Home Leave: A Novel (18 page)

“Why don’t we take a stroll?” I finally suggested, once her breath had evened out. It sounded corny, even to me. But she nodded. We skirted the restaurant and walked down the path to the bay, lit now by flaming torches. There were honeymooners and swooning gay couples; I hoped it didn’t look like Leah was my underage girlfriend. I glanced at her. Her face was, once again, set, stony, numb: all evidence of the molten emotion from the gym vanished. “You’ve got to go easy on yourself, Leah,” I finally said. “Don’t go overboard.”

She nodded.

“You want to sit?”

She shrugged. We sat. The sand was surprisingly cold.

“I couldn’t stay there,” she finally said.

“Where?”

“At that table. With Mom and Mr. Pinker. And you just sitting there, like, I don’t know, some sad old dog.”

I had never felt like hitting my daughters, but at Leah’s words, I had to struggle not to smack her.

“Some sad old dog,” I said, my voice strange and shaking.

“Yeah. Just letting her go for it. Just letting this ugly, stupid British dude flirt with her the whole night, while you order more rice. Disgusting. That’s why I left. That’s why I went for a run. To try to get all of you guys out of my mind.”

“You have no idea what it’s like,” I said. “You are so spoiled.” As the words came out, I was already willing them back.

“Screw you,” she said, and glared at the ocean like she hated it, too.

She had never come close to cursing at me before now, and I was overwhelmed by the injustice of it. I didn’t trust myself to speak. I stood instead and, at her unrepentant silence, walked away and left her there. Senseless, I knew: not good parenting. What had been the point of the entire exercise? To go find her, remove her from danger, and then leave her there, alone, on the beach? But I was angry. I never got angry, and I was angry. I marched up the path back to the hotel. I looked back and saw Leah sitting there, a sad little statue. Obscurely, Bernard’s words comforted me, and I believed them, in that second, maybe because it was convenient: kids know what’s good for them. I should have left her in the gym in the first place, I thought. Let her run it out.

I went to the restaurant. Elise and Bernard were still sitting there, like idiots, listening to a crappy Filipino band play “Rockin’ around the Christmas Tree.” I strode over to them.

“Everything okay, Chris?” Bernard said.

“Shut up,” I said. “Come on, Elise.”

“What do you mean, come on?”

“I mean, come on. Enough.”

She sat there, her arms crossed. This wasn’t going exactly as I’d pictured, which had involved punching Bernard and Elise melting into my arms, whispering that she was sorry.

“Where’s Leah?” Elise asked. “Was she in bed?”

“No,” I said, taking near pleasure in the worry that came over Elise’s face now. “She was in the gym. Running. Looking like she was about to collapse.”

Elise looked as horror-struck as I’d hoped. “And now?”

“She’s on the beach.” That was a bit harder to explain.

“Alone?”

I nodded. Elise rose swiftly, throwing me an appalled look for abandoning our daughter, and headed towards the path to the beach. Bernard and I maintained an awkward silence until he asked if I wanted to get a scotch at the bar. Somehow, in light of everything else that had gone down, it seemed like the fitting thing to do.

I followed the path down to the beach, where I quickly spotted Leah: the only one who was there alone, a huddled spot not far from the waves. I had been trying to figure out what I would say to her, but now that I was there the words fled, and even going up to her seemed like too great a task. So I positioned myself fifteen feet behind her and sat down to watch the ocean and my eldest, my only.

I wondered if she was crying. The crash of the waves and the rattling palms in the wind made it impossible to tell. I realized, now that I was sitting here, how much I craved the act of doing just this, every day: watching her, making sure. Shadowing her. I could devote my life to that, I thought. Ducking behind columns, wearing wigs and fake mustaches, hiding behind bushes, sitting two rows behind her and her friends in the movie theater. It was a way to not have to live anymore, while making sure she stayed alive. An affair with Bernard would have been good for me, I knew. Against all commonly accepted mores, a fling with him would have been the safer thing at this point, the kinder option. I could feel, strongly, how the three of us—Chris, Leah, and I—were becoming our own solar system, establishing a gravitational pull on one another. Bernard would have drawn me away from that, would have made me feel beautiful, made me want to wash my hair.

Over the past few months, flirting with him, I had been trying to save myself. If things had gone a little differently tonight—if he and I had played things more subtly, if I hadn’t sabotaged it by overdoing the flirtation in front of my husband and child—it might have been Bernard and me on this beach, kissing, doing whatever forty-plus-year-old lovers do when they are finally alone, at night, on the sand. It would have been much healthier than this overly protective, guardian-angel routine. But now that I was in the role, I didn’t mind somehow: I felt relieved to be assigned to the task.

Thirty minutes later, when Leah rose, I did too. I followed her to the lobby and hid behind a man-size Buddha head, watched her safely inside the elevator. I saw the buttons light up until it reached our floor. Then I walked slowly back outside. I headed to the pool and lay on a chaise longue, where I could see Bernard and Chris at the bar, having a man-to-man talk, of all things.

At some point, I fell asleep. Later, I was woken by Chris, and I sleepily put a hand to his face as he stroked my shoulder. His cheek was scratchy with a five-o’clock shadow, and it was Bernard. He led me, with determination, back down to the beach. I wondered which of my family members were watching me now, as I’d been watching them. I had an irrational desire to give a wave, and suppressed a private giggle. We passed the spot where I’d sat behind Leah, and stumbled over boulders to a smaller beach. Then farther, over more boulders, until we got to a beach that was barely bigger than the two of us, and Bernard laid out the pool towel he’d been carrying and produced a minifridge bottle of champagne (although, at that point, I honestly would have preferred straight gin), which I sipped as he removed my dress.

And it was for my own survival that I abandoned my family that Christmas Eve, including Sophie, and let his caresses bandage me and allowed his long-imagined touch to let me drift back to myself, and to him. Afterwards, sitting naked, Indian style, on the towel, watching the phosphorescence gleam green on the waves’ white froth, I felt fortified. He felt as close as a childhood best friend in a tree house. We walked back silently, barefoot, dodging waves: the tide was coming in. We kissed once more on the beach in front of the hotel before he suggested I go ahead; he wanted to sit outside a bit longer. I was relieved to hear he wouldn’t be clingy.

For as long as I could remember, physical desire had been laced with (and often undermined by) an unshakable repulsion. Something invisible and insidious, like the smell of sulfur, that refused to lift. Thanks to Paps, I guess. I had had phases with Chris when I was the one who initiated sex more than he did, but it was always part of a larger act, about how I wanted to see myself. It was less desire for Chris, or for sex, per se, and more the desire to be someone who wanted sex, a modern woman who knew her own body. I’d tried talking to Ivy about it a few times, after a couple of drinks, to see what it was like for her, but it turned out that Ivy, the wild child, the black sheep, was as shy as a Girl Scout when it came to discussing the birds and the bees, and it went nowhere. She had had a lot of partners, I gathered, but in the end that didn’t tell me too much.

That night with Bernard, the desire felt clean. And—how do I put this?—it ultimately felt like a gift from Sophie. A whisper to come back to life, to stop the endless accusations that I should have been a better mother, should have hugged her more, should have been less strict when she was little.
Go for it!
I heard her say. Sophie always knew how to have fun; it came more naturally to her than it did to Leah, or me, or even Chris.

I’m sure Genevieve, my therapist in Singapore, would have said that this was all an elaborate ploy to evade Sophie’s death. That’s why I never breathed a word about Bernard to her. Or to Chris. The next morning, as he and I wrapped Leah’s presents, I told him that I’d stayed out on the beach alone after Leah had come in; he made no further inquiries.

Back in Singapore, I slept with Bernard about once a month, until we moved back to Madison three years later. Each time, I left feeling like I’d eaten granola or gone to yoga. Weirdly enough, my affair with Bernard also improved sex with Chris: I felt more open, more available. Of course, there were the normal headaches and horrors of cheating: the fear of being found out, the logistics of meeting up, the growing suspicion, towards the end, that Bernard was a bit of a bore outside the bedroom. But strangely enough, the guilt and shame that have accompanied me nearly all my life, the huge waves of regret that have hit me at the most minor things, like a surprisingly high grocery bill, never troubled me with the affair, my greatest transgression. I’ve never been able to explain, not to myself, nor to any therapist since, how sleeping with Bernard saved my marriage, even if he ruined Christmas that first year without Sophie. Which was arguably already fucked.

W
e—repatriated global nomads, third-culture kids restored to our first culture—are happy to be home, by which we mean the United States. We are happy to have graduated from our international schools, happy to have left all our foreign countries behind: Singapore, Indonesia, France, Ghana, Germany, Costa Rica—you name it, we lived there. We are happy to be here, Going to College, with our new pinstriped duvet covers and our glossy orientation pamphlets and that nervous feeling in our stomachs, which we shouldn’t have, after switching schools a million times, but still…

We are happy our parents are on flights back to the time zones where they’re stationed. We’re happy our roommates aren’t total weirdos (except for the one who only eats blueberry fruit-on-the-b
ottom
yogurt and never wears shoes, not even outside; what’s up with that?). We’re happy to pick classes, to finally choose our life’s destinations, after being schlepped around the world for eighteen years by our parents (“Your fathers, you mean,” our mothers remind us, sternly, in our heads).

We are happy to have our pasts erased. To be neatly, cleanly, American—until we are asked our opinions on politics by cute guys and girls who’ve grown up listening to NPR and who have invited us to protest with them in support of minimum wage outside the dean’s office on Wednesday. (Is it a date? We hope so.) This invitation, and the ensuing late-night dining hall conversation over November’s election, during which we are conspicuously silent, intent on shaping our brownie into a human head, reveals to us two things: (1) we know the name of our country’s president, are fifty percent sure about the name of the vice president, but have no clue when it comes to the secretary of state; and (2) we know the name of the president / dictator / ruling junta from our former foreign homes, where we lived up until three weeks ago, but not the names of the vice president / opposition party / jailed dissident there, proving us to be hopeless about politics in both locales. We do, however, know where you can find the American cereals and soft drinks that once reminded us of home, back there (the Wellcome store / the army base / KaDeWe) and where you can find authentic local food, which now reminds us of home, here (Jade Garden / Entrez! / Bavarian Lodge).

Two months into the semester, we puzzle our roommates by developing an obsession (their words) with Halloween and decking the common area with strings of black bats, plastic orange jack-o’-lanterns, and a
Haunted House
CD from CVS, until the only roommate who ever says things out loud, the one with soft chestnut hair, who pointed out a week earlier that we hadn’t changed our sheets since the semester began, insists that “Enough is enough” and chucks the CD out the window like a Frisbee. Always cavalier (it was we, after all, who, at seven years old, ignored the taunting of the Chinese / Bolivian / Nigerian kids around us, yelling “Foreigner! White ass!,” and neatly scored a goal at our local soccer fields), we shrug nonchalantly and return to our rooms, where we cry for an hour and eat all the Halloween candy we were going to share with our roommates.

Halfway through the semester, we meet with our guidance counselors, who express concern that we are not doing well in our Mandarin / Spanish / Korean classes. We attempt to explain that our intermediate classes are filled with students whose parents speak these languages. Our guidance counselors interrupt, gently, but with a gleam of triumph in their eyes: “But didn’t you live in China / Mexico / Korea for four years? It says on your high school transcript that you studied the language while you were there.” We do not attempt to evoke for her the laughable routine of our American school language classes, where the instructors were cruelly teased by the expat students for an hour, in English, before the instructors bowed their heads in daily defeat and assigned homework that nobody did. We do not attempt to explain how college language classes now result in an eruption of memories for us, how hearing those familiarly unfamiliar dialects instantly summons markets with bloody meat / the tang of fresh lime and cilantro / riding up an escalator, nodding our heads to ambient Korean pop music, to buy clothes that will not fit, at a mall in Seoul. We bow our heads humbly and promise to do better.

We do no better, not even close, but after class one day, the teachers ask us to stick around. We sit in our desks as the other students shuffle papers and throw backpacks over their shoulders. We nervously draw little people in our notebooks. You’re a terrible student, the teachers tell us, once the room is empty, but your accent is perfect. Why?

And so we tell them about Shanghai / Mexico City / Seoul, and they tell us about Hangzhou / Juarez / Busan, where they grew up. We spend the next hour reminiscing about the odd fact of caged dogs in Chinese zoos / Mexican drug cartels / a Korean game similar to jacks. When the bell rings, the teachers and we look up, startled. Nervously, shyly, the teachers say how nice it’s been to think back on their homelands. We agree. The teachers ask what we are doing on Thursday night. Most of us say we are busy. The few of us who are free (and hopelessly naive) go to our teachers’ humble apartments for some home cooking. And of these few, two of us lose our virginity to our language professors, who say things, between caresses, that we vaguely recognize, but cannot, when pressed by our best friends the next day, translate into American English.

When the summer comes, our parents are pleased to hear we’ve found jobs. They assume it will be in their newly adopted American cities, since they have recently moved back to the States to be closer to us. (We are not convinced that this was the real incentive, considering these cities are also corporate headquarters.) They are startled and disappointed to learn that we will be heading abroad, returning to the countries we lived in as teenagers, to work for a travel guide that hires college students. The editors said we’d be perfect for the job, we explain. How much does it pay? our parents ask, resigned. Nothing, we admit, but it covers travel costs! At the long silence that follows, we hurriedly change the topic. Our parents suggest a part-time job in the fall.

On June 5, we fly to Singapore / Hamburg / San José, reveling in our imminent homecoming. We beam at passengers with Singaporean / German / Costa Rican passports, who steer their children away from us. In our diaries, midflight, while everyone else is asleep, we scrawl, “Can’t wait to be back home!!!” and fall asleep only as the plane is landing.

We take taxis to our high school best friends’ houses. It’s kind of weird because our best friends are spending the summer on an organic dairy farm in Vermont, but their parents are nice and serve us cookies and ask about college. We oversell it, the way our parents always used to oversell living abroad to relatives during home leave. The next day, we examine our itineraries. “Since you’re practically a local, we expect you to come up with several new entries,” our editors said. After breakfast, served by a Filipino maid by the pool (we feel new twinges of guilt, picturing what our Socially Conscious Crushes would have to say about this setup), we scrawl down some potential itineraries for the travel guide, consisting of our personal favorite hangouts from high school: Pete’s Place, a burger joint; the American Club; and Tower Records. Only once we’ve written these down do we recognize the fallacy of our suggested entries. Nobody travels to Singapore / Hamburg / San José to go to restaurants they could easily find in Oklahoma. We need something authentic. We’re embarrassed to find ourselves stumped, and even more embarrassed to realize that we don’t have a single Singaporean / German / Costa Rican friend to call and ask.

Aside from a near rape in Kota Kintabalu / Munich / Monteverde, the rest of the summer as travel-writer extraordinaire is a success. We hike through rain forest / force ourselves to visit a Holocaust museum / fall off a horse during a carefree beach canter. Throughout our journeys, we shun fellow tourists. Their wild enthusiasm for “exotic” Asia / Europe / Central America embarrasses us, as do the things that the Australian backpackers find it hilarious to tell waitresses. We have developed an unofficial rule for ourselves over the six weeks: speak only to locals. As if every conversation we now have with a stranger in a foreign language will make up for the fact that we never had these conversations growing up. We find the Mandarin / German / Spanish that escaped us on our college campuses coming through in true form now; we feel practically fluent. Our elation at this discovery, our pride at gaining insights into the culture through our newfound curiosity and extroversion, will lead to the near rape mentioned above, when a customer at the restaurant where we are eating one night, a friend of the owner, offers to give us a ride back to our hotels. Like idiots, we happily agree. We are surprised and vaguely alarmed when he turns off the main road and drives into a park. We are downright terrified when he drives into some bushes and turns off the engine. We will try to remember the Chinese / German / Spanish words for “That’s inappropriate!” and “I’m going to yell for the police!” When this doesn’t work, we will jiggle the door handle and try to escape.

For unknown reasons, our captors and would-be violators, sleepy eyed, sad, frustrated, will abruptly stop pawing us and will back the cars out of the shadows and drive us back to our hotels. We will trip up the stairs to our tawdry, stained rooms smelling of cigarette smoke, with one fluorescent bulb, and feel wildly homesick for the only homes we’ve ever had: our nuclear families. We’ll use the phone downstairs to call our mothers, crying, trying not to frighten them, but needing to tell somebody. They’ll urge us to come home. A bizarre sense of duty, which will utterly evaporate in ten years’ time, will convince us to keep going.

When we return to the States, we will be ten pounds skinnier, bedbug bitten, and strangely quiet, from so many weeks of not speaking to anyone (we dropped our chat-up-the-locals routine after the aborted amorousness in the park). Our backpacks will reek of green tea / bus stations / the ocean. And as we throw our things into the washing machine, back in our parents’ sparkling abodes, we’ll realize: we already miss being back there, being foreign.

Around Christmas of sophomore year, we land Significant Others. They are everything we are not: born and bred in New York City, assured, unambiguous, on the crew team. We do everything with our new loves: homework, sex, eating mountains of cereal, watching
The Simpsons
. Our roommates will roll their eyes when we resurface every two weeks for clean clothes, having basically moved into our new lovers’ dorms, sharing a top bunk and trying not to piss off the bunkmate below when the bed squeaks.

With our new loves, we are relieved to have found partners and friends. We tell them everything. But sometimes, we have to lie in bed alone, to be with the old images and objects—palm trees, rotting fruit, oily water, sickening heat, cold hospital—that hover around the edges of our vision. When we go to those places, our boyfriends/girlfriends cannot come along. They sit on the edge of the bed for a while and then leave, or they hold us, or they get impatient and tell us to snap out of it. When we go to these places, we start to shiver, we sometimes scream, we talk to dead siblings / mothers / friends, we whisper we are sorry to still be alive, so far away.

In the end, we find others who live between these borders. We sense a weight in them, the carrying of two people, and we meet up with them at coffee shops and dining halls and bars. Our dead sisters and brothers and mothers and fathers squeeze into the booths too, demanding more room, just like they always did on long car rides, or airplane flights, or the sofa. It is these friendships that will last, longer than the Significant Others, who, after all, cannot see our Sophies sitting there, plain as day.

The rest of college flies by. We get wasted / get sober / get hung over / get puritanical / go hedonistic / and repeat. We throw ourselves into poetry, only to be told we’re precious. We study history and literature, only to be told, at the end of a paper, that we are not the first to theorize about what the British were doing in India and that our evidence is lacking. Despite this minor failure, we are enamored of postcolonial theory and literature; we consume it hungrily; it sheds garish light onto our former lives abroad that we can’t tear our eyes from: how different were we in Singapore / Ghana / Martinique in 1996, we wonder, than the French in Algeria in 1890? Absorbed in guilt and self-deprecation, we do not pause to consider the condescending implications of this assumption: namely, that certain modernized, independent nations are as helplessly victimized and subjugated by global business now as they were by colonialism in the late nineteenth century.

Fiery with our new knowledge, unaware that our facial expressions look very much like those of our parents at our age, consumed with their own private causes, we march back home for the summer between junior and senior years. Our parents have since moved back overseas, and we are thrilled to be returning to the Heart of Darkness. (We are quick to explain that our metaphor refers to expat culture, not, God forbid, the local culture; we’ve come somewhere since Conrad, after all.) We do not have “jobs” until July, when we will fly back to the States for various internships, so we busy ourselves with Feeling Things, Making Art, and Writing It All Down. The first week, this involves constructing a diorama, much like we did when we were ten years old. The diorama consists of an old shoebox, with photos of local construction sites stapled to the outside. The inside of the shoebox contains dirt from the construction site and an abandoned worker’s glove that we snatched from the site when no one was looking. On top of the glove—this is what we’re really proud of, the real punch line—is a note of local currency. We present it to our parents over breakfast and they react the way they do when the dog drags something dead onto the porch. It dawns on us that we will have to explain our art to them (the greater dawning will happen later: that any art that has to be explained is probably bad art). This is a construction site, we explain, pointing to the photos, and these are the oppressed Sri Lankan workers. This is one of their gloves. Our parents nod solemnly. Where’d you get that cash? our fathers ask casually, and we have to admit we took it from their wallets, since we haven’t had a chance to change our dollars yet. We promise we’ll pay them back. As the conversation shifts to what English movies are playing in town, we conclude that they just don’t get it, and place the diorama at a conspicuous place in the living room after breakfast, so that our parents will have ample opportunity to absorb it. Four days later, we find the diorama has been moved back into our rooms, on our bookshelves, as our mothers work with the maids to tidy the house for a dinner party.