The Size of the World

by Joan Silber

  MY BROTHER THOUGHT it was hilarious that we gave speeches about Siam. We could not talk about the place without his correcting our pronunciation. I gathered, however, that Owen spoke about it quite a lot himself, muttering his accounts to fellow travelers in bars. He had lost his job in the bank and taken the western sales district for a company that made metal screws and nuts and bolts for airplanes. When he told my kids stories, Siam was a dark forest full of cobras and crocodiles. Thea’s favorite tale of his was about a treacherous map and the clever servant who saved everyone by seeing a message in the sky about where the river was.

  And Owen hadn’t married either, though I’d always thought he would, once he was home. He had not really done well here. Whatever had thrilled and emboldened him there, he’d not been able to carry it back. He wasn’t good at being in America. He’d lost his knack, he said.

  ONCE THE WAR in Europe was on in earnest, Christopher worried a great deal about his family in London. Constant reports of the Blitz hit him very hard and he listened to the radio with his head in his hands. Bob, who was only six, wanted to know when we were going to be bombed. We both said, “Oh, no. Not here,” and then I felt as sappy and arrogant as everyone around us.

  And they did bomb here, they being the Japanese and here being Hawaii. Within hours of the Pearl Harbor attack, Japanese troops landed on the coast of the Gulf of Siam—they took Singora and Pattani and Kota Bharu. I looked at the map in the paper, with its arrows and underlined place names, and my first horrified thought was: Now we’ll never get back.

  I was ashamed right away for thinking such a thing, while Zain and Som were in the bloody path of an invading army. As it happened, Zain was worse off in Kota Bharu, across the border in Malaya, than he would have been in Siam, which made its own slippery peace with Japan at once.

  The Siamese had no way to resist a power like Japan and wasted no time thinking otherwise. But Christopher was angry at them for not even trying to stop Japan’s troops before they came down the Malay Peninsula. He spoke with sarcasm about the famous Siamese genius for compromise. And hadn’t Siam been glad to grab bordering bits of Indochine back from the defeated French? Hadn’t it been happy to see the West lose its grip over Asia, hadn’t some people cheered over Asia for the Asians?

  The British began at once to lose very badly in Malaya. All these years I had sent my little careful cards every December to Zain in phonetic Siamese—sawat dee pee mai, happy new year. There wasn’t a stamp in the world that could take them where he was now. Friends across the water, he used to write in his notes to me. Wishing you weather good like we have here.

  It was terrible to hear on the radio about civilian deaths in Malaya, massacres of Chinese there, local men taken captive to cut roads as the Japanese made their way to Singapore—I hated the peculiar privilege of listening to this in the fanned comfort of our living room, with a bamboo rake on the wall as ornament. How had I come to live here? How had that happened? It was an accident, wasn’t it, that we were safe and someone like Zain wasn’t, though it didn’t feel like one.

  At night Christopher heard me weeping for Zain, and perhaps my weeping should have been more private. I should not have sighed out loud, “He’s lost.” “You were nothing to him, if you don’t mind my saying,” Christopher said. Poor Christopher. I told him I was only crying for the country we’d known. And what did it matter which unrequited love I was crying for? Weren’t we beyond that now? How was my crying a disgrace?

  THE WAR WAS ERASING Siam for my husband. He didn’t forgive it. And for me the war did something quite different. It caused me to pray. I pleaded over and over in my head for Zain’s fate, and the only holy words I knew that could be for him were in the calls to prayer we always heard from the mosques in Pattani. Allah u Akbar, Allah u Akbar, God is greatest. La ilahah illallah, no god but God. I had at least those by heart.

  ZAIN HAD BEEN right all along that my money (such as it was) would take me home when I wanted, though I hadn’t wanted. Christopher said to me, “You can’t really think it’s so safe here either.” They (meaning the Germans) could bomb this coast, this base, and we didn’t even have a hurricane cellar. “America’s not immune,” he said.

  I said, “Yes, yes, I know”—I didn’t want my sweet, sheltered kids to hear it. But I wouldn’t answer them or let them interrupt while I listened to all the solemn-voiced war news and sat sewing a hem for Thea. I was elsewhere anyway, stuck in longing; I saw that I had planned every second to go back. I was so homesick now, hearing the place names over and over on the radio, that the rest of my life seemed like smoke, though I couldn’t have said this to anyone. I sang out the right tones to the announcers when they said the names wrong.

  ALLEGIANCE

  Mike

  SOME PEOPLE THINK TRAVEL IS UNSAFE. They don’t trust the aeronautic logic of planes, and they think the rest of the earth is more bloody and troubled and roiling than wherever they’re from. I’d never been one of those people, though I taught a course called Patterns of Civic Unrest in the Post-Colonial World and I knew more about trouble than most people. No, my not traveling was because I got married young and had kids early on. A lot of kids, as it turned out.

  I suppose I always thought I would have a family, though not so fast. I had steady girlfriends from the time I was fourteen, I hung out in their TV rooms and ate dinners with their siblings. My mother was sure for a while that I was going to marry Viana, the girl I took to my senior prom. Everyone liked Viana. Her parents were FOBs, fresh off the boat—they had come from Sicily a generation after everybody else in the neighborhood—and the meals at their house were enough to bring a boy to his knees. Viana herself was fresh and round and smart and sexier than anyone knew, but she went off with Eddie DiFranco that summer. She had never been smitten with me, I knew that.

  But Annabel was, right away. We met in an economics seminar my first year at college. She was a nervous but eager girl, quite confident underneath that surface fluster. Much of Annabel’s power was hidden; she was a tiny redhead, small-boned and lightly freckled, who trained for triathlons. At the end of our first date we had a long kiss—hungry and inspired—and I thought how particles of lust had been flickering all evening through our fog of conversation. I was ready to go home with these thoughts, as we untangled ourselves, but Annabel, holding my hand, assumed it was time to sneak me into the dorm. I followed in manly silence. She told her half-awake roommate to go sleep on someone’s floor across the hall, and then we lay down together, in our lordly freedom. My life was turning out even better than I’d expected.

  It might have been my idea, in the early days, that we should pass every day in each other’s company, every possible hour. It seemed such a gift, to have a craving you didn’t have to struggle against. “Are you my boy?” Annabel would whisper, in queenly gloating. “You’re my boy.” She seemed so tickled with herself to have found me. By November, Annabel’s roommate requested a transfer, and I became known as Mike the guy who was secretly living in the girls’ dorm. When I went home for Christmas, it felt odd to be in my family’s old narrow house in Hoboken, a son instead of a lover. I shared a bedroom with my younger brother Pete, and I still had too much time alone.

  Annabel’s mother thought she needed to date more people, but blending and binding together so young had advantages. We had some of the dopey intimacy of children—the playful, messy physicality, the shared private customs, the histrionic displays of injury. We settled right in. The fights we had were mostly about money. I refused to let her buy an expensive box of Belgian chocolates and I truly believed that car wax was a corporate scam. Annabel came from more money than I did, though not as much as I pretended, and I saw her bossiness as spoiled, while she viewed me as arrogantly mingy. I would call her a slumming aristo fake-leftie, and she’d call me a macho poor-mouth show-off. Politically, we were both complicated forms of socialists.

  We married at the end of junior year. Back in my old neighborhood, Brad Battaglia asked me, “Ho
w do you deal with the fidelity thing? You sure you’ve seen enough of the world?” Richie Cohen said, “When you get as much at home as he does, you don’t need extra helpings.” I smiled serenely, the well-fed man. I had a wife—what did I need to talk to these guys for?

  There was some pride in me—and certainly in Annabel—that we’d sped ahead of our friends, formed so precociously as a couple, learned how to do it before anyone we knew. Capitalism makes people overcompetitive, I knew that, but I could not keep from crowing to myself, and the zest of victory was real.

  When Nicholas was born in my first year of graduate school, my secret fear was that I would lose Annabel to him. The fatigues and fascinations of motherhood swept her along, and she hardly knew I was there. My strategy was to kidnap the baby (“the men will go play in the park”) and let Annabel swim or run or bike. I knew that even sleep-deprived she hated to stay still. On my lucky days Nicholas came back zonked and ready to nap and Annabel returned buzzing with endorphins and remembering what sex was.

  We were living in Ann Arbor then, where I was trying to write my thesis on shifting constructions of marginality in postwar Palermo and whether Sicilians ever believed they were Italians. I was fired up about it, and would work through the night, the obsessed scribbler. When the baby’s crying brought me back to where I was, I’d feed him his breast-pumped milk and try to let Annabel sleep.

  Annabel always had deep reserves of energy. After Matthew, our second, was born, she started competing in races again. I’d see her on her bike in that weird swimsuit that zipped to the neck and I’d think how you had to be someone who preferred ecstasy to pleasure to do that. “Honey,” she’d say, “you get used to it from practicing.” She was very good at focusing, which also made her an ace at statistics, the field in which she was slowly getting her doctorate. And it was her idea to have a third kid. By then we were settled in Bloomington, where I’d gotten a very decent teaching job. She said she liked having a group of kids, a full house, and the town was thronged with students who would look after them for cheap. Annabel always pushed things to the hilt, she couldn’t stand to do anything halfway.

  And I liked being king of our own rowdy boys’ club, our principality of noise. I liked scrambling around with my guys, I liked inventing elaborate games in the yard to tire them out, I liked their cockeyed inventions and their weird boy theories. I had to make an effort not to keep repeating their witty sayings to my colleagues in the history department.

  The fourth baby was a big surprise, and when I went home to the old neighborhood, I faced the usual jibes about not being able to keep it in my pants. Four was a lot but by then half the people I grew up with had done something weird. Joel Fantini was in jail in Sri Lanka for smuggling drugs, Angie Lindblad had killed herself in a car in her garage, and Viana LoBianco had run off with a Muslim from some country and her parents had cut her off.

  I HAD TO QUIZ my mother for more of the Viana story. Viana had always been very tight with her family and got angry with me the one time I made fun of their being gushingly protective and Old-Worldy. I thought she must have fallen in love very hard. She was a sweet girl with a tender nature, and it did not surprise me that she had given herself over to a great attachment. My mother said he was a doctor from Thailand, a very nice boy, who’d come here on a fellowship and had treated Viana for an interesting knee problem. Her parents didn’t worry when she was dating him, since he was leaving soon. But then the two began writing back and forth, all the time. It was Viana’s father who insisted she break it off. Viana cried and then she did what he said. But she stopped eating, she hardly spoke, she never slept. “A zombie,” my mother said. “She didn’t even look pretty anymore.” When she began writing to the man again, she didn’t lie about it. Her parents told her she had to choose. If she wanted him, they were done with her for good, finished. For months she agonized, and then she grew bitter against her family, and she left.

  “Poor Viana,” I said. My own parents had been only moderately miffed when I married a non-Catholic. My mother was wholly on Viana’s side in this saga. “They lost her anyway,” she said. “So what did they have to break her heart for? I got news for them. It’s a bigger world nowadays.”

  SINCE I SPENT my working days talking about what kind of world it was nowadays, I went home and looked up Muslims in Thailand. Plenty of them in the south. There had been local outbreaks in the sixties and seventies—protests against poverty, underrepresenta-tion, cultural assimilation, the usual—but things had mostly simmered down; in one province, a die-hard band of separatists was still active. With this scanty information, I worked in a reference to it in my next seminar on minority movements, and I probably blushed when I heard myself speaking all of a sudden about Thailand.

  I would have liked to write a book about the great mystery of what allows a heavily outnumbered population to ever stop hating the dominant group. And if the fighting ends, how do old enemies manage to live together? There were people you could still talk to, for instance, about the Italian Resistance and how the Partisans went back to towns full of old Fascists trying to be invisible. How did they all walk across the same piazza? I had notes for this book, a half-written introduction. But I would have had to travel to ask those questions, and I couldn’t see myself making any trips soon. How could Annabel manage four kids by herself? But later I was sorry I hadn’t gone.

  I always felt funny teaching courses in global whatever when I’d never been anywhere. I had some other ideas about where to go too. In the highlands of southern Mexico, an armed leftist band of Indians called the Zapatistas, with a leader who always wore a black mask (my students loved him), had just recently mounted a brief, astonishing insurrection around San Cristóbal, to bring local rule and oppose the takeover of resources by international grabbers. Mexico wasn’t that far, and I didn’t get there either.

  BUT I WOULD HAVE given up much more for my boys than that. A secret perk of fatherhood was seeing yourself rise to the occasion, get a little heroic on the job. I still couldn’t get my mind around how Viana’s family had acted—it chilled me to the bone. To turn your back forever on your own daughter? How would you get up every morning after doing that? I had sometimes wanted to throw my kids out the window—Nicholas especially could be a real pill—but deciding to never see them was not thinkable. And Viana’s parents had been regular nice people, as far as I’d ever seen. The house was full of photos—Viana in a starched Communion dress, Viana a gap-toothed baby held by her brother; the refrigerator still had smeared drawings on it she’d done in grade school. When she got her driver’s license, her parents had every single relative over for a gigantic picnic in the yard. They turned their back on Viana?

  MY OWN HOUSE was a mess of toys and Fritos and juice, the pandemonium zone. The thing about four boys was, they egged each other on. This was the hardest time for us, with a houseful of banshees under eleven. Once the first two moved into early teenagehood, we didn’t have to run around in circles every second, and we could lean on Nicholas or Matthew as babysitters. Annabel was good at bribing the older guys with extra privileges if they’d just let her escape now and then. The summer Aaron turned four, two boys were away at camp and one was working, and the house had a staggering quiet. I noticed I didn’t like the way the future felt.

  On her side, Annabel was seizing the time to train harder—rising early, working late, whittling her pale body to sinew. It was beyond me why she did this, a type of music I couldn’t hear. I was afraid one afternoon when she sat me down for a discussion in the backyard that she was going to start talking again about building a pool we couldn’t afford. But she wanted to talk about Steve, her coach. She was having an affair with Steve. Well, she had been having it for seven years. “You must have known,” she said. She gave me a tight smile with a lifted brow. “You thought I fucking knew,” I said, “and closed my fucking eyes?” My house was built on sand, on dry granules of nothing, and was about to be blown away. She wanted a divorce.

&nbs
p; All I could voice at first was righteous outrage. More than grief, more than anguish. I couldn’t believe she thought she could get away with this. I shouted and roared and then I was steely and appalled and disgusted. This kind of rank, flagrant injustice couldn’t be railroaded through. Not on my watch. It was the sort of unspeakable maneuver that had to be stopped. Right now. “Don’t pretend you didn’t know,” she said. And we went on like this for weeks, we couldn’t shut up or keep the kids from hearing, and it only got worse. Annabel had been suffering with me for years. This hideous fact (I had to believe her) burned a hole in my heart, a crater. In the end I agreed to move out, because it seemed the least humiliating alternative. I had the kids on weekends.

  THE FIRST YEAR was very bad. Each of the kids freaked out in his own way—the older boys were sullen, the third was a brat, the littlest was screamingly needy. They came to visit a father who looked like a miserable, red-eyed creature-from-the-deep and who lived in a large hovel of an apartment. Self-pity reeked from the malodorous kitchen.

  At meals, one boy would suddenly wax sentimental about the buckwheat pancakes I used to make, how great they were, and another would talk too much about what Steve told them about the White Sox, Steve knew a lot. They were like citizens of a country whose borders had changed, confused about where their loyalties fell or on what side their advantages lay.

  Aaron, who was still in kindergarten, said to me once over the phone, “Steve’s in California the whole week. Don’t you miss Steve?” He was so little he didn’t entirely follow the new arrangement. It had crossed my mind some time before that by the simplest of calculations, there was a chance Aaron wasn’t my son. Annabel and I had never talked about this, and my guess was that she didn’t know. I didn’t see how it could matter now. I was his father, now and forever, every day of his life. All my efforts on weekends were to get this very point across to him and his brothers: we were bound together for good, even if their mother and I weren’t. My job was to repeat and underline this eternally, to make them see the ties between us etched in the air. Maybe they saw.