Embassy Wife

by Katie Crouch

  The words. Amanda recognized them. And for years, she had known they were coming. But here they were now, floating in the air, suspended. Amanda could almost see them there, bumping lightly off her skull.

  “Your turn.”

  “Yes.” Mark was staring at her now with expectation. Amanda looked around. How she loved that kitchen. She loved the marble she’d had reclaimed from a condemned house in Saratoga. She loved the Viking range she’d saved up for, the gallery of Meg’s stick people and rainbows she’d had framed and arranged on the wall.

  “Okay,” she said after a while. He grabbed her and hugged her tight, letting her go only when she gave a little squeal indicating she couldn’t breathe.

  “And actually,” Mark said after planting one huge kiss on her cheek, “everything will be just the same when you come back.”

  Amanda shook her head now, steeped in the memory of the rest of that conversation. How she had said okay, because even after all these years, she still felt like he might find someone better. And he was right—it was his turn. How her boss had told her she’d age out of Silicon Valley within a year, much less two. How they’d ended up selling the house because the realtor told them managing a rental from Africa was going to be a nightmare, and, well, with the market at an all-time high … How their daughter had burst into tears over having to leave third grade in the middle of the year, then proceeded not to talk to Amanda for a week.

  That, certainly, was the worst part. Worse than giving up the job she’d grown to love, worse than selling the house. Amanda’s daughter had never cut her off before. From the moment that tiny wonder had exploded from her body, Meg and Amanda existed in comfortable symbiosis. Moods were communicated without the bother of words. When either was plagued by some sort of anxiety, one pitched, the other caught.

  Mainly, Amanda thought, it had to do with Meg’s supernatural sense of intuition. “You look tired, Mom,” her daughter had said once when she was just three years old. “Maybe you need a nap.” Her precociousness progressed from there. “I like your hair, but you could use more layers in the front.” “Mom, after you hang out with Tara’s mom, you get a little mean, I’ve noticed. I think she’s too competitive.”

  “Siamese twins,” Mark would grumble when he felt particularly left out. “Besties.” Which would be true, except Amanda and Meg weren’t friends. Not really. Amanda made certain to avoid the creepy, overly familiar manner of the Silicon Valley mothers and daughters who wore matching outfits and sat in chairs, hand in hand, while having false eyelashes applied. She didn’t want that. And more importantly, she and Meg didn’t need it.

  Amanda and Meg’s bond was maddening to her husband. So Amanda worked hard as well to make him feel included. Love in a family is supposed to be even, but everyone knows it’s not. Meg loved Amanda more than she loved Mark, and as his wife, Amanda was constantly trying to make up for that fact. If he wanted to go to Namibia, they’d fucking go.

  But there was a cost. Because now, for the first time in her life, Meg was shutting her out. The loss was physical to Amanda. She could feel the sadness spreading, black and oily, through her veins. And worse, it made her furious at her husband, with whom she had once been so in love she’d nearly tattooed his name on her lower back.

  (Thank God for her fear of needles. Thank f-ing God.)

  The thought of her growing isolation brought tears to Amanda’s eyes, which pissed her off only further, which was why she was banging her forehead lightly against the steering wheel when someone tapped sharply on her window.

  “All-i-son.”

  Amanda raised her head and turned, slowly. It was Persephone Wilder, even more resplendent up close, and she was determinedly calling Amanda by the wrong name.

  Amanda rolled down her window. The hot air blew in as if from a vent.

  “Hi. I don’t know if we’ve met. I’m Persephone Wilder.”

  “We have,” Amanda said. Three times, she didn’t say. Because why drive home the point that Amanda’s appearance was so nondescript that even the volunteer community liaison—whose unofficial job it was to meet and greet new Americans—couldn’t remember her?

  “Oh dear. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. Also, it’s Amanda.”

  “Where?”

  “No. I’m Amanda. Not Allison. My name. Amanda Evans.”

  “Oh. Shame.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Shame. Shame! As in, ‘sorry.’ Or, ‘pity.’ Or, ‘too bad.’ It’s an Afrikaans phrase.”

  “Are you from South Africa?”

  Persephone straightened up, resting her hands on her narrow hips. “No! Well. We’re all from Southern Africa now, aren’t we? But no. I’m from Virginia. Still, whenever I’m at a post, I try to become as local as possible, you know?”

  Because locals always dress like the love child of Lilly Pulitzer and Moses, Amanda thought. And then: Please let me not have said that one out loud.

  “Wrong foot, wrong shoe! Okay. Well. Amanda, I assume you have children.”

  “If I don’t, call the cops, because this would be a weird place for me to park.”

  Persephone smacked her head. “Shame! Amanda, as you can see, I can sometimes be, pardon my Oshiwambo, a real dum-dum.”

  Despite her foul mood, Amanda felt her insides begin to thaw.

  “Well, what I was trying to say, before I dug myself into even more of a hole, is that I’m unofficially the greeter around here, and there’s nothing I’d love more than to arrange a little meet-’n’-greet coffee hour with the other spouses. Or maybe, if we get ambitious, even a little afternoon braai. Which means barbecue. Which I’m sure you know. Do you think you would like to—”

  And then something amazing happened. There, in the school parking lot, two men wearing blue workmen’s clothes marched toward Persephone carrying a large dead oryx. As Amanda gaped, they unceremoniously tossed the carcass at her feet. She closed her eyes and opened them again, just to make sure it wasn’t the residual effect of the Ambien she’d been relying on to get her through her sleepless nights. But no, when she looked, the oryx carcass was still there, its tongue lolling dangerously close to Persephone’s polished toenails.

  “Oh my God.” Amanda grabbed an old airplane blanket from the backseat to cover the body, and got out of the car. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw someone coming toward her.

  It was a woman. An African woman. Though was she really just a woman? Amanda wondered. Because a creature that beautiful, she surely could not be cut of the same cloth as herself. This goddess was half a foot taller than either her or Persephone; every limb seemed to stream from her body, graceful as water. Her skin was dark, polished, and poreless; her face, a masterpiece of planes and curves, centered by long-lashed eyes the color of maple syrup. Her figure, which was magnificent, was shown off in a sheath dress so well tailored, it was obviously conceived just for her. To top it all off, she wore exactly the sort of high heels with red soles Melania Trump favored when visiting prisons for toddlers.

  “Wow,” Amanda breathed, soliciting a snort of annoyance from the other woman beside her.

  “Persephone,” the woman said. Not a greeting—a command. “The meat you ordered for International Day.”

  Amanda was surprised to see that Persephone Wilder responded with a huge smile.

  “Why, thank you, Mila. So wonderful of you. It’s a bit early, as the event isn’t for months, but—”

  “You need to be prepared, Per-she-fo-NEE.” Mila enunciated each syllable with what seemed to be disdain. “The day does sneak up on you. And tell Adam to call me about our meeting tomorrow.” She paused and looked at Amanda. “Please.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. This is—”

  But the woman named Mila had already turned and floated away. Persephone put her hand on her forehead, tapping her hairline with her index finger.

  “Wow,” Amanda said again. Persephone shot her a murderous look. “Oh. Sorry.”

  “She’s a government wife,
” Persephone said. “I have to be nice to her. But she is such a … a … monitor lizard.”

  “A stunning one,” said Amanda.

  “Shame,” Persephone said. “Damned shame.” She looked at the brown playing field, where some tiny hatted figures limply kicked a soccer ball back and forth in the scorching sun. “Actually, monitor lizards are amazing animals. They can live for months on an ounce of water, and their tails are strong enough to beat off lions.”

  “Huh,” Amanda said, still staring at the dead oryx.

  “Though my favorite animal, of course, is the rhino.” Amanda cocked her head. Persephone Wilder seemed to be talking to her own personal God. “So extraordinary. So elegant.”

  “Yup, they’re nice,” Amanda answered, bewildered. She held up the airplane blanket. Persephone took it, smiled, and threw it over the corpse.

  “Good sirs,” she called to the two men in blue, though they were standing right beside her. “There’s a ten in it for each of you. Just place this neatly in the trunk. Thank you.” She turned back to Amanda. “Well. Amanda Evans. It looks like I’m off to the butcher. But tell you what. Follow me, and afterward we’ll go to my house.”

  “Well, I—”

  “Oh, come. You’re an unemployed expat in Namibia. What else do you have to do? I’d say I’ll make you coffee, but the truth is—despite the fact that it’s forty minutes shy of eight a.m.—I’m already in need of a real drink.”

  / 2 /

  Persephone Wilder really did try to be generous toward everyone. It was her duty, after all, as a representative of the State Department. But Mila Shilongo … now, there was a piece of work.

  It wasn’t Persephone’s fault that the PTA had voted her in as president over Mila. Everyone had seen the level of nepotism and, frankly, corruption that had gone on at last year’s International Day fundraiser during Mila’s term as head of the organization. It was supposed to be the PTA’s biggest event, for Lord’s sake, and in Mila’s hands the whole thing was just a messy, drunken, hot party that probably lost as much money as it made.

  Though perhaps, she thought as she wove through the clogged streets of Windhoek, Persephone did have one other problem with Mila. Persephone’s husband, Adam, was obsessed with the woman. The two had been working together on a publicity project having to do with road safety in Namibia. Mila’s husband, Josephat, was the minister of transportation, which for some reason gave Mila the right to handle his media relations. Adam, meanwhile, was representing the U.S. Embassy, which was funding the project. The arrangement made no sense to Persephone, but she’d learned long ago not to look too long and hard at State Department enterprises. Still, whatever this was, it had turned into a work duty Adam was entirely too enthusiastic about.

  “That woman! She’s like Beyoncé and David Bowie’s wife melded into perfection!” he’d crowed the other day after a meeting.

  “You’re being a little race-specific, dear.”

  “Fine. Throw in Scarlett Johansson. My God! That ass!”

  Maybe that had nudged Persephone to campaign with glittery signs, phone calls, and teensy favors just to ensure her PTA presidential win. Persephone knew how much the PTA meant to Mila, yet the victory brought her surprisingly little satisfaction. Especially when, the other day after a government reception, Adam had muttered: “Damn. That Josephat Shilongo must have an amazing time in bed.”

  Persephone wrinkled her nose. Sometimes Adam could be so crude. Yet as a State Department wife whose husband was obviously being groomed for an ambassadorship within a post or two, she could not let her dislike of the wife of the minister of transportation show. Particularly to the other wives. Oh, she might let a tiny diamond of discontent slip at an opportune moment, in the name of camaraderie at, say, an International Women’s Association of Namibia coffee. But as volunteer community liaison officer, it was her unofficial job to show a good attitude at all times, in order to steer the others toward the correct psychological state.

  After all, it took grit to be a State Department spouse. Patience. The ability to pretend you were not living in a house that looked like a jail. The ability to find a way to throw a brilliant pool party during a drought. The ability to suffer through afternoons of craft-making and Nia dance. The ability not to hate your husband (or wife!) for roping you into this life.

  Persephone’s Namibia was different than Amanda’s, in that it was something to be conquered rather than feared. She had three years to visit the highlights of this mammoth tract of red dirt and diamond mines; three years to ferry her children to all the best campgrounds and oasis resorts and game parks, to experience Namibia’s Best of, to photograph her children at progressively remote settings (#worldasclassroom #statedepartmentlife #livingthedream). Persephone was impossible to discourage, but she had to admit, sub-Saharan Africa was challenging. So far they had camped in Etosha, where one of the twins got bitten while trying to feed a zebra; Swakopmund, where Adam had almost drowned trying to impress their (former) babysitter; and four different lodges in the Namib Desert, all of which served only “game,” a dish that, to Americans, was basically a food-poisoning Russian roulette.

  Because she was squinting into a white shield of high noon sun that rendered her Ray-Bans useless, Persephone’s SUV stopped just short of a red light at the intersection of Hosea and Mandume Avenues. This was Windhoek’s ground zero; everything in town radiated from here. Men in state-issued blue jumpsuits hawked Namibian papers from the median. Farther down, children in torn, donated clothes, their feet bare, white, and cracked from pavement burns, defended their territory, knocking on the car windows for coins and bits of food. Taxis—tiny, brightly colored, driven by Blacks—wove dangerously in and out of the SUVs and massive safari-outfitted pickup trucks driven by whites. All the while, the sun beat down, slamming against the roof, pressing incessantly against the car windows.

  Your entire life, Persephone observed, could be defined by which way was home from this huge intersection. A turn to the right would take you to Pioneerspark, a bland, flat, Afrikaans middle-class neighborhood. Years ago, this was the Old Location, a tract of land the German government set aside for the Blacks to live in. The Old Location wasn’t elegant, but it was comfortable, centered around a pretty stone church and dotted with small kitchen gardens. After the South African government took over, it was decided that this land, which was comparatively fertile and convenient to town, should be given to the whites. One by one, the Black families were forcibly removed, culminating finally in the 1968 uprising, which resulted in eleven deaths. The houses, their gardens, and the school were razed to make way for ranch houses and bungalows and garages for bakkies that still remained there today.

  People of color still came to Pioneerspark, of course, but only to bring in deliveries and to slip in and out of service doors. To get to their homes now, they had to turn left instead of right at the Hosea-Mandume intersection and travel the three miles to Katutura, the new Location, where the soil was even crueler, where the shops were protected by metal bars on the doors and dogs chained outside, where riverbeds dried up for eleven months of the year, then flooded during the rainy season, carrying away the most vulnerable shacks and drowning children.

  Katutura, in one of Namibia’s many tribal languages, translates literally as The Place Where We Don’t Want to Live. Persephone was proud to say she had even been there once, on an embassy cultural field trip. There was a tour guide hired by the State Department who shielded Persephone and the other wives from speaking to anyone and herded them on and off the air-conditioned bus. From the bus, the women peered at houses, which ranged from stone bungalows to corrugated tin shacks. The orange clay streets snaked up and down a rugged hill; the market smelled of cow blood and sour milk.

  The light turned green, finally. Persephone pressed her foot on the gas, for she was going neither to Pioneerspark nor to Katutura. She, along with the wealthiest Namibians of any color and the other expatriates with money, was headed to the green hills that rose i
n a comforting, motherly fashion above this dustbin of a city. Her air-conditioned car would now glide up Nelson Mandela Avenue, where she would soon turn off onto a lovely street and retreat to her large, cool house, which, like all the others in her neighborhood, had a veranda, a garden, a pool, and a huge electric security gate to keep out Afrikaners and Blacks alike.

  Persephone didn’t take these things for granted, mind you. She spoke daily with her maid, Frida, about the crime in Katutura, and someday would take her own children, also, on that ghastly tour, so they could have a concept of how lucky they were. She was an empathetic person, and she did her part with the local charities and thought often about the unfortunates of the world. And now she was almost home, and what, she wondered, did she have in the fridge to serve Amanda Evans for breakfast?

  Persephone checked her rearview mirror to make sure the Incoming was still in her wake. She seemed pleasant enough. No initial signs of crippling homesickness, culture shock, nervous breakdown, or eating disorders, all of which Persephone had dealt with in her time. She seemed sporty, kind of, but not like Shoshana, with her hundred-mile desert mountain bike races and Kilimanjaro marathons. She seemed funny, but not bitter. Smart, but not obnoxious. No flags as of yet—like, say, Kayla’s constant exclamations about the glorious affordability of the help, or Carol Li’s gluttonous application of hand sanitizer before and after every trip outside of her own gate. Shoshana was bearable, sometimes. Kayla and Carol were a drag. In short, Persephone was fostering high hopes for Amanda.

  She was in the relative safety and calm of the affluent Eros neighborhood now. One last raring of the motor to get her up the almost vertical hill, and they were in front of the gate. Persephone leaned out to punch in the code and waved at Amanda, who waved back. The gate slid open with a thundering groan, and the cars slipped side by side into the huge circular driveway.

  Amanda stepped out, pausing momentarily to take a good look at the house. Persephone smiled broadly, crinkling her eyes at the corners to hide the fact that she was actually checking Amanda out. Silver Birks, black Athleta travel skirt, gauzy tank, crafty-looking infinity scarf. The outfit, for a beginner, was a solid B.