Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

I’m in Rhode Island.

I’m back in Virginia.

I’m heading off to Maryland soon.

There were more than a dozen other places, although I was only able to remember the exact locations of four others: two of them not too far away from the last apartment complex, with the others split between Vermont and Virginia. And perhaps while more of an effort could have been made on my part to track her locations, I always understood she would have never wanted that. If I had come too close, settled in a town nearby, or even made frequent visits to see her, then the relentless forward progress she had strived for would have come to an end. There wasn’t a trace of her to be found anywhere in my life — not a coffee shop, restaurant, or bar that I could have associated with her, which was precisely how she wanted it. Had it been any different it would have been impossible to have claimed that she had gotten away from anything or anyone.

She left the door open for me. She had situated herself awkwardly in the center of a cream-colored couch that looked to have cost more than she could have afforded. Whatever indulgences she had developed to brighten her days manifested themselves in furniture.

She remained seated while I bent down to kiss her three times — formal, ritualized gestures delivered by a culture that I had never really believed in. She told me tea was brewing in the kitchen before she asked me how I was doing, how my wife was doing, while pointing to a chair opposite her for me to sit in. The last time I had visited her I had told her briefly about my job at the immigration center and Angela, whose apartment I had just moved into.

“What’s she like?” she had asked.

“She’s wonderful,” I said. “I’m sure you would like her. She’s smart, tough, and never lets anyone take advantage of her.” I pulled from my wallet a picture of us on the corner of Broadway and Canal, Angela’s lips pressed against my cheek as I held the camera high in the air with one hand to capture the traffic behind us. My mother held the picture in her hands briefly, staring at it with no more or less of a passion than with which she watched her sitcoms at night.

Her response after she returned it to me had been her usual one, “That’s lovely, Jonas. Are you happy?” She claimed at the time that she herself was perfectly content where she was, and had been so for quite some time, even with all the wandering that she did. Since leaving my father, she had supported herself well enough with odd jobs — mainly working in people’s homes or on occasion as a sales clerk in a grocery store or restaurant. She had a little in savings, not much but enough to live on after she retired.

We talked about a number of things during that last afternoon visit, much more so than in previous ones. I understood from the gauntness of her frame that she was, or had been recently, sick. When I asked after her health, she smiled and said, “It’s getting better,” which was one of the tricks that we once had for communicating. We both always understood what couldn’t be stated directly. My mother would have never told me, especially at that point, about the extent of her illness, even if it was grave, nor would I have asked her directly, but then again, neither of us needed to say anything for me to understand that something was wrong.

It was near the end of my visit that she began to talk about what happened between her and my father the evening he reportedly drove the car off the side of the road. The events of which weren’t a myth in our family so much as a shadow marriage behind which the true forces that governed their relationship played out. One of the more common accusations my father made against my mother was that she still wished him dead. Not that she wished him dead at any particular moment, but that she had once done so in the past and had never stopped since.

“I know what you want,” he would shout. “You want me to go back and have me dead.” In the way he phrased it, death always sounded less like a condition and more like an item from a grocery list. You want me to go back and get the fish. Or, You want me to go back and get more bread. Over the years I had time to come up with dozens of variations on what it meant to go back and be dead, a sentence that my father always followed with a quick, backward thrust of his hand against whatever part of my mother’s body happened to be near. This would generally go on for several minutes.

Later, when he was finished and his arm was tired or his hand was sore and he needed to justify what he had just done, he would grumble, from whatever corner of the house he had retreated to, that he could not be easily fooled. How else would he have survived this long? How else would he have made it to America and gotten a job and a car if he didn’t know how to protect himself?

“I’m not stupid,” he would add. “I know what’s going to happen,” which was mostly how he saw the world — as a series of traps against which he must remain vigilant, because the threat, as he believed it, could come from anywhere.

With time he began to consider everything my mother said as being a conspiracy against him. If she asked him, “Why not move to somewhere else?” his response would be slow and measured as he considered all the calculated risks the question posed.

“Why not move to somewhere else, huh? This is what you want to know. Why not move to somewhere else? What do you mean by that?”

During which an immovable fury would begin to swell, a force that as a child I often pictured as taking the shape of a comically large wave in the midst of a vast blue ocean slowly growing larger as it headed toward the shore. Sometimes I would plug my ears closed with my fingers so I could better imagine the crash when it finally came.

“That would make you happy, wouldn’t it? To see us with no home, so I could go begging like a dog for a new place to live.”

All angry men are depressingly the same, and my father was no different. Once he reached the apogee of his fury he had to let loose; this was when things would begin to fly. My father was a spectacular thrower, with a world-class arm that in another version of his life could have landed him in the minors. He threw whatever was near, mainly within reason. On several occasions I watched his better judgment take hold of him as he picked up an object that was far too heavy (there was nothing too precious to throw in our house) or dangerous — a category that included a range of objects from chairs to glasses and cutlery, a copper vase, and every lamp we owned. A brief list of things that were eventually airborne: books, spoons, plastic cases full of pens, my school notebooks, markers, crayons, a pack of cigarettes that he found in my bedroom, bottles of liquid soap, multiple types of fruits — bananas, oranges, apples — and one flashlight. All flew, as did a couple of pillows, which my mother easily caught, causing both of us to spontaneously burst into laughter.

The worst of these fights often left my mother plotting our escape the next day. Over the course of my childhood I must have missed out on at least three months’ worth of school because of these attempts at leaving. After my father left for work, my mother would wake me up by telling me to hurry and get dressed because we were going on a trip. I don’t remember the first time she tried this. I imagine she must have begun shortly after I was old enough to walk. I know that on later occasions I was excited at the prospect of going somewhere just with her, and at that age any distance greater than a few miles seemed epic in scale. We would walk half a mile together to the nearest bus stop, with me holding her left hand while she carried a suitcase in the other. By the time we arrived I was always exhausted and ready to go back home. We tried this several times a year, and for a long time afterward I considered my mother foolish for doing so. How could she see these attempts as anything more than desperate measures? I didn’t understand yet that these were all just trial runs. She was gauging my strength and courage and testing the waters to see how we would fare on a long journey from home together. By the time I was ten we were taking bus trips out of the city. Two years later we even spent several nights away from home, once in a motel just outside of Chicago, on another occasion in Springfield supposedly on our way to St. Louis. My mother spent most of that time asking me if I wasn’t afraid being so far away from home by myself.