by Pam Houston
You might say I had avoided going home all day, missing my Sacramento-Denver flight on purpose and standing by for the next one, spending a long time at a Denver Office Depot trying to decide between a 4-gig and an 8-gig memory chip for my phone.
Wednesday is Communication Day and I will do just about anything to miss it. According to the agreement, Rick and Sofree are supposed to quit by midnight and are limited to subject lines of emails until the next Wednesday rolls around. This Communication Day promised to be a particularly gnarly one because both the summer schedule and the chicken pox vaccination debate were on tap.
Quinn sends me a text that says, The biggest problem with Communication Day is that it’s boring. You slept on the side of the road because we are prone to dramatic acts of desperation, in which we find great beauty, because we are insane. Our insanity is far more interesting than anything that happens on Communication Day.
I send a text back that says, Plus, the day after Communication Day is Philosophy Day, where Rick decides that he can’t fight with Sofree anymore because he is a gentle person who needs to let the flow come through him. He is the tree, and it is the sap . . . but he doesn’t make the sap, the sap makes him, etc.
Quinn texts me back a link to a ladies’ baby doll T-shirt, which is available in five colors, and says in black letters, I saw your sad, and your sadness is very sexy, strong fragile man, you know what I mean? Because this is love, maybe.
By the time I get to Del Norte, which is not pronounced Del Nor-te, the Peace of Art Cafe is open for business and the buffalo in the field behind the railroad tracks still have thick frost on their backs.
104. Rotorua, New Zealand
It looks a little like Yellowstone, this geothermally active region full of geysers and hot pots sacred to the Maori people, but the busloads of tourists who come here each day come mainly to see the Maori living “traditionally,” washing their clothes in one steaming pool, cooking their vegetables in another.
Today there is a Maori woman, in traditional dress, cooking ears of sweet corn and selling them in Ziplocs, with a pinch of salt and a pat of butter, to the tourists for fifty NZ cents.
The man who shoves to the front of the corn line is Japanese, but clearly taking his wardrobe cues from American movies, The Outlaw Josey Wales meets Saturday Night Fever. His cowboy boots have toes so pointy his feet look reptilian, and gold chains hang in layers under his unbuttoned yoked shirt.
He offers the corn lady a single American dollar. She shakes her head and turns away.
“Wait a minute,” the man says, in heavily accented English. “You not take this?”
The woman shakes her head again, doesn’t speak.
“But this is the almighty American dollar!” the man says, “the most powerful currency in the world.”
The corn woman moves out of the man’s proximity to serve customers in another part of the line. Another Maori woman, one pool away, has stopped washing her sheets to watch.
The man turns back to his fat billfold and pulls out an American five.
“Madam,” he shouts, “I offer you five American dollars for one ear of corn. With the current exchange rate, that is twenty times your asking price.”
The corn woman holds her arms over her head in a gesture of refusal and protection. This is not the first time something like this has happened to her, since her homeland got turned into a theme park, but as with many things in life there is little to be done.
The Japanese man pulls out a twenty. “I’m offering you twenty American dollars for one ear of corn!” He is shouting now, and has the entire crowd’s attention, but the corn woman ignores him. The man throws up his hands and climbs back on the bus. The second Maori woman puts her arm around the corn woman’s shoulders, says something low into her ear.
The Japanese man emerges from the bus waving a U.S. hundred-dollar bill.
“In exchange for one ear of corn I am offering you one hundr—”
“Okay,” the woman says, before he has a chance to finish, and plucks the stiff bill from his hand.
105. Boulder, Colorado
“You are not being very useful to me right now,” Sofree says, seven hours into mediation, leaping out of her chair and putting one knee up on the table as though she might come at me across it. And while Tom invites her out into the hall for the fifth time today to calm her down, I think, Well, there you have it.
Three days ago I got an email saying Sofree wanted very much for Tom and me to come to the annual mediation so we could bear witness, sustain and corroborate, and so here we are with our little Styrofoam cups of tea. Sofree has lost a bunch of weight, and looks—I have to admit it—pretty darn sexy, though Rick’s eyes have hardly left the floor all day.
I’d been thinking I might get through the day without crying, but an hour ago I came back from a bathroom break and Sofree said to the mediator, “While Pam was gone, the three of us were having a very amiable conversation, but now that she is back I am experiencing the field in here as very toxic,” and I opened my mouth three times to defend myself, but all that finally came out was a series of hiccuppy sobs. I wanted to say, I’m sorry, or It hurts, or I never got one chance to be the shiny thing with Rick, and you of all people ought to understand that. What I did say was, “I’m just trying my best to be a decent stepparent,” and Sofree made her hands into pep-rally fists, held them out in front of her, and said, “Thank you, Pam, thank you, Pam, thank you for that.”
“Of course you would be her target,” Cinder says on the phone when it’s finally over and I’m alone in my car, driving up to Mount Princeton, where I have rented Rick and me a cabin for the weekend. “She had three whole years to make Rick feel worthless and she can heap rectitude onto Tom any night of the week.” There’s a special room in heaven, I think, for the girlfriend who always takes your side.
Just before the canyon swallows the cell reception, half a text comes in from Quinn: What I keep saying to myself is, Quinn, what you know is that the world keeps opening up. You never know how or when it is going to happen but it always does. You . . .
Once we are soaking in one of the creekside pools, Rick asks if I want to process what happened in mediation and I say, yes, I do, but I think it might be better to wait about a week.
It is an uncharacteristically prudent suggestion coming from me, but a good one because if anyone asked me right now what I would give up to never have to see/hear/think about Sofree again I would say, anything. Anything.
The next morning I tell Gyana that mediation was like a wreck where all the cars were totaled but everyone walked away. After he has worked on my pubic bone for twenty minutes and it’s all I can do to keep from doing a backflip off the table, he says, in his thick Austrian accent, “Do you have a scar here?” Which I do, of course, because of all of the shenanigans my father got up to when I was a very small girl and the subsequent surgery I had at sixteen, performed (hush hush) by his urologist to remove some percentage of the damaged tissue that was so large it was creating infections down there and has caused—even since its removal—more than one gynecologist to blanch, and then want to talk about it; which I’m perfectly willing to and have done, at length, in therapy with Patrick and others (though, as Quinn says, in this new millennium, who really wants to?). But what I think Gyana has said is, “Do you have a car here?”
So I say, “Sure I do.” And when he doesn’t say anything I say, “Was I supposed to take some kind of a bus?”
“One day, Pammerz,” Quinn is fond of saying, “you are going to stop being so sorry for everything.” Down the hill and back in cell reception the second half of her text shows up: . . . are so much more than a witness to anything. You are my friend, and I will be wherever you need me to be.
106. Narbonne, France
The SNCF woman says, in French, that the train does not exist. Rick, who speaks Spanish and is generally shy around the French, says, in English, “I suppose you are going to tell me that the ticket I am holding in
my hand for the train that does not exist, does not exist either.”
The woman slams her office door on him, and we are pretty sure that is going to be the end of our lesson in postmodernism until ten minutes later when the biggest bus in the world appears at the curb in front of the station. There are four of us going to Barcelona. The bus holds roughly seventy-nine. The Catalan driver looks like he has been up for a week, between the unpronounceable volcano and the SNCF strike, and to keep himself awake he whistles Beethoven’s Sixth, then “Bye Bye Blackbird,” followed by the entire score of Cats.
At the Cave of Pech Merle, near Cahors, the twenty-six-thousand-year-old drawings of the spotted horse and the bear and especially the woolly mammoth on the wall looked like the work of a fine art grad student—a pretty good one at that. But it was the female handprints with little ochre spots around them that brought tears to my eyes.
Standing with Rick on the stone balcony of Château de la Treyne overlooking the Dordogne River, the air full of the smell of lilacs in bloom, I felt my life do cartwheels back on itself. It turns out people die one day and then they keep on dying, and Henry kept dying around every corner in the southwest of France. Every time I ordered a bottle of Badoit, every time I saw a sign that said Centre Ville (we used to shout it together in the rent-a-Citroën on our way into any town), every time I saw red poppies blooming in a spring-green field.
I said, “Why does anybody ever stay with anybody anyway?” and Rick laughed and put his arms around me, but in that moment I really wanted to know.
In Forest Grove, David St. John said time has only one message and it is that it continues and we do not and it is our job to learn how to trick it. The lastest addition to my suicide list is David Foster Wallace. Maybe faith is really more about surrender with a little self-directed mercy thrown in.
In 2001, after one of those glorious lazy Henry-inspired France extravaganzas, I had to fly home from Paris the day after the shoe bomber, twenty-four hours later on the very same flight. My favorite part about the shoe bomber story was the way they kept referring to the flight attendant who spotted him, who sicced those beefy businessmen on him, as mature.
107. Davis, California
After acupuncture, Janine says, “We’ve talked about the whole . . . what you really are thing, right?” But I’m not sure that we have.
“See, the problem is,” she says, “I can’t really get it for you, but I can tell you about my experience with it, okay?”
I nod and try to listen with my whole body.
“Well, the question I asked,” she says, “was, What do I see? And I looked right out there in front of me and I saw a crystal obelisk—I think that is the word, just a big crystal obelisk—and they said, That’s you, and I said, Really? Me? and that’s how I knew what I was.”
Last week in therapy, I told Patrick that in that awful mediation, it was actually Tom who repeatedly stood up for me, but that I wasn’t mad at Rick about it, because if anybody ought to have been taking care of anybody that day, it ought to have been me—of him.
Patrick said, “Can we sub out the word mad here?”
I said “Sure, for what?”
He said, “Abandoned, demoralized, crushed like a grape.”
I meet Fenton the human in the city for dinner at Greens and we eat Padrón peppers with olive oil and salt just like the ones in Barcelona, and while we are waiting for the main course he asks me my philosophical stance on suicide, but it comes out more like a statement in one of those rolling-hills-of-Kentucky constructions of his: “I am interested in finding out your opinion on this matter though I would assume you feel as I do that suicide ought not to be thought of as a tragedy but rather as one of the few unalienable rights left to people in a time of vanishing liberties . . .”
I wait while he talks on, an oh-no trying to get purchase around the edges of my eyes, but the next day I get an email from him that says: Not very good Buddhist that I am . . . I want to hold on for a moment to sitting with you discussing matters great and small at that lovely table with the seal lazing in the tide and the sun sinking beyond the Golden Gate. If I weren’t so perennially pessimistic, I might believe I was leading the life that, forty years ago, I could only dimly imagine . . .
One time, long ago, when I got stuck in Hamilton, Ontario, with a bunch of people who wanted me to feel inconsequential, Henry sent a limo to pick me up, all the way from Detroit.
108. San Francisco, California
Driving down the tight curves of Lombard Street, with Madison standing on the center console, head out the moon roof in the bright winter sun.
Rick says, “Outings like this are so much better now that I am a whole person again,” and Madison says, “What do you mean?” and he says, “Oh back there a-ways in time I wasn’t so happy,” and Madison says, “I know that, but me and Pam-Pam got you going again.”
She gives me my favorite Madison smile and I think, the only reason Rick and I made it through the first year is that I wouldn’t have been able to handle losing both of them at once.
Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson says space is process, and I think it’s true. When Rick and I went to see Eliasson’s 360º Room for All Colours at SF MOMA when he came to visit that first fall we were dating, it was the only thing we did that made him anywhere close to happy.
We stayed at the Hotel Rex, which is supposed to be literary in some way, and when we walked, holding hands, downhill to the Ferry Building and our dinner reservation at the Slanted Door, thirty high school girls stuffed into a cable car started chanting, “Kiss her!” “Kiss her!” “Kiss her!” and even though Rick couldn’t understand what they were saying, I thought it was some kind of miracle sign.
I remember the English acrobats on Pier 39: the skinnier, less charismatic, possibly drug-addled brother, perpetually falling from the waist off his towering unicycle as if onto the crowd, the older brother’s muscles, which did not go at all with his high-pitched and infectious giggles.
I remember the cats at the museum in Bend, the sleepy sleepy lynx with the white ring around his eye. And the poet in the wheel-chair and the woman he called his one true love who picked him up and carried him everywhere.
I remember riding in the convertible with Willow, listening to the Jayhawks singing “All the Right Reasons,” thinking: Maybe, finally. Finally, maybe.
After treatment, Janine said, “Just as I suspected, you have jumped a whole level of vibration, but you have left your body behind. No wonder your back hurts so much!”
It was Marianne Williamson who said, Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond all measure, but it is often misattributed to Nelson Mandela.
Surely it counts for something that Rick and I worked really hard and then it got better. The last time I saw the rocket scientist, he told me that Mars is only twenty light-minutes away.
DL #55
THE PLANE IS GRADUALLY but perceptibly descending. It is barely light outside, and we aren’t due at Orly until nearly noon. There is an odd ticking noise coming from the wing outside my window. I come fully awake and realize we are listing strenuously to the right.
I glance at my seatmate on the aisle. Her name is Rebecca. She is a twenty-six-year-old bank teller from Cincinnati who has never flown before, who has saved for five years to take her dream trip to Paris. I spent most of dinner telling her how much safer airplanes are than car travel, how the 777 has a minimum of three fail-safes on each of its major systems, how even if one of the engines fell clean off the fuselage it is designed to tumble backwards, up and over the wing, so it doesn’t tear the wing from the plane. Now, in spite of all my reassurances, we seem to be heading shoulder-first into the North Atlantic.
“Ladies and Gentlemen,” the pilot says, “as many of you are probably aware, we are descending, preparing to make an unscheduled landing into Reykjavik, Iceland. Approximately thirty-five minutes ago, we experienced an explosion in our number two engine and that engi
ne is now inoperable. The ticking sound you hear is the wind running through it, spinning the blades backwards much like a household fan. You can probably also tell that we are tacking toward Iceland—much as we would in a sailboat—as our current engine configuration will not give us full power in a straight line.”
Now Rebecca is awake and looking at me wild-eyed. “The man likes a metaphor,” I say, and offer a small smile.
The light out the window has strengthened and I can see white caps on an angry gray sea.
“I always kind of wanted to go to Iceland,” I say, but by now Rebecca is no longer looking at me. She has her eyes closed tightly, has given herself, I imagine, to prayer.
“We will be landing in approximately fifteen minutes,” the captain says. “Please give your undivided attention to the flight attendants as they instruct you in landing in the brace position.”
I like that he did not say crash. I like that he is a language guy. The ocean is getting quite a bit closer, no sign of Iceland out my window, and I hope that Reykjavik Airport does not turn out to be a metaphor for fucked.
Just when it seems that our wheels have to be skimming the water, land and runway lights appear, and then more of them, so many lights it is hard to count them, a sea of spinning red and blue, every ambulance and fire truck in Iceland seems to have come out to greet us.
“Holy shit!” I say, just before the wheels hit the foam and the foam splashes up and covers all the windows, throwing the cabin in a half-light exactly like waking up in a tent after a snowstorm, and then everyone is cheering, as the plane glides to a jerky, sticky stop.
Much later, in an upstairs blank space of terminal, as we are being fed rice with some kind of yellow chickeny goo all over it by something resembling the Icelandic Red Cross, the crew tells us the reason for the emergency equipment. When the number two engine exploded, it spit jet fuel all over the fuselage. We were a Molotov cocktail hurtling through space, is the way the literary copilot puts it, there was no way to be certain that the friction of the tires on the runway wouldn’t make a spark and ignite us, turn us into a 90-mile-per-hour ball of flame.