Dinaw Mengestu: How to Read the Air

At the time my mother had thought to herself, I could never love anything called “fall.” There was fall and Fall. To fall was to sink, to drop. When my mother was nine, her grandfather came out of his bedroom at the back of the house wearing only a robe with the strings untied. He was deaf and half blind and had been for as long as Mariam could remember. He walked into the middle of the living room, and having reached the center, where he was surrounded on all sides by his family, fell, not to his knees, but straight forward, like a tree that had been felled, the side of his head splitting open on the edge of the fireplace mantel, spraying the wall and couch with blood. That was one way to fall.

One could also fall down a flight of stairs, as in, your husband falls down the stairs while leaving for work one morning. She had this thought at least once, sometimes as many as three times a week. She pictured him tripping, stumbling, feet over head, just like the characters in the cartoons she had grown addicted to watching between the hours of one p.m. and four p.m. In those shows the characters all shook the fall off after a few seconds, bending an arm back into place here, twisting an ankle there. The cartoons made her laugh, and when she thought of her husband falling down the steps, his tall, narrow body perfectly suited to roll uninterrupted down the shag-carpeted stairwell, stopping perhaps briefly at the one minor bend that led to the final descent, it was only partly with those cartoon images in mind. When real bodies fell, as Mariam knew well enough, they did not get up. They did not bounce back or spring into shape. They crumpled and needed to be rescued.

Despite my mother’s best efforts to resist fall, she found herself taken by the season more and more each day. The sun set earlier, and soon she learned, an entire hour would be shaved off the day, an act that she sometimes wished could be repeated over and over until the day was nothing more than a thumbnail sketch of its former self. The nights were growing marginally but noticeably cooler. Leaves were changing, and children who over the course of the summer had ruled the neighborhood like tyrants were once again neatly arranged in groups of twos and threes each morning, beaten (or so Mariam thought) into submission by the changing rules of the season. There was enough room in the shrinking day to believe that the world was somehow sensitive to grief and longing, and responded to it the same way she did when she felt convinced that time had been arranged incorrectly, making the loss of one extra minute nearly every day a welcome relief.

My mother could never have said she loved fall, but as she walked down the steps with her suitcase in hand toward the red Monte Carlo her husband had been waiting in for nearly an hour, she could have said that she respected its place as a mediator between two extremes. Fall came and went, while winter was endured and summer was revered. Fall was the repose that made both possible and bearable, and now here she was with her husband next to her, heading headlong into an early-fall afternoon with only the vaguest ideas of who they were becoming and what came next.

Six months before I left my wife, Angela, and began retracing my parents’ route through the Midwest, my father passed away in the boardinghouse he had been living in for ten years. At the time I had effortlessly placed his death into the same private corner in which for many years I had buried anything I considered too troubling — a steadily growing category which by that point included even minor injuries such as casual insults and malicious stares from strangers. It had been three years since my father and I had spoken, and many more since we last saw each other regularly, a fact that I pointed out to Angela when she asked me, several days after news of his death arrived, why I was acting as if I wasn’t even the least bit affected.

“You’re doing it again, Jonas,” she said. “You’re going on as if nothing at all has happened. I can’t stand it when you do that.”

I remember we were sitting on the plush faded green couch in what doubled as our living room and dining room on a Saturday afternoon when we had that conversation. It was late July and I was beginning work on the syllabus for the freshman English literature class I once taught at a private high school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Angela was dressed in a light blue suit and had her hair, which she had recently braided into thick black locks, tied into a bun, giving her a grave, serious look that seemed unearned, as if she, with her oversized, almost fawnlike black eyes and slightly puffed, elevated cheeks, were merely playing the role of a busy lawyer who worked even on the weekends for a small-town production in which she was the star.

“We were never really close,” I told her, “and besides, I’d been expecting this for a long time. What else do you want me to say?”

Many of the conversations that Angela and I had at that point fell along similar defensive lines. We had been married for three years, but we had spent much of the past six months hardly talking except to exchange pointed attacks at each other. It was common for Angela to accuse me of feeling nothing at all, just as it was common for her to spend long stretches of the day and night away from me and the small one-bedroom basement apartment that we shared. She was a lawyer at a midsized law firm in midtown Manhattan that dealt with second-rate corporate clients who didn’t have the resources yet to hire one of the white-shoe law firms that occupied the top floors of the building she worked in. She hated what she did, and most of the people she worked with, but she took great pride in the job itself, having grown up poor and rootless in more than a dozen different towns scattered throughout the South and Midwest, from Tennessee and Missouri to the northern reaches of Ohio. She told me once that she could still remember how she felt the first time she looked in the mirror and told herself that she was a lawyer.

“It was strange,” she said. “I had to say it three times before I really began to believe it.”

It was Angela who found me my job teaching at the academy through one of the partners in her law firm. Before then I was working at a refugee resettlement center in Manhattan, which was where she and I met. The center was near the corner of Canal and Bowery and came with a fifth-floor view of the East River and the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges. The center’s clients often liked to stand in front of the double-paned windows for several minutes before seeing one of the lawyers, as if they knew already that given the laws and politics of the time, they might never have the chance to catch sight of such a view again. It was the sixth job I had had in two years, part of a string of constant upheavals that included new and progressively smaller apartments shared with strangers who remained throughout our time living together as thoroughly unknown to me as on the day we first met. I had held a couple of semipermanent jobs before then, but none that could be marked as a career, or even as preparation for one. After finishing college, I had thought vaguely of returning to school to get a Ph.D. in English literature, with a focus on modern American poetry, and had often said as much when asked by casual acquaintances or women I was trying to impress with what I did in New York, since often I did very little at all. A decade after graduating, however, I had yet to make any substantial effort to do so other than annually requesting a catalogue and application for the five or six universities that I said I dreamed of going to. I had been a waiter at two small but trendy coffee shops on handsome, tree-lined streets near the edge of the city’s West Village, both of which prided themselves on their homemade jams, bread, and locally grown produce, and whose prices reflected the extent to which people were willing to pay for them. Our customers were often wealthy and on many occasions famous but were never gawked at. For promptly delivering coffee or toasted bagels with the requisite jam, I was paid twice what I earned per hour in tips and was twice offered unwanted and unnecessary investment advice, such was the slightly surreal air in which those places existed. Besides my multiple stints as a waiter, I had also held temporary jobs at middling midtown brokerage firms that occupied a quarter or less of a floor in a shabby, neglected building on an off-brand avenue. At least one was an elaborate tax evasion scheme for the city’s very rich but nearly dead; the others were simply hustling start-up ventures, still too poor to hire more than a handful of people full-time, and which in their desperation for clients, or customers, often seemed to me to be little more than elaborate lemonade stands around which a dozen or so men and women sat waiting for their phones to ring. My sole tasks, regardless of what the companies did or how successful they were, were to speak little, eat quickly, and punch in several hundred numbers an hour, all of which I always did well, and for which in two instances I was, at least temporarily, said to be greatly valued.