Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

For a few seconds his arm does nothing. It lies harmless against his right leg before finally curling into a fist. It pounds once on the dashboard and then, without warning, takes a strong premeditated jab toward the passenger-side window but finds nothing but air. It retreats and then unfurls. It reaches from behind and makes firm contact with the back of my mother’s head, but not as it had hoped for. The contact is only fleeting and falls short of the full grab and hold it had been seeking. It flies straight backward now and finds a nose; it knows to do this again quickly while the odds are still good, and sure enough, it comes up a winner one more time. And while my father’s arm swings wildly about, my mother’s hands are busy as well and have been so from the moment she first caught him looking at her. The “Welcome to Missouri” sign had told her that this could happen, and the look from him had confirmed it. Everything else fell quickly into place from there, as if she had planned this all out. She would later insist that she hadn’t.

“It was more like instinct,” she said. “I had never had to think about what I was going to do.”

First there was her seat belt. As soon as she saw my father’s hand begin to curl, she reached over and tugged at it to make sure that it was secure. Despite the extra slack, she felt confident that it was, but for good measure she pulled the remaining part around the back of her seat so that she felt nearly pinned by it. She felt somehow safer even though sacrifices in mobility were being made. It would be difficult to dodge or duck, and even harder still to throw a hand up in defense, but in this case it would hardly matter. She could take a few blows, even direct ones at that. In fact, if asked, she would have said they were necessary to what she was doing, because just as my father’s arm was busy half blindly searching the car for parts of her head to grab and hold on to, my mother’s arm was also busy quietly reaching over to his side in search of the metal clasp that held his seat belt in place. He was overly fond of such devices — seat belts and smoke alarms and even guardrails. He insisted on their use and after all these years in America still marveled at their constant, indefatigable presence. “Everywhere you go,” he had told her once, “there is something there for your safety.”

When she found the belt, before pressing down on the clasp that released it, she let out a loud, piercing scream, one that at times I imagine I can hear more than three decades later. It was strong enough to disturb my father’s sense of touch and danger so that he didn’t know until it was too late that one of the safety devices in which he had placed so much of his trust no longer protected him. The belt retreated not all the way but just far enough to leave his body free, and even though my mother knew that all the way would have been better and more true to what she had imagined — him sailing clear head first through the window like a rocket with both hands at his side for hundreds of feet if not miles — she also knew she had to settle for what she was given, and that even half was better than nothing at all.

Call what she did next self-defense, revenge, or an act of sheer deliberate fury; I’m not sure it really matters. Either way it was never the accident that she and then later my father reported it to be. Anyone witnessing the scene would have agreed. No accident in the world could look like that. The car suddenly swerved hard and fast to the right as if someone had grabbed hold of the steering wheel and thrown it violently in that direction and was determined, despite the consequences, to hold it there, because no one driving a car with their seat belt unfastened would accelerate and swerve straight off the road into a clearly marked irrigation ditch unless they had gone suddenly mad or had been forced to do so.

Two weeks after I had begun telling my students the history of my father’s life in Sudan, Angela asked me to meet her at her office after work to celebrate the progress that she thought we were making.

“I want us to have a nice dinner out,” she said. “At a proper restaurant. I think we deserve that.”

I had only been to Angela’s office a handful of times. On numerous occasions I had waited for her downstairs in the lobby or at a nearby bar in order to avoid the awkwardness of standing in an elevator or even in an office where everyone seemed certain of their status as young career-minded professionals. I had always suspected as well that there was something slightly embarrassing for Angela in having a husband whose pay was calculated by the hour, and whose job had been a gift from one of the firm’s senior partners. I was resolved, however, to show no signs of my former self, so when Angela asked me to meet her at her office I didn’t say that I would meet her in the lobby, or at the corner of Thirty-first and Fifth, or Thirty-second and Sixth. I simply said that I would be there shortly after six.

It was at the reception desk where I met Andrew, the senior partner who had found me the job at the academy and who oversaw many of Angela’s cases. He walked in a few seconds behind me — a slim, towering figure in gray whose hair resembled the color of his suit, down to the thin white pinstripes that were barely visible against the background. He acted immediately as if he knew me, a privilege that affluent white men always seemed to grant themselves when it came to me. He smiled and stared me directly in the eyes without blinking. He placed his hand on my shoulder before introducing himself.

“Jonas,” he said. “It’s good to finally meet you.”

I knew who he was as soon as he said my name, and would recall only later that he never actually said his and that both of us understood that he didn’t need to.

I don’t know whether Angela heard us from her office or if the receptionist at the front desk had quickly called her to tell her I was there. Regardless, before I had a chance to respond she was standing next to me. She rubbed her hand across my back and kissed me on the cheek, which bought me the necessary time to find the strength to tell Andrew that it was a pleasure meeting him as well.

“Good,” Angela said. “You’ve both met. Now I don’t have to do an introduction.”

Before we left the lobby, Andrew asked Angela if she had read the message he had just sent. She told him that she had, and that she would get on it right away. He asked next if we had special plans for that evening. Yes, she said. We’re having dinner at a new restaurant in Chelsea called Le Coeur. Andrew had heard of it as well. The food there was supposed to be excellent and worth the price. He was happy to see her making time for herself. He directed his attention back to me. He told me that there was a period there when he was worried that she was never going to leave the office. She worked so hard, he said, that he was eventually going to force her to take a vacation. And how was I doing, he wanted to know. Was the academy still treating me well? He was on the school’s board now. His youngest son would be attending next year. The school had a special place in his heart. What exactly did I teach again?

“Freshman English,” I said.

“Still the same class?”

“Yes. Just the same class for now. That’s going to change, though, next semester,” I told him. “I’m being promoted. I’m going to be teaching some of the more senior-level English classes, hopefully a course on literary modernism in American poetry.”

“I didn’t know there were changes in the faculty for next semester,” he said.

“There are,” I told him. “I wanted to teach the class last year, but I was preparing to apply to graduate school so I thought it was better to keep my time for studying, but that’s finished now so I’m doing it this year.”