Leaving Before the Rains Come (7 page)

T
he next day, I caught the plane back from Texas to Wyoming, and two weeks later, I fell ill. I lay in bed with a fever, the windows thrown open, our brown velvet curtains billowing in an early June breeze. The fever evolved into a cough. The cough evolved into something that became all I was. I coughed until I lost my voice. I coughed until I felt as if my ribs might disconnect from my spine. I coughed until I was the sum of my biology. By night, I sat with my back against the cool tile of the bathroom, hot water running into clouds of steam, and I coughed until I was winded. I grew exhausted. Charlie grew exhausted too. Not only from being up nights listening to me but also from some nameless, deeper, more worrying weariness.

Then one late morning, in the middle of the illness—proving unseemly long—Charlie walked into our bedroom with his latest calculation of our finances and abruptly announced, “If something doesn’t happen soon we’re going to lose the house.” In my drained, mildly hallucinatory state, I pictured the house lifting off its foundation and splintering to pieces in the sky. I pictured Carl Fredricksen, the retired balloon salesman from the movie
Up,
flying our house to Paradise Falls (or, more likely, Idaho Falls, Sioux Falls, Twin Falls). I pictured us coming home from the children’s school one day and finding the house gone, the land reforested and wild-encroached.

I contemplated Charlie’s profile, gray and shadowy in the darkened room. I wanted to ask him, “If you and I are not this house, then who are we?” But I said nothing partly because I didn’t have the spare breath, and partly because I knew neither of us had the answer to that question. Without the house, Charlie and I were undone from one another, uprooted and uncoupled. We had reached the point of speaking past one another, as if in a code intended for someone else entirely. And yet the idea of not belonging under the same roof was unthinkable to both of us.

When my father spoke of his parents’ divorce, which he did rarely, and then only when it sounded as if I was contemplating the same thing, he would not use that word. Instead, he would say, “When the house broke apart.” And I knew what he meant. You hear about so-called good divorces, about amicable detachments, about houses morphing into two—holidays taken together, Christmas Days spent under one roof, children’s graduations attended en masse. But ours would not be that kind of uncoupling. We’d come together with too much passion to break apart gently. We’d tried separations before and the trauma of the near-catastrophic implications of what our divorce would be had always pulled us together again. Ours would be a house breaking apart and that is a monumental, irreversible event, as if a geological eruption has occurred. Survivors will be scattered to the four corners of the earth; they will have the shocked, wounded expressions of people who have endured an explosion. It will be terrible and biblical. “And if a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”

A few more days passed. Friends phoned to say they had dropped off soup and flowers for me at the bottom of the stairs. Mum sent a care package of Epsom salts and aspirin from Zambia. Vanessa sent an e-mail that read like a fractured hallucinogenic neon sign pulsing over a midnight diner: “Hi Al, are you
DYING?
Mum says you’re ‘dying.’ Do you have the
BLACK
plague? Leave me something juicy in
YOUR WILL
 . . . ‘Only joking.’ Love you lots and lots, so please don’t peg it. Xxxxxx Van.” The kids pushed get-well notes under the door and shouted requests; could they eat this, play that, go there? Charlie ebbed in and out of the room, anxious and depressed. I felt restless with worry too, but helpless to do much about it.

My eyes, bloodshot with coughing, were too sore for reading or writing. The radio—hours of indifferent contemporary music and repeating loops of news for much of the day—only added to my sense of shiftlessness. Eventually, as much to reassure myself out of my unproductivity as anything else, I went up into my office and found my old tape recorder and the stack of tapes of the dozens of interviews I had done with my parents over the years. I brought the tape recorder down to our bed and put it on the pillow next to my head.

I had made the tapes in part because I had wanted some concrete way to reach back home; a way to tell my
U.S.
-raised children, “These are the other people you came from. Here are their stories. Here is how they sound.” But I had never played the tapes for any of our three children because it turns out real children don’t tend to work the way we imagine they might, as little vessels into which we can decant our own reconstituted pasts. In my experience, young children exist almost forcibly in the present; they have scant interest in their heritage. They little care if their ancestral histories are erased, or if the graves of their forebears and relatives have been untraceably overrun. To begin with, it’s we who care and we try to make our children care too; we remind them to hold on to the idea we have created of ourselves; we tell them to remember where they come from. We are the ones who say, “This is your special identity.” And by extension there is the implicit instruction, “Become violently attached to it.”

Listening to the tapes now, I was struck by my younger voice asking the questions, the accent still purely colonial English so that it’s almost indistinguishable from Mum’s and certainly nothing like the accent I now have. I was struck too by how impatiently I spoke, how quickly I filled any silence, how little I appeared to be listening to my parents’ answers. Not for the first time in my life, I wished I had spoken less and heard more. It had taken this illness—my own loss of voice, a mild fever, forced seclusion—for the quality of my listening to begin to change.

Mum’s voice was firmer than Dad’s. She painted life gilded, she skipped over the difficult bits, and she put a positive spin on Rhodesia’s long and bloody civil war (“Best years of my life!”). She repeated her favorite stories over and over like church, and I think for the same reason: the more often you say something, the more likely it is to affirm itself, to become an accepted truth and to evolve into a communal memory. She was an upholder of myth, a creator of burnished image, a best-foot forwarder. “I know most people remember most vividly the horrible gruesome tragic bits of their lives,” she said. “But I don’t see things that way.”

When Dad spoke, he said everything only once, and then quite clearly, which is the only way I have known him. “Those who talk the most, usually have the least to say,” he said when I complained about the long silences he was leaving on my tapes. Perhaps it’s his native British reticence, combined with years of war and common-or-garden trauma plus a few seriously uncommon tragedies that pared down his utterances to only the essentials. When he was not much younger than I am now, and we were living on a drought-prone farm in eastern Rhodesia, the workers gave my father the nickname “Boss Fuck-Off.” With retrospect, I can see how intonation and context could render that phrase uniformly useful to a tobacco farmer of English origin turned reluctant, conscripted Rhodesian soldier.

But although Dad has a definite sense of delivery, he doesn’t have Mum’s definite sense of belonging. In fact, his most determining act seems to have been an early decision to go against generations of military tradition on his father’s side of the family and not join the British navy. Unlike my mother, who has long defined herself as belonging to Africa, my father is defined not by place but by an unbelonging to anywhere. My father eschewed both the nation and the much-flaunted naval tradition of his British forefathers, it was the earth—
any
earth, as long as it was far from the madding crowd—that suited him.

“No, the sea wasn’t really my strong suite,” Dad admitted. And it is true I have seen him swimming in it only once, and then only reluctantly. Goaded by the rest of us on a rare vacation to the seaside, he finally agreed to paddle out with exaggerated laboriousness from the beach a little way, before splashing uneasily back to shore. He looked hapless and incompetent enough that some German tourists appeared seriously to be considering a rescue. “Bloody wet,” Dad said, toweling himself dry with the urgent vigor of someone emerging from hours among deep ice floes rather than a brief warm tropical bath. “And some bastard’s overseasoned it with salt.”

As a little boy, Dad was occasionally dressed up in sailor suits that he loathed, the way most children hate the smart clothes imposed on them by their elders. He remembers posh regimental dinners, hours of dreaded stuffy nonsense and kowtowing. Once, when he was old enough to have such inspirations but not yet old enough to fully think through the consequences of his actions, he had the idea of putting an exploding cigar in the humidor to liven up the dreariness of after-dinner port. The effect on the nerves of elderly shell-shocked naval officers turned out to be spectacularly rewarding. “I really got bollocked for that one,” Dad said. “But it was worth it.”

A few times his father took Dad out on a ship, and although the enormous, imposing battle-readiness of the thing was impressive, Dad doesn’t remember feeling a thrill of wanting to be a part of it. “All that discipline,” he confesses on the tapes. “Bit awkward with someone of my temperament.” So, in Dad’s telling, he fled England (“An aunt and half a dozen cousins in every county”) for a farm-laborer job in Canada, found it cold and alcoholically dry; tried a stint in the West Indies, where he stayed until his bar bill exceeded his salary; went to Kenya to see a giraffe and met my mother. And she, fresh from the confines of dreary finishing school in London (“Tweedy lesbians and boiled cabbage,” she says), was ready for the sort of adventure he promised. “Tim Fuller of No Fixed Abode,” he introduced himself. Which would have rung out as a warning to anyone else, but manifested as a mating cry to Mum.

Ten years into my own marriage, when it was becoming clear that Charlie had receded from me, or that I had flowed out beyond his reach, maybe irrevocably, I asked Mum if she had any advice about being married, or (more to the point) staying married. I was home on the farm from the States, it was early morning and we were a little hungover, inspecting the fishponds before the heat of the day could really pick up. The dogs, as usual, were spilling all around us, scaring up pigeons and grasshoppers.

Mum frowned at me and, thinking she hadn’t heard, I repeated the question. “No, no, no, I heard you perfectly well the first time,” she said. She dusted flies away from her ears. “Oh Bobo, I don’t know. Marry the right chap to begin with, I suppose.” And then she whistled for the dogs and marched on ahead. It occurred to me then that Mum had probably never thought of herself as
married.
She just sailed on with life as she saw fit, and Dad, smitten with her, more or less steered from the stern, occasionally shouting (usually unheeded) words of warning.

By all logic and by any standards, my parents should have spun away from one another years ago. Together they had lost three children, a war, a few farms, and for a while my mother had seriously lost her mind. And yet they incorporated these losses into their marriage along with what they had gained, assigning very little in the way of either blame or praise almost anywhere. They put no more weight on despair than they did on joy. The way they did love was also the way they did tragedy, as if it was all an inevitable part of the gift of being alive. It was rare for my parents to make a production out of their tragedies unless sometimes, drunk, the past eddied out in Mum’s mind and she was caught in the circulation of her old grief for a day or a week or a season until the sorrow passed.

“I was just bloody lucky to find your mother,” my father told me after breakfast when I asked him the same question. “No one else would have put up with me.” He thumbed some tobacco into his pipe and tapped it down. “Anyway, we’ve always given each other heaps of room.” Then he added, as if this mattered more than anything, “Whole bloody acres of room.” He clamped his pipe between his teeth and lit it. “Yep, that’s it. Acres and acres of room.” Dad set his cards out for a game of solitaire. “Now,” he said. “Let’s see what sort of day we’re going to have.” By Dad’s questionable reckoning, if his game came out, the day would be good. If it didn’t come out, Dad cheated and the day would still be good. “Win-win,” he said.

I watched Dad’s hands hovering over his old cards, sticky with spilled tea and dog hair. I remained confused: Charlie and I seemed to have nothing but acres of room between us, and my parents, who had the kind of marriage to which I thought it worth aspiring, had none. They had lived, worked, and played together for the better part of forty years. Their tastes have cleaved and overlapped; they share bathwater, silently conceding that the grubbiest person goes last; they sleep under the claustrophobic confines of a single mosquito net. I said, “That’s absolute rubbish, Dad. You give each other no room whatsoever.”

Dad looked up at me, his eyes crinkled against pipe smoke, eyebrows raised as if I had said something of surprising stupidity. He tapped his temple with a forefinger. “Ah, yes, but it’s all in the head, Bobo. All in the head.”

I had a glimmering of understanding then. No, my parents are not two solitudes, as Rainer Maria Rilke would have had it, protecting, touching, and greeting one another. To the contrary, they are indistinguishable from one another, inseparably connected; they have become a single recognizable culture with its own food, its own scents, and its own private language. Even the way they have annoyed one another over the years has become part of their shared culture, the way mosquitoes are a difficult but inevitable part of the Zambezi valley, or rain has become a standard joke in Scotland. Over time, they have learned to make their foibles part of the ties that bind them, their love is
everything
about them—not only the passion and humor and resilience, but also the aggravating habits, the quirks, the flaws.

When they were younger, Mum’s excessive love of plastic bags made for one of those plaguing marital recurring arguments that are always about more than the subject at hand. As if terrified that they would run out in her lifetime, Mum collected bags, washed them, reused them, washed them and reused them again until eventually they disintegrated into little plastic dust atoms. Until then, like neurotically beloved pets, they came with her everywhere. “Just in case,” she said.