by Pam Houston
What I want to say on the phone to Rick is, I can no longer sustain myself if my primary role in your life is witness to the Rick-Sofree War. I want to say, I can’t bear to watch Madison grow up to limp and vamp and flirt and think of herself as a sweet mossy font of purification. I want to say, We don’t have sex that much anymore because watching you proofread an email you are going to send to Sofree sixteen or eighteen times doesn’t really work on me as foreplay. I want to say, The only thing we have between us that isn’t fighting about Sofree, strategizing about Sofree, or commiserating about Sofree is baseball, and while we both agree that baseball is wonderful, it is probably not enough.
What I do say when I actually talk to him is, “I miss my friends,” and then I cry so long and so hard you would think that every single one of my friends was dead.
94. Ksar Ouled Soltane, Tunisia
When we first get there, the five o’clock prayer is being sung from the green and white tower of the monastery, and the man who will turn out to be Khalifa Guesmi says, in perfect French, “Where are you from, Colorado? Texas?” That is how we know we are meant to meet.
He says, “I am just closing up for the day . . . but if there are any questions I can answer for you about this place, please do not hesitate to ask . . .”
It is our third ksar of the day, including Hadada, the one that was used in the filming of The Phantom Menace, rounded mud structures that rise from the ground and out of each other like swallow’s nests, burnt sienna mud against the blue Tunisian sky.
Khalifa Guesmi speaks thirteen languages, in spite of passing every one of his twenty-four years—as he puts it—in Ksar Ouled Soltane. He works in the fields, tending his father’s sheep, and here at the ksar, which, he tells us, has recently been declared a World Heritage Site and now will be protected forever. He is as delicate as rain, as different from the men at the camel fair in Douz as the ocean is from the desert.
“The people in this part of Tunisia seem . . .” I say, “gentler,” is the word I can finally find in my limited French.
“The people in this part of Tunisia are descendants of the Yemeni people,” he says. “They came here hundreds of years ago, but they still live as they did in Yemen. This place, the ksar, is their method of building.”
I tell him, truthfully, that friends of mine who have traveled far more extensively than me tell me that the Yemeni people are the finest they have met in all the world, and he beams with unconcealed pride. While he is making us tea he mentions, quietly, that he uses his spare time at the ksar to paint. We say we would love to see his paintings, and when he brings them out we know that the problem of Christmas shopping for all of Rick’s family members has been solved.
Khalifa’s brother shows up, and he is a painter too, and we drink tea and talk about Yemen and Tunisia, also about America and Barack Obama and hope. We take pictures together in the tiny teahouse, pay for the ten small paintings we have selected for Rick’s relatives. Khalifa and his brother give us one painting each as a gift.
It was light when we went into the teahouse; by the time we emerge it is dark dark dark. No moon, no streetlights, Orion and the Pleiades framed together by the ksar’s rounded walls.
When we get back to where the Punto is parked I turn my painting over and in the light that hangs over the door of the monastery I read the inscription in French (though he has also printed it in Arabic): I give as a present to the lady Pam from the USA with my sincere thanks and my wishes to a tranquil Christmas and my best wishes to a happy life with Rick. KG
Under a million stars and along the weathered alleyway begins the humming and warbling of the seven o’clock call to prayer.
95. Sedona, Arizona
The lady who leads the Zumba class is wearing a hot pink sweatsuit with the words PEACE, LOVE, ZUMBA appliquéd on it in silver sparkly paint. The class is comprised of me, a husband-and-wife sex therapist team, a young black woman whose shirt indicates she teaches at a YWCA camp, a retired rancher and his wife, and two Hassidic sisters from the Bronx. Out in the real world of power yoga Olympics and competitive Namaste, there would not be one of us brave enough to sign up for a class like this, but these classes at the all-inclusive spa are like the Ellis Island of fitness: give me your fat, your nerdy, your clumsy. Zumba Patti loves us all.
Patti herself is not a kid, but you would never know it by her energy level, as she steps us through rumbas, mambas, cumbias, salsas, rap, hip-hop. It is the male sex therapist, and not the old cowboy, who flags first, and the sisters in their kerchiefs and thick glasses who have the most fun. Except for Patti, whose enthusiasm is infectious, and beyond all comprehension.
So far at Mi Amo I have had a Thai massage, an Aura-Soma color reading, reflexology, and something called Shared Soul Seeker with Rick. In Shared Soul Seeker, a woman named Francesca Francesca stood by and made approving noises while Rick and I first interpreted each other’s chakras, and then spun healing energy into them.
When Rick put his hand over my fifth chakra he said he saw a deer that turned into a wolf that turned into an owl, so when I got to his sixth chakra I said I saw a purple grizzly bear walking on a clean white glacier, confirming what anyone would have guessed, which is that even in something called Shared Soul Seeker, Rick and I would be inclined to compete.
Twila, the Reiki Master, has the clearest green eyes I have ever seen, but during the healing she closes them and screws her face all up like the Exorcist, especially when she puts her hands near my heart, my knees, or my nether regions. In the picture she draws there is one jaggedy circle inside another jaggedy circle inside my stomach. There is a smooth circle over my heart, one small circle over each knee, and a giant cone coming out of the top of my head.
When she shows me the picture I think the cone is going to turn out to be the good news, but when she goes over it with me it turns out that the cone is about my suicidal tendencies.
“You are so powerful they are trying to pull you back with them,” she says. “That’s why you have this big strain on your knees.” She points to the little circles. She takes my hands. “But you’ve got to stay here, Pam, because you have very very important work to do.”
At this she begins to weep. Not her, exactly, but the thing that comes through her, and I leave the room thinking that suicidal is not what I have been feeling lately, even with the days so short, and I’m not as absolutely sure as she is that those jaggedy circles in my stomach are grief over my two abortions, though I have to give her credit for knowing there’s been exactly two.
Yesterday Rick and I walked up to one of the eight Sedona vortexes. Rick climbed up on top and when he got down I asked how it felt up there and he said, “Oh, you know, all vortexy.”
I sat in the shade of the vortex and contemplated Kachina Woman, a several hundred-foot sandstone tower nearby. Kachina Woman has a boat on her head because after the flood—the big one—she rowed across the water and repopulated the earth single-handedly.
The lady we sit next to at lunch says she went on a hike and there were “sky vaginas” everywhere and Rick says, so quietly he thinks I am the only one who hears him, “Frankly, there seemed to be a lot more cocks.”
Rick and I figured out today that the difficulty we are having getting along at the spa we owe to our preexisting expectations. He thought we were coming to a spa together, and I thought I was coming to a spa.
I have my Reiki healing with Twila only a few hours before I have my psychic massage with Nadish, who is also German, and married to Nadira, and we go back to the room with the flaming trees out the window and he asks me what I want to work on. I say a few words about second chakra and self and before I have even finished my sentence he waves his hand and says, “No, no, zis is just what all the others have told you to say,” which I have to admit is true.
“Let me ask you a question,” he says, sounding a little like Colonel Klink, “Vy don’t you just stop trying to be better?” and I think, Well there is a suggestion for you.
/> “Za problem is that you are trying to achieve an Eastern ideal with Western tools,” says the German, who now calls himself Nadish. “Is it possible for you to stop trying to be better?”
“I don’t think so,” I say.
“And remember,” Nadish says, “if you have to try to keep yourself from trying, you are missing the whole point.”
“Of course,” I say.
“Pam,” he says, laying one hand on top of my head like a blessing, “you are a giant tree that many people like to sit under, and you like being that tree very much. Vy not just accept it?” He puts his hands on my cheeks and forces me to look right at him. “You have a thin top layer that is all fear,” he says, “but underneath that is a big person, a big mothering presence. You are always so hateful toward your body, but you can’t be who you are without zis body.”
This must be, I think, why they call it a psychic massage.
“Pamela,” he says, “do you know what zis name means?”
I do know what it means—it made me want to die of embarrassment when I was a teenager and absolutely nothing in me wants to tell Nadish the truth. He tells me that Nadish means ocean and Nadira means pinnacle, like that’s going to up the ante.
“It means all honey,” I finally mumble.
“Well,” he booms, laughing, “that’s perfect for you!” He pats my stomach merrily, gives me a wink, and leaves the room.
96. Creede, Colorado
I have the airplane dream again. This time I am with Rick and Madison—we are on our way home from somewhere—and the captain tells us there is such a large and strong low-pressure system over the area the plane cannot stay in the air. We will be making an emergency landing in Melbourne. It is hard to imagine where on earth we could have been that would force an emergency landing in Melbourne on the way home, but such is the logic of dreams.
The emergency-landing dreams don’t scare me anymore. Partly because I have them so often and partly because the pilot never has trouble putting the plane down softly, usually on a freeway, twice on a major artery, once in a giant lake. I have flown low and slow now through dreamscaped versions of Honolulu, Seoul, London, and oddly, Cleveland, Ohio. It always looks like the wings will scrape the sides of the tall buildings, like we will hit a car, a pedestrian, get tangled in electric lines, but we never do. Sometimes it seems to take forever, from the announcement of distress to wheels down on the tarmac, but we always get there safe and sound.
In the Melbourne dream, we check into a hotel with a giant pool to please Madison and she couldn’t be happier with the turn of events. The airline tells us it will be a week before the low-pressure system lifts, and I worry out loud to the chambermaid that Madison’s mother will be apoplectic because we’ll get all these extra days.
In real life, the lowest low-pressure system in one hundred years dumps another thirty inches on the ranch, on top of the three feet already standing, and the only reliable snowplow guy in the county goes to the hospital with chest pains. Some kind of odd back draft from the garage turns the cars into giant car-shaped snowmen, entirely concealed. It takes all day for Rick and me to dig to the barn, and the horses are glad to see us when we get there. Our range for the next three days is the house, and that skinny little barn trail, and even that blows back in every night when the wind comes up and we have to redig it. We eat through most of the freezer food and never once have the urge to kill each other and that’s got to be some measure of progress.
I get an email from Fenton the human who’s in Calcutta for a month that says: Last night as the candles of the pilgrims were floating slowly down the Ganges and the faithful were doing their evening devotions in the vast, wide, polluted, holy river and the hymns were wafting, with the cries of the spider monkeys, over the rooftops, I watched from my hotel balcony and wished you were here with me to see it.
The snow finally lets up and Madison comes to the ranch for real, and we put on snowshoes and drag three sleds out to the hill where the homesteaders are buried. The little red bullet sled goes the fastest but the old wooden toboggan is the sweetest ride, staying high and light up on the crystalline surface, running fifty yards out into the pasture before it loses enough momentum to sink down in, everything so silent out here with the snowfall that Madison’s giggles echo back from the mountains that surround us like a song.
NZ #0015
I HAVE BEEN UP FOR three straight nights finishing articles and reading student papers, and now a three-hour layover in LAX finds me on the floor in the corner of an unused gate, a year’s worth of credit card receipts, bank statements, and bills spread out around me. By the time I get back from New Zealand, April 15 will have come and gone.
Takeoff is on time and uneventful. Once dinner is over I know I can finally go to sleep. A sweet flight attendant who looks like a young Dick Van Dyke offers me champagne and I accept. I eat my dinner with half a glass of bubbles and that’s when the cabin begins spinning.
I don’t remember getting myself to the aft head, but I must have, because the next thing I know I am being pried out of it. I have passed out with my body against the door, which is making extrication difficult. No one can get in far enough to throw me back against the seat from which I have fallen, until I wake up enough to do it myself.
“You’d been in there nearly twenty minutes when we started to wonder,” Dick Van Dyke says, once I have come to, and gotten my pants pulled up, and allowed two of them to help me to my seat. I am breathing comfortably into an oxygen mask attached to a portable tank. The five other people in my row, I notice, are seriously afraid of me.
“Happens to me all the time!” Dick says, flinging his long graceful arms about the cabin. “All the hustle and bustle of getting ready to go, take off, and then whoops!”—he executes exactly three quarters of a pratfall—“They find me flat on my back!”
“You are very kind,” I say, “but I am sure you are exaggerating.”
“Scout’s honor!” he says, and his arm comes swinging back up in front of my face, two fingers raised. “You think a body likes to go from sea level to thirty-nine thousand feet in twelve point seven minutes?”
About six times in the next hour Dick tries to take my oxygen mask off, and every time he does blackness rushes in from the outsides of my eyes and he has to snap it right back on. “No sweat,” he says, patting the silver-bullet-shaped tank and wiggling his eyebrows, “I got a case of these babies in the back.”
The pilot comes over the loudspeaker and tells us there are ten hours and fifteen minutes left in our trip. I wonder about their policy, if they will try to land somewhere like Rarotonga if all of a sudden I start to die for real.
Somewhere over the equator I finally fall asleep. I am on my third oxygen canister by the time the wheels touch down in Auckland.
“You’ll want to stay in your seat while the others deplane,” Dick says. “They’ll be coming for you. They’ll need to check you out before they let you in the country.”
Because everything Dick says is kind of a joke, I don’t realize he’s serious until I find myself in an ambulance on my way to international quarantine where a nurse takes about seventeen vials of my blood and puts me in a sunny room with clean white sheets and a sweet breeze coming in through the curtains, where I sleep like a baby for fifteen hours.
What I don’t find out till the next morning, when they release me with a sheaf of papers that proclaim me healthy beyond all reason (but possibly allergic to champagne), is that New Zealand, at this time, is free of many diseases, and still has a very low occurrence of HIV.
A kind orderly with an accent so thick I can barely understand him drives me from the hospital to the Hertz office. I get my car one day late and head north to Cape Reinga where I’ve been told the blue-green Tasman Sea meets the midnight-blue Pacific in great crashing waves, and the spirits of the dead leap off the eight-hundred-year-old kahika tree into the place the waters come together. The kelp divides to reveal the way to Hawaiki, their mythical hereaft
er home, and the spirits, it is said, turn back briefly at Three Kings Island for one more look toward land.
97. Gunnison, Colorado
New Year’s Day up the Taylor Fork. The fortuitously named Becky Barkman sits comfortably in the sled while I drive her ten-dog team through the six inches of new snow that sit on top of the two feet they got in December.
“I’ve decided to get rid of the horses,” she says, legs stretched in front of her, Tessa, a blue heeler, who does not pull, sitting on her lap. “I’ve had them for twenty years and decided they’re pushy, insolent, greedy. Even the good ones, when it comes down to it, are all about the food.”
By my best calculations I have not seen Becky Barkman for seventeen years, although technically, with her down and Mylar all-in-one suit, her fur-rimmed hood, and her wraparound glasses, I am not exactly seeing her now. We have picked up a conversation we must have been having seventeen years ago. Disappointing men, overachieving dogs, cutting your own wood and hauling your own hay and living a life held together with paper and string, but how many people, how many people get to do this today?
“It’s not that there’s anything wrong with horses,” Becky says, “they simply don’t give back.” She is talking herself into this, I suspect, because in this recession something’s got to go and if it’s not the horses it’s some or all of the twenty-five dogs, who are giving back and giving back with all their little hearts even as we have this conversation. “You might say, come on, how can you ask a horse to give back, but if we are talking energetically, I think you know what I mean.”
“Uh-huh,” I say, because I do, more or less, and as far as I am concerned, Becky can talk about anything she wants to all day, as long as she lets me drive, because driving a dog team, whipping down a snowy path at 15 miles per hour through the silent woods behind ten joyful, hardworking canines, I re-remember, each time I get to do it, is the thing that makes me happier than anything else on earth.