How to Read the Air (11 page)

“I burned my hand making tea,” she said when I came through the doors and asked her what she was doing and what had happened to her hand.

“And just by chance,” she asked me a few seconds later, “did you hear the news this afternoon? Two women, just a few blocks away from where we live, were burned to death in an apartment fire this morning.”

 

 

 

 

Up ahead a sign offering a room for $29.99 per night loomed, came, and then went. It was three thirty in the afternoon on a Wednesday and they were only twenty miles outside of the city, which meant that they were still one hundred and forty-three miles away from the fort Jean-Patrice Laconte had built in 1687 when first settling this land for the French. The remains of Laconte’s fort were historical landmark number one along the road to Nashville and, with the exception of a potential detour to Springfield to see Lincoln’s home, were at the top of my father’s list of the important places in history he wanted to see on this trip.

He had made a list of at least a dozen such places that he planned to someday visit, most of them scattered around the Midwest where less notable bits of history were easy to stumble upon. He hadn’t mentioned wanting to stop anywhere to his wife before they left. He was afraid of what the explanation would have sounded like, having already tried a couple of variations in his head.

There are some places I want to stop at before we get to Nashville.

There is an important historical landmark on the way to Nashville.

He had given up after that, confident that his desire to delve into the obscure parts of the country’s history made sense only to him. Since arriving in America, he had tried to come up with a series of standards by which he could judge his assimilation. He gave himself points for knowing answers to certain questions, like which teams were playing football that Monday night, or which television actresses he would most want to sleep with and which ones he wouldn’t. If while at the plant one of his coworkers said, “Hey, Yosef, who’s that playing on the radio?” and he responded correctly by saying Ray Charles, then at least one, sometimes two points were added to the poorly tracked column in which these things were supposed to matter.

It had been almost a year since he had begun keeping track, but there still weren’t enough points in his column to satisfy him, and undoubtedly he failed by almost any measure to appear as a real American. Unlike the other men at the plant, he spoke very little while he was at work. He knew that too many words and sentences strung together on his part were an open invitation to be mocked. If he said anything more than “Mr. Henderson, I have finished with the task you have given me,” he could expect to hear his words echoed back to him in a comical but perhaps not so far from the truth accent, and so he kept his mouth shut and spoke in grunts or, better yet, gestures when he could.

He wanted other inroads into America, and his list of historical landmarks was his most recent one. By his reckoning, the more obscure the landmark the better. Anyone in the world could claim to have laid eyes on the country’s more famous or important monuments. There were plenty of immigrants in D.C., New York, and Boston who could see towering skyscrapers or marble monuments out their living room windows, but where did that get them? Nowhere, he thought. It meant nothing to stand in the shadows of such buildings if you didn’t know the history that preceded them, and if you didn’t believe that as a result of that knowledge they belonged to you as well.

My father planned on rectifying some of that that afternoon. He had read about Laconte’s fort in a small pamphlet at the immigration office in Chicago where he had declared his intentions to someday be a citizen of the United States. The pamphlet, titled “A Brief History of Our Great State,” concerned itself mostly with facts about Lincoln and the post-Civil War years. Only one paragraph at the beginning had mentioned Laconte and a few other early explorers. “Pioneers of the American wilderness,” it had called them, with Laconte as chief among them; this had been enough to convince him of the path he needed to seek out. Afterward he could say, “This is very similar to an early American landmark ...” or “This reminds me of an old American fort that I visited,” and anyone who heard him would be impressed and would think, Look how far he has come.

He understood that he wouldn’t get there all at once. It would take time and patience to become the kind of man he dreamed of. This visit to Laconte’s fort was merely the start. Perhaps he wouldn’t get all the way into the heart of America just yet, but surely in the end he would feel closer to it. He’d stand in the center of one of the country’s first ruined forts, and if he had to, he promised himself, he would drag his wife, kicking and screaming if need be, to bask with him in the light.

 

 

 

 

While my father drove lost in his thoughts of history and Nashville, my mother was missing mountains. They had always been there, holding down all four corners of the city she had been born and raised in, neither imposing nor protective but significant nonetheless. They weren’t the type of mountains that inspired awe or wonder. Uneven, stunted, and without the requisite snow-capped peaks, they rose around the edges of the city in clusters of threes and fours, and in the morning and evening drew the clouds into them. It’s baffling to realize sometimes what we miss and in fact have always loved, she thought. Whether it’s a particular view of green-and-brown-clad mountains or a voice we assumed we had long since put to rest. They come back and find us whether we want them to or not. On that morning she missed the mountains, even though in the twenty-eight years she had spent in Addis, she had never once deliberately considered their existence. She had never stared at them because they were simply and irrevocably there. That alone had been reason enough to believe they were always destined to be.

She picked up on their absence just as the red Monte Carlo approached sixty-five, a respectable but not reckless speed above the limit, and as she did so, she realized she had no idea or reason for being here in this car on this day in this country. The entire sequence of events, as it turned out, had been a mistake. There was never supposed to be a husband she hardly knew, much less loved, or a child whose existence she had hidden for first one, and then two, and now three months. The facts of her life had crept up on her, had asserted themselves one at a time—first a plane ticket, then a middle-aged man, who had at once grown slightly heavier and more diminished than she remembered, standing in an airport with a cheap bouquet of flowers. That in turn had been followed by a few nights of rough, mediocre sex with that same man pushing away inside her with an urgency born more out of desperation than love or attraction. Taken together, those facts had accumulated enough mass and force to assert themselves, incontrovertibly and without doubt, as the sum total of her existence. It was no different from adding up cans of peas and cartons of milk in a grocery store. Take one town, one man, one apartment, and one unborn child and add them all up together and what do you have if not the definition of a life?

She almost pressed her hand against the window, as if there were something on the other side of the glass that she could touch, and in doing so would save her from the irrepressible fear that she was lost and would never find herself again. That gesture, however, would have made the longing that much more difficult to bear. It was better, she believed, not to translate emotions into actions, to let them lie dormant, because once they were expressed, there was no drawing them back. They enter the world and having done so become greater than us. Of all the lessons I learned from my mother, this was the first. It was conducted on the steps of a brick Catholic school with two angels guarding the doorway, neither of whom had the power to comfort or protect, despite what their roles suggested. I remember there was something resembling a bruise beneath her right eye that morning. The night before had been rough, although I can’t say I recall the details as to how or why. What I can say is that that morning she put on a light blue dress and for an hour curled her hair so that the ends turned in toward her neck. She put on lipstick and pressed her eyebrows down and stretched her eyelashes up, and before leaving the house she sprayed herself with a quick burst of the only perfume she ever wore, the same one I continue to smell after all these years regardless of where I am, because every time I think of her, I breathe her in.

It was my first day of school, and taking me there was the only social outing she had had in months. She treated it with all the pomp and circumstance that other women bring to more significant affairs—a dinner party here, a first date there—since while she had had these things in the past, they belonged to a different Mariam, one utterly unrecognizable from the one who stood in front of a mirror worrying about whether her neckline revealed too much for an early Monday morning.

We walked the six blocks to my school together, hand in hand, and I remember thinking, or maybe I’m just saying this now because there are few children in the world who do not want to remember their mothers as being beautiful beyond imagination, that there could be nothing better in the world than this. I had never seen my mother smile or walk that way before. She literally seemed to glow as she walked down the street, heels clicking and the inverted curls of her hair bouncing in sync, her beauty rising out of her in cone-shaped beams that I’m sure would have had the power to pierce any heart they touched. It was the most memorable walk I’ve ever had.

It wasn’t until we arrived at the school that her mood changed. It was almost possible at that moment to breathe in the confusion and anxiety that came with her seeing herself surrounded by women as young as or younger than she was, but without the bruises and uncertainty of language she carried. Those women wore jeans and shirts with logos advertising baseball teams and hardware stores, their hair unkempt, their lips naked. They walked their kids to the top of the steps and shook hands with the teacher and then banded together in circles that seemed almost preordained, as if their gatherings were reflections of a natural law that grouped women together by the size of their bodies and the color of their hair and the year and model of the cars they drove.

She left me just a few feet away from the school, kneeling down on the curb behind a rusted red van so she could hide in its shadow and see me clearly as she told me the first in a series of lessons that she later referred to simply as Things You Must Never Forget. She told me dozens of such lessons throughout my childhood, each delivered with the same insistent wide-eyed stare and stern voice that seemed to say on every occasion, you will never hear anything as important as this again, even if the point she had to make concerned utterly trivial matters: the proper way to break a clove of garlic; the necessity of keeping your socks dry. That first lesson went like this:

Jonas, I want you to remember what I say now. Are you listening? You must listen. This is important. There are things that you must not ever tell anyone. Is that correct? Must not? It’s okay. It doesn’t matter. You know what I mean. You are good. Say that after me.

Good.

No. Say, I am good.

I am good.

Yes, you are. And so you will listen. If someone asks you what’s wrong, you say nothing. Say this, Nothing is wrong.

Nothing is wrong.

Good. Say it again.

Nothing is wrong.

Perfect.

She kissed me once on both cheeks before safely crossing the street, where a row of identical two-story brick houses with small front porches and unguarded front lawns stood ready to hide her. With a few quick flutters of her hands, the kind generally used to shoo away dogs, pigeons, and the empty-handed poor, she waved me up the school’s steps, where I stopped and stared until she disappeared around the corner, because she knew that I would never leave until she was gone. A piece of dark blue fabric from the end of her dress trailed her for a fraction of a second and remained fluttering in space even after she had rounded the bend. It could have just as easily been a patch of blue stolen from the sky and delivered to earth for all the consideration I put into it. Imagined or not, that last patch of blue stayed floating in the air, and I could still see it even after she was gone just as clearly as I could see the stop sign on the corner and the maple tree that shaded the sign and intersection. That patch of blue was no less real for not having technically been there, just as my mother was no less real for being out of sight. We persist and linger longer than we think, leaving traces of ourselves wherever we go. If you take that away, then we all simply vanish.

It took the firm grasp of a teacher to pull me into the school, the bells having made their last call.

 

 

 

 

 

I said earlier that I couldn’t remember what happened to my mother the night before she took me to school, and perhaps that is true. Perhaps I can’t remember, neither then nor now. At the time I did know, however, that it was easy for terrible things to happen to women when they were out of sight. They took hard hits, and then later slept in your bed where you could protect them.

VIII

As Angela and I began to withdraw from each other, I found myself increasingly taken with my teaching; each new class was an opportunity to step farther away from what I thought of as my slightly bruised and sequestered self. Even if it was only for an hour and a half, after my first year at the academy was over, I knew that it was important to seize every chance to do so. I gradually began to transform myself from a quiet, seemingly sullen teacher, known primarily for my expensive black leather briefcase and the brown-bag lunches I carried to work, to a fully engaged and often dynamic lecturer who sometimes filled in his daily lessons with small digressions and slightly fanciful tales.