Her Beautiful Brain Page 2

  We were tired and grateful. We had one long day of shooting ahead, before the day when Mom would arrive and Caroline would come into the city to meet us. And the apartment, which faced away from the city and toward the faded, square-cut hills of central Haiti, had two bedrooms, which would be a nice surprise for Mom and Caroline. I knew Mom had spent more than she should have on her plane ticket, and Caroline was living on practically nothing.

  The next morning, as Rus and I drove away from the Hotel Montana, I began to understand why Haiti looked the way it did from the air. When you fly into Haiti from the Dominican Republic, you fly from green to brown: from the green half of the island of Hispaniola—where Columbus first set foot, planted the flag for his patrons, the King and Queen of Spain, and got to work slaughtering Taínos and Caribs—to the brown half. This was true two decades ago and—as the whole world could see in the aerial footage shot after the cataclysmic January 2010 earthquake—it is even more starkly true today. Haiti’s trees are disappearing because they are the only source of cooking fuel that most Haitians can afford. The resulting erosion has turned most roads into successions of potholes that are full of dust in the dry season and mud in the rainy season. That dry-season day, we were driving deep into the dusty middle of the island to profile a veteran Peace Corps volunteer who was working in one of the poorest, barest areas.

  Our driver was not much of a talker and he had to stay focused on the constant, crazy dips in the road. Our only common language was French, which neither he nor I spoke very well and Rus spoke not at all.

  As we bumped silently along, my mind wandered to Mom and all the many reasons why I was not looking forward to seeing her in Haiti.

  All my life, I had idolized my mother as the strong, smart survivor, the Woman of Steel. But in 1987, I was in love and she was a walking reminder of where love can leave you: in her case, divorced twice and widowed once. She was also a walking reminder that, like her first two husbands, I had behaved badly and hurt someone. Behaved badly: I couldn’t even say that big bad word—adultery—the word I had hated since I was twelve, when my parents split up and I started going to a church youth group and decided my father was a sinful adulterer. Now I was the adulterer and for the first time in my life, I couldn’t look my mother in the eyes.

  Like the Haitian roads, these new feelings about her made me feel seasick and strange. Every time I saw her, I felt guilty for leaving Dick, for wounding him the way her husbands had wounded her. Dick and I had no children or property to bicker over. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t guilty. I slept with Rus the night before I left Dick and it wasn’t love at the time, it was lust; it was just the kind of amoral behavior—adultery, the scarlet “A”—that I had self-righteously railed against since my parents’ divorce. And the fact that I did it was what shocked me into finally moving out.

  And just as Mom had not deserved to be tossed aside by two husbands, Dick didn’t deserve to be tossed aside by me. On a good day, he was gentle and funny and his Carolina accent charmed me and everyone else. On a good night, he was long-limbed and surfer-blond and lazily sensual, just like when we met, two lucky, literature-loving American exchange students washed up on the shores of England in the dirt-cheap, Punk Rock seventies. But on most days and nights, he was un-gently, un-funnily depressed. He wanted to be a writer, but wasn’t writing. He was teaching a few community college classes, but didn’t like it much. He needed to get another job, but wasn’t getting one. He liked Seattle, but the weather was killing him. I was the breadwinner, but my salary was about what a rookie schoolteacher would make. I was running out of patience and sympathy. I was tired of feeling guilty for liking my job and my hyperactive, creative, risk-loving work friends. I was tired of coming home to gloom. I was tired of trying to cheerlead. I was tired of being tired. I was too young to be so tired. Rus made me feel like I would never ever feel tired again.

  For months after that night, I felt like the new Bad Girl who’d never been bad before and didn’t really know how to wear the label. The gossip at the TV station wasn’t about Rus—after all, he was single, good-looking and arrogant—it was about me: married, serious, hard-working me, the one you went to when you needed help with your script or your research. Not the one you went to for a one-night stand. I was the producer who made the anchors look smart. I was not some ditzy airhead, some wannabe reporter. I was brainy. I’d gone back east to college. How dare that Rus—with his one “s” and his python boots and his mustache and his show-offy, low-angle shots—how dare he break up her nice marriage to that cute teacher with the fetching Southern accent. What a jerk! Ann and Dick were our role models for young marriage! Now what will we do?

  The potholed road ground on and on. Rus cradled his camera. It was too dusty and bumpy to shoot much out the window.

  As the crow flies, we couldn’t have been far from the mountains of the D.R., where, three days earlier, we’d filmed volunteers helping local farmers plant trees in rich, black soil.

  And then we rounded a sharp bend and found ourselves passing through a town right on the D.R. border, where, even though we were not leaving the country, Haitian soldiers, teenagers with machine guns, stopped us.

  They asked for our passports. We handed them over. I looked around, trying to appear relaxed. There were just a few small buildings, tucked up against a grove of banana trees that had seen better days. A half-dozen bony dogs rested in the shade.

  Rus nudged me and pointed with his eyes back to the soldiers. They were examining our passports upside down. Then they closed them and motioned us and our driver out of the car and into a dark, concrete hut that appeared to be a jail cell. They shut and locked the door, which in retrospect should have scared us more than it did. But it all happened so quickly and non-aggressively, as if they were simply short on space and the jail cell doubled as a waiting room, that it seemed logical to comply.

  There were people squatting on the floor of the cell, eating mush from tin plates, looking like they’d been there a while. Through the bars of the door, we could see the soldiers showing our passports to another soldier sitting at a wooden table in the thin shade of the anemic banana trees. The prisoners, if they were prisoners, openly stared at us, but in a bored way, like this happened all the time.

  Standing there with Rus, I felt detached from the scene around us, as if I knew I should be afraid, but it was all so sudden and surreal that I wasn’t. And—and I knew this didn’t make sense to people, so I didn’t talk about it much—secretly, inside, I always felt so deeply good when I was with him that it cancelled out physical fear. I felt clean and honest. Baptized, in a way the teen youth minister might have understood. All my fakery had been washed away.

  And something important was happening with Rus, something that might have a future. We were doing creative work together: long, atmosphere-drenched pieces that were more like short films than news stories. For many months now, we had been spending most of our free time with each other too, making a satirical movie just for fun with our friends, drinking beer at the Virginia Inn on First Avenue, eating after midnight at Tai Tung’s or the 13 Coins, calling in to work in the morning to say we were at the “library” doing “research.” We both lived in studio apartments, his in Wallingford and mine on Queen Anne Hill, and we shuttled back and forth across the Aurora Bridge from one to the other, blasting X in his car and Patsy Cline in mine. I had a better bed and a crow’s-nest view of Lake Union; he had a VCR and the all-night Food Giant right next door.

  We held hands and kept our faces neutral. We tried to project patience.

  Then the officer at the table said a few words to the soldiers and handed our passports back. One of them unlocked the cell door, gave us our passports and waved us away.

  Back in the car, I felt a little shaky.

  I couldn’t believe my mom was coming to this country. I couldn’t believe Caroline was living here. Caroline was so young, and Mom was—not so young. And they didn’t have the magical protection of love, like I
did. The Fourth World, journalists had taken to calling Haiti, and I was beginning to understand why. If the green but poor D.R. was the third world, then this was a universe beyond: where dirt had gone to dust and green to brown and soldiers who couldn’t read carried guns as big as themselves.

  Looking back, there’s something else I wonder: exactly when had I started worrying about Mom and whether or not she could handle a challenge?

  One of my earliest memories is of our old pastel-green Pontiac sedan breaking down on a street in an unfamiliar neighborhood far from our own. It was just Mom and Lisa, then a baby, and me in the car. I don’t know where we’d been. But I remember Mom scooping up Lisa and taking my hand and walking until we found a bus stop, all the while talking about what an adventure we were having: my first bus ride! In my three-year-old mind, it was the ideal moment: the complete safety of Mom, the thrilling adventure of the bus.

  Our mother was the opposite of fear, the opposite of worry, the handler of everything. Two divorces didn’t change that. Only when her third husband Ron died of cancer two months after they got married did it become conceivable to worry about her. But we never doubted that she would bounce back. And she did. Mostly.

  Mostly. There were little things. But looking back, how to parse them? Women in their fifties love to blame forgetfulness on hormones: I know. Was Mom’s fifty-something forgetfulness—a birthday here, a name there—just that, hormones, menopause, or was it something else? And what about the post-divorce pluckiness of her forties: had it become a little edgier, a little feistier, or were we imagining it? She seemed—defensive. As if something was nagging at her. Something she couldn’t or wouldn’t name.

  At moments in my own life when it might have made more sense to babble in fear—like those moments in the Haitian border town jail—I often found myself mimicking her calm pluckiness. I knew I wasn’t as brave as she was, but after watching her do it, I knew how to pretend. It was a great gift.

  In 1987, it was still way too soon to believe that she might not be able to keep it up forever.

  A few towns down the road from the border, we found Chris, the Peace Corps volunteer, in a hut with a woman whose leg had been badly burned in a cooking fire. Chris explained to us that she had treated the wound in the traditional Haitian way, basting it with bluing and raw egg, and it had become inflamed and possibly infected. He was soothing her in Kreyol and translating for a newly arrived doctor from Doctors Without Borders. Rus started shooting. I tried to keep the videotape deck—still cumbersomely attached by a long cable to the camera in those primitive video days—out of the dust. Chris had been in the Peace Corps for almost two years and it was clear that the woman with the burn knew him as a trusted friend, not one of the awkward outsiders the rest of us so clearly were.

  Later, Chris took us to his favorite viewpoint, where he went when he needed to take a few deep breaths. Along the way, he talked about being a tall, red-headed, freckled Blanc, about standing out so much that eventually you don’t stand out, you’re just another quirk in the local landscape, like a tree that’s been split in two by lightning. The fourth world.

  The next day, we went to the Peace Corps’ office in Port-au-Prince to meet Caroline. At first the office seemed empty, so I ducked into a bathroom while Rus waited. When I came out, I saw her over his shoulder, coming towards us down the dark hallway, the first time I’d seen her in seven months, her short braids swinging, her face lighting up at the sight of us. She looked like a younger, more wholesome version of myself. Part of me longed to be her: uncorrupted, idealistic, just starting out.

  Rus told me later he saw Caroline before I came out of the bathroom and thought for a disoriented moment that she was me. He had not met her before. Both of us resembled our mom and all her tough Finnish ancestors: olive-skinned, blue-eyed, and strong-limbed. She and Mom had the same dark, straight hair. Mine was sandy. In a Bergman movie, we would be cast as the maids and cooks to the blonde stars.

  What do sisters say when they haven’t seen each other for a long time? Nothing at first: you smile, laugh, embrace; in a split-second, you take in the changes—skin very brown and shiny in this heat, the female Peace Corps volunteer’s de facto uniform of a modest top and loose skirt and running shoes—and you exult in the familiar: the sameness of the smile, the goofy little-girl laugh, the voice pitched, like Mom’s, a good couple of octaves higher than my own. The no-nonsense hug of a youngest child who was over-held and over-hugged and treated like a new toy for four years by five older siblings, then suddenly dropped off a year early up at the Catholic school’s all-day kindergarten when Mom and Dad got divorced and Mom became a full-time student and we big brothers and sisters became mini-parents mired in varying stages of adolescence.

  “And of course this is Rus. And Rus, this is Caroline. I’m so happy you’re finally meeting.”

  They did the awkward, first-meeting half-hug, all of us laughing to break the ice and then agreeing, yes, we’d better go get Mom at the airport.

  I confessed to Caroline right away that I’d been brooding about Mom.

  “Really?” she said. “Wow. That really surprises me. My Peace Corps friends are awed that Mom is visiting. Awed. They all have parents who are too worried about AIDS and the Tonton Macoutes to come visit and, you know, they don’t like seeing poor people when they go to Mexico, so God knows they can’t handle Haiti.”

  We followed her out of the office and across the narrow walkway that connected the ramshackle Peace Corps building, which was built out from the side of a steep hill, to the street.

  “Besides,” Caroline continued, “maybe this is hard for you to believe since you just turned THIRTY, but I’m still young enough to want a visit from Mom!” She clapped a platter-sized straw hat on her head.

  “But I don’t know if she’s even thought about what she’s getting into,” I said, fumbling in my purse for my sunglasses. “She’s been talking like it’s going to be some big vacation, like the two of you are going to hang around a pool.”

  Caroline laughed. “Oh for God’s sake, Ann, she’s a teacher at a public high school in a big city. She has to face down 150 surly hormone cases a day. As she likes to say, she is a tough cookie! Is this your car? Nice!”

  We waited while Rus fished out the keys.

  “Speaking of cookies,” Caroline continued, “I really hope she brought me some. I’ve been weirdly craving those Finnish Christmas ones with the chopped almonds, or Snickerdoodles, or even just some M&Ms … I told her anything that doesn’t melt too fast would be great.”

  Rus listened with curiosity. He did not have much family. His parents split up after his only brother died at age nine during a botched operation to close a hole in his heart. Rus was seven at the time, with one older half-sister who was already out of the house. He grew up spending hours and hours alone. I grew up the third of six children, fantasizing about what it would be like to have privacy.

  “We really should get going to the airport,” he said, unlocking the doors.

  “You sit in front and help Rus navigate.” I climbed into the back seat. “Cookies. You are a dreamer. Didn’t Mom have to get up in the middle of the night, Seattle time, to make her flight? And I think she had to turn in her quarter grades, I don’t know, yesterday.”

  “She’ll bring me something. I’m her baby, right?”

  I reminded Caroline that Mom had grandchildren now. That the one thing she could count on her remembering to bring would be plenty of grandkid photos.

  Caroline claimed she couldn’t wait to hear all about our little niece and nephews.

  “I know I must sound so cranky, Caroline,” I said, as Rus inched out onto the main road. “It’s just been weird with Mom lately. She doesn’t listen. Or you think she’s listening, but then she doesn’t remember a thing.” I tried to explain how odd it had been talking to Mom about Haiti, how she seemed only barely to compute that I would be there too. With Rus. For work. How it was as if I was talking about a trip that had no
thing to do with hers.

  “You’ll tell her something important—like, guess what, Mom, the news director says Rus and I can go to the D.R. and Haiti if we can get Pan Am to comp our airfare—and she’ll say, ‘Oh, great,’ and then she’ll just go off on some completely inane tangent about school or tennis or the grandkids.”

  Caroline was looking at me intently, her chin on the back of her seat, like I was speaking Kreyol or French and she was translating in her head as I talked.

  “But that’s how Mom is,” she said. “She’s always thinking about ten things at once.”

  “I know.” Over Caroline’s shoulder, I saw a man cross the street with a bird cage full of canaries balanced on his Panama hat. “But I guess I’m just worried she’ll forget where she is, she’ll forget to look out the window and see Haiti or ask you any questions about Haiti, because she’ll be too busy talking about her flight or her last-minute packing or something.”

  I realized I couldn’t even get near what was really bothering me: that Mom, through no fault of her own, made me feel like a bad girl instead of the joyously in-love girl I wanted to be every waking minute of the day—and I didn’t know how to fix that. And I couldn’t expect my youngest sister to fix it for me.

  “You forget I’ve spent the last five summers living with Mom,” Caroline said. “I’m used to her. It’s going to be OK.” She turned around. “Oh my God, Rus, turn here! Sorry!”

  The man with the canaries danced to one side to avoid colliding with us and then danced again around a woman with a baby on one hip, her other arm reaching up to steady the dozen or so bolts of cloth piled high on her head.

  I wanted to be in the present, in Haiti, with Caroline, with Rus. I wanted to see, hear, smell, taste the present. Mom was not the present.

  We pulled up to the airport. Caroline and I went in and we spotted her right away, coming through the swinging doors, pushing her bags on a trolley. Right into the middle of my romantic fantasy. Right here, right now, in my treasured present, looking sweaty and a little bedraggled but in great spirits, like she’d been gardening all morning and just laid down her tools for a lunch break. When she saw us, her knockout, I-love-you smile lit up her face and her arms opened and Caroline dove right into that hug, that hug I miss so much, these twenty-three years later, that I smell and feel it in my dreams.