by Katie Crouch
Josephat gave a half laugh and kissed her cheek again. “You’re so funny, darling. I’ll be down in half an hour.”
She could feel the rejection physically, cold as a sharp wind. She watched her husband climb the stairs, then went into the kitchen to keep Libertina from daydreaming and letting the pap turn into cement.
* * *
Like Josephat, Mila grew up in the north. She was the second eldest of four sisters. The family lived in Onesi, a village seventy long kilometers west of Oshakati.
The girls’ mother was Olivia, a notoriously skilled seamstress with equally notoriously questionable judgment. The sisters had three different fathers between them, the cause of constant rivalry. Yet the eldest, Selma, and the second youngest, Sophia, had the same father—Tega. No one would call Tega a good man, as he drank, and had two other houses of children. Still, he was there in the flesh, not dead of TB or HIV, and not just some dim memory from a night at a drunken braai. His very existence made Selma and Sophia feel vastly superior to Mila and Saara, who had fathers somewhere, though their names and faces were lost in the beer-soaked stories of nights at the local shebeen.
Onesi. It was a small town, a typical Ovambo village consisting of a carefully planned group of round huts with walled-off yards. Gardens of mud, perhaps a tree to provide a shady corner. Communal, poor, gossipy, Onesi was—like many towns of this nature—also loud. Goat bleats, rooster crows, shrieking children, women gossiping, men laughing, radios blaring church hymns and tinny rock, whining dogs, angry chickens, hungry goats, wind, rain. If you wanted quiet in Onesi, Olivia liked to say, you had to die for it. Years later, when Josephat was designing the glass castle in Ludwigsdorf for Mila, she insisted on walls so insulated she could hear nothing from the streets or neighbors.
Mila had the bad luck of being an uncommonly beautiful girl growing up in a spectacularly poor place. The contrast turned up her prettiness so much it brought on harsh feedback, same as the volume dial on their ancient radio. None of the village women liked her. She was a favorite as a toddler, but at six or seven, it became apparent what she would become, and all affection dropped away. As an adult woman in a world of comfort and laws, Mila found beauty is a pleasant thing; in an impoverished place run by men with too little to do, it was a black mark. Older boys were forever trying to corner her in the back of the schoolhouse; they grabbed her thighs in passing and tugged harshly on the hem of her dresses. When they could catch her ear, they whispered the things they could do if they could get her alone. By fourteen, all the men were wild to get Mila by herself. If she was alone on the way home from school or to the shops, she took to running. Often her sandals were too flimsy to be of use, so she’d put them in her knapsack. Her bare heels grew thick from wear on the pavement. Her body became more lithe as she learned how to pump her legs and lungs faster for speed.
But being fast didn’t always help. Sometimes the boys would reach out a stick and trip her. One night Dominic, an old neighbor who was always drunk but still strong, was able to grab her by the arm and pull her toward his house. Her sister Saara saw it happening from a few feet back, where she was playing with her friends. Running to the fire, she grabbed an unspooled hanger her sisters used for cooking meat, then scuttled over and whipped Dominic until, yelping, he slunk away in retreat. Mila and Saara hadn’t been particularly close before, as one was shy, the other the opposite. But now an alliance was formed, and the sisters protected each other, warding off the jackals so their fine bodies could be used later, for proper things.
Saara was the youngest and the one everyone liked. She wasn’t stunning like Mila, but she was fine-looking, and she was quick with jokes and had a voice the village gossips said would get her on that idol show in Johannesburg, the one on the TV. Her father was rumored to be from Rehoboth—how else to explain her light skin and almond-shaped eyes the color of jade? Tega loved her best even though she wasn’t his daughter; one day he passed Saara some candy, and Selma, in a fit of jealousy, took a coal from underneath the potjie and set fire to Saara’s dress. When Olivia came back from the well to see her youngest screaming with legs burned and blistering, and her two eldest trying to gouge each other’s eyes out with sticks, she dropped her bucket, spilling the hard-earned water onto the dry, cracked mud. Then she went inside, filled a plastic Pick n Pay bag with clothes, and left. Olivia never visited the hut again, but simply sent for Sophia—the most reasonable of the four—to collect a small amount of money every week for their needs.
At fourteen (Selma), thirteen (Mila), twelve (Sophia), and eleven (Saara), the girls were completely alone. As they grew, their house became nicknamed the Beautiful House. Tega bought padlocks for the doors and tied a large dog to the shepherd’s tree outside. Within weeks, more than one man had a scar on his ankle after walking by and checking to see if a window, perhaps, might be cracked for a little view.
It was filthy, the Beautiful House. Plastic bags batted against wire fences. Mole rats darted in and out. When the girls did their laundry, ants would crawl up the line onto the shirts and dresses, so that every piece of clothing had to be beaten with a stick before it could be worn.
By the time they could walk, the girls paired off against each other in their race to become something else. They competed for the teachers’ affections. They fought over every odd job that was batted their way. Selma and Sophia had an advantage, in that Tega sometimes passed his real daughters some money after he’d been drinking. By sixteen and eighteen, they had enough to travel to Katutura, where they found a cousin and commandeered a corner in her house.
As soon as they left, Saara and Mila scoured the place for clothing. Before, Mila would never have given her sister the satisfaction of wearing her used rags, but now she riffled through the old dresses, rescuing a sleeve here and a skirt there. Neither girl could sew, so they went to their mother’s new hut, fifteen kilometers away.
It was an ugly place, much worse than the Beautiful House. The walls were dark green, and coated with something that glistened gruesomely, as if someone had smeared them with lard. The only decently kept item in the hut was Olivia’s sewing machine, which stood in a cleanish corner under a bare bulb, surrounded by finished pillowcases the color of jewels. The girls were shocked to find their mother barely recognizable. Her curves, which once had poured into precariously tight shirts and dresses, had now shriveled into nothing. She had sores on her face, and her daughters could see her bones through her skin.
Mila and Saara stood rooted to their spot by the front door. “Sophia didn’t tell us you were hungry,” Mila finally said.
“I’m not hungry,” Olivia answered, using a chair next to her bed to pull herself up. “I have the AIDS.” Her head was bald in patches. “Why are you here? For money?”
“We are hoping you can make us some clothes,” Mila said. “So we can get good jobs at a hotel.”
Olivia shook at the loveliness of her daughter’s voice and swiveled her head at her. Mila was seventeen now. Olivia put her clawlike hand on her arm and led her out into the lane. In the sunlight, the chasm between illness and vitality opened between them even further.
Five dresses: three for Mila, two for Saara. It was the last work Olivia completed in her life, and the result was conservative but exquisite. Mila was given a black suit embroidered with cobalt thread, a knee-length sheath of purple and black, and a looser sundress that was burgundy in front, blue in the back. (Creativity was required, as materials were limited.) Saara was presented with a green suit and a pink Ovambo sundress—Olivia had raided her own material for that. Mila donned her suit, Saara her Ovambo dress. They crept out of their mother’s house without saying goodbye.
The year was 1994. The girls hitched a ride with a farmer to Oshakati. Wearing their hand-sewn finery, they marched into the Oshakati Country Hotel. Saara went to the reception desk as Mila hung back.
“Please tell the manager,” Saara said in a clear voice, “that we are educated ladies, and we would like to give you the op
portunity to let us work at this fine hotel.”
The receptionist, a man, laughed quietly in order to scorn her while not disturbing the guests. Then he caught sight of Mila. As he hesitated, Saara turned around and gave her sister a sly smile. It happened this way often. People would believe one thing, and then, looking at Mila, change their mind.
“I’ll be back in a moment,” the receptionist said begrudgingly, obviously disgusted with his own susceptibility to beauty. As luck would have it, the manager who appeared was a rather rough-looking white woman who introduced herself as Mrs. Ferreira. She took the girls out back by the trash bins, and grilled them, hard.
“You must not steal,” she said. “You must get tested for TB and HIV. The tests will come out of your wages. You must not speak socially to guests. You must not steal. Did I say that already? I’ll say it again. Do it and I will call the police. You can have one job between you as a maid, and one bed in the staff house. There are no men in the women’s side ever, no women in the men’s side. There is no liquor, ever. And, for God’s sake, do not get yourselves pregnant. If you get pregnant, you will be fired and tossed out.”
“Yes, miss,” Mila and Saara murmured. Mila dug her nails into the back of Saara’s hand.
* * *
Now it was more than two decades later, and Mila Shilongo, once a girl who had so little her dying mother had to sew her a dress out of discarded clothes, sat in a white enamel chair grand enough to serve as a throne. She looked out at the baked hills of Windhoek, washed pink in the waning sun. Already the lights of the houses along Nelson Mandela Avenue were beginning to glitter below. And to the north, beyond Eros, she could see the glow of Katutura, where Selma still lived, and where Mila, too, might have been fated to be, had she and Josephat had not been quite so clever. In certain weather, you could hear the distant sounds of the Location, pulsating with grief and joy and car engines and yelling and real life. It called to her, clearly as fine music. When it did, Mila pulled her soundproof windows shut.
/ 5 /
Persephone Wilder was thirty-eight years old. She was not worried about her age, nor did she hide it. For one thing, it helped her keep her dates straight. She knew, for example, that it had been twelve years since she’d taken on State Department life. Never one to do things halfway, she’d jumped in as enthusiastically and gracefully (she hoped) as Esther Williams jackknifing into William Hearst’s Neptune Pool.
Persephone was twenty-six then, and by that point she had already supported Adam during his slog through law school. After his graduation, Adam had gotten a job as an associate at a middling firm, and it turned out he didn’t like law at all. More alarmingly, he wasn’t very good at it. And though Persephone had been making a very fine living for them both ever since college as the personal assistant to celebrity chef and homemaker Doni Oppenheimer, the bloom was off the rose. She was tired of Doni, and, as hard as Persephone worked to stay in a cloud of cheerful denial, it was becoming increasingly clear that Doni was tired of her.
Not that she hadn’t learned invaluable lessons from the woman. No condiments on the table outside of serving bowls, ever! Decisions—whether it be the color of one’s socks or one’s choice of marriage partner—should take no longer than forty-five seconds and should never be regretted! Pick a designer for life and if you can, meet them! Always order the third most expensive wine on the menu! Goose down, no substitutes, no questions! A hangover can be solved by a fur collar and large sunglasses in the winter, an iced whiskey and a nap in the summer!
Oh, she was brilliant, Doni was, but she was a notorious Svengali, and even a girl of Persephone’s fine constitution could only take so much gaslighting for sport. (“Persephone, I won’t need you until eleven tomorrow! Have a nice morning, darling!” to be followed with, “Persephone, you are over two hours late! I am beyond disappointed!”)
After all those years of service, Doni had started attacking Persephone in her classic, underhanded way—pointedly commenting on the brilliance of certain designers two to three years Persephone’s junior … dropping story after story about her little niece’s acceptance to business school … (“She’s only twenty-three and she really knows what she wants. As every woman should, Persephone!”)
So if Adam was going to fail at law, then he had damn well better pick up something else, she told him, in soft, wifely terms. Because she was ready to retire. This was when, over a plate of gnocchi Doni Oppenheimer would have thrown against the wall for its gummy texture, Adam had brought up the Foreign Service exam.
“You mean, work for the government?” Persephone had responded. “As a … bureaucrat?” The words fell out of her mouth like stale raisins.
Living in Washington, she’d sometimes fantasized about Adam’s potential career in politics. He wasn’t especially political, though, and when he did show an interest, he tended to lean distressingly to the right. (Persephone had grown up in a benevolently Republican house, only to drift over to the other side at UVA.) Being elected to serve was noble and even glamorous. But being employed by the government, that just made Persephone think of ill-fitting Docker pants and very bad shoes.
“No, no. I’d be a diplomat,” Adam said, even as he studied another woman at the bar, one of his less appealing habits. Very good-looking people like Adam, Persephone had observed, got away with things like that. It had shown an uncharacteristic lapse of foresight, her marrying such a handsome man. Junior year he had dropped a note on her book while she was studying, asking her to his Psi Phi formal, and her study partner, Betsy, had literally screamed with shock and envy. She knew it was one of her faults, but Persephone thrived on other people’s envy.
“A diplomat,” Persephone said, pouring herself more wine to wash away her pointless negative thinking. “Tell me more about that.”
So he did. He would take the Foreign Service exam. It would require some studying, but nothing like the bar, so he was sure he could hack it. There were some current events questions. Some public speaking tests. A personal statement that, of course, she would prep him for.
“And so, if you do end up getting the job?”
“Then we go. Somewhere. All our expenses paid. They come pick up our things—a whole houseful!—and take it to, you know, wherever we’re going. And they give you a house over there and travel expenses. My fraternity brother Treef … remember Treef? Yeah, he wasn’t the most … anyway, Treef lives in Harare now, which is sort of dodgy, but he has this huge mansion with a pool and his wife hangs out at the country club all day and all he does is manage the office.”
Persephone wrinkled her nose. “Well, you wouldn’t be doing that.”
“No. I’d be higher up. A lawyer. Embassy counsel. And maybe, if I did well, which I’m sure I will—I mean, how hard can it be? Well…” He leaned in to whisper, “Ambassador. Which would make you…”
“Mrs. Ambassador.” She’d sat back, pleased already with this happy inevitability.
That was the thing about Adam. He was so smooth, you thought you were going out for gnocchi, and the next thing you knew, you were signing up to leave your home country for the rest of your life. And he managed to make it feel like it was your dream.
The night before the exam she’d fed her husband a large helping of bland tuna pasta (Doni always had this meal before award shows and galas) and gave him some Benadryl for a good sleep. For confidence, a blow job in the morning, followed by eggs. And, with that, she sent him off. As expected, Adam had aced the public speaking portion. On the rest he did just fine. A few weeks later, he received a job offer: legal counsel in Kuwait, starting in four months.
At the time, Kuwait sounded fine to Persephone. She didn’t know exactly where it was, but she was twenty-six, so that was forgivable. As promised, some very nice movers with a clipboard had come and emptied out their town house, while she and Adam attended some rather alarming trainings on world health and disaster preparedness and international security. Adam was even sent to some secret location, where he learned h
ow to try to survive an explosion, drive in reverse at sixty miles an hour, and shoot a machine gun (a boot camp experience that made Persephone green with jealousy). Then a government car had come to take them to the airport. They showed their special diplomatic passports, which let them cut all the lines, then got onto the plane and flew away.
That was three posts ago. After Kuwait came Laos (wonderful food, shitty health care), Romania (grim, but pleasantly close to Paris, or at least Vienna), and now Namibia. Back in Kuwait, she’d invested in a world map backed by corkboard, placing little color-coded pins, red for places they’d actually lived, green for places they’d just visited. It was the first thing she hung in every kitchen, with the world by now satisfyingly covered in protruding dots.
There is much to be waded through when your spouse is in the service. And at the beginning, she wasn’t always good at it. But because of an inner ear imbalance, Persephone fell a lot (once into a pool while wearing a sari given to her by a Trailer from Mumbai). She liked wine a bit too much (not the reason for the fall, she still swore to Adam) and was sometimes prone to laughing uncontrollably at inappropriate moments. Like funerals, for instance. Or commemorative ceremonies for World War I battles.
But, damn it, after twelve years and three children, she was better than most. Which was why last year she had decided she’d officially graduated. Persephone was no longer a Trailing Spouse. She didn’t just follow Adam around, languishing in his shadow. No. Persephone Wilder was a person who uplifted the State Department by providing excellent support for her husband, her family, and her peers. She was something else entirely: an Embassy Wife.
Persephone knew perfectly well how antiquated this sounded. In fact, she had only once let out her true thoughts about her role. This was with her siblings, over cocktails on the porch at the farm a couple of years ago. They, too, were spending their trust funds in serving their country—her sister as an immigration lawyer; her brother, a high school teacher. So she’d assumed they’d understand. But instead, they had both just stared at her, openmouthed, before suddenly roaring with laughter into their Goslings Dark ‘n’ Stormies (her family’s signature drink).