Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

“Did I enjoy it?”

“Let’s just say that at the time you thought you did.”

When it came to these stories we never sorted out which details were false and which ones may have been true. To have done so even once would have destroyed the whole enterprise we had created from the foundation up, and so we always diligently avoided any prodding that could be construed as a search for verisimilitude. The imagined memories had to have as much weight as the real, or we had to at least pretend they did to such a degree that they just very well might have. And so I never questioned Angela about that particular story, or about all the troubling things that it pointed to, content to believe that at least in this version things worked out for her better than they did in the one I never heard.

If Angela were driving with me, she would say that this is exactly where I belong, somewhere here in the middle of the country, a man unsuitable or ill-made for coastlines, more at home in flat terrain that bears no hint of ending and that strives at all times to be as evenhanded and uncomplicated as possible. I’ve never lost my affection for this place; many times over the intervening years I’ve thought that it would be wonderful to stand alone in the middle of any of the fields on the other side of the car windows. Shortly after my mother left my father, I thought of coming back here to commemorate the event. This was the only context in which I knew her, and I understood even then that once she was gone from here we would grow increasingly distant from each other, until eventually someday we were completely estranged. It was a fair price to pay for her tarried freedom.

Her departure in the end wasn’t the dramatic event that it had promised to be during the nineteen years my mother and father lived together. There was no furious packing or preceding arguments. They were, if anything, at a relatively tranquil moment in their lives — their fights and arguments having all but ceased, to the point where they hardly spoke at all to each other. It was peace through a policy of détente, with occasional violent skirmishes that flared up from time to time on the side. Two weeks after I had left home for college she left too, packing her clothes in the middle of the afternoon while he was at work, calling a cab to take her to the bus station, and then taking a bus to Chicago, and from Chicago a flight out east to Washington, D.C., where a few old friends from the private school she had attended in Ethiopia had recently resettled. She called me shortly after I arrived at my dorm room in New York.

“I’m in D.C.,” she said.

“What are you doing there?”

“I’m staying here for a while with my friend Aster. You don’t know her.” Nor would I ever.

I understood even with those few words that she would never return to my father again. Washington, D.C., at just over seven hundred miles away, was the farthest she had ever been from home since she came to America, and if there was any one rule to her departures, it was that once you get far enough away, you never go back. What I hadn’t known at the time was just how little of her I would see afterward. She lived four hours away from me by car, and yet over the course of the next three years we only saw each other twice, both times at cold, impersonal cafés outside the city, in one of the suburban mini-malls that had taken the place of the northern Virginia farmland. When we did see each other, we talked around whatever we were supposed to have said. She asked me on every occasion if I was happy.

“Are you happy, Jonas?” she asked, much in the same way she had asked me as a child if I was hungry or tired, both states of being that she could easily remedy by either giving me a plate of food or offering me a place to sleep on the couch next to her. What could I say to her except “Yes. I’m happy,” which put her mind at ease and allowed us to continue sitting at our table, picking apart whatever pastries she had chosen to buy that day.

My mother chose a diner similar to the ones we used to meet at to make her first stop of the trip, less than an hour from Fort Laconte and still more than five hours from Nashville. She had kept a cheap little souvenir from it on top of her chest of drawers for years afterward — a palm-sized aluminum pig with a wide-brimming smile and a napkin wrapped around its neck that read “Eat at Frank’s.” Her excuse for stopping was a simple one: “I have to use the bathroom,” she said, and my father, sensing that this time she was indeed telling the truth, and that regardless it was easier to oblige her than to argue, pulled off at the next exit, at least two hours sooner than he would have preferred to stop again.

Inside the diner cold blasts of refrigerated air seemed to hold the people sitting at the counters and at the booths in place, frozen and lifeless, as if they had been sculpted out of the same dough that had been used to make the pies sitting on display in the glass counter next to the entrance. My mother walked in and wrapped her hands around her arms, trying to quell the little bumps that had sprung up as soon as she entered. No one looked at her when she came in — not the girl sitting behind the cash register and not any of the dozen or so patrons who were eating at this odd hour of the day, and yet she still felt as if all eyes were secretly trained on her, and that if she could only turn her head fast enough to the right she would catch them measuring her every step and taking size of the neat little bulge below her waist that could have just as easily been a few extra pounds put on since her conversion to a nearly all-American diet.

She didn’t ask where the bathrooms were. The signs were obvious enough and plus she had learned that only the guilty and the frightened asked for things that were otherwise evident.

“The first step to being an American,” a friend of her father’s had told her shortly before she left Ethiopia, “is to act as if you know everything. The two most important words in the English language are ‘of course.’”

Gashe Berhane Getachew was one of the few Ethiopians she knew who had actually lived in the United States, a scholarship child of the former emperor, sent abroad to study agriculture in Kansas; his words, as far as she and everyone in the family were concerned, were nearly sacrosanct when it came to America.

“They didn’t know what to do with me,” he told her. “When I got there I asked them where their peasants were. All that land and no peasants. My teacher told me, ‘I don’t know how it is where you come from, but we don’t have peasants here.’ Liar. They had plenty of them, everywhere. They just kept them far away from the university so I couldn’t see them. Please, when you get to America, find the peasants for me.”

That became his running joke with her until the day she left. “The peasants, Mariam. Remember me to them.” If someone new was present, he would exclaim, “Soon our young lady here will be leaving to find the United Peasants of America.”

If Gashe Berhane were here with her now, he would say, “At last, Mariam, you’ve found them.”

The bathrooms were located at the back of the restaurant, just off the kitchen. The only two stalls were empty and the room smelled of a mixture of ammonia and fried chicken that made her both nauseous and hungry. For the past few weeks she hadn’t been eating nearly half as much as she wanted. She was afraid that if she gained weight too quickly the barely noticeable bulge would swell and become all but impossible to deny, and so she had kept herself hungry to the point where she often had to sleep once if not twice in the middle of the day to quell the hunger pains in her stomach and the slight dizzy spells that were becoming more frequent.