lucy did not tell her father that she was pregnant. He expected marriage first and she could not imagine marrying this man—not here, not in this distant place. She did not want to buy a white dress in a dusty market. She did not want an American wedding in an African church or an African wedding in which she was the pale, false bride. There was no ceremony in which she made sense so she kept the news a secret.
The months passed and the inner sculpture did not make Lucy’s clay any more generous. She had thought of art as a house you simply had to unlock: she had been one of the good artists in school, always an A student, and she’d thought that the creations would pour forth if she only had the time and space, and here she was in this new universe with all the hours of the day, but now there was a new problem: none of this belonged to her and she did not trust her own eyes here. She made various bowls, none of them necessary for the world. She hadn’t thought about the need for a kiln and everything she’d put on the porch to dry the day before dissolved in this morning’s dew. The African came into the room and said, “How is the little foreigner?”
“Tired,” she said. “Untalented.”
“I was talking about someone else.” He staked a claim on her belly with his hands. “But I’m glad to hear how you feel.”
“I feel moved-into.”
“Let’s go on holiday. I’ll take you to the animals.”
* * *
—
THEY WAITED FOR the tiny airplane on the ground under a mango tree mad with fruit. Behind them, a man waited for customers in his small open-air café. Six plastic tables, a television tuned to a preacher, a Coke machine sweating. When the African went to the bathroom the man smiled at Lucy and she thought he was flirting until he looked at her rounding belly and asked about the baby. She had almost forgotten—more than by any legal marriage, any symbolic ring, a pregnant woman was marked as another man’s property.
Lucy picked the brightest fruit, bit the end and rolled the skin back. Her face was yellow and sticky. The African watched her with pleasure. This was exactly the kind of woman he preferred to love—fertile, juice-sweet. He came in and kissed her, the mess of her lips. They heard the plane, watched it grow bigger in the clear blue. It skidded and, so small and light, bounced to a stop.
“We just walk right up?” Lucy asked. And they did, wearing their sunglasses, stepping over the weeds in the tarmac, ready to take flight. On board, the pretty young flight attendant poured beer.
“Thanks, sweetheart,” the African said. Lucy was surprised that she liked this, the old-fashioned racism and sexism of a big white man sweet-talking a small dark woman. It felt good to admit that power was unequal, that, if he wanted to, the African could pick them both up and carry them away. Then her hand went to her middle. Don’t be a girl, she thought. But don’t be a boy, either.
* * *
—
IT RAINED ALL NIGHT, the kind of warm rain that made Lucy feel the distance she had come. Even in summer in California, the rain was cold. She listened to it on the thatch of their little cabin, the crack around the door frame weeping. The African lit all three kerosene lamps and dealt the cards, but he couldn’t keep track of any of her rules and she couldn’t keep track of his. He put a jacket over his head—he never wore a raincoat, only used it to make a roof—and ran to the restaurant where he bought stewed chicken with soft flatbreads for dipping. The food was hot and rich and Lucy ate her portion and sent him for another. All the while, rain.
The African said. “Pregnancy is good for you. You look more natural now.”
“Natural?”
“You know the most famous Lucy in Africa is an ancient skeleton? They’ve found older bones now, but your namesake is important proof of evolution. The shape of her spine meant she walked upright.”
“You want me to look more like a Neanderthal?”
“Wrong continent, wrong age, darling. Lucy was a hominid.”
The African was hungry for her all night. In half sleep and half love, she heard something outside tearing up the grass and chewing it. Cows, she thought. Except for the rain and the thatch hut, she could almost place herself in the Midwest, a farmhouse and a grain silo nearby, a herd of Jerseys heavy with milk.
* * *
—
IN THE MORNING, the net was black with mosquitoes. Lucy flicked her finger and watched them take off, their fat legs dangling below. “How are we ever going to get out of bed?”
The African made a case for staying, but Lucy said, “Take me to see a giraffe. I’ve been in Africa seven months.”
The footprints outside their door were huge disks. “Hippos,” the African said. “They come out of the lake at night to graze.” Ordinary, his voice said. As if he were talking about skunks, raccoons. She thought of them in their little hut, naked while a herd of giants tore at the ground just outside. Lucy and the African walked from their cabin under the massive trees. The hotel owner served them oily pancake-bread and jam and sweet Indian tea in an open-air room, w
ood-floored and thatched. The room was cool and dark, the walls washed with blue. There were chickens somewhere nearby, clucking. Lucy swatted at her ankles, hot with bites. All that extra blood in her body, sucked out.
Another couple came and sat at the next table. “Having a blessed morning?” the man said. He was wearing all khaki the way white people did here. They were missionaries, the man said, without invitation and without embarrassment. Lucy thought people had given this up, mostly, the conversion of darker people to a lighter God. Or at least that they disguised it underneath the pretense of medicine or education. The man went on to talk about what he called “The Jesus Movie” as if this was something every good soul on earth knew well. Lucy pictured a tired VHS tape, thirty years old, its ribbon stretched and the audio slowed down. A man on a cross plus your sins and the sins of your continent equals no more struggle. The woman smiled hard but said nothing. She looked to Lucy like she would rather be shopping for sensible separates in Cleveland. Like she would rather be living the Christian life in a house with central air and a shorn lawn.
Awayland Page 4