Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

If she had known any English at the time, she would have turned to them and said, To hell with you all.

As the car slowly slid in reverse out of the driveway, she remembered that she had forgotten something upstairs.

“Wait,” she said. It was the first word she had spoken to her husband that morning, and if either one of them had had a penchant or taste for symbolic speculation, one of them would have said, “But isn’t that all we’ve done? Isn’t that the only thing we have to offer each other anymore?”

No such taste existed in either of them, however, and that “Wait” was simply uttered and then lost and left for me to interpret.

My mother took her time getting out of the car and walking back up the stairs to the apartment. She slid her hand along the banister as she went up the steps and took account of the dust that gathered around her fingers. Her own house in Addis, she realized, had never been so dirty. There had been a maid to clean and cook; a gardener to tend to the yard; a squadron of neighborhood boys to lift heavy objects, change lightbulbs, and screw in broken locks (three on the front, three on the rear, and one on each window, because a woman living alone could never be too safe, could never trust solely the kindness of strangers). The dust now was her responsibility. It was what she heard the other women at the church talk about: dust and stains and collars that never got clean. Sofas that were ruined by grape juice left to sit too long. Children’s pants stained with blood. All of that was supposed to be her charge now.

She took a seat on the bed, and then after a few minutes laid back, allowing herself the luxury of placing her feet on the hand-me-down white duvet given to her by one of the women at the church. There was nothing she needed or had forgotten. She had come back here for purely selfish reasons. In those few minutes between opening the car door and taking her seat next to her husband, she had caught a glimpse of her life as it would have looked to her if she were standing outside of it: the poor woman with the cheap and overstuffed valise being more of a cliché than she was willing to bear. Unlike those stories, however, she was not running from but to, her suitcase packed not in defiance but in submission, with her in no particular rush at all. She should have expected more from herself, the voice she was trying to quell threatened to say. To which she would have agreed wholeheartedly.

Coming back up to this room was just another one of the minor lies my mother told herself to get through each day. There was only this quiet, solitary repose that she sought, and if the world was a kinder and better place, I imagine sometimes, it would have stopped permanently right then and there exclusively for her. Everything else around her could have continued. Neighborhood children could have aged, graduated, and fallen into drugs and love and premature pregnancies. The old women at the church — Agnes, Harriet, and Jean — could have faded away into their deaths one at a time, like summer months ticked off so quickly they hardly seem to have ever happened. Life in general, in other words, need not have ended, just so long as my mother could be granted the small gift of lying endlessly on a bed on an early September afternoon staring at the ceiling while her husband sat parked in the driveway waiting for her. It could have made a picture-perfect scene, supposing the canvas was drawn wide enough to allow for a view of house, bedroom, trees, and car — a scene quiet enough to deserve the merit of being hung in a famous museum. People could have gazed at it in some future era and said to themselves, “So, this was life.”

My mother lay on the bed and counted off the minutes in her head one second at a time. Today, she gave herself two hundred and twenty seconds, a record. On other days she needed only twenty or thirty to step back gracefully into life. That was enough time to compensate for a broken dish, for a day and evening of complete silence between her and her husband. The seconds themselves were nothing more than that. They were the smallest fragments of time that she knew how to account for, and she believed that if she could count and accept them, then she could believe again in the hours and days they made up. If she knew how to do it, she would have counted to the tenth or hundredth of each second. She would have gotten to the very bottom of time, and having arrived, stared at it directly and said, “Okay, I can do this. If this is all there is.”

Until today the most she had ever needed was one hundred and eighty-four seconds. That had been enough time to make up for getting lost on an afternoon stroll and being told by a young white boy with bright red hair and freckles that if she knew what was good for her, she would turn around and get the fuck back to wherever she had come from. Most of what he said was lost on her, but she understood the intent of violence and threat in his voice, as we almost all always do. Long before we understand anything we know this.

One hundred eighty-four seconds were not enough for her today, however, nor were two hundred ten, or twelve, or eighteen. Two hundred twenty alone were enough, while anything greater would have been too much. The consideration of time in itself was a threat, one no less real than the sneering red-headed boy on a bike.

She checked the seconds off with her eyes closed. When they were all gone, she opened her eyes and planted her feet firmly on the floor. Time had started over just enough so that the woman who rose from the bed and walked quickly down the steps to the waiting car with a random book in hand (in this case, a coverless tan-colored hardback copy of James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk that had been bought by her husband at a garage sale for decoration) was not the same one who had gone upstairs. This Mariam was lighter, more prone to smiling and acknowledging the simple beauty of a fall afternoon drenched in solid light and smoothed over by sporadic pollen-filled breezes. Like the other Mariam who preceded her, though, this one knew just as well that a time was approaching when closing your eyes and counting off the seconds would not be enough. What happened when that time finally came remained a mystery to both. Would they flail and tear their hair apart, or simply sink quietly to the bottom of whatever life they had, never to be heard from or seen again?

She opened the car door, slid in, and shut it hard. It was still possible to believe in Nashville at that moment, to think, perhaps, that a honeymoon was not so impossible after all.

She turned to her husband, who appeared not to have moved a muscle or inch since she left him, and said, with more conviction than anything she had said to him in weeks, if not months, “Okay, I’m ready now.”

When she returned to the car, my father took note of what my mother had claimed she’d forgotten. Just enough time had passed between her leaving and returning for him to begin to doubt what she had said about forgetting something upstairs. He pictured her in the apartment staring at him with contempt from the window, or perched in front of the bathroom mirror thinking that she had grown far too beautiful for a man like him. The last thing he had wanted that morning was a fight, but it was clear now that it was going to happen anyway. The fights grew out of their own organic, independent force, obliged only to their own rules and standards. They existed independently in the world, just as surely as the oak trees that lined the driveway existed whether he was present to see them or not. He could no more keep the fights from erupting than he could make the trees vanish by an act of will or, say he had the authority, one of mercy.

That morning the fight began as soon as my mother returned to the car with a copy of a book she had never heard of and could hardly read in her hand. In retrospect it’s easy for me to say that it was the book that did it, but it could have just as easily been a change in a pair of shoes, earrings, a favorite shade of lipstick that proved to my father that he had waited for nothing, and had therefore been made, once again, into a fool.