How to Read the Air (10 page)

“Excuse me, Mr. Woldemariam. Where are you from?”

I had heard the question before, of course. Bill had asked it and then answered it as he saw fit during our first meeting, although with less tact and subtlety.

“Woldemariam? What is that? Eritrean. No, let me guess. Ethiopian. Probably an Amhara name, am I right?”

I had come to an easy agreement with Bill, but I found myself reluctant to do the same with my students.

“I’m from Illinois,” I said. “If that’s what you mean.”

The girl, I think Katherine was her name, fidgeted in her seat until one of her friends whose name I no longer recall came to what she must have thought as being her friend’s defense.

“No. I think she means where are you really from.”

I had considered saying that I was
really
from Illinois, but then I realized that most if not all of my students knew the answer they were looking for already, whether it was specifically Ethiopia or just Africa in general that they wanted acknowledged. They had heard it, just never from me, and now they wanted a personal confirmation that would elevate their knowledge of who I was beyond the general rumors that swirled around the teachers at the academy. In that way they could mark me as being theirs. At that point, as fond as I may have been of my students, I had no need to give that to them.

 

 

 

 

When I later told Angela about the questions my students had asked, she laughed and said, “If they can get an answer to that, I’d like to know too.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning sometimes I think you’re not from anywhere at all. Your parents are Ethiopian, or I assume they are, because I never met them. The only thing you’ve ever told me about them is that they didn’t like each other, and none of you are close. I don’t ask you for more than that because I figure you must have your reasons, but it gives you a cold, sometimes abstract air. You know what Bill told me once about you?”

“What?”

“That when he first met you he thought you might have come here illegally. He was only partly joking. He said there was something about the way you barely spoke in the office that reminded him of the illegal immigrants he used to work with. He was wrong though. Talk to any immigrant long enough and they’ll tell you where they came from, and then once they start most of the time they won’t really want to stop. Next thing you know you’re looking at pictures of someone’s grandparents or village, but the most anyone can get out of you is that you were born in the Midwest. Most of the time you don’t even say the city. Just the Midwest, as if that means anything.”

I had heard something similar before from Angela. Shortly after we started dating she noted what she referred to as my unusual reserve. Friends in college had often told me that I could sometimes come across as indifferent. Rarely was I confided in, but it wasn’t trust that I seemed to lack, but empathy, or empathy that could properly express itself as such. People needed to know in tangible and familiar ways that they were being heard; it wasn’t enough to say that they were, or to stand in close proximity when called upon, even if you were willing to do so for as long as needed. If there weren’t warm feelings, then perhaps there were no feelings at all.

I dismissed most of what Angela said. I still thought of myself as capable of the great displays of affection she seemed to be waiting for, and who knows, maybe with time I may very well have found a way to express them, but there was always another crisis lurking not too far off to which we had to respond. In quick succession Angela lost two important cases that she had spent the better part of the past six months arduously working on. Even though she had no reason for thinking so, she assumed after the first loss that her job was in jeopardy. Other more senior lawyers at her firm were involved in the case as well, but it was Angela who decided she would assume the brunt of the failure. She came home after the first defeat and lay down on the bed in a semi-fetal position. She was worried about her future. “I hate not knowing what happens next,” she said.

“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 town 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.