In Praise of Messy Lives (4 page)

But is it more stable or secure to grow up in a house with two parents? There is arguably an absence of what people like to call borders in my house. For instance the baby seems to have caught my insomnia. Before going to bed he howls like a wolf, then says, “I am a wolf,” then says, “Where is my bottle? Where is my mango? Where is my ketchup?” then very deliberately climbs out of his bed and walks through the dark halls saying, “I am lost, Mama, I am lost.” It occurs to me that in this unfiltered, unmediated environment I am passing everything along to him. In any event, that’s exactly how I feel at two in the morning—somewhere smack dab in the middle of “I am lost” and “Where is my mango? Where is my ketchup?”

I am quite prepared to believe that in a household with two adults, there is generally a little more balance, a healthy dilution of affection, a diffused focus that makes everyone feel comfortable. One morning I overhear Violet saying to the baby, “You can’t marry anyone. You are going to live with me.” When I first separated from her father, she said, at three, “Mommy, it’s like you and
I
are married.” And this would pretty accurately reflect the atmospherics of our house: a little too much love, you might tactfully say.

Quentin Bell once wrote about growing up with his single-ish mother, the painter Vanessa Bell: “We had to balance the comforts of being so well loved against the pain of being so fearfully
adored.” And that seems like a fair assessment of what goes on in my house and those of other single mothers I know. (The grown son of one of them refers to this as “the unparalleled intimacy.”) But if I am being honest, I like the fearful adoration, the too-muchness of it, the intensity, the fierceness. I don’t actually believe “healthy” is better.

I also can’t help noticing that the people talking about a “healthy” environment are often the same people talking about “working” on their relationships. They are often the denizens of couples therapy and date nights in restaurants that serve hand-cured pancetta and organic local fennel; I have no doubt that they do create a healthy, balanced environment, but I like to think there are some rogue advantages to the unbalanced and unhealthy environment, to the other way of doing things.

Here someone is bound to say, “Studies have shown …” And as far as I am concerned the studies can continue to show whatever they feel like showing. There are things that can’t be measured and quantified in studies, and I imagine the multitudinous varieties of family peace are among them. Not to mention what these stern and admonitory studies fail to measure, which is what happens when there is anger or conflict in the home, or unhappy or airless marriages, relationships wilting or faltering, subterranean tensions, what happens when everyone is bored.

One also has to take into account that the realities of American family life no longer match its prevailing fantasies. One of the reasons children born outside of marriage suffer is the culturally ubiquitous idea that there is something wrong or abnormal about their situation. Once it becomes clear that there is, at least, nothing abnormal about their situation—i.e., when the 53 percent
of babies born to women under thirty come of age in the majority—the psychological landscape, at least, will be vastly transformed.

Even people who are certain that the children of single mothers are always and forever doomed to a compromised existence are going to have to await more information about a world in which these kids are not considered illegitimate or unconventional or outsiders, where the sheer number of them redefines and refreshes our ideas of family.

There is no doubt that raising a child on your own is different than raising a child with a partner, it’s apples and oranges, but what progressive American culture is not currently prepared to acknowledge is that there are advantages to each. My friend Cristina Nehring, who is also a single mother, writes in an email from Paris that she has observed that kids in single-parent households “are often rendered more mature, caring and empathic. Kids in two-parent households risk viewing their parents as an amorphous unit of authority, as a kind of faceless ruling elite, a wall of adult power. This can be useful for crude discipline in the short term, but it’s less useful in terms of the development of empathy and imagination in the long term. Kids of mono-parental families have more and earlier opportunities than their peers to recognize that adults have stories and sensitivities and struggles of their own. In today’s age of imperious, entitled super-children, the kids of single parents often grow up a bit more modest and humane.”

It’s fascinating to me that she would say this because of course part of what people think children miss in a single mother’s home is the steadiness and security of that “amorphous unit of authority.”
Part of what seems threatening or unsettling about the single mother’s household is precisely that sense that the mother may be glimpsed as more of a person, that these children are witnessing a struggle they should not be seeing, that their mother is very early on a regular, complicated person, rather than simply an adult who is part of the opaque, semi-separate adult culture of the house.

One day at dinner, Violet is playing a game where she is listing impossible things. Like it’s impossible to talk when you are dead, or it’s impossible for a human to fly without a machine, when she suddenly comes out with “It’s impossible to be normal.” The family member in attendance shoots me a look that eloquently points out that Violet might not think it was so impossible to be normal if instead of piles of books on the floor I had a little financial security, if I had a man around the house. If I stopped running around like I do, in other words.

It’s near dawn when I finish
The Scarlet Letter
and I had forgotten the ending. Hawthorne is careful to tell us that Pearl, wild, untamed, radiant, spritelike Pearl, grows up and leaves for Europe, where she is happy and flourishing; the suggestion is that she is perhaps a bit happier than the children of the drab Puritan town she has left behind.

It’s getting dark and I am stepping into a taxi, the parlor window is lit, the children at home in their pajamas, smelling of Johnson & Johnson’s, domestic peace descending, and I go off in a car to meet a man at a hotel bar. This will seem like the wrong structure to many people; they will tell me how unhealthy it is, how unsustainable, how unstable, and they may be right, but there I am speeding across the bridge nonetheless. There are other possible ways I could conduct my life, other forms and
structures. But I remember hearing somewhere: “You have one life, if that.” And one sometimes feels like mentioning that to some of the more blinkered respectable couples, to those purveyors of wholesome and healthy environments, to those who truly believe the child of a single mother is not whole or happy in his room playing with his dinosaurs: You have one life, if that.

I spent more time than was strictly necessary in the plush red corridors of the Hotel Metropole in Hanoi. For some reason, I had convinced myself that I needed to see the inside of suite 228, which was otherwise referred to in the voluminous hotel literature as “the Graham Greene Suite.” Greene, whom I had been mildly fixated on for some time, had stayed there during the fifties. I was staying next door in suite 226, and after several days of wondering how I was going to get into his room, I noticed the maid’s cart outside. When she finally ducked out to refill her stash of aloe shampoo and little almond soaps, I slipped through the half-opened door. Inside was a bare mahogany desk, a brass lamp, a king-size bed with a modern, striped duvet, and several spindly French sofas, also striped. I couldn’t help feeling vastly let down. The setting was devoid of both Greene’s seediness—he later regretted popularizing the word “seedy”—and his elegance, which should not, of course, have come as a surprise. The
Metropole was gutted after the war and rebuilt. And even if it hadn’t been, I knew from experience that this sort of literary pilgrimage is always anticlimactic: the writer is dead and what remains of him is in his books.

Luckily in Greene’s case the books are everywhere. It’s almost impossible to walk down the street in Hanoi without stumbling across a sky-blue Penguin edition of
The Quiet American
. If one looks closely enough, the black-and-white photograph of a gun emerging from long grasses on the cover is slightly blurred, and if one flips through the pages the words themselves are also blurred, which is because they are pirated copies, photocopied from the originals. When I first spotted the cheerful, familiar blue covers, I was taken aback, as if my private relation to the book were cheapened; it somehow bothered me to see Greene’s morally complicated vision hawked to tourists, but then everything was hawked to tourists, and wasn’t I, when it came down to it, a tourist myself? In a way, its commercial ubiquity is something the book could have predicted of itself. The novel foretells a Vietnam in the thrall of what it calls “dollar love,” and Westerners in thrall right back.

By the time we reached Hanoi, my then husband and I had been traveling through Asia for almost a month. I had begun to see that everywhere we went there were a million minor transactions taking place beneath the surface. At first I was oblivious to these transactions, but slowly I began to recognize them: if a driver takes you to his friend’s hotel, he is getting a cut; if a waiter sells you an expensive dish, he is getting a cut; if a guide takes you to a silk shop, he is getting a cut; and there are bound to be other people getting cuts of his cut. If you watch these transactions
closely enough, you begin to get the feeling of an ant farm, a honeycomb, thousands of tiny gestures replicating themselves.

On one of our first days in Bangkok we made our way to the Grand Palace. We could see the gold roof of the main pagoda glinting behind a wall. A man pointed us down a street to the entrance. It seemed a long way, so we asked again and two other men pointed us in the same direction. When we got to the end of the street, a cyclo driver told us that the Grand Palace was closed, and he would take us to another temple and then back for a dollar. An old man came over to translate his offer. In fact, the Grand Palace was not closed. The entrance was in the other direction. This scheme employed five men for an afternoon.

After a while, we began to get used to the idea that for small amounts of money, the facts were willing to alter themselves. At a jumbled antiques store across from the Metropole, we picked up a coy-looking stone Buddha with its hands on its hips. “It is from the seventeenth century,” the woman with serious glasses behind the counter informed us. When we returned later that afternoon, it was from the nineteenth century.

We bought it, whatever it was, and went out for a late lunch. I looked over at my husband dipping a dumpling in sauce, and I noticed that he had been physically transformed. He is one of the few people I know who looks most himself in a suit and tie. In his closet at home, he keeps wooden shoe trees in his shoes, which he polishes himself in a ritual that takes over our entire living room for an afternoon. But as soon as we arrived, he stopped shaving. He started wearing sandals that Velcroed across the toes. At some point, without my realizing it, his appearance had passed beyond scruffy into the netherworld of international drifters who float
through Asia staying in guest houses without clean sheets. I am not sure whether this was a subliminal attempt at disguise, but if it was, it didn’t work.

One staggeringly hot day, we took a motorcycle through the rice paddies to a nearby beach and stopped at a stretch of creamy sand with mountains rising from the ocean. But as soon as we took off our shoes, dozens of children clustered around us trying to get us to sit under their umbrellas.

When we finally laid out our towels and settled down with our books, two sturdy-looking girls came to offer pedicures and necklaces. “My name Hong Kong,” one of them said. They crouched next to us. They showed no signs of moving. The one that was not Hong Kong sulked theatrically. “Bad day. No one buy Buddhas.” She fanned out the jade necklaces she was selling.

“I don’t have any money,” I told her.

“He has money,” said Hong Kong, gesturing toward my husband.

“He doesn’t want to buy anything.”

“He change mind.”

“I never change my mind,” he said.

“You change mind.”

“Madam, you want? Tell him you want, he change mind.”

“But I don’t want one.”

The green Buddhas glittered in the sand.

“If we stay he change mind.”

“I never change my mind,” he said again.

They squatted near our feet. One of them rested her head on my arm. We tried to look out at the ocean.

“You need souvenir? You remember day?”

They sat with us for an hour, resuming their sales pitch every now and then. “You buy one?” “You buy two?” They were harassing us, but sweetly. Their presence changed the nature of the activity. We were not sitting on the beach the way we think of sitting on the beach at home.

“You change mind?” They went over to my husband. Hong Kong put her hands on her hips and studied him.

“No.”

The shadow of a cloud moved across the sand. Suddenly I needed a souvenir to remember the day.

“Let’s just get one,” I said. We bought a jade Buddha on a strip of leather.

“He change mind!” they said triumphantly. “He change mind!” We gave them a dollar. Interestingly, it was my husband who put the Buddha around his neck.

We paid in dollar bills because street sellers prefer them here. In other countries one pays for familiar-looking items with brightly colored bills that look and feel like Monopoly money. But here it is the opposite: every element of life is different, the air, the sun, the dense, sweet coffee, the dragon fruit we eat for breakfast with its curling fuchsia rind like lapping tongues, the lizards that dapple the walls of elegant restaurants like patterned wallpaper. The only thing that is familiar, the only thing that moors us to our regular lives, is the green face of our former president.

In Phnom Penh, the proprietors of our hotel have placed a discreet gold plaque on the reception desk that reads
NO CHILD SEX TOURISM
. If this warning is regarded at all, it is regarded quite literally, because outside on a chaise longue near the pool lies a sullen-looking Khmer girl in a leopard-print bikini who looks no older than fourteen. The German next to her has graying, wiry hair, tortoiseshell glasses, and a perfectly round, pregnant-looking stomach emerging from his Speedo bathing suit. He is talking avidly into his cellphone. After a little while they go into the pool. She lies on her back and closes her eyes. He holds her up as if she were a child learning to float.