I remember telling you that night that I couldn’t imagine ever fitting in on the Upper East Side. You told me I’d never have to. You told me we’d never have a life like your parents. You wouldn’t allow it.
But things change. We changed. In the end it did make sense to move uptown and into the house after your father passed and your mother moved to West Palm. It was so close to the good schools, the park, everything we needed as young parents. And then we painted the black door red. That was such a happy day. We worked hard to make that house our own, to make it our home, and I have cherished every Christmas we’ve had together since.
Still, looking back on that first Christmas, it was the first time I felt truly out of place anywhere in the world. And, if I am honest, that feeling never entirely went away. I feel strangely at home here, in my little box in the middle of nowhere.
The room I’ve been living in is basically empty. After a decade of filling three houses with more and more stuff, living with nothing lightens something inside me.
I don’t talk to many people. I spend most of my days alone writing and reading. Yet I feel more like myself than I have in years. I think that’s why two weeks have turned into two months. It’s so cliché to say that I’m finding myself. You know how I hate to be a cliché.
Tomorrow I’m visiting a refugee camp for women and girls on the border of Thailand and Burma. No one calls it Myanmar here. It’s like the new name gets all tied up on people’s tongues. I’ve been so busy writing, I thought it would do me some good to do some good and volunteer for a few hours.
I miss you all the time. I miss you in the moments between the seconds. I’ll go hours, sometimes days, concentrating on something else and then realize I’ve still felt you with me the entire time. Thank you for giving me this time here. It’s the best present you’ve ever given to me.
Love,
Kate
One week had turned into two, and then a month went by and I still hadn’t booked a ticket home. In the blink of an eye it was nearly Christmas.
If I were a man leaving my family for a few months for an exotic adventure it would have been labeled a midlife crisis. “He’ll come to his senses. They always do,” people would say.
But for a woman? Well, I couldn’t even imagine how harshly and gleefully Karl’s colleagues and the school moms were judging me. Actually I could. I could see the moms clustered together at drop-off, hands around steaming travel mugs of Starbucks, a band of vultures devouring every last detail. They’d speak in horrified and disparaging whispers: How could she?
I couldn’t blame them. Let’s be honest, I probably would have joined in on the excitable speculation if I weren’t the mom being burned at the metaphorical stake. From their perspective my actions looked completely unjustifiable.
But I knew well that their outspoken judgment only served to cloak their own insecurities and peccadilloes. In my time in New York I’d seen too many sordid affairs, blatant nanny abuse, bribery of admissions officials, secret pill addictions, and enough backstabbing to fill a stack of Danielle Steel novels.
None of us was above judgment, even as I imagined how sharp-tongued theirs would be. Which is why I had purposely avoided opening any of their e-mails. I’d seen the subject of one or two messages from Lois Delancey. The first: “ARE YOU HAVING A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN????!” And the second: “IT’S TOTALLY OK IF YOU’RE HAVING A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN!!!!!”
I knew Karl hadn’t told a soul where I really was, he valued our privacy even more than I did. Yet I steeled myself for the clichéd Eat, Pray, Love comparisons—middle-aged woman on a quest to find herself in the Asian jungle. The thought of it made me laugh out loud. I hardly ate here. Buppha’s noodles and puddings were filling and tasty, but not haute cuisine, even by Thai standards. Even though I now lived in a zen center I hardly prayed, and I was still complete shit at meditation. I could barely concentrate for more than a minute or two before I’d need to pull out a notebook and start scribbling ideas I’d like to write later in the day. As for looking for love, that wasn’t my intent. Or sex. The last thing I wanted to do was fuck someone new. If anything I was on a quest to Rest, Relax, Make My Husband Want Me Again. But that wasn’t a very compelling title. Besides, didn’t Elizabeth Gilbert eventually leave that guy she fell madly in love with in Bali for another woman?
The cast of characters at the center changed every couple of weeks. Sometimes I’d partake in their sessions of laughter yoga, or the shamanic sound baths. I made my way to a couple of boozy dinners, but cut myself off before passing out in a corner again. One time I told Kevin I’d come to tequila Twister night, which was definitely a mistake. One night there was a foam party that reminded me of a bar mitzvah we once went to in New Jersey. But, for the most part, I did my own thing.
By this point I had settled into a comfortable routine and I reveled in the fact that I could wake up and have the whole day to myself. It was a luxury I’d almost forgotten how to enjoy. Most days I rose with the sun and went for a long hike through the jungle.
The saw-bladed palms of the forest engulfed me. Bright pink flowers erupted on vines, coating the thick trunks with strawberry frosting. Fat caterpillars crawled over my feet. I wandered through the soft mist of elaborate spiderwebs and didn’t bother to wipe them from my face or arms.
There’s a real difference between starting your day with a quiet walk in the forest and being assaulted by alerts on your phone. I felt like my brain had simultaneously slowed down and rewired itself for creativity.
After my hike, I’d find coffee, write for four hours, have lunch, and write for another four hours.
I read books left behind by other guests. Long hours of uninterrupted reading, the joy of finishing a novel in a single feverish sitting, those were other small pleasures I’d forgotten were even possible.
I was productive. I’d gotten plenty of words on the page, which already felt like an accomplishment. But more than that, I actually liked what I had written. I was proud of it, which felt like the biggest feat of all.
When I mailed off the girls’ Christmas presents in Chiang Mai, I also sent off a stack of pages ripped from my notebook—four stories—to an editor named Ben Hirsch at Zoetrope. I’d met him once at our home during one of Karl’s events and I remembered him telling me he despised receiving submissions over e-mail, hated the added burden of printing everything out. He told me he never read anything on a screen. I hoped he would appreciate my “old school” handwritten pages.
I sent them using my maiden name, Kate McKenzie. I doubted he would recognize my name and immediately connect it with Karl, but I didn’t want to take the chance. If I was going to get published I wanted to do it on my own.
I knew it was a shot in the dark. Ben Hirsch probably didn’t even open his own mail and the stories would likely end up in a slush pile and eventually the trash. But I was proud of the four stories I sent. I’d written and rewritten them over and over, agonizing over every sentence. Three of them were things I’d started in grad school and never finished. One was something entirely new, and it might be the best of the bunch. It was a story about a middle-aged couple, constantly teetering on the brink of divorce, who are only able to fall back in love when they attend someone else’s wedding. The protagonists move through various emotions over the course of the event—disdain, ennui, fear of rejection, desire, passion. The celebrations become like a powerful drug and they begin to crash strangers’ nuptials just to get another hit.
Write what you know, as they say.
With just ten days left until Christmas, Buppha and I were the only ones left on the property, and our lives quietly orbited one another’s. She still did most of the cooking, which seemed to make her happy. Kevin told me she liked having people to fuss over. She had her own apartment just down the road, but I would often find her dozing on the deck in a hammock. Her snores were soft like a kitten’s.
I shook her awake on the morning when we planned to go to the refugee camp. Before Kevin
left he’d praised the camp’s director, a doctor named Mia, as one of the most brilliant and dedicated women he’d ever met. Even though Kevin was prone to hyperbole, I was excited to meet her. I longed to get out of my own head, to try to do some good. You’d think, with all our funds and resources, that it would have been easy to find a way to dedicate myself to something meaningful back home. I’d tried. I’d joined boards and organized fund-raisers. It always felt like we were moving vast amounts of money around without accomplishing anything tangible. I’d grown weary of the $1,000-a-plate fund-raising dinners where more than half of the money went to the venue, the dinner, the band, the photo booth, and the chocolate fountain. Last Thanksgiving and Christmas I took the girls to volunteer in a soup kitchen on far East Seventy-Third between Second and First. It was the first time they’d witnessed real poverty, and I was proud of the way they took it in and stood by my side, helping me dish out meals to the women and children. Before we left, Izzy handed her American Girl doll, the Kirsten, the one she’d begged to have for an entire year, to a little girl about her age. When I took the girls back for Easter, the doors were shuttered. Apparently the neighborhood homeowners’ association raised concerns about the “kinds of people it attracted to the neighborhood.”
Buppha sat up in the hammock, the early-morning sun streaming around like a halo, lending her a sacred air. I took in the smell of her. She always smelled the same, like sweat, dough, and a freshly peeled orange rind. She smiled at my outfit, a bright orange sarong. Buppha had given me three of her sarongs and showed me how to tie one into a skirt and another into a halter dress.
“I need more underwear,” I had whispered to her.
She dismissed me by pulling up her skirt to reveal nothing beneath.
“Natural air-conditioning,” she said, and erupted into a fury of laughter.
I made us both coffee and brought the mugs into Kevin’s beat-up truck.
Buppha drove wildly down the mountain with a teenager’s abandon and enthusiasm for being behind the wheel. She pulled the seat as close to the steering wheel as it would go, but her feet still barely grazed the pedals. We veered off the main road, the one with the switchbacks leading into the valley, and went the other direction, deeper into the range. The path became even more narrow and precarious. It probably wasn’t meant for vehicles at all, but here we were.
She chewed on the end of a Red Vine candy that had come in a care package from Aly. Buppha adored Red Vines and Sour Patch Kids and consumed the candy like someone who still had all of their own teeth, which she didn’t.
Buppha stopped the car at a tall and thick bamboo fence with broken beer bottles on the top meant to discourage outsiders from climbing over. An official-looking white sign with blue writing read UNHCR, THE UN REFUGEE AGENCY. A less official sign, hand-painted on particle board in rainbow colors, read WELCOME TO NEW BEGINNINGS. The words were translated twice, once in Thai and below that in Burmese.
Kevin had filled me in a little bit on the refugee camps on the Thai-Myanmar border. Some of the refugees had been there for nearly three decades, but more arrived every day. The refugees lived in isolation. They were people without a country, and Thailand still hadn’t made up its mind about allowing them to assimilate. Kevin had described the situation for ethnic Karens and Karennis in Myanmar as a slow genocide. Villagers lived in terror of the military coming to their town, killing the men suspected of being a part of the opposition, raping the women, and conscripting the children for service in the army. Hundreds of thousands had fled for Thailand and found themselves stuck in the camps, where conditions were dismal, but they no longer feared for their lives.
Buppha exited the car and smacked her palm flat against the gate. A stern-faced guard wearing khaki fatigues and a jaunty black beret, and brandishing an automatic weapon opened it. Buppha’s eyes came to his belly button. She raised her head, spoke quickly, gesticulated wildly, and then pointed at me. I heard the word American. It pleased the guard enough to pull the gate open wider so the car could drive through. We parked among a chaotic mishmash of thatched-roof huts and lean-tos all built practically on top of one another. Some looked more permanent than others, with clotheslines strung between them. A few even had satellite dishes perched atop them with a tangle of power cables hooked up.
A line of a few dozen women snaked outside a structure with a red cross painted onto a white sheet that hung listlessly over the door. Each of the women clutched a wailing infant or had one wrapped in a sling over their shoulder. Some breast-fed as they waited. It made me think of the $300 raw-silk ring sling Alyse gave to me as a Christmas present when Isabel was born. In New York we carried our babies in expensive scarves as a status symbol, to prove we were good mothers who’d read all the right books about attachment parenting and baby wearing. These women wore their babies because they didn’t have any other choice.
A group of little girls in ragged pink dresses and blunt pageboy haircuts played a version of hopscotch in the puddles along the side of the road. The sight of them made me miss my girls with such intensity that I wanted to grab them and press their small bodies into mine.
We parked behind the only two-story building in town, a cement structure painted bright blue with a corrugated tin roof. Buppha pushed open the door with both hands and strode down an empty hallway to a small office.
“Meet Dr. Mia Williams.” Buppha said it like an instruction.
A woman a little younger than me, wearing battered jeans and a formfitting black tank top, stood up behind a metal desk. Her long red hair hung loose down her back, past her shoulder blades. She had the posture and flat chest of a runway model.
She greeted both of us in a bright Australian accent. “G’day. Welcome to the end of the world.”
Out of habit I glanced at Mia’s left hand and noticed she didn’t wear a ring, nor was there the faint white line of someone who’d recently removed her ring. I don’t know why it mattered to me if she was married or not. It was just something I was accustomed to noticing. I was again very aware of my own jewelry. I should have taken it off before we left.
“It’s good to have you, Kate.” Mia grinned at me. “Buppha’s a good friend. I’ve spent many weeks up at the center. Kevin and Aly are the best. I need bodies to help, especially now. No one comes here during the holidays, and I have more work than I can handle. I’m always desperate for people who can help teach the women English and computer skills but now I need the basics. I need people to give out food and medicine. I’m a one-man band most days.”
“I’m happy to help.” I meant it. I didn’t tell her that I would be another one of those people clearing out of the country for the holidays. I promised myself I’d help as much as I could until I left to go home.
“Great! I’ll give you the tour.”
Buppha held my hand as we walked, letting go every so often to greet someone she knew or to hand one of her Red Vines to a child.
“I keep telling her not to give them candy, but she doesn’t listen,” Mia said with intense affection.
Mia showed us around the hospital, a small building crammed with forty beds with barely an inch between them.
“We end up doing some triage here. There’s one doctor besides me. We get too many women coming in after they’ve stepped on a land mine, blown their leg to bits, and still made it forty miles through the forest to cross the border. I run out of morphine on a weekly basis. I never have enough pain meds to help women through childbirth. We deliver a couple babies a week, and God help them if there are complications.” She led me to a tiny back room with a single incubator.
“Just got this donated. It’s a ten-thousand-dollar piece of equipment and most days I don’t have the electricity to plug it in.”
We went back into the street. A little boy with a dirty face gave me a shy smile and reached out to grab my other hand as he walked alongside us. Next Mia led us into another small building built from crumbling cinder blocks.
Inside there was a ricket
y table covered in brown cardboard boxes.
“Welcome to the new computer training room. This Hollywood actress, that one who adopted a refugee baby from Myanmar and then posed with him on the cover of People magazine like she was holding an Oscar, donated a hundred laptops to the camps. A year ago Google began a project to bring free Wi-Fi all along the border. I helped them with the logistics. It was a bureaucratic nightmare, as you can imagine. And while these computers are a nice gift, we probably don’t have enough electricity to power it all.”
“That’s why you have me!” a tall white man said as he snuck up behind Mia and wrapped her in a hug. He looked much younger than she was, maybe by ten years. Intricate tattoos snaked up his taut muscular forearms. I picked out a dragon, a scorpion, and the word GRATITUDE. The man squeezed Mia and landed a wet kiss on her cheek. She leaned into his hug.
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