Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

Something broke after that day. I shed many of the reservations I had around my students and increasingly found myself engaged in short periods of idle chatter with them. I was often interrupted by questions of an entirely personal nature that I sometimes tried to diffuse quickly and which on other occasions I went to great lengths to respond to. My students soon knew that I lived in the East Village, north of Houston, somewhere between First and Fourteenth streets, in a one-bedroom apartment that got little to almost no light during the mornings, and that before then I had spent time in Brooklyn and Queens. In college I had tried briefly to be a poet — I had a love for the modernists, Bishop, Pound, and Williams being top among them — as did most of the people I knew, but while I had given that up, I still kept my love for certain poets alive. These were only warm-up questions to the greater narrative that they wanted to get ahold of. Near the end of my first semester one of my students — a round, freckled-faced blonde who until then had never spoken in my class — finally asked me where I was from.

“Excuse me, Mr. Woldemariam. Where are you from?”

I had heard the question before, of course. Bill had asked it and then answered it as he saw fit during our first meeting, although with less tact and subtlety.

“Woldemariam? What is that? Eritrean. No, let me guess. Ethiopian. Probably an Amhara name, am I right?”

I had come to an easy agreement with Bill, but I found myself reluctant to do the same with my students.

“I’m from Illinois,” I said. “If that’s what you mean.”

The girl, I think Katherine was her name, fidgeted in her seat until one of her friends whose name I no longer recall came to what she must have thought as being her friend’s defense.

“No. I think she means where are you really from.”

I had considered saying that I was really from Illinois, but then I realized that most if not all of my students knew the answer they were looking for already, whether it was specifically Ethiopia or just Africa in general that they wanted acknowledged. They had heard it, just never from me, and now they wanted a personal confirmation that would elevate their knowledge of who I was beyond the general rumors that swirled around the teachers at the academy. In that way they could mark me as being theirs. At that point, as fond as I may have been of my students, I had no need to give that to them.

When I later told Angela about the questions my students had asked, she laughed and said, “If they can get an answer to that, I’d like to know too.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning sometimes I think you’re not from anywhere at all. Your parents are Ethiopian, or I assume they are, because I never met them. The only thing you’ve ever told me about them is that they didn’t like each other, and none of you are close. I don’t ask you for more than that because I figure you must have your reasons, but it gives you a cold, sometimes abstract air. You know what Bill told me once about you?”

“What?”

“That when he first met you he thought you might have come here illegally. He was only partly joking. He said there was something about the way you barely spoke in the office that reminded him of the illegal immigrants he used to work with. He was wrong though. Talk to any immigrant long enough and they’ll tell you where they came from, and then once they start most of the time they won’t really want to stop. Next thing you know you’re looking at pictures of someone’s grandparents or village, but the most anyone can get out of you is that you were born in the Midwest. Most of the time you don’t even say the city. Just the Midwest, as if that means anything.”

I had heard something similar before from Angela. Shortly after we started dating she noted what she referred to as my unusual reserve. Friends in college had often told me that I could sometimes come across as indifferent. Rarely was I confided in, but it wasn’t trust that I seemed to lack, but empathy, or empathy that could properly express itself as such. People needed to know in tangible and familiar ways that they were being heard; it wasn’t enough to say that they were, or to stand in close proximity when called upon, even if you were willing to do so for as long as needed. If there weren’t warm feelings, then perhaps there were no feelings at all.

I dismissed most of what Angela said. I still thought of myself as capable of the great displays of affection she seemed to be waiting for, and who knows, maybe with time I may very well have found a way to express them, but there was always another crisis lurking not too far off to which we had to respond. In quick succession Angela lost two important cases that she had spent the better part of the past six months arduously working on. Even though she had no reason for thinking so, she assumed after the first loss that her job was in jeopardy. Other more senior lawyers at her firm were involved in the case as well, but it was Angela who decided she would assume the brunt of the failure. She came home after the first defeat and lay down on the bed in a semi-fetal position. She was worried about her future. “I hate not knowing what happens next,” she said.

“Lawyers lose cases all the time,” I told her, even though that was hardly what she needed to hear. That cases were lost was evident.

“I know that,” she said.

What was less obvious was that for Angela each loss posed as the commencement of a greater disaster that she had always imagined would someday occur, one that she believed wouldn’t end until she had been stripped bare of all that she had accomplished.

“I’ve never believed that things work out for the best in the end. It’s simply not true as far as I can see. Once we learned about the decision Andrew came to my office and told me not to worry about it. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. I almost laughed when he said that. Don’t worry. It’s only the people who’ve never had to worry about shit in their lives who say that.”

When a judge handed down the second defeat two months later, Angela was fully convinced that she was going to be fired any day. She spent the later hours of the night worrying about how to pay the debt she had amassed along with her substantial portion of the rent. “We have almost nothing saved,” she said. “And there’s no family that we can turn to, so what happens then to us?”

The next day she went to a boutique in the West Village and spent several hundred dollars on a single pair of shoes. She threw them down on the living room floor and said, “If I’m going to lose, I might as well have good shoes.”

“I thought you were worried about money.”

“I needed something to make me feel better.” She didn’t have to point out that it was because I had failed to do so. On the night she told me she was worried about losing her job, my response had been to rub her shoulders gently for a few seconds before drifting off to sleep. In small but significant ways I had been hiding from Angela’s doubts and fears as if they were my own. When she came home defeated, I had to remember to look her in the eyes, which meant that I must have often forgotten to.

Without acknowledging it, we began to draw lines around the apartment. Angela cornered herself off at the dining room table. I kept to the kitchen and bedroom. We both stayed up late working: Angela on the next set of memos for the newest case, while I took my time grading papers on symbolism in short stories and poems that the school required the students to read. Our greatest failure up to that point was that we were unable to explain to each other the degree to which we were afraid of the same things — suddenly losing whatever minor gains we had made in life and the security that we hoped came with that. We knew our place in the world was far from secure; each defeat, whether it was at work or at home, only reinforced that. We had failed to say that much to each other, so it was only inevitable that soon we would begin to multiply our losses.