Her Beautiful Brain Read online

  One night, shortly after I left Dick, I was staying at my Dad’s house while he and my stepmom were out of town and I started crying about what I’d done—how I’d ended something, killed something that had started so sweetly. I couldn’t stop. Really couldn’t stop. For hours. I finally called Mom. I don’t know what time it was. I just know that she got out of bed, threw on some clothes, drove the two miles to Dad’s and wrapped me in her hug and stroked my hair like I was still her little girl until, finally, I could stop. Even though I was a bad girl. Even though the next day and every day since, I still couldn’t look her in the eye.

  Rus took her bags and we headed to the car. Sure enough, she was full of stories about her flight: which friend gave her a ride to the airport; how hard it was to decide which and how many skirts and shirts to pack; how she was glad Caroline had advised us not to wear shorts, since she was feeling a little out of shape. She had M&Ms for all of us.

  “Of course I brought lots of photos, too, but those can wait!” she said.

  I watched out the window as we drove through what I now knew were the streets surrounding the Iron Market, Port-au-Prince’s vast bazaar, where you could buy a cup of rice or a side of beef, a plastic bowl or a nesting set of ten, a giant wooden spoon, fruits that looked like stars. And peanuts, everywhere peanuts roasting over tiny fires.

  At the Hotel Montana, the first thing Mom did was turn on the faucet and fill and drink a large glass of water before anyone could stop her.

  “Mom, are you kidding? Did you really just do that? We’re in Haiti!”

  She looked at the glass like it had just appeared in her hand.

  “Remember how I was telling you how careful you have to be? You can’t drink the water here, not in this hotel, not anywhere!”

  “Well, Ms. Smartypants, if I get sick I get sick!” She laughed and set the glass down. “Too late now!”

  She did not get sick. Which was maddening, since I’d already flamed out gastro-intestinally speaking in the D.R., after being as careful as I knew how, and Caroline’s gut still wasn’t behaving after six months in Haiti. Mom was indeed a tough cookie. Maybe it was her miner’s daughter upbringing in Butte, Montana, her childhood spent drinking the water that bubbled up from under the copper deposits.

  Caroline had drawn a luckier Peace Corps card than Chris, the volunteer we’d visited the day before. She was assigned to verdant Cap Rouge, perched on a cliff above the resort town of Jacmel on Haiti’s southern coast. Because tourists went to Jacmel, there was a passable highway. The plan was to spend the night at the Stride Rite apartment, then set out the next morning in our rented Montero.

  The next day, on the drive to Jacmel, we saw the Haiti that tourists and artists come to see: the sweeping red cliffs and valleys and distant views of the sea. There were no potholes; there were no teen soldiers. As we approached Jacmel, we saw vendors on the side of the road, selling oil paintings and gourds and soft drinks. Mom was charmed. She snapped photos. She paid attention as Caroline pointed out the cliff of Cap Rouge, where she lived in a house far too tiny to accommodate all of us and where we would go tomorrow for the day.

  “It doesn’t look far, but it’ll take at least an hour,” Caroline said. “The road is so steep you have to do it all in low gear. And you can’t drive it, period, in the rainy season. But isn’t it beautiful?”

  We agreed that it was. And looking up at Cap Rouge, I was amazed that Caroline, barely twenty-two and fresh out of college, was doing this: living on a cliff in a Haitian village, one of two volunteers, the only two Blancs in the area. Speaking Kreyol with ease. Telling us about the preventive health care program she was helping to start. Such a very short time ago, I had been in college and she had been sending me color-crayoned pictures of our family and our house in Seattle. Then she’d become our token preppie, the only one of the six of us to go to a fancy private high school, and I’d worried she’d wind up with some Wall Street guy, living a Ralph Lauren kind of life. But no, here she was in her running shoes and peasant skirt, pointing out the sights in Haiti, talking to the roadside vendors in Kreyol.

  It was Easter season and Jacmel was busy. Caroline had booked a room at a bed-and-breakfast in town for herself and Mom and a room at a hotel on a tiny cove outside of town for Rus and me. We dropped them off and doubled back to the Hotel Cyvadier.

  If the Montana was the Sleeping Beauty Castle of Haiti’s hotels, then the Cyvadier was like the funny fairy godmothers’ quirky cottage. The manager, a French woman, was long-haired and plump and looked like she’d be comfortable mixing a potion or chanting a spell. Her one employee, the bellhop/waiter/bartender who took us to our bougainvillea-shaded room and brought us cold beers, insisted his name was “Je Veux.”

  “I want,” he said. “Just say, ‘Je Veux,’ and I will be there.”

  “I want the beach,” Rus said.

  The path to the Cyvadier’s beach was like a hand-made shore trail back home: first, the dirt track through a shady thicket, then the bleached, battered staircase, then the tangle of driftwood and rocks. But it was hot, beautifully hot, and the sand was as fine as sugar and the water silky and warm. We were the only Blancs in the cove. Down the beach, we could see some boys hammering and painting away on what looked to us like the wreckage of a boat. They waved cheerfully when they saw us and we waved back.

  We both ran in, plunged under the waves and came up in the waist-high surf.

  “Back in a minute,” I said. “I can’t resist.”

  Rus had not grown up swimming and he didn’t like deep water, but I knew he liked to watch me swim. I dove under and swam hard out into the middle of the bay. It felt so good after days in jeeps and planes and cars, days of being dusty, sweaty, alert, polite. Now it was just us two in our own private cove. I flipped over on my back for a few minutes, letting the sun bake my face. Then I swam back towards Rus, dipping under water for the last few strokes and coming up right in front of him.

  Standing in the lapping waves of the Cyvadier’s cove, we kissed for a long time. And then Rus suddenly went all shy and awkward. He pulled back to look at me, keeping his hands on my waist. His sexy, deep-set, caramel eyes had a newly hesitant look. I thought he was getting nervous about being in the water for so long. Or maybe he was bothered by the boys down the beach who were whistling and catcalling at us in a harmless, joking way.

  But no, he was asking me to marry him. And I was saying yes.

  “After all, only a fool would propose on April Fool’s Day and not mean it,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, yes, yes. Je veux.”

  Yes, je veux, even though I had no idea what it would mean or how it would all unfold. But at that moment in Haiti, there wasn’t an iota of No or Maybe or Let’s think about it in me.

  We kissed some more and found ourselves laughing because it all felt so absurdly good.

  We still had two hours until dinner and there were cold beers in a bucket in our room. As we peeled off our swimsuits, Rus told me he’d thought of proposing one night at the D.R., but was glad he’d waited, especially since I ate something bad that night and did a lot of throwing up. I tossed back the sheets and said thank God he hadn’t on that night and the Cyvadier was perfect, being in this bed all salty and sandy and clinking our Prestige beer bottles was perfect. We would always remember this: saying yes, starting out together, in Haiti.

  On the drive back into town to meet Mom and Caroline and Caroline’s Peace Corps colleague Peter for dinner, I was brimming, full, flooded with love for Rus and Caroline and, yes, Mom and oh yeah, Peter, who I hadn’t met yet, and all of humankind. It was April first. Rus and I had a whole future ahead of us. Everything was beautiful. Haiti was beautiful.

  But twenty-three years later, I can see some of what I couldn’t see at that moment on April Fool’s Day, 1987. I can see my mother, a woman closer in age to me now than me then, so excited about trading in her everyday worries for the thrill of getting on a plane and flying to a part of the world she h
ad never visited, where not one but two grown daughters would be waiting for her, two of her six children. Her children were now all college graduates, every one of them, and she would brag about it more if it just didn’t sound so obnoxious. Six children launched! Four married, well, three now, and three grandchildren already. She’d been raising children since she was twenty years old and more than half that time, she’d been doing it alone. She deserved this trip and she intended to enjoy it. So what if she’d have to do some catching up on paper grading when she got home. So what if her penny-pinching ex-husbands disapproved. Think of what they missed by not taking trips like this to see their kids. And those nagging fears about her brain misfiring, about reaching for a word in front of the classroom and coming up blank: well, wouldn’t a complete change of pace be just the thing?

  And then there was Caroline. Floating along like I was on that blissful afternoon made me just as unable to fathom the tremendously daring cliff dive she had just made from college to Haiti. I thought I understood. But really I was just seeing her in relation to me and to Rus. I was proud to be showing them off to each other: my new boyfriend, the hotshot cameraman, and my cool little sister, the Peace Corps volunteer. I wasn’t thinking about what it must have meant to her to have her mom and her big sister visiting her in this, her first seriously responsible gig as an adult, a gig she had barely begun and which she knew could turn out to be far more difficult and even dangerous than she had told any of us. And yet, because it meant I could come see her, she was allowing me to turn it into a TV news story, of all things. She would be showing us her world. She would no longer be the baby of the family. And she had promised herself she would be very mature about meeting the new boyfriend, even though she missed Dick.

  We were gathering at the Hotel Jacmelienne, a white-pillared, aging doyenne of a place that seemed, in my awash-with-love mode, perfect for the occasion, even though, in the brief tropical twilight, its narrow, open-air bar was already as dark as a movie theatre just before the film begins.

  Caroline introduced us to Peter, the only other Peace Corps volunteer in the Jacmel area, who had been there a little longer than she had. We sat down, our backs to the ocean, facing Mom, Peter, and Caroline across a tiny table, our eyes adjusting clumsily to the low light. Peter, skinny and blond, was only a few years older than Caroline and she had told us he was looking forward to a family kind of an evening, even if it wasn’t his family.

  And then I couldn’t wait another minute.

  “Well, I have some big news. Rus and I are engaged! As of about two hours ago!”

  There were a few strange seconds of silence. Then exclamations and kisses from Mom, handshakes and congratulations from Peter.

  And then Caroline began to cry.

  Caroline, who’d whispered to me just that morning how much she liked Rus. Caroline, who I had counted on to be my ally if Mom flipped out about our engagement.

  “I’m so, so sorry,” she said. “I really am happy for you guys. It’s just that—well you know I liked Dick too and it’s weird to think he’s just gone and—” She stopped and dabbed her eyes with her napkin and laughed a little in the middle of crying. “—And I really like you, Rus, I do, and I can see how happy you guys are, but I guess I need to get used to all this.”

  Seeing Caroline cry made me cry. We hugged and cried together. I don’t remember what Rus and Peter did. But Mom took action.

  “Well, I think what we need is some champagne!” she said, and she stood up and headed into the shadowy depths of the bar. “My treat. I insist.”

  “Caroline,” I said. “I feel so incredibly stupid. I hadn’t even thought about what this would be like for you. I am so sorry.”

  “No, really, it’s OK. You can’t exactly keep news like that to yourself, can you? It’s just that feeling—when you’re prepared for all kinds of stuff but not for the thing that actually happens, you know?”

  Meanwhile, Rus was explaining to Peter about our history and my divorce and how Caroline had still been a kid when Dick and I got together, which I hadn’t really thought about until I heard him say it.

  Quite a few minutes later, Mom and a waiter returned with a dusty bottle of champagne and glasses. “To Ann and Rus,” she toasted. “Long life and happiness and many children!”

  We dried our tears and laughed and drank, and drank some more. I felt so happy that she was happy for us. Of course she wanted me to be in love. Of course she understood everything and didn’t think I was awful. What a fool I’d been. What a self-centered idiot.

  Warmed by the champagne, Caroline and Peter and Rus and I began to talk about Haiti, politics, the Peace Corps. The sky was utterly black now and we huddled around the one candle on our table. I told them about the soldiers who stopped us at the D.R. border. They told us about rumors of Duvalierists planning a coup and Tonton Macoutes still at large, but they chose their words carefully, explaining that it was important to say things like, “followers of the former leader,” so that nothing would leap out of our English conversation and catch the attention of the people around us. I had never been anywhere as volatile as Haiti and, over champagne in a bar in a tourist town, it was exotic and exciting, not frightening.

  When our food finally arrived—crispy fish and fried bananas and sweet potatoes—we all ate and talked at the same time. Except for Mom, who wasn’t eating or talking much at all, and her face was outside the circle of candlelight.

  Looking back on that night, I can imagine her feeling, at first, nothing but happy for Rus and me—with maybe a little wistfulness about Dick—happy to be in Haiti, happy to be with Caroline, happy to be drinking champagne. But I can also imagine that she must have begun to feel very tired. She had gone from school one day to Haiti the next. Maybe she’d had another one of those moments in front of the class, when Shakespeare or Faulkner, her old friends, eluded her and her students shifted in their seats and exchanged knowing looks with each other. Maybe she’d had a moment with Dad, with him wondering aloud how she could afford such a trip or whether Caroline needed that kind of coddling. Maybe her Northern brain and body were saturated, overloaded, with the heat and color and noises and smells of Haiti. Maybe she hadn’t eaten enough before we started drinking. None of us had, but we were all younger and not so tired.

  After a while she leaned in and tried to say something and someone, it could have been any one of us, corrected her.

  “Please don’t patronize me.” Her voice was suddenly a little too teacher-loud.

  “Mom—” Caroline began.

  “Let me TALK. Please.”

  Suddenly we were all on high alert.

  “We’re listening,” I said.

  “I just wish I knew what you all were talking about.” Her volume was still uncomfortably high. “I haven’t had time to study up on Haiti. But no one’s even given me a chance to ask a question!” She laughed a little but it didn’t sound right.

  “Mom,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, me too. I guess I’m just a little tired, and that’s no crime, is it?”

  “Of course not,” Caroline said.

  “I must seem pretty dull to all of you.”

  “Mom, what are you talking about?” I leaned in towards her, trying to keep my voice low, hoping she’d follow suit.

  “I guess I’m talking about feeling … well, to be frank, feeling ignored!” That odd laugh again.

  “Mom, we didn’t mean to ignore you. Rus and I don’t know anything about Haiti either and we figured we could learn a few things from Caroline and Peter.”

  “Fine. Don’t let me stop you.”

  “Mom, c’mon,” Caroline tried. “Mom, please, we don’t think—”

  “Maybe I’ll just head back to the room,” she said, standing up, looking at me. “I’m happy for you, honey, I really am. Maybe we can have a real conversation about your plans when we get back to Seattle.”

  My face went red-hot. Mom never talked to me this way. She sounded like some other mom
, someone else’s bitter, sarcastic mom. Not the mom I knew. I could feel heads turning, eyes on us.

  “Arlene,” Rus said. “I’m sorry, I—we—you’re right, we were being rude. I’m really sorry. Let’s sit down and finish our meal.”

  “Finish our meal! I hardly think so. You eat all you want. I’ll wait outside.” She grabbed her purse and headed out the door.

  “Mom, please,” Caroline called as she followed her out of the bar. “What are you doing?”

  Rus and Peter stood up and started pulling out American dollars and piling them on the table.

  Outside, Mom was standing unnaturally still and staring into the darkness, away from us. She looked exhausted. She looked older than I’d ever seen her look: older than her age, instead of younger. Her spine was as straight as it always was but her face sagged.

  Peter said good-night, quickly.

  She turned to him like she wasn’t quite sure who he was. “Good night,” she said. Then she turned back to the three of us.

  “Mom—” I began.

  “Don’t. Don’t say anything more, please. I’m just so damned tired. And I’m tired of being patronized. By all you young people who think you’ve got it all figured out!”

  Rus was shepherding us down the street, towards Mom and Caroline’s bed and breakfast. He looked bewildered and a little like he wanted to flee.

  We stood outside their door and Mom continued to rant about being tired and being patronized and Caroline and I continued to plead. Finally, Mom began to sob. She let Caroline hold her. We watched as the tears helped her calm down and then Caroline slowly led her inside, motioning us to follow and wait outside the room.