by Andrea Lee
THE FAMILY: We are standing at the foot of the Space Needle, which was our goal. It’s as tall as the Eiffel Tower, and there’s a rotating restaurant up at the top. We won’t go up because there’s a long line, and it costs four dollars a person, and because we’re not the kind of family that does things all the way to the end. This is enough for us. The Space Needle points to the Sputniks, to the stars. It’s like part of a cartoon about the future, something we think we must have wanted for a long time. A prize the president might have promised us as an inalienable right. A giant ultra-modern suburban kitchen appliance out of a dream.
SCENE VII
(Heading back home. The FAMILY MEMBERS speak in turns.)
MAUD: In Oregon the Pacific was tall gray waves that turned my feet numb when I waded. There were dead trees like goblin trees scattered on sand that came from volcanoes. My father and brothers peed against one of the trees, and my mother said: “Don’t look.” It was the end of the country, and I wanted to stay there forever. I kept some sand in a bottle. I’d never seen black sand before.
DR. HARMON: White fellow who ran the lodge where we stayed in the Bighorn Mountains, a Pacific Theater vet, kept going on and on about the Indians when I went to pay the bill, about how they were shiftless and drank and so on. I think the son of a bitch thought I was going to laugh and chime in. Out here, Indians are niggers. Once my brother Ray, the minister who’s the straightest-haired one in the family, was traveling across Oklahoma with some kind of fool Baptist tour group, and in a little two-bit café, they refused to serve him. But then the owner kind of slid up to him and asked if it was true that he was an American Indian. “No,” says Ray, figuring he’s not going to eat anyway. “I’m an American Negro.” Damn if the cracker didn’t shut up, smile, and bring him his apple pie.
RICHIE: At Yellowstone, the best thing wasn’t Old Faithful, which you could hardly see because there were so many people around, or the bubbling pink sulfur mud that would probably parboil your foot if you wanted to make the experiment, it was two girls that Walker and I met at the campground canteen. They were a pair of not very pretty white girls with hair the color of grass when the green is burnt out of it at the end of the summer, one of them with pimples and one with a bow clipped on over her bangs. They started talking to Walker, who was very cool and said he was in college and that impressed them into wild giggles and “Oh,” they said to me, “you look older than fourteen, you look at least twenty.” They went crazy over the Golden Chariot, and I showed them how the front seats flipped all the way back. We would have taken them for a ride except Mom was waiting for the hot dogs. “They were ready, little brother,” said Walker, who the whole time had had this sort of constipated look on his face, that he gets when he tries to act suave. “It’s a new age, the great and glorious West, gateway to the future. Be cool and the white chicks will flock like pigeons, they think we’ve got the Space Needle between our legs.”
GRACE: When we got to Cody, Wyoming, we stopped in a big general store that had traps and skins hanging from the ceiling and dusty old pickup trucks in the parking lot and we went in and all three of the kids bought blue jeans. No one we know wears blue jeans, except for white teenagers on television. The kids walk differently now: they amble like cowboys; they look, even little Maud, as if they all of a sudden know about distances, as if they’re about to gallop away from me into a Technicolor sunset.
THE FAMILY: In the Black Hills of South Dakota, we, the Harmon family and our new car, were present at an historic event: the first intercontinental television broadcast using the Telstar satellite. At the base of Mount Rushmore we stood in a crowd looking on as the huge indifferent sand-colored faces of the Founding Fathers traveled magically across outer space to Paris. The Harmons, latest issue of the combination of a few Mid-Atlantic coastal Indians with certain unwilling West Africans shipped abroad for profit by their own warlords, which combination lightly mixed with the largely undistinguished blood of English debtors and Irish bond servants, stood and cheered with the rest of the crowd watching itself on an outdoor screen. Though we still can’t vote or eat or pee with white men in many states, we love our country. Didn’t we learn patriotism at school? We feel enlarged by a sense of history and destiny, even though inside each of us, in the dark space at the very center, is a secret question mark.
MAUD: The USA is like a big board game, Monopoly or Clue. We’ve been following signs for days along the highway: Burma-Shave; Little Stinker; and ads for the Corn Palace, in Mitchell, South Dakota. There it is, smack in the middle of the country, a royal palace really built out of corn. Cars all around it from every state. And if you look up in the sky, clouds of crows just gobbling it up.
RICHIE: I’ve grown three inches since I turned fourteen, and I have the biggest appetite in the family. I’ve been eating my way across America, and I say that the best root beer floats on the road are at A & W and the best barbecue is the Piggly Wiggly chain. I won a bet with my sister by drinking four bottles of Coke in less than five minutes in the backseat, when we were driving through the Badlands. And, out of intellectual curiosity, I ordered shrimp in Iowa, a thousand miles from either ocean. In Chicago, we went out to a restaurant run by Jewish people, and it was the best place I ever ate in my life. Papa Stein’s. When they brought the meat, it looked like a rib out of an elephant, and they even served pickles that were made from whole tomatoes. The real Papa Stein himself, a cool old white-haired guy with a Mad Professor accent, came over to our table to say hello. Like we were celebrities or something.
WALKER: In Chicago, I didn’t go out to dinner with everybody else. I stayed in the hotel, which for once was a deluxe one, a Holiday Inn—AAA of course. I had to get away from them all, to breathe. I wanted to think about how I could start living my own life. After a while I opened the curtains, and you could see the big city just lighting up in purple dusk, and I turned on the radio, and a wild tune stole out of that radio that was like the breath of the city. Jazz like I’ve never heard before. Spilling out of some big mysterious black heart hidden out there under the lights. I sat and smoked a Winston, and for a few minutes, everything fell into place. The family trip doesn’t bother me anymore: I knew it was the last time for me. And that I was where I needed to be.
THE FAMILY: So we returned, dashing across the last few states to Philadelphia, overcome by a sudden desperate urge to sleep in our own beds. Back East, nothing much was changed. It was still August 1962, the cicadas still at their summer wars in the treetops. Our new car, unmarred by the dust of prairies and alkali flats, was still a sumptuous gold. Were we the same? That was a question not one of us, for a long time, would think to ask. Not until years had passed, and other, far more sophisticated vacations had been taken—jaunts to Europe and Africa and Asia, paid for by credit cards and boosting us to a palmy level of worldliness we’d never dreamed of. Not until we Harmon children had gone our separate ways, and looked back suddenly to realize that this was the trip by which we would judge all others. A journey that defined the ambiguous shape of our citizenship, when we moved across our country feeling as apprehensive as foreigners and at the same time knowing that every grain of dust was ours. And a private moment of glory, the kind every family has just once. When the highway belonged to us, and our car was the best on the road. “Swing low, sweet chariot,” sang Dr. Harmon for a joke, as we turned the corner of our suburban street. And the Rambler Classic carried us home.
MUSIC. CURTAIN.
Interesting Women
Interesting women—are we ever going to be free of them? I meet them everywhere these days, now that there is no longer such a thing as an interesting man. It’s the same for all my girlfriends, whether they’re in the States or in Hong Kong, where I’m now living. They come back from vacations or parties and announce proudly—with an air of defiance—that they met the most fascinating woman. What a refreshing change it would be if the new acquaintances were gorgeous lesbians or bisexuals whose intoxicating charm fed straight into hot
, wet tumbles between rented sheets! Instead, these encounters are always drearily platonic. More than anything—and I speak from experience—they turn out to be schoolgirl crushes in disguise, instant friendships that last as long as it takes to swap tales of love and desperation. In short, an ephemeral traffic of souls that is about as revolutionary as flowers pressed in rice paper.
My hotel in Thailand is swarming with interesting women. I am probably one of them, though I try not to be. My husband, Simon, metallurgist and tireless père de famille, is presently looking over strip mines in Hunan Province, so I’m free to reinvent myself. I plan to occupy six days of Easter vacation with conspicuous idleness—no sightseeing, eating and drinking without compunction, binges of in-room movies with our twelve-year-old daughter, Basia. And, when I sit by the pool, I even bend back the cover of the book I’m reading, so no one can see that it’s literature.
This hotel is the kind of place where guests read worthy books: it has, of all things, a library on the beach, where one can come in covered with sand and, under lazily revolving ceiling fans, open a glass case and consult The Oxford English Dictionary. It also has a meditation pavilion, and a high-tech gym, and bougainvillea garlands placed on the beds in the bungalows every morning; it has a view of an opalescent bay strewn with distant islands of surpassing beauty, and a chef with California leanings, plus a mad French owner who bestows on each guest a handwritten guide that mingles facts about the medieval kingdoms of Ayutthaya and Sukhothai with information like “The hotel grounds are kept secure at night by dogs trained to bark only at Thai faces.”
On my third afternoon here, in a lazy moment, I fall into a conversation from which I sense that I will not be able to extricate myself without relating the usual set pieces of emotional history. I am pulling a kayak up over the sand, after a jaunt on the lagoon with Basia. She is still in her kayak, skimming around the shallow waters inside the reef, and I am huffing and puffing, scratching my feet on broken coral, and exchanging cheerful insults with her. “You’re a wuss,” she calls. “Go ahead, desert your only daughter!”
A slim shape emerges from the palms behind me, and I see that it belongs to a woman I have been observing idly since I arrived. I’ve seen her by the pool, drinking gin-and-tonics with a pair of Swiss anthropologists, husband and wife, who live in Bangladesh and are here with their adopted baby son. I eavesdropped on an emotional discussion they had about child prostitution and AIDS in Bangkok, and noted that this woman was demanding some kind of attention, not sexual, from her new acquaintances, which the couple, focused on their gorgeous, dark-skinned baby, couldn’t give. And at odd moments of the day, I have been aware of the woman sitting, not reading, in a deck chair pulled into one of the furthest clefts of the elephant-colored rocks that loom over the water. I judge her to be in her early fifties, about ten years older than I am. Looking good without pushing it, still in the game. No matronly straw hats or designer sunglasses. Over various stylish bathing suits she wears a white pareu, expertly tied, and she walks barefoot with the lounging gait that in the Far East often marks members of the great diaspora of Westerners who imagine that they are not tourists.
“Is it hard?” she asks, coming up beside me and indicating the kayak.
“It’s easy, as long as you don’t go outside the reef.”
“I’ll do it tomorrow. It’s on my list of things that scare me.” She looks at me knowingly. “I was very good at canoeing at camp,” she goes on, with a sibylline smile.
An American East Coast accent. Upper-class. The old traveler’s game of placing a compatriot arranges itself in my thoughts like a fragment of Anglo-Saxon verse: clearly Caucasian, so Jewish or Gentile? A wandering WASP wastrel, or Irish, Italian? Camp? I imagine her at some posh backwoods establishment with secret midnight hazings and awards inscribed on birch bark. But Maine or Blue Ridge? Up close, she’s a funny mix of elegance and uncouthness. Her body has a thoroughbred length of bone, but her limbs look slightly wasted—a tropical bug, perhaps, or simply borderline anorexia. Her armpits and legs are unshaven but her toenails are meticulously manicured, painted a glossy orange-red. She is wearing an Indian nose ring, and bangles around her ankles. Her hair, short and raked back from her face, is orange-red as well, the cheap, untempered henna color one sees in fakirs’ beards; and her sun-weathered face with its short, arrogant nose and hooded gray eyes—no surgical work that I can discern—displays a peculiar expression of rueful good humor that reminds me of a street urchin in a thirties movie. It is amusing to see her studying me at the same time.
“Taos,” she says. And everything is clear. Of course she wasn’t born there, because no one like her is ever born in Taos; people like her are reborn there. A horsey childhood in northern New Jersey and Madrid, where her father owned chewing-gum factories, she tells me. Then twenty years as a banker’s wife in London, where she ran a shop that imported South American textiles. Then the divorce and the move to New Mexico, which she initially discovered when she was “doing a Thelma and Louise” with a friend. “After all those years in England, I realized that I didn’t want to be buried among the Brits. I got to Taos, and knew I could die there.” Now that the kids are grown, she is traveling through the East by herself. Roughing it, mostly—she’s at this pricey hotel, which fits her style but not her present budget, for a few days of R and R. She has just finished moving from ashram to ashram in India, and was at Poona, where the faithful live on in the waning rays of the glory of the Maharishi.
We are sitting on the powdery sand, our legs stretched out into transparent water the temperature of amniotic fluid. There is too much information, I worry, moving between us too fast. But I’m on vacation, and after a while, I let myself go. Sitting there in my black bikini, the water from my hair dripping down my shoulders, I describe the fancy Santa Fe wedding I once attended, where aristocratic Florentines and Milanese, wearing spanking-new cowboy boots, boogied with Texas millionaires. I complain about the rootlessness of my life as an expatriate wife blown by multinational winds from Massachusetts to Birmingham, Warsaw, and now Hong Kong. Shamelessly, I lament the superficiality of the travel articles I write for two quite reputable magazines back in the States. Then I get to the hard stuff. Showing off to this adventurous new acquaintance with chitchat about cities and jungles we both know, I touch scornfully on the inability of men to appreciate canopic jars and shaft tombs, to deal with knavish cabdrivers, to tolerate bedbugs. I observe that women are better travelers than men, and superior beings altogether. And then I drop the word ex-husband—that password that functions as a secret handshake in the freemasonry of interesting women.
It is five in the afternoon, the time when it rains for ten minutes every day at this season. Steel gray thunderheads loom over the bay and, as a long-prowed fishing boat motors hastily by, there is a distant flare of lightning under an arcade of black cloud. Basia has beached her kayak and is chasing crabs on the rocks, circling closer and closer as she eavesdrops on us. By now, we’re engaged in an orgy of divorce talk, slapping away at the mosquitoes that began attacking us once the shore breeze died down. My new friend is telling me in detail exactly how the Filipina maid was bribed to testify against her. And I respond with the well-worn saga of my perfidious lawyer, a woman who, after helping arrange the official dissolution of my brief first marriage, moved in with my ex-husband. Perched above us on the rocks, Basia gives up any pretense of not listening. “You can come and sit beside us, you beautiful girl,” says the woman, whose name I still don’t know. She speaks to my daughter with a tender familiarity that sends a wary prickle down my spine.
I have to be careful what I say, I think, as Basia climbs down and settles near me. But it’s hard. Impromptu confession can be as irresistible as sex. At least I keep my revelations rigorously in the past, and avoid the slightest spilling of guts about my second husband, Basia’s father, Simon. Although at other times I can go on for hours about him and his controlling love, his occasional stupid infidelities, and his still more
annoying blind devotion—revealing itself more and more over the years—to a fantasy ideal of a family. Or about my two miscarriages after Basia, and how Simon’s prolonged and noisy grief left nearly no room for mine. Of none of this do I speak as I watch Basia sitting in the warm sea, her arms crossed to protect her twelve-year-old breasts, those impertinent brand-new breasts that already, I note, attract attention from old and not-so-old lechers around the hotel pool.
Basia is as tall as I am, and wears a larger shoe; she is one of the new, giant breed of American children created by overnurturing parents, and she has the precocious social aplomb of most expat kids. She goes to an international school where kids have tongue studs and Prada running shoes and get alternating lectures on the importance of getting into the right college and of avoiding STDs. However, when it comes to matters other than sex, ambition, and controlled substances—small matters like distinguishing honest people from charlatans—Basia is still as innocent as custard pie. Now she is openly hoarding the specious information we are exchanging. And I feel a flash of alarm that changes to annoyance at her presence. Later, back at our bungalow, I will scold her unfairly, poor baby, for butting into adult conversations.
The rain comes on, cooler than the water where we are sitting. The three of us raise our arms and turn up our faces to the hard drops that rattle down as if someone were tossing handfuls of coins. Up from the lagoon, as if in response, leap entire schools of tiny silver fish. In a minute, the sun pokes through; the daily rainbow bridges two dark banks of clouds, and, on cue, a fashion shoot appears on the beach in the distance, as it does every morning and evening: photographer, dressers, models, minions, trunks and tripods and diffusers. Tonight it’s the two male models in long bathing trunks: a sculptural blond with a strange, chopped haircut, and a black guy with a shaved head and a body that makes one realize that sometimes just a body is enough. “Look at that,” I say.