Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [28]
Are you in or out?
In late December I went home to my husband and to my children and to the post-Christmas chaos of a resort town, but instead of feeling glad to be back, I was dislocated and depressed. It should not be physically possible to get from the banks of the Pepani River to Wyoming in less than two days, because mentally and emotionally it is impossible. The shock is too much, the contrast too raw. We should sail or swim or walk from Africa, letting bits of her drop out of us, and gradually, in this way, assimilate the excesses and liberties of the States in tiny, incremental sips, maybe touring up through South America and Mexico before trying to stomach the land of the Free and the Brave.
Because now the real, wonderful world around me—the place where we had decided to live with our children, because it had seemed like an acceptable compromise between my Zambia and my husband’s America—felt suddenly pointless and trivial and almost insultingly frivolous. The shops were crappy with a Christmas hangover, too loud and brash. Everything was 50 percent off. There was nothing challenging about being here, at least not on the surface. The new year’s party I attended was bloated with people complaining about the weight they had put on over Christmas. I feigned malaria and went home to bed for a week.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to join in the innocent, deluded self-congratulation that goes with living in such a fat, sweet country. I did. But I couldn’t. And confining myself to the house didn’t help. Now I felt like a trespasser in my own home with all its factory-load of gadgets and machines and the ease of the push-button life I was living. And, uninvited, K strolled around in the back of my head and talked his loneliness out of himself and straight into me and would not let me rest and by the end of this, there were pieces of me and pieces of him and pieces of our history that were barbed together in a tangle in my head and I couldn’t shake the feeling that in some inevitable way, I was responsible for K. And he for me.
Then gradually the winter seeped into spring and I resumed the habits of entitlement that most of us don’t even know we have. And K’s imaginary voice—which had been an almost continuous presence through the cold weather—melted into an only occasional intrusion. I drank coffee at the café on the creek without imagining K asking me how I could pay three times the average Zambian’s daily salary for the privilege; I ate sun-dried tomatoes and wild mushrooms drizzled with extra-virgin olive oil and the ghost of K didn’t appear to tell me that you were either a virgin, or not, but you couldn’t be extra-virgin. And I disentangled myself from my history, one sticky thread at a time, until I was completely, happily reestablished as a Wyoming mother. I started to take the ease for granted.
Then in late August, I woke up one night into the brittle light of a Rocky Mountain full moon. I had been crow-dropped and caught by the silly bell-bottoms again. I lay in bed feeling rigid and my skin burned with that old terrorist-under-the-bed feeling. The moon had set the world alight in a pale, cold fire of silver. The fir tree outside our bedroom window gleamed blue and rapped an urgent tattoo against the glass. I got out of bed (feet prickling) and went through to the kids’ room. They were both asleep, their faces turned up to the light that shattered through their window. I sat on the edge of their beds and kissed them both, hungry for the kind of peace they usually instilled in me. My daughter turned over and hugged her blanket to her belly. My son muttered. It felt as if I was imparting disquiet into my children, as if my embrace were poisoned.
I went through to the kitchen—feeling exiled by who I was—and made some tea and sat on the sofa with a blanket over my knees. It was the time of night that precedes dawn and is without perspective or reason.