Crossing the River (32 page)

44
44

The Long Stutter of Good-Byes
The Long Stutter of Good-Byes

L
EAVING WAS EXPENSIVE
. First there were the parties, then the thank-you presents, then finally the eight hundred
reais
for each of us at the airport for overstaying our visas.

Peter, Molly, Skyler, and I sat around the dinner table one night and debated whether to throw a going-away party.

“Well, Lu's already talking about having a soccer-team party at Janela's. He's already figured out how much beer and
cachaça I
should buy,” Peter laughed. “But another idea would be to have a cocktail party,” he suggested. “We could say this is how we do it, in our country.”

“No music, no dancing,” I said, thinking of what we do at home.

“And it ends,” Molly added.

“Yes, it ends. Talk for a few hours, just talk, then it's over,” Peter said soberly.

“A little to eat, but not much, and a little to drink, but not so much that you can't talk or stand,” I chimed in.

“Could be good,” Peter concluded.

“They'll hate it,” the kids said. We laughed in agreement.

After mulling it over, we decided to go ahead, to invite 175 of our best friends to a final bash at the tennis club.

Some might think Northeastern Brazilians are slackers when it comes to work, but when it comes to organizing a party, they are on it. Half the fun, I realized, was the planning. I visited Shirley and Robson at their beverage store down in the
baixa
almost every day for a week. Shirley helped me calculate quantity, told me whom to contact for coolers and ice, arranged for all the drinks to be delivered two days ahead of time.

When I started handing around invitations at capoeira, Bentinho offered to hold a
roda
at the party. Peter consulted with Eduardo, the
president of the tennis club, to see if we could use the pool and the
futsal
court. Everyone was excited.

A friend of Skyler's, Francisco, asked if he could be our DJ. I was dubious. A thirteen-year-old DJ? But we said we'd try him out.

I handed Skyler's classmate Mateus an invitation and realized, as his face lit up, that instead of saying, “You need to present this invitation to enter,” I'd just said, “There will be presents at the entrance.” Oh well.

By the time we'd rented the club; hired five servers, a sound system with disco lights, and Francisco as DJ; ordered a thousand savories and five hundred sweets; bought ten cases of beer and seventeen cases of soda pop; and printed out invitations and photos of our friends for a display, we'd spent $2,000, more than we'd ever spent for a party.

But what a party.

It started at four on a Sunday afternoon with small-court soccer on a cracked cement court. The gals watched, chattering excitedly. The guys subbed in and out, even Robson and Zeca.

“When I got my nose broken playing soccer, I quit,” Zeca had told us when we first met. But not surprisingly, he hadn't forgotten how to play.

The
capoeiristas
were in there, deftly weaving with the ball, and Victor and his older brother Italo and his friends and of course Peter and Skyler. Then the party moved on to a treasure hunt we'd set up ranging all over the top of the ridge, then an exhibition
roda, forró
dancing for young and old, and finally lots of eating and drinking until it was dark outside and people stumbled out the door seven hours later.

As the last people left, Skyler and I stood with Zeca in the vestibule.

“No, but you know, I jus remember,” Zeca was saying, his speech a little slurry and his eyes beginning to droop, “I was thinking, it was you and Peter. You remember the time we were at the
pousada
and you were telling me I should do now what I want, that I can do it if I want it enough? I needed someone to tell me that. So now I am going to open this English school, and I am so happy. I have no money in the bank; I can't buy underwear, but it's okay.”

“Yeah, who needs underwear?” I said. “You can set a new trend.”

“Yah, in ten years, no one will be wearing it anyway.” He smiled, turning to Skyler. “Do you wear underwear?”

The next day, Francisco, our DJ, appeared in our garden room, come to collect his payment. He'd done a great job choosing music and keeping it moving. His eyes widened at the sight of the bills. He confided quietly that this was the first time he'd ever been paid. We'd launched a career, and sure enough, I now follow it weekly on Facebook.

Saying good-bye felt like one long stutter.

Only when we began to pull the duffel bags out from under our beds did our imminent departure begin to seem real.

“This is our last Tuesday in Brazil,” Skyler said with wonder.

How strange. You create a whole life, and then it evaporates, as though you'd just conjured up a town, full of people and houses, a river and a ridge, ferry boats and horse carts, school kids in uniform,
capoeiristas
and
futebol
players, coconut palms and mango trees, buzzards and egrets,
cachaça
and beer, holidays with parades and bouncing crowds behind
frevo
bands and
equip som
cars, people getting drunk, young men getting shot and friends going to prison.

Before leaving, Molly wrote a note to each of her friends. To Karol she wrote,
I know this is not the end of our life together. You will visit me, and I will return to Brazil. We will be friends always. You were like a sister to me this year, Karol. I don't know how we did it, but we always talked even when I couldn't speak Portuguese . . .

Skyler exclaimed, “I don't know if I want to leave now. We might never come back. Are we going to come back?”

“Maybe we could come back in three years for the World Cup,” Peter threw out. We all seemed to breathe a sigh of relief at the suggestion, relief at not having to confront a leave-taking that was suddenly feeling so final.

“Our struggles make me proud,” Molly said as we walked back up the ridge one night. “Like, through our struggles, we've really dug ourselves a place here, each of us.”

45
45

Crossing the River
Crossing the River

T
HE FLEET OF LADIES
was lined up on the shore—
Renata
,
Valeria
,
Liziane
,
Elizabeth
,
Vitoria
. I stood on the grass bank, sucking a stream of cold sweet juice out of a green coconut, and surveyed these brightly striped
lanchas
. It was still unclear to me how anyone knew which ones were going where and when, just as I could never figure out where to catch the bus when there were no clues, like signs or benches.

“
Qual está para Carrapichu?
” I asked the man lazily stirring ropes in the water.

He pointed to
Vitoria
, a slim white boat with splashy stripes of red, yellow, and green. It would be the next to head to Carrapichu, the mound of town across the river that I'd chosen for my weekly getaway.

I bounced up the gangplank and boarded. I liked being on the water and had decided I was going to take advantage of these floating ladies being so convenient in my last few months in Penedo. I was also running an experiment: Could I break out of my everything-must-have-a-purpose, must-lead-to-an-achievement pattern and give myself time just to think random, free-floating, non-pragmatic thoughts? This was not something I'd given myself time to do in my adult, working-mom life. Besides, I had a decision to make. I designated Thursday mornings.

I loved that twenty-minute trip—the initial cross to the island, jockeying for position with the car ferry, then hugging the island's far shore to sneak upriver through the currentless eddies, and the final cross to the other side with the blast of welcome breeze through the
lancha
's open windows. Slowing as we neared the shore, the captain killed the engine, and the little boat nuzzled up onto the sand.

Carrapichu was a busy place. Fully clothed women in floppy sun hats sat semisubmerged in the water, beating laundry on flat rocks; others
cleaned fish. Clutches of glistening boys dove off rounded boulders, shooting sprays of shining water. Men backed their motorcycles into the shallows for a wash or stood on carts like Roman charioteers, urging their horses into the river. After their bath, the unhooked horse and rider went for a friendly swim. Then the dripping horse cantered out of the water, jubilant, electrified, exuding virility, its rider glued to its bare back. I envied the ease and companionship these horses and their riders seemed to feel.

My routine was to cross the road to the Pousada Terrazo and retreat into its quiet courtyard. There I sat under the potted palms, next to the pile of construction scrap and a murky goldfish pond, and helped myself to a thermos of dark, sweet
cafezinho.
I opened my newly purchased notebook, the one with the word
Happy
, in English, printed on the front. Now for the decision: to move forward with my dance company, i.e., stick to my old life, or chuck it and jump. It had taken me eight months to be able to even confront the question.

I'd spent twenty years of my life the American way, making my job my life—early mornings, nights, weekends. At least, that seemed to be the way for ambitious, career-oriented Americans on the track to “success.” I had loved teaching dance and running the dance program at the University of Montana: the openness of new students, the stimulation of old ones who'd become friends, the camaraderie of shared passions with colleagues, the exhilaration of putting on dance performances. But it was hard, too, especially when Peter and I became parents.

When Molly was born, we split the days. I stayed home with her in the morning, working of course, and Peter stayed with her in the afternoons. We thought we'd figured it out. But it only took watching the top of her little blond head bobbing along inside the picket fence, wailing, “Mommy, Mommy!” as I drove away, to make me dissolve. Ten minutes later, I'd stand in front of my class, trying to hold myself together.

Then Skyler was born. At first, it was great. I had a sabbatical. We carted our five-week-old little boy and Molly, now three and a half,
off for the five-month stint in Spain. I rented the dance studio and made a bed for Skyler on the floor, as I had for Molly in studios at home. My muses. But when the sabbatical ended and we returned home, our earlier system didn't work so well. Molly, a highly social being, was enrolled in preschool in the mornings, while I was home with Skyler. By the time I got home at night, she was often asleep. I'd barely seen her.

I started the long process of divesting. That was hard, too. The dance program felt like my other baby. But by the time I could apply for a second sabbatical, I'd managed to hand over the helm and was lobbying for a teaching schedule that would free me up in the afternoons—free me up to work, but at home. That sabbatical felt like a reprieve from a situation I knew in my heart wasn't working.

We headed to Mozambique. This time, when we returned to the States, I was determined to learn how to say no: no to 7:00
AM
faculty meetings, no to more university committees, no to students wanting me to figure out their schedules and proofread their papers. My student evaluations went down.
Ms. Ragsdale seems distant
, they said; they didn't understand that my veins had run dry.

A friend had suggested I look at the world in terms of “breathers” and “suckers,” that I look at situations and people and assess whether they are breathing life into me or sucking it out. After twenty years and the addition of two children and a dance company, my job at the university was falling hard into the sucker category. It was, however, our family's primary means of support.

I asked Peter for a meeting on “the rock,” the rock by the creek across from our house—neutral ground, a calm setting. I wanted to quit.

“Okay,” he said.

Just like that? Okay? But
how
, I wanted to know. How were we going to make it work—financially? He'd been freelancing for the last twenty years. So for him,
somehow
was a sufficient answer. For me, it was unnerving. We had a piece of land we could sell. The neighboring plot had sold for a lot. Maybe we could sell ours and buy a rental for some regular monthly income.

Okay, I'll make the jump.
I quit.

Three years later, sitting between the construction scrap and mouthing goldfish, sweating over a
cafezinho
, I decided it was time to assess. How was I doing?

I watched the water hyacinths float down this slow, winding Brazilian river, the horses and their young men, the laughing women, and a brightly striped
lancha
swinging out into the current. I thought about Molly and Skyler, sitting at desks in a Portuguese-speaking classroom, now able to understand almost everything. I saw Molly's brilliant smile as she posed for photographs with her Brazilian friends and heard Skyler's rapid-fire voice debating in Portuguese with his. I remembered Molly performing with the Ballet Alagoas, tall, blond, and elegant, and Skyler, barefoot, deftly zigzagging with a soccer ball through his black-haired friends down a cobblestone street. I thought about how the capoeira men hadn't blinked when this fifty-two-year-old foreign woman and her slight blond boy wanted to join them, how they'd gently guided me into the
roda
. I heard the phone ring as Lu called Peter for another daily consultation about how to get Junior out of jail and sensed Peter's pleasure at being asked to travel with the team. I remembered Mario's smiling, crinkled eyes, a soccer ball cradled between hip and elbow, as he gazed with pleasure at Molly and Skyler running hard, sneakers squeaking, on the
futsal
court. I saw Aniete and Katia shaking their heads, saying, “
Que pena
,” sad and disbelieving that we were actually going home.

I pictured Robson flapping his saloon-door fingers, understanding nothing as we chatted in English but wanting to understand, wanting to engage.

I heard Giovanni, head thrown back, mouth wide in a huge laugh, responding to another of my “But why can't Brazilians . . . ?” in our ongoing debate about the powerlessness of the little man.

And Zeca.

Zeca picking us up, innumerable times, in the little black Fiat. Zeca knocking on the door for Skyler, to take him out for a guys-eating-meat lunch. Zeca putting bait on our hooks at his family fishpond. Zeca telling us he had never wanted to be a lawyer, but he needed to take care of his new nephew. Zeca, fortified by our encouragement, announcing he was going to open an English-language school.

I thought of all these people and this place that were now part of my life and Molly's and Skyler's and Peter's.

So what about the dance company? I'd come to Carrapichu to decide. The fact was, I loved to dance, but there were lots of other things I loved, too. Mostly it wasn't in my personality to make drastic changes. I was more of a “tweaker.” So I decided to tweak, to downsize. I'd give it two years and then see—keep my eye on the “breathers” and “suckers” gauge.

But, too, I was going to remember to lie in a hammock, to sit at the “back window,” to invite friends over on a Sunday for
feijoada
. I was going to find a physical community to replace my capoeira community. And mostly, I was going to remember with pride how my children staunchly hung on—through hours of incoherent Portuguese, the lines of girls and young men wanting to make out, and the onslaught of knockers at the door—and how my husband stood by my desire to raise “global children,” despite his doubts about the size of the town and the emotional challenges.

And lastly, I was going to remember “balance” and “joy,” and I was going to laugh.