by Anita Desai
That evening she sat quietly, running her fingers over and over again through her cropped hair—so fair as to seem almost ashen—committed to the next stage of her work but aware of its significance to their relationship. “I’ll be away in the field with my professors,” she kept explaining as if afraid he did not understand the implications. It appeared he did not because, instead of turning apprehensive or worried as she expected him to be at the announcement of her departure, he seemed stirred and excited by the news. “But, Em, it’ll be just the thing for me,” was his unexpected response, in a voice that had risen by several decibels, and with his glasses flashing his enthusiasm. “You know how stuck I am for ideas.”
She had not known. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, I’ve done all the work on that thesis I ever wanted to do. I haven’t really the least interest in taking it any further—”
“But your fellowship? You were given it to work on a book.”
“I just can’t—you see, I haven’t the right kind of mind for theory. I’ve always worked with detail, Em. And can’t seem to find the one I need.”
“Have you spoken about this to your professors?”
“No, no, not yet. But I’ve considered making a fresh proposal.”
“Have you? You never told me about it.”
“No, well, I haven’t any fresh ideas yet,” he confessed, “but if I came with you to Mexico, I’m sure ideas would just come flooding in,” and he smiled as winningly, as persuasively, as he could, refusing to be discouraged by the doubt in her gray eyes.
As she ran her fingers nervously through her hair, he ran his through Shakespeare’s.
Outside, Boston lay like a lumberyard, incapacitated by winter, knee-deep in slush, ice, and mud, its houses sagging under their sodden weight. Gutters awry, window frames moldy, woodpiles and metal junk protruding from the soiled snow. As if to emphasize its plight, a branch of the bare tree at the window cracked and plunged downward with its burden of ice. One glance through the curtains—he could never get them to meet—at the traffic crawling in the street below, and Eric resumed his pleas.
“I might come across, um, something in Mexico that would put me on the right track,” he said in what he hoped was a confident tone.
“Or not. You don’t know Mexico, you’ve never been there, it might not prove the right place at all. You’re an Americanist after all.” Em could not see how her Mexico, and its mosquitoes, could possibly provide him with ideas for a book on American immigration.
BUT IN THE SUBSEQUENT months of preparation for the field study, it became clear that Em would be away in Mexico for a considerable amount of time, and she began to give way to Eric’s persuasions; they found themselves discussing such details as where Shakespeare was to be housed in their absence and arranging to take him to Eric’s parents before they left.
Visits to Eric’s family were always hasty, improvised, scrambled affairs, infrequent and rarely satisfactory. Em, who came from a solid phalanx of doctors, dentists, optometrists, and surgeons in Philadelphia and its environs, so that her own choice of a medical profession seemed not only logical but inevitable, never could find such a link between the Eric she knew and his family, which was, effectively, his mother’s side of it.
There they were, all over the great muddy yard by the sea, at one end the fish market and at the other the restaurant that carried the family name, O’Brien’s, on its great wooden signboard with its painted image of a fiery red lobster, and down below the docks where the boats drew up with the daily catch. The collection of white clapboard houses they lived in were scattered up and down the slope of granite with its crown of tough, stunted fir trees at the top. In one dogs barked, in another babies squalled, smoke billowed from the chimney of a third, and laundry flapped on a line outside a fourth. Men and women dressed identically in blue jeans, plaid flannel shirts, and rubber boots climbed up and down between them, bearing lobster pots and tubs of fish or dragging lengths of fish netting. Some were setting out in their boats, others returning. The smells of diesel fuel from boat engines, of fish from the sea, of brine and seaweed, swirled as thick as steam in the chill autumnal air, and gulls hovered, shrieking with unappeased greed.
Em hung back, letting Eric go before to find his parents within the crowding clan. How could he, her Eric—scholarly and spectacled—have emerged from out of it, she wondered, as always. She held the cowering, apprehensive Shakespeare in his box in her arms, protectively, but it might have been Eric she was protecting.
He had explained to her, often, his parents’ recognition of the awkwardness of having such a misfit for a son, this pale, frail scholar within a clan of hearty Maine fisher folk. Eric’s father had always gamely accepted the blame, as an Englishman and an intruder on their Irish Catholic tribe, but it was his mother who had, in her direct and practical way, dealt with the problem by plucking him out of the turmoil of a high-spirited family bred for the outdoors, and sending him to a boarding school for an education. This went totally against the family tradition—it was not even a parochial school run by the Irish priests, which she might have chosen if she had wanted and which would have been quite acceptable, but a small, progressive school run by an old friend of hers from the convent school who had rebelled against their own education and created an alternative in the hills of New Hampshire. Here they taught Eric according to the precepts of Rudolf Steiner, and after years of dancing barefoot to the music of a piano, painting with oils in airy studios, playing the flute, and attending classes on wooded hilltops, he found himself totally unfit for life in the family’s boatyards and fishing boats; lobster as food totally repelled him. The one direction he could take was to the universities and libraries of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Returning to the clan remained as daunting and bracing as a plunge into the Atlantic Ocean.
Not that anyone had the time to notice his trepidation, or Em’s. Eric was directed to the back room of the restaurant where his father had an office and kept the books while Em went in search of Eric’s mother. She was not to be found in her house, having communal duties to fulfill, but Shakespeare could be unboxed in the relative privacy it afforded before Em ventured into the restaurant, where the clan had gathered for a meal now that it was closed to the public for the season. She and Eric sat on opposite sides of the long table and she glanced at him, quiet between his equally quiet father and a large and gregarious uncle. Then there was the clam chowder to attend to with the accompanying oyster crackers, and after that a procession of dishes each as large as a basin and oozing with sauces and gravies, melted butter and cream. “You city folk need some feeding up,” she was told again and again each time someone heaped another spoonful on her plate.
The talk ricocheted back and forth across the table, and she found she was not required to add to it. Eric had previously pointed out to her how no one in his family—other than his mother, privately—ever asked them a question about their own lives; where they lived or how, what they worked at, where they had been or what they planned to do; these were simply not subjects of any interest. Instead, as usual, they told and retold the same family stories, each time evoking the same responses. Em could hardly believe it but yes, once again they were telling the story that Eric so hated to hear, about the first time he went trick-or-treating as a child on Hallowe’en.
“You remember that mouse mask we gave you to wear, Eric—”
“The Mickey Mouse mask from the cereal box—”
“When you wanted to be Batman—”
“And you set off brave as a lion, with a pillowcase for candy, and when you got to the first house and saw all the pumpkins lined up with candles in them—”
“On a dark and windy night—”
“And then the door opened and this hu-uge clown with a red nose and carroty hair and great big grin painted on his face came out to give you some candy—”
“You just screamed and ran.”
“And the clown ran after you, yelling, ‘Here, take some candy
,’ but you were so scared—”
“You never went trick-or-treating again with the rest of us.”
Em tried to catch Eric’s eye but he was looking sideways, mumbling, “Well, Hallowe’en is scary, you know.”
“It’s meant to be!” they chorused. “But clowns are not. Why were you scared by the clown?” Then they went on to talk of the time the circus had come to the neighboring town and they had all been taken to it but Eric had disgraced himself by letting out a shriek when the clown appeared and was reduced to such a state that they had had to get up and leave. Groans rang out all around the table as at this point they always did.
Eric’s mother, several seats away, sat quietly waiting till they were done with their stories and their dishes, when she could rise and start clearing the table. Em joined her with relief.
At the kitchen sink the two women found themselves alone together, Eric’s mother washing while Em dried. They had done this on previous visits too: the mother, being the only daughter in a family of sons, had this role to play. At the same time, she made it evident that while she cooked, cleaned, and washed up for the others, she had a mind of her own, separate and intact. She had shown it when she had insisted on marrying the English stranger who appeared in their village some forty-odd years ago, and again when she chose to send Eric away to school. Now Em, wiping plate after plate with a dishtowel, saw another display of it: a steady stream of questions was being directed at her regarding her work, her research, her university, its labs, her colleagues, and her workplace by the woman who had rarely left the fishing village in Maine where she had been born but seemed keenly aware—unlike the rest of her family—that there was a world beyond it. Em, scrubbing and polishing furiously with her dishtowel, tried to make satisfying answers while attempting to comprehend a mind so free of resentment or envy, so buoyant with curiosity and quest.
When the last dish was put away and the towel hung up to dry, they paused for a bit by the sink, looking through the window made almost opaque with steam at the rocks below where the figures of Eric and his father could just be discerned, picking their way gingerly around rock pools and boulders. It was clearly the two of them, the only men who wore neither plaid flannel shirts nor rubber boots—hands deep in the pockets of their black parkas, the hoods pulled up over their heads, which were lowered to the spray that flew up from the white-capped waves of the wintry sea.
Eric’s mother gave a little laugh and dabbed her finger at the windowpane, making an opening in the steamy screen. “Don’t they look just like a pair of herons?” she said to Em, as if she thought them a pair of exotic visitors to her workaday world, which, perhaps, Em did too.
Driving back to Boston in the early dark, Em and Eric were both silent with fatigue and with their thoughts. Em did finally stir herself to say, “Your dad was quiet.”
“Isn’t he always?”
“Your mom’s family seems to overwhelm him.”
“Oh, he likes that. They leave him alone, in his office room, with his books. Did you get any time with Mom?”
“We did the dishes together.”
“Talk?”
“I did more than her.”
“It’s not her thing.”
Em laughed suddenly. “She did say you looked like a pair of herons down on the rocks, you and your dad. And you did. I wish I had come with you.”
He put out his hand to clasp hers for saying that. “I wish you had.” They were passing a row of stores and their attendant parking lots, gas stations, and motels, with the traffic and the glare of lights making it difficult to talk and drive at the same time. It was when they achieved a quieter, darker stretch of the highway with tall fir forests looming on either side that he gave her some information he had clearly been mulling over. “When I told Dad we were going to Mexico, he told me something I hadn’t known before—that he was born there. He’d never told me that.”
“But how strange, Eric—not to know where your dad was born!”
“Well, you know my family is strange. You’ve always said that,” he teased her.
“But as strange as that! I never guessed. Why hadn’t he told you before?”
“I suppose because he doesn’t remember a thing about it. He was taken to England as an infant and brought up there. Mexico is just a fairy tale to him.”
“Oh.” Em yawned. There seemed no point in pursuing a conversation that had no substance. She settled deeper into the seat, putting her head back to sleep while Eric drove.
2
I dreamed of Mexico and I am in Mexico: the move from the first state to the second happened in these conditions without the slightest shock . . . for me never before has reality fulfilled with such splendor the promise of dreams.
—ANDRÉ BRETON
EM’S DOUBTS ABOUT LETTING ERIC ACCOMPANY her appeared well-founded as soon as they stepped up into the plane together with her colleagues, two terribly sober and certain men who talked between themselves constantly, using a language Eric could not follow, it was so specialized and technical. He had followed them in, dressed for a holiday in a warm climate, and found himself with nothing to say. He had convinced himself that scientists were fascinating people: they knew the human being and the phenomenon of life as no one else did, after all. He had imagined he would put intelligent questions to them, and listen to their stories of medical emergencies, crises and curiosities. But they had no stories, they were not doctors: They did research. If they saw patients, they saw only those parts necessary to their research and were not in the least interested in anything beyond these bounds. Of course what Em shared with them was precisely that focus, that intense and exclusive focus, and it was what Eric had hoped to escape on concluding his thesis in order to let a wider, more expansive view take over and transform his world. Realizing he would have to embark on that journey alone, he thought it best to leave them to themselves and fell back. They glanced at his initially hopeful, ingratiating smile, ignored it, and went ahead.
He insisted they take the three seats in front together, sat behind them, and read all the airline magazines, drank all the drinks offered him, and listened to the animated conversation in Spanish between members of a family scattered through several rows of seats while they passed the smaller ones from lap to lap along with bottles of milk and pacifiers and diaper bags, toys and snack packs. He began to get a headache from the chatter and the glare that came in through the window as the plane droned its way over endless, colorless plains and the pleats and convolutions of mountains that were like prints left by giant knuckles in a pan of putty-colored dough.
The headache was blown out of his head when the top of Popocatepetl suddenly floated into sight, disembodied in the haze over Mexico City, catching him utterly by surprise. No one had told him he would see Popocatepetl but he knew it could be nothing else, nothing less. “Em,” he shouted, rising in his seat to tap her head in front of him, “Em, look!” as if he were a boy, her boy.
But Em and her colleagues had visited Mexico many times before; they glanced out of the window, took note of the familiar landmark, and what they saw had the effect only of making them gather up their files and briefcases and begin to prepare for the descent. Eric was left with his face flattened against the oval aperture to catch what he could of the magic of a cone of ice floating in a blur of clouds and dust over a dun cityscape.
THE DISJOINTEDNESS OF their joint experience of Mexico was repeated at every step. While Em and her colleagues passed casually through the immigration barriers and collected their baggage with the harassed air of professional business travelers, Eric found himself distracted by everything in the airport—the booths displaying textiles bright with rainbow stripes and rainbow flowers, tequila bottles shaped like cacti, sweets made out of cacti and fruit—and the arrival hall, which was swamped by more people with black hair and brown skin than he had ever encountered before, families embracing and weeping and laughing as if they lived their lives on the level of grand opera. Outside, he was f
aced with light that struck more whitely, electrically than he had ever seen onto a spectrum of color unknown in Boston, Massachusetts—flat-roofed houses with pink and orange and violet walls, pea-green taxis and leaf-green buses. When they reached the hotel, where the tranquilizing effect of plashing water in marble fountains was canceled by the shrieking of birds of bright plumage in tall cages, he had to lie down, he felt the blood racing in his veins too fast.
Em did not appear concerned; she went about unpacking, hanging clothes in a gigantic armoire and putting out her jars and bottles on shelves of glass and marble, saying merely “It’s the altitude. It affects some people that way”—not her, of course.
Later that evening, they took the elevator of intricate art nouveau filigree up to the rooftop restaurant and sat by the balustrade with their drinks, looking down onto the plaza that seemed built on a scale greater than a merely human one; it struck Eric as strange in a country where the human scale was generally small. Over this great field of volcanic rock from the ruins of the Aztec temples, the tricolor of Mexico whipped like a dragon in the wind from the mountains that ringed the city and were visible at the end of every avenue and street, benevolent and protective witches wrapped in dark skirts. Eric and Em were just in time to observe the ceremony of taking down the flag for the night by a platoon of toy-sized soldiers as stiff and smart as painted lead. The figures strolling across the vast expanse with their silver balloons might have been toys too, fashioned for the gods. Lights were coming on haphazardly, so many embers in the soot and coal of the night.