Tales of Two Americas Read online

  Navajo House

  Then suddenly she was very still. Hurting all over, she said, though no one could say why, meaning we waited too long. No one believed her, she said, and she was right. Lyme. Perhaps by then she was already her own doctor? (Most of it was out of pocket anyway.) She quit the museum or was fired, no one knew. The Navajo house filled with rocks, bared down on us, stick built with a brick-and-mortar mortgage. Our stepfather had been feeding his paychecks into slot machines, I learned when I asked him to fill out his portion of the FAFSA. The spring my classmates spent dropping out to have their babies and you spent raising our half sister I spent overexercising, baffled on the treadmill at how his tax returns said $100,000 per year and yet every day at lunch one of my girlfriends lent me two dollars so I could buy three Pizza Hut breadsticks or a seven-layer burrito. All the mail went into one massive drawer, unopened, envelopes white then yellow then pink. The phone rang and rang, we did not answer—the caller ID always said UNKNOWN. Soon there were morphine patches and a mortar and pestle so she could grind up her Oxy and snort it. Soon all the blankets and cushions had cigarette burns in them. She watched TV—Star Trek: The Next Generation, The X-Files, Law & Order—and we watched her fall asleep with a cigarette smoking between her fingers, caught the cigarette at the fabric’s first singe but not before, for if she woke she’d accuse us of overreacting, of nagging, and we’d have no evidence to the contrary. Many mornings she did not wake up and on some of those she could not wake up. Often there were so many pills she still had some on her tongue in various stages of dissolve. We took turns waiting for the ambulance. We got to know the EMTs. One was a few years older than me, a friend of a friend, and did me the dignity of never acknowledging that we knew each other. I sometimes saw him at parties, sitting on old tires or tailgates, he and I the only ones not chugging Robitussin. He never let on that he’d carried my mother naked on a stretcher down our stairs on more than one occasion. And now I wonder and am often asked, how many occasions were there? So many that the emergency wore off. We called the ambulance and then argued who would wait for it, who had a test in first period, who had too many absences, whose teacher was more lenient and whose was a hard-ass. My first period was Drama 2. Yours was something hard, something you probably failed. Drama 2, Anatomy & Physiology, Civics, AP English. Volleyball and plays, answering the phones at Domino’s pizza, lifeguarding and teaching swim lessons in the summer. She called her overdoses accidents. I believed her and you didn’t, though you weren’t unkind with your knowledge, allowed me some denial. So many years ago, when our father was dying, you’d been the one to tell me what dying meant. You’d explained permanence gently but exhaustively in the busted hot tub when I came up for air. So perhaps you thought you needn’t explain it again. Still, it’s a concept I struggle with.

  Barney Road

  One way to say all this is, Our mother was an addict and she overdosed.

  Another way is, Our mother was suicidal and she killed herself.

  Another way is, Our mother was poor and ignored and dismissed for years by doctors who put her on legal and extremely profitable heroin, which eventually killed her.

  Another way is, Our mother needed help and no one, including us, gave it to her.

  ■ ■

  And yet you and I have loved each other and her and been loved by each other and by her in all these houses, through all these memories which were once moments, real and felt even if forgotten. We have loved and been loved despite the fissures and losses, violence, cruelty, smallness, timing, deficits in money and attention, despite the betrayals and indifferences, the distance and weather. Despite developing different definitions of certain words. Death, expensive, cold. Why, I wonder, or how? Because the little one was kind, pliant with forgiveness, because you absorbed my failings and defects, made them your grace. There was not enough to go around. Such a handy phrase to describe such mean circumstances. Here is another:

  ■ ■

  I was born at a good time.

  MOBILITY

  Julia Alvarez

  WE WERE HURRYING through the Atlanta Airport, worried about missing our connection, as it would be the last direct flight to Vermont until evening the next day. Navigating our way in the world’s busiest airport was like being in a large city, something my husband and I aren’t used to, living as we do out in the country, on ten acres, next to a sheep farm. On the crowded train between terminals a canned voice warned us the train was about to move: to hold on; the doors were about to open: to step back; to watch our step stepping out. (Do travelers really lose all common sense?)

  Up the escalator we entered a maze of branching corridors. Carts zipped by, mostly empty, as if the drivers were on leisure vehicles, cruising the sights, much like Vermont farm kids on their snowmobiles on a bright winter day. TVs, two or more to every waiting area, blared the same recycled news. Perhaps the intent was to numb us against the horrors or inanities being reported, the bombing in Brussels, an airstrike in Yemen, Syrian refugees in desperate exodus across Europe, Trump’s latest trumpery. Those who couldn’t bear one more round could follow George W.’s advice after 9/11 and go shopping. Stores were everywhere, selling books, magazines, luggage, eyeglasses, Montblanc pens, Swarovski crystals, MAC makeup, T-shirts—you name it. (When had airports turned into humongous, overpriced malls?)

  Our flight wouldn’t be boarding for another half hour—time enough to hunt down a bite to eat. A “market” offered a selection of pricey salads and wraps encased in plastic. My husband, a former farm boy from Nebraska who grows half a dozen varieties of greens, kept shaking his head at what people were willing to pay for a container of wilted leaves. There was nothing in the Atlanta Airport you could pay him to eat.

  “Come on now,” I coaxed him.

  I was in a mood of surprising equanimity, rare for me in airports, where I’m usually the one on edge with the heightened anxiety of air travel these days, the long lines, the security checks, the magical three-point-four ounces under which all liquids are deemed harmless, the boarding by zones, ours always the last one to be called, by which time all the overhead bins are full, and we have to cede our carry-ons to baggage loaders who board the cabin and lug them out like bouncers at a bar.

  But we had just come from Ohio where I’d met with a group of undocumented teenagers who had traveled unaccompanied all the way from Ecuador through deserts, flash-flood-prone rivers, rough towns—kids fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, one seventeen-year-old with her three-month-old baby. They were desperate to reunite with missing parents in el Norte or they had been sent away by desperate parents from hometowns afflicted by violence, poverty, gangs, drug cartels. Their stories were wrenching, disturbing.

  Every once in a while, another reality breaks into the gated communities of what turn out to be our default entitlements as we complain vehemently when they are withheld. To use an old-fashioned word, I felt chastened by the encounter, a reminder of how most of the rest of the world lives.

  An overpriced salad, a soggy tuna wrap—we could deal with that!

  ■ ■

  We found a greasy, littered table in the noisy, crowded food court, more corral than court, a holding pen for travelers trying to grab a bite before boarding their flights.

  “How is it?” I asked. Bill had just taken a bite of his wrap and most of its contents had oozed out the other end.

  He leveled a bleary eye at me, shaking his head at the affront of what passed for food these days.

  But looking around, we both cheered up. Inveterate people watchers, we feasted on the scene around us. It’s the part I love about big airports (and cities) which we don’t get in Vermont: the energizing diversity of people. A cross-section of America, if not the world, was gathered here: mothers and grandmothers in head scarves scolding a bunch of rambunctious kids chasing one another around their table; a raucous group of college-age guys besting one another’s tales of spring-break misadv
entures; Indian women wearing saris so striking I stared; an orthodox Jewish family, the father with sidelocks, a hat, the mom with a velvet hair band over her wig, and four kids obediently eating from the containers she unpacked from a shopping bag while balancing a toddler on her knee. I recalled those lines in Whitman’s Song of Myself: “I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear.” And Walt didn’t have a clue what was coming down, an America singing in such diversity and not always in English and not always harmoniously, in fact, judging from the vituperative presidential primary debates, America was coming apart at the seams. Along with the issue of immigration (whom to let in, mostly whom to keep out or throw out), the other most explosive issue was the growing economic inequality in this country. According to our own Bernie Sanders, the top one tenth of 1 percent own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent.

  The crowd assembled in this food court was definitely in the solid middle of that 90 percent, as the poor at the bottom would not have the money for air travel, or travel at all. The upper end would be dining in the enclosed bistros and eateries on white linen tablecloths, the cost of their meals the equivalent of the poor’s food budget for a week, maybe two, depending on the number of drinks. Others would be ensconced behind the frosted doors of their airline clubs where they could rest, relax, get free drinks, e-mail, and nap, away from the hubbub of the hoi polloi, before boarding first on a special red carpet aisle cordoned off from the rest of us.

  The airport was packed tonight, odd for a weekday—until we worked it out—we’d lost track of the upcoming holiday because of work travel: this was the beginning of Easter weekend. Which meant tonight was Maundy Thursday, my favorite holiday on the liturgical calendar. Something about the story still deeply stirs me: the table where all are welcome, the breaking of the bread, the foot-washing ceremony. Later that night, a hunted man awaits capture in an olive grove, a man so terrified he sweats drops of blood—or so he was depicted in my old holy cards—about to be apprehended by a migra who won’t stop at deportation, while his sorry friends fall asleep, too exhausted to stay up and comfort him.

  It was not lost on me that the young people I’d just met in Ohio, the Syrians splayed across the airport TV screens, or our own invisible Americans, secreted away in ninth wards and trailer parks until some “natural” disaster thrusts them into our awareness—all were in a similar fix.

  ■ ■

  An announcement came over the intercom: our flight to Vermont was delayed, please check the monitors.

  “Great!” my husband said. He began on the list of grievances we’d been adding to since the start of our travel six days ago: flight delays, lost luggage, found luggage delivered to the wrong state, rerouted flights, and now another delay.

  “I know, I know,” I kept commiserating. Like many long-term couples we tend to fall into good cop–bad cop routines, one person’s nasty mood triggering the better angels of the other’s nature.

  My husband was giving me his detective look of trying to find a missing clue. “What’s with the good mood tonight?”

  “I’m making believe this is the Last Supper.” I was quick to grin at what I’d just admitted. Given the bad rap fundamentalists have cast on Christians, it’s embarrassing when my childhood faith shows up unbidden. Not that Bill would scoff at that. Lutherans are as prone as Catholics to be revisited by ghosts of their religious past.

  If I could put a caption on the look he gave me, it’d be something like “Wake me up for the Resurrection.”

  ■ ■

  At our gate a small vocal group had gathered at the counter.

  They were giving large, annoyed pieces of their minds to our airline representative—what they’re called these days, perhaps to make us all feel we elected these poor, beleaguered, mostly-women underlings, the first line of defense for the CEOs in the aforementioned airline clubs who have packed too many people and too many flights into America’s airways. The flight was delayed a half hour, though in another half hour, the screen showed another delay of a half hour, then again, as if that were the increment that the air traffic controllers had decided the public could tolerate at a time.

  At each announced delay, the group gathered at the counter to complain. Our representative kept her cool, speaking to each increasingly agitated traveler in an even voice, not abusing whatever brief power she might have over us. I was impressed by her self-control and refrained from the impulse to add my own serving of annoyance to her already-full plate.

  I wondered about her life. Middle-aged, with the pale skin of someone who doesn’t see much sun or vacation, she wore the front part of her graying hair gathered up in a ponytail, loose in back, a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland look, belying her lined, tired face. A girl who’d gotten old before her time . . . working for this airline, probably taking whatever shifts were offered to her. She wore no ring, maybe single or divorced with teenage kids she called during her breaks to make sure they were safely home. It was already after ten p.m.

  A woman in a flowing cotton outfit approached the counter. She had a freckled face, Quaker-kind eyes, wisps of hair fallen out of her barrette. That former-flower-child look of many Vermonters.

  “Just be honest with me, okay? Before I move everybody.” She indicated two young children lying on their coats on the floor. On the bucket seat beside them sat an older man with a head of tousled white hair and a vacuous look in his eye. “I’ve got two kids who haven’t slept in the last forty-eight hours and a father with Alzheimer’s, so, please, I just want to know the odds of us leaving tonight, because if not, I’ve got to get them to a hotel.”

  I could see our representative pause, considering whether to parrot the official line or give the woman the straight talk, one human(e) being to another. In a quiet voice so as not to alarm the rest of us, she advised, “If I had two kids and a dad in that condition, I’d find me a room for the night.”

  “Good luck!” a voice called out. It was the seasoned traveler among us, a consultant who went around the country giving advice on sustainable designs or renewable energy or green construction—I wasn’t sure, though he had a lot to say about it. He had several watchdog apps on his phone and kept updating us on what was being reported about our missing flight. A cold front was blowing in. Flights were being rerouted, canceled. It was closing on midnight. Everyone was scrambling to reschedule and bed down. He’d been calling around, and there wasn’t a hotel with vacancies within a twenty-mile radius. He was packing it up, going back to the city.

  “We just got the last two at the Courtyard,” a businesswoman on our flight announced to her two colleagues. Her male colleague had already rerouted their flights with the company’s twenty-four-hour travel agent. Everyone else calling the airline’s 800 number to reschedule their flights was being given a one-hour call-back delay. Off the group went, relieved their corporate big daddy had taken care of them.

  Our representative was shutting down her computer for the night. The monitor had just flashed the news we’d all been expecting: our flight was canceled.

  “Can’t you let her use the club?” I asked on behalf of the mom with the afflicted father. They had couches in there. Carpets on the floor the kids could sleep on.

  Our representative looked at me as if we’d been living in different universes until this night when our paths crossed in the Atlanta Airport. Did I really believe she had the authority to grant that? “I don’t have the authority to do that.” She had read my mind reading her mind. “Try the HELP desk.” I knew all about the HELP desk: its line was now so long, it reached as far down as our gate, and looped back up again.

  It was my turn to vent to Bill. Damn airline won’t let them use the club! And that business trio. Couldn’t they have ceded at least one of their two rooms?

  “Would you have?”

  Bill gave me that chastening look I’d given him earlier this night.

  ■ ■

 
; Chastened or not, I wasn’t ready to admit that I, too, would have denied her. A woman I didn’t even know. What I did know was that I was fed up with the airlines. Clubs left empty because policy trumps compassion. First-class passengers getting preferential treatment: an express security check-in line (don’t we all pay taxes?), early red-carpet boarding, seats with more space, and a curtained-off section with a bathroom no one else can use even if she’s peeing in her pants. I’d seen a recent CNN report on increased air rage among travelers. Turns out that passengers in economy seating were almost four times more likely to have an incident of air rage on a plane with a first-class section—especially when they had to walk through first class to board the plane.