The Zigzag Way (3 page)

“You just screamed and
ran.”

“And the clown ran after you, yelling, ‘Here, take some candy,' but you were so scared—”

“You never went trick-or-treating again with the rest of us.”

Em tried to catch Eric's eye but he was looking sideways, mumbling, “Well, Hallowe'en
is
scary, you know.”

“It's meant to be!” they chorused. “But clowns are not. Why were you scared by the
clown
?” Then they went on to talk of the time the circus had come to the neighboring town and they had all been taken to it but Eric had disgraced himself by letting out a shriek when the clown appeared and was reduced to such a state that they had had to get up and leave. Groans rang out all around the table as at this point they always did.

Eric's mother, several seats away, sat quietly waiting till they were done with their stories and their dishes, when she could rise and start clearing the table. Em joined her with relief.

At the kitchen sink the two women found themselves alone together, Eric's mother washing while Em dried. They had done this on previous visits too: the mother, being the only daughter in a family of sons, had this role to play. At the same time, she made it evident that while she cooked, cleaned, and washed up for the others, she had a mind of her own, separate and intact. She had shown it when she had insisted on marrying the English stranger who appeared in their village some forty-odd years ago, and again when she chose to send Eric away to school. Now Em, wiping plate after plate with a dishtowel, saw another display of it: a steady stream of questions was being directed at her regarding her work, her research, her university, its labs, her colleagues, and her workplace by the woman who had rarely left the fishing village in Maine where she had been born but seemed keenly aware—unlike the rest of her family—that there was a world beyond it. Em, scrubbing and polishing furiously with her dishtowel, tried to make satisfying answers while attempting to comprehend a mind so free of resentment or envy, so buoyant with curiosity and quest.

When the last dish was put away and the towel hung up to dry, they paused for a bit by the sink, looking through the window made almost opaque with steam at the rocks below where the figures of Eric and his father could just be discerned, picking their way gingerly around rock pools and boulders. It was clearly the two of them, the only men who wore neither plaid flannel shirts nor rubber boots—hands deep in the pockets of their black parkas, the hoods pulled up over their heads, which were lowered to the spray that flew up from the white-capped waves of the wintry sea.

Eric's mother gave a little laugh and dabbed her finger at the windowpane, making an opening in the steamy screen. “Don't they look just like a pair of herons?” she said to Em, as if she thought them a pair of exotic visitors to her workaday world, which, perhaps, Em did too.

Driving back to Boston in the early dark, Em and Eric were both silent with fatigue and with their thoughts. Em did finally stir herself to say, “Your dad was quiet.”

“Isn't he always?”

“Your mom's family seems to overwhelm him.”

“Oh, he likes that. They leave him alone, in his office room, with his books. Did you get any time with Mom?”

“We did the dishes together.”

“Talk?”

“I did more than her.”

“It's not her thing.”

Em laughed suddenly. “She did say you looked like a pair of herons down on the rocks, you and your dad. And you did. I wish I had come with you.”

He put out his hand to clasp hers for saying that. “I wish you had.” They were passing a row of stores and their attendant parking lots, gas stations, and motels, with the traffic and the glare of lights making it difficult to talk and drive at the same time. It was when they achieved a quieter, darker stretch of the highway with tall fir forests looming on either side that he gave her some information he had clearly been mulling over. “When I told Dad we were going to Mexico, he told me something I hadn't known before—that he was born there. He'd never told me that.”

“But how strange, Eric—not to
know
where your dad was born!”

“Well, you know my family
is
strange. You've always said that,” he teased her.

“But as strange as that! I never guessed. Why
hadn't
he told you before?”

“I suppose because he doesn't remember a thing about it. He was taken to England as an infant and brought up there. Mexico is just a fairy tale to him.”

“Oh.” Em yawned. There seemed no point in pursuing a conversation that had no substance. She settled deeper into the seat, putting her head back to sleep while Eric drove.

I dreamed of Mexico and I am in Mexico: the move from the first state to the second happened in these conditions without the slightest shock . . . for me never before has reality fulfilled with such splendor the promise of dreams.

—
ANDRÉ BRETON

 

E
M'S DOUBTS ABOUT LETTING ERIC ACCOMPANY
her appeared well-founded as soon as they stepped up into the plane together with her colleagues, two terribly sober and certain men who talked between themselves constantly, using a language Eric could not follow, it was so specialized and technical. He had followed them in, dressed for a holiday in a warm climate, and found himself with nothing to say. He had convinced himself that scientists were fascinating people: they knew the human being and the phenomenon of life as no one else did, after all. He had imagined he would put intelligent questions to them, and listen to their stories of medical emergencies, crises and curiosities. But they had no stories, they were not doctors: They did research. If they saw patients, they saw only those parts necessary to their research and were not in the least interested in anything beyond these bounds. Of course what Em shared with them was precisely that focus, that intense and exclusive focus, and it was what Eric had hoped to escape on concluding his thesis in order to let a wider, more expansive view take over and transform his world. Realizing he would have to embark on that journey alone, he thought it best to leave them to themselves and fell back. They glanced at his initially hopeful, ingratiating smile, ignored it, and went ahead.

He insisted they take the three seats in front together, sat behind them, and read all the airline magazines, drank all the drinks offered him, and listened to the animated conversation in Spanish between members of a family scattered through several rows of seats while they passed the smaller ones from lap to lap along with bottles of milk and pacifiers and diaper bags, toys and snack packs. He began to get a headache from the chatter and the glare that came in through the window as the plane droned its way over endless, colorless plains and the pleats and convolutions of mountains that were like prints left by giant knuckles in a pan of putty-colored dough.

The headache was blown out of his head when the top of Popocatepetl suddenly floated into sight, disembodied in the haze over Mexico City, catching him utterly by surprise. No one had told him he would see Popocatepetl but he knew it could be nothing else, nothing less. “Em,” he shouted, rising in his seat to tap her head in front of him, “Em, look!” as if he were a boy, her boy.

But Em and her colleagues had visited Mexico many times before; they glanced out of the window, took note of the familiar landmark, and what they saw had the effect only of making them gather up their files and briefcases and begin to prepare for the descent. Eric was left with his face flattened against the oval aperture to catch what he could of the magic of a cone of ice floating in a blur of clouds and dust over a dun cityscape.

 

T
HE DISJOINTEDNESS OF
their joint experience of Mexico was repeated at every step. While Em and her colleagues passed casually through the immigration barriers and collected their baggage with the harassed air of professional business travelers, Eric found himself distracted by everything in the airport—the booths displaying textiles bright with rainbow stripes and rainbow flowers, tequila bottles shaped like cacti, sweets made out of cacti and fruit—and the arrival hall, which was swamped by more people with black hair and brown skin than he had ever encountered before, families embracing and weeping and laughing as if they lived their lives on the level of grand opera. Outside, he was faced with light that struck more whitely, electrically than he had ever seen onto a spectrum of color unknown in Boston, Massachusetts—flat-roofed houses with pink and orange and violet walls, pea-green taxis and leaf-green buses. When they reached the hotel, where the tranquilizing effect of plashing water in marble fountains was canceled by the shrieking of birds of bright plumage in tall cages, he had to lie down, he felt the blood racing in his veins too fast.

Em did not appear concerned; she went about unpacking, hanging clothes in a gigantic armoire and putting out her jars and bottles on shelves of glass and marble, saying merely “It's the altitude. It affects some people that way”—not her, of course.

Later that evening, they took the elevator of intricate art nouveau filigree up to the rooftop restaurant and sat by the balustrade with their drinks, looking down onto the plaza that seemed built on a scale greater than a merely human one; it struck Eric as strange in a country where the human scale was generally small. Over this great field of volcanic rock from the ruins of the Aztec temples, the tricolor of Mexico whipped like a dragon in the wind from the mountains that ringed the city and were visible at the end of every avenue and street, benevolent and protective witches wrapped in dark skirts. Eric and Em were just in time to observe the ceremony of taking down the flag for the night by a platoon of toy-sized soldiers as stiff and smart as painted lead. The figures strolling across the vast expanse with their silver balloons might have been toys too, fashioned for the gods. Lights were coming on haphazardly, so many embers in the soot and coal of the night.

“Em, you never told me it would be like this,” Eric said, tearing his eyes away from the scene to her at last. She had never seemed so pale, so Nordic as here with her gray eyes, her fair hair, and her white dress.

Instead of seeming pleased with his response to the scene to which she had brought him, Em appeared to grow more apprehensive. She frowned slightly and said, “But what will you
do
here, Eric?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, while I am away.”

Eric had been picking up grains of salt from the rim of his margarita glass; now he licked them and looked at the oversized goblet with its blue rim and its wedge of lime and crust of salt as if it were an object in a museum, requiring his serious attention and measured opinion. He was considering, too, the fact already known to him, of course, that Em would be going away with her colleagues to carry on their research “in the field.” He knew it would be foolish to tag along, that it was not for him, he would be in the way, but somehow he had neglected to give this fact sufficient thought. Of course in Boston they worked separately too, coming together in the evenings to cook their pasta and listen to Mozart or to Schumann. He was quite capable of spending the day alone even if Em seemed to need reassurance on this point and would anxiously ask, “Did you get any work done today? Did you start with the book?” He would protest, “But, Em, writing is not a nine-to-five job in the city. One doesn't just sit at a desk and type ten pages a day, you know.” Now he began to doubt his ability to sit at a desk and write two pages, or one, while in this giddy state with so much around to be experienced and regarded. Nor had he thought about where he would go or where he would stay in her absence. He said the only thing that occurred to him at this moment of pressure: “D'you think I could come with you to Yucatán?”

“Of course not,” she said immediately, and he looked at her and smiled: it was what she would say and she was quite right to do so, of course. How foolish to think he could join the company of the sure and the certain, those who knew what to do with themselves from morning to night every day of the year and everywhere. Just when he himself had lost his way and was in search of one. Had he not always been the misfit? It was his role; she knew it.

“But don't you have any plans at all?” she asked, sounding worried and making the straw in her margarita glass bob up and down to show it.

“Only the vaguest one, Em. I'm hoping it will become clear. I have to wait for the ‘Eureka' moment.”

“Oh, Eric. I know what you'll do with yourself—stroll and chat.”

“That's what a writer does.” He smiled at her, he thought winningly.

 

T
HIS EXCHANGE
, not at all atypical of their relationship, did not quite cast down Eric's spirits. Rabbitlike, these wriggled free from under it and went out to meet the city, a city that strewed its sights before him as a carpet seller might his carpets, a jeweler his gems—the immense plaza where bird-shaped kites rose into the sky to meet the eagles circling there, the arcades alongside with their jewelry stores filled with gold ornaments of Mayan or Aztec design and guarded by armed police and police dogs in chains, the sweetmeat shops where the sweets resembled gems, the restaurants where waitresses floated in balloonlike skirts and winglike caps, the pavement vendors outside proffering lottery tickets, safety pins, or songbirds in stacked cages, the Zapotec women from the country who spread out their bunches of dried herbs, their shriveled scorpions and fried grasshoppers on little mats they rolled up and made disappear as soon as the city police roared up in white jeeps, the stalls where creams and lotions were sold in seashells and jumping beans jumped on trays; and leading off from the plaza, streets of the old quarter, where there were stately mansions with blackened façades, drooping wrought-iron balconies, strings of laundry and leftover Christmas tinsel, and the dark rooms beyond from which television sets flickered with blue and violet images, intermittently lighting up the family groups gathered to watch the
telenovelas
; and the shops below, which displayed white satin wedding gowns and wax orange-blossom tiaras for brides and little girls at their first Communion, ecclesiastical artifacts of purple and plum-colored satin, velvet skirts fringed with tinsel to drape around the heads of Madonnas or around the lower regions of saints whose exposed hearts and wounds oozed crimson paint, or party gifts, masks, and costumes from which you could choose to dress up as a Zapatista or a witch, underwear shops with naughty panties and lace socks, stalls selling household goods like tin and plastic buckets and pans and bowls . . . and down the street an old man would come, banging a great drum with one hand and blowing a brass trumpet held in the other while at the corner outside the cathedral fleshy dancers in costumes of brilliant feathers and anklets of jangling bells danced and whirled the Aztec dances for tourists with cameras, purses, and pesos.