A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [53]
Ann begged off.
“She didn’t understand these folks—the idea of living an expatriate life that was so completely divorced from the world around you, that involves hiding yourself away in these protective cells of existence,” Maya said. “That was peculiar to her, and she was bored by it.” Ann complained to her friend Bill Collier that all those middle-aged white Americans talked about inane things. Lolo, she told Collier, “was becoming more American all the time.” Occasionally, the young Obama would overhear Lolo and Ann arguing in their bedroom about Ann’s refusal to attend his oil company dinners, at which, he writes in Dreams from My Father, “American businessmen from Texas and Louisiana would slap Lolo’s back and boast about the palms they had greased to obtain the new offshore drilling rights, while their wives complained to my mother about the quality of Indonesian help. He would ask her how it would look for him to go alone, and remind her that these were her own people, and my mother’s voice would rise to almost a shout.
“They are not my people.”
The relationship between Ann and Lolo appears to have begun deteriorating even before Lolo took the oil company job. As Obama describes it, something had happened between them in the year they had been apart. Lolo had been full of life in Hawaii, regaling Ann with stories from his childhood and the struggle for independence, confiding his plans to return to his country and teach at the university. Now he barely spoke to her at all. Some nights, he would sleep with a pistol under his pillow; other nights, she would hear him “wandering through the house with a bottle of imported whiskey, nursing his secrets.” Ann’s loneliness was a constant, Obama writes, “like a shortness of breath.”
Ann’s colleagues noticed. At times, she seemed downright unhappy. When one fellow teacher asked about her husband, she told him grimly, “I’m never asked. I’m told.” Trusti Jarwadi, one of the teachers Ann met in her first job, could see that something was wrong but feared violating Ann’s privacy by asking her questions. Reflecting on her marriage some years later, Ann told her Indonesian friend, Yang Suwan, somewhat bitterly, “Don’t you know that you don’t argue and you don’t discuss with a Javanese person? Because problems don’t exist with Javanese people. Time will solve problems.”
Ann could not have known what she was getting into, said another close friend in the 1980s, Renske Heringa, a Dutch anthropologist who herself had married a man who was half Indonesian. “She didn’t know, as little I knew, how Indonesian men change when suddenly their family is around,” she said. “And how Indonesian men like women to be easy and open abroad, but when you get to Indonesia, the parents are there, you have to behave. You have to be the little wife. . . . As a wife, you were not supposed to make yourself visible besides being beautiful. By the time I knew Ann, she was a hefty woman. She didn’t care about getting dressed, wearing jewelry, the way Indonesian women do. That was not her style. He expected her to do it. That is one reason she didn’t stick it out. She absolutely refused to. I understand why he couldn’t accept it.”
Ann had also pieced together some of what had happened in Indonesia in 1965 and afterward from fragmentary information that people let slip. Men employed at the embassy told her stories that would never have appeared in Indonesian newspapers, according to Obama’s account in Dreams from My Father. Her