How to Read the Air

by Dinaw Mengestu

  “Lawyers lose cases all the time,” I told her, even though that was hardly what she needed to hear. That cases were lost was evident.

  “I know that,” she said.

  What was less obvious was that for Angela each loss posed as the commencement of a greater disaster that she had always imagined would someday occur, one that she believed wouldn’t end until she had been stripped bare of all that she had accomplished.

  “I’ve never believed that things work out for the best in the end. It’s simply not true as far as I can see. Once we learned about the decision Andrew came to my office and told me not to worry about it. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. I almost laughed when he said that. Don’t worry. It’s only the people who’ve never had to worry about shit in their lives who say that.”

  When a judge handed down the second defeat two months later, Angela was fully convinced that she was going to be fired any day. She spent the later hours of the night worrying about how to pay the debt she had amassed along with her substantial portion of the rent. “We have almost nothing saved,” she said. “And there’s no family that we can turn to, so what happens then to us?”

  The next day she went to a boutique in the West Village and spent several hundred dollars on a single pair of shoes. She threw them down on the living room floor and said, “If I’m going to lose, I might as well have good shoes.”

  “I thought you were worried about money.”

  “I needed something to make me feel better.” She didn’t have to point out that it was because I had failed to do so. On the night she told me she was worried about losing her job, my response had been to rub her shoulders gently for a few seconds before drifting off to sleep. In small but significant ways I had been hiding from Angela’s doubts and fears as if they were my own. When she came home defeated, I had to remember to look her in the eyes, which meant that I must have often forgotten to.

  Without acknowledging it, we began to draw lines around the apartment. Angela cornered herself off at the dining room table. I kept to the kitchen and bedroom. We both stayed up late working: Angela on the next set of memos for the newest case, while I took my time grading papers on symbolism in short stories and poems that the school required the students to read. Our greatest failure up to that point was that we were unable to explain to each other the degree to which we were afraid of the same things—suddenly losing whatever minor gains we had made in life and the security that we hoped came with that. We knew our place in the world was far from secure; each defeat, whether it was at work or at home, only reinforced that. We had failed to say that much to each other, so it was only inevitable that soon we would begin to multiply our losses.

  VII

  The blow that temporarily knocked my mother unconscious came hard and swift and was coupled with the crash of her head against the passenger-side window. She didn’t see it coming, which is not to say that she didn’t expect it to happen. The blow, she knew, was inevitable from the moment her husband spoke, because in doing so, he had crossed a line that not even she was aware of having made.

  Like a courteous guest, the blow had announced itself ahead of time, and like any good hostess, she had prepared herself in advance, turning her head just slightly to the right to protect the delicate spots—eyes and nose—in the seconds between her husband locking the door and raising his hand. The only thing that had yet to be determined in those remaining seconds was how hard and where he would hit her. Over the course of the past six months there had been a few full-forced, closed-fisted punches, dozens or perhaps even hundreds of open-handed slaps, some minor, some not. There had been an irrational childlike kick to the shin that made it difficult to walk, and two days later a flashlight that upon hitting her just above her left brow had temporarily darkened the world in that one eye. (“Imagine,” she would say to me thirty years later in an obvious attempt to impress me with how well she knew English, “the irony of that.”) No two blows were ever the same, even if they were delivered to the same spot within seconds of each other. Each had its own force and logic. As a general rule, however, the first punch, kick, slap, or push was the hardest; the rest, when and if they came, being generally milder, softer—a concession to both their bodies’ ability to endure pain.

  The blow that knocked her unconscious today was a first. Neither a punch nor slap but a simple, deliberate shove to the head. A push, open-handed, with all five fingers spread open as if her head was a ball that could be palmed and then tossed at will. In the end, though, it was the passenger window that did it. It was the glass that took her narrow face and diffused the force with which it came through millions of tiny particles of sand; and in the end, it was the glass that decided that there was nowhere else for her head to go but back to the white vinyl seat from which it came. You could almost imagine the side of her head leaving an impression on the window, a haunting daguerreotype portrait that would have forever captured the right side of my mother’s face, with its high cheekbone and pointed chin, the side she liked to show off in pictures because she knew it was the prettiest side she had.

  The last thing she recalled was reaching for the door handle as the car began to reverse far too fast out of the driveway. It was an instinctive gesture, born no doubt out of the secret conviction that all she had to do in order to right the world to her expectations was get away. Did she actually expect to make it out of the car, however? I doubt it. She should have realized by then that an escape was impossible. The car was moving too quickly, and the passenger door was already locked, and then there was the matter of her husband’s arm stretched over her body like a guardrail—one that at any moment was prepared to fight to bring her back. Had she gotten away she would have gone crashing into the driveway, the concrete being far less generous than the glass that had absorbed her head. Escape anyway was never really more than just a fantasy. After all, how many times did I watch her pack and unpack her suitcases: dozens, at least, which I alone can recall. We were always supposedly on the move, to St. Louis, Kansas, Chicago, and Des Moines, ready to disappear but somehow rarely getting any farther than one of a half-dozen motels on the outskirts of town, or on occasion, when the situation demanded it, to a shelter for the battered and homeless. Life, for my mother and me, was lived in the spaces between attempted departures.

  During the twelve minutes and thirty-two seconds that she was unconscious my mother’s mind wandered off into a gray area that I like to think of as the future conditional: the “will” and “would” that are simultaneously built on the past and yet foolish enough to imagine that what happens next is simply a matter of will and hope. And so there was this dream: of Mariam sitting alone on a couch in a house with dark wooden floors and whitewashed walls, a child asleep in a corner bedroom painted orange just as hers had been. The house was a near-perfect replica of the one she had grown up in, with arched doorways leading to the kitchen and bathrooms, along with windows every few feet opening out onto a grassy banana-tree-filled courtyard. The differences here lay in the furniture, sleek, low-slung, and thoroughly modern, just like the city the house in her dreams inhabited—let’s say a place somewhere along a coast, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle. What matters most, however, is the stillness, the sheer absence of sound that is otherwise impossible to find except in dreams. Here then is the place where no harm can happen: sanctuary that even the dead would be envious of.

  By the time she woke up, the 1971 red Monte Carlo her husband was driving was halfway over the bridge spanning the Illinois River. She came to just in time to catch sight of a barge heading south along the river, its minor wake washing up along the abandoned shoreline littered with recently defunct brick warehouses that, she would say to me in a future time and city, seemed like the perfect metaphors for modern life—long, neglected, and relatively empty. It was not a beautiful view from the bridge, but it was an honest one, and for that she respected it. Even on a clear, sunny afternoon it carried with it a tinge of gray, as if sorrow were automatically built into this tow
n and its recent decline. Ahead of them was a factory known for its tractors and earth-busting machinery. In two months it would be roughly two thousand souls and feet lighter—her husband’s being just one pair—while behind them, my mother knew, was a downtown whose finest days she had arrived far too late to see. She was not a spiteful person, except in her worst moments, but like anyone, she took a measure of comfort in knowing that recent disappointments in life were not hers alone.

  She touched the side of her head just as the bridge came to an end. A small knot had already grown and in an hour would begin to throb as if the blood pressing against the grain of her scalp were seeking a way out.

  I’m swelling in two places, she thought to herself.

  She always did have a thing for pairs. While most people lived content with individual moments, my mother was constantly on the lookout for the twin event, the correlation that proved nothing happened by accident, and by extension, that none of us was ever really alone. I remember once coming home from school and finding her standing in front of the living room window with a plastic bag filled with ice wrapped around her hand. I was ten or eleven at the time. I knew enough by then to expect the worst—a temporary arrest, or her rendered into a ball of flesh huddled in a corner, but no one was home except her, and the visible signs of struggle—pillows on the floor, a TV blaring loudly, or a torn bra left dangling on the edge of a chair—were absent.

  She actually looked serene that afternoon. Her body was pressed against the window, a distant but faint smile on her face, the kind we employ when remembering something deep and personal, something that no one else would ever understand.

  “I burned my hand making tea,” she said when I came through the doors and asked her what she was doing and what had happened to her hand.

  “And just by chance,” she asked me a few seconds later, “did you hear the news this afternoon? Two women, just a few blocks away from where we live, were burned to death in an apartment fire this morning.”

  Up ahead a sign offering a room for $29.99 per night loomed, came, and then went. It was three thirty in the afternoon on a Wednesday and they were only twenty miles outside of the city, which meant that they were still one hundred and forty-three miles away from the fort Jean-Patrice Laconte had built in 1687 when first settling this land for the French. The remains of Laconte’s fort were historical landmark number one along the road to Nashville and, with the exception of a potential detour to Springfield to see Lincoln’s home, were at the top of my father’s list of the important places in history he wanted to see on this trip.

  He had made a list of at least a dozen such places that he planned to someday visit, most of them scattered around the Midwest where less notable bits of history were easy to stumble upon. He hadn’t mentioned wanting to stop anywhere to his wife before they left. He was afraid of what the explanation would have sounded like, having already tried a couple of variations in his head.

  There are some places I want to stop at before we get to Nashville.

  There is an important historical landmark on the way to Nashville.

  He had given up after that, confident that his desire to delve into the obscure parts of the country’s history made sense only to him. Since arriving in America, he had tried to come up with a series of standards by which he could judge his assimilation. He gave himself points for knowing answers to certain questions, like which teams were playing football that Monday night, or which television actresses he would most want to sleep with and which ones he wouldn’t. If while at the plant one of his coworkers said, “Hey, Yosef, who’s that playing on the radio?” and he responded correctly by saying Ray Charles, then at least one, sometimes two points were added to the poorly tracked column in which these things were supposed to matter.

  It had been almost a year since he had begun keeping track, but there still weren’t enough points in his column to satisfy him, and undoubtedly he failed by almost any measure to appear as a real American. Unlike the other men at the plant, he spoke very little while he was at work. He knew that too many words and sentences strung together on his part were an open invitation to be mocked. If he said anything more than “Mr. Henderson, I have finished with the task you have given me,” he could expect to hear his words echoed back to him in a comical but perhaps not so far from the truth accent, and so he kept his mouth shut and spoke in grunts or, better yet, gestures when he could.

  He wanted other inroads into America, and his list of historical landmarks was his most recent one. By his reckoning, the more obscure the landmark the better. Anyone in the world could claim to have laid eyes on the country’s more famous or important monuments. There were plenty of immigrants in D.C., New York, and Boston who could see towering skyscrapers or marble monuments out their living room windows, but where did that get them? Nowhere, he thought. It meant nothing to stand in the shadows of such buildings if you didn’t know the history that preceded them, and if you didn’t believe that as a result of that knowledge they belonged to you as well.

  My father planned on rectifying some of that that afternoon. He had read about Laconte’s fort in a small pamphlet at the immigration office in Chicago where he had declared his intentions to someday be a citizen of the United States. The pamphlet, titled “A Brief History of Our Great State,” concerned itself mostly with facts about Lincoln and the post-Civil War years. Only one paragraph at the beginning had mentioned Laconte and a few other early explorers. “Pioneers of the American wilderness,” it had called them, with Laconte as chief among them; this had been enough to convince him of the path he needed to seek out. Afterward he could say, “This is very similar to an early American landmark ...” or “This reminds me of an old American fort that I visited,” and anyone who heard him would be impressed and would think, Look how far he has come.

  He understood that he wouldn’t get there all at once. It would take time and patience to become the kind of man he dreamed of. This visit to Laconte’s fort was merely the start. Perhaps he wouldn’t get all the way into the heart of America just yet, but surely in the end he would feel closer to it. He’d stand in the center of one of the country’s first ruined forts, and if he had to, he promised himself, he would drag his wife, kicking and screaming if need be, to bask with him in the light.

  While my father drove lost in his thoughts of history and Nashville, my mother was missing mountains. They had always been there, holding down all four corners of the city she had been born and raised in, neither imposing nor protective but significant nonetheless. They weren’t the type of mountains that inspired awe or wonder. Uneven, stunted, and without the requisite snow-capped peaks, they rose around the edges of the city in clusters of threes and fours, and in the morning and evening drew the clouds into them. It’s baffling to realize sometimes what we miss and in fact have always loved, she thought. Whether it’s a particular view of green-and-brown-clad mountains or a voice we assumed we had long since put to rest. They come back and find us whether we want them to or not. On that morning she missed the mountains, even though in the twenty-eight years she had spent in Addis, she had never once deliberately considered their existence. She had never stared at them because they were simply and irrevocably there. That alone had been reason enough to believe they were always destined to be.

  She picked up on their absence just as the red Monte Carlo approached sixty-five, a respectable but not reckless speed above the limit, and as she did so, she realized she had no idea or reason for being here in this car on this day in this country. The entire sequence of events, as it turned out, had been a mistake. There was never supposed to be a husband she hardly knew, much less loved, or a child whose existence she had hidden for first one, and then two, and now three months. The facts of her life had crept up on her, had asserted themselves one at a time—first a plane ticket, then a middle-aged man, who had at once grown slightly heavier and more diminished than she remembered, standing in an airport with a cheap bouquet of flowers. That in turn had been fo
llowed by a few nights of rough, mediocre sex with that same man pushing away inside her with an urgency born more out of desperation than love or attraction. Taken together, those facts had accumulated enough mass and force to assert themselves, incontrovertibly and without doubt, as the sum total of her existence. It was no different from adding up cans of peas and cartons of milk in a grocery store. Take one town, one man, one apartment, and one unborn child and add them all up together and what do you have if not the definition of a life?

  She almost pressed her hand against the window, as if there were something on the other side of the glass that she could touch, and in doing so would save her from the irrepressible fear that she was lost and would never find herself again. That gesture, however, would have made the longing that much more difficult to bear. It was better, she believed, not to translate emotions into actions, to let them lie dormant, because once they were expressed, there was no drawing them back. They enter the world and having done so become greater than us. Of all the lessons I learned from my mother, this was the first. It was conducted on the steps of a brick Catholic school with two angels guarding the doorway, neither of whom had the power to comfort or protect, despite what their roles suggested. I remember there was something resembling a bruise beneath her right eye that morning. The night before had been rough, although I can’t say I recall the details as to how or why. What I can say is that that morning she put on a light blue dress and for an hour curled her hair so that the ends turned in toward her neck. She put on lipstick and pressed her eyebrows down and stretched her eyelashes up, and before leaving the house she sprayed herself with a quick burst of the only perfume she ever wore, the same one I continue to smell after all these years regardless of where I am, because every time I think of her, I breathe her in.