Leaving Before the Rains Come (8 page)

Dad, more worried about broken-down lorries and armed bandits in the forest than he was about a dearth of petrochemical packaging, grew increasingly impatient. “Nicola, I am leaving now,” he would suddenly declare, as if an invisible starting flag had been dropped. “We need to get back before dark.” Then he roared off in the pickup while Mum still had only one leg in the car. Meanwhile, plastic bags were strewn like wind-buffeted reprimands all over the driveway. “And my poor limbs ripped off at the knee, arms severed at the elbow,” Mum remembers.

Now, though, Dad sits behind the steering wheel calmly smoking his pipe while Mum has a last, protracted faff in the house. “She’s getting together all her plastic bags, the bane of my existence,” Dad says cheerfully. “Just you watch, she’ll have about five hundred of them and she’ll rifle through them all the way to Lusaka.”

At last Mum emerges from the house and gets into the car clutching her treasured cache. Dad waits for her to swat the dogs away from the car. “Don’t run over the terrorists,” she says. “Go on, Harry. Off you go, Sprocket.” Then she shuts the door and after that there’s the lengthy performance of the seat belt. Finally she’s ready, and she flashes Dad a victorious smile and a thumbs-up, like a Formula One racer leaving the pit.

“Got all your plastic bags, Tub?” Dad asks.

“Yup,” Mum says. And after that for a hundred or more happy miles, Dad drives and Mum rustles around making small, satisfying discoveries—“Ooh look, I found my copper bracelet. I knew I had put it somewhere safe,” or “Ah, there’s my receipt for the fingerlings, Tim. See? It had to show up somewhere”—until we reach the Munda Wanga Botanical Gardens on the outskirts of Lusaka where there’s always a chance the caged lions will be eyeing a bunch of children on their school outing. As soon as she catches sight of the huge trees that line the gardens’ walls, Mum’s attention is diverted from her plastic bags and is riveted instead on the enclosure. “Oh, no schoolchildren today,” she says, disappointed.

“Mum can’t wait to see a schoolchild being eaten by a lion,” Dad says.

“
I
’
VE TOLD BOBO THAT A HUNDRED TIMES ALREADY
,” Mum shouts. Then she turns back to me. “It’s like living with a sheep,” she says. “Every day’s a fresh day for Dad.”

B
y early July, I had been treated for swine flu, tested for pneumonia, and had subjected my lung meridian to acupuncture needles, but still my illness would not abate. A friend brought me flowers, soup, and bottles of eucalyptus oil. Then she sat on the end of the bed and watched me cough. “This won’t do,” she said at last, and had me phone a doctor who specialized in tropical diseases. He made a house call, listened to me for a few minutes, and diagnosed me with whooping cough. He prescribed steroids for me, and prophylactic antibiotics for the rest of the family. Even after I felt well, he cautioned that I should probably stay out of circulation for a while. Whooping cough, he warned, is very contagious.

I thought of a ship in harbor flying the international maritime signal flag Lima, also known as the Yellow Jack. It meant, “This ship is quarantined.” I liked the word,
quarantine,
and all the protective cover it implied. I liked too the idea of signal flags. In a crisis of the sort that unlanguages a person, when there is no longer any possibility of intimate and complex communication, there is still the simple, dread symbol of two yellow squares juxtaposed with two black squares: “You should stop your vessel instantly.”

After a few days, the fever subsided. I stopped coughing. Spinning from the steroids, I woke before dawn and started tidying the yard of its winter debris. “Sweat equity,” Charlie called it, a phrase I hated for the way it took the joy out of labor, but one that had nonetheless stuck in my mind, reemerging every time I swept the driveway, weeded the flowerbeds, raked the lawn. After that, I went up to my office. Beginning that afternoon, and in the weeks that followed, I did the seventh draft of a frustratingly out-of-reach screenplay. I wrote eighty pages of a new book. I reviewed a couple of novels for newspapers, I accepted a magazine assignment on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation for the following summer. I worked and worked as if so doing could tether our house to the earth; Charlie to me; our family to itself.

“It’ll be okay,” I said. “Won’t it?” But Charlie’s anxiety swelled and began to fill the room. Although he went into the office every day, and stayed there all nine or ten hours and sometimes late into the night, his real estate business was dead; there was nothing left now but the phantom labor of shuffling papers from one side of his desk to the other. The edges of other people’s panic leaked into our lives. Charlie talked about clients who had lost their jobs, their homes, their savings. Then he said we would have to put our own house on the market and move into something smaller, downsize. “We’re going to have to tighten our belts,” he said. “Batten down the hatches. Save every penny we can.” At night our sighs and exhaustion left our mouths and settled over our bodies; a cloud of unmet expectations, a threatening storm of broken promises, a low pressure system of the unsaid.

I thought of how it isn’t impossible, but it’s overwhelmingly daunting and perhaps even pointless to construct a viable future from an imperfect past. I thought of Charlie and me confined again to a little cottage; his brooding silence, my reactive chatter. It was too late. Fifteen years ago, I would have moved into a teepee or a hut or a tent with him. But we’d killed the very possibility of small air between us. We were a broken working relationship. Dread played a long, low note in my chest. We couldn’t move into something smaller. If we were going to stay together, we needed a wing each, adjoining cottages with a drawbridge, two houses divided by state lines. We needed the kind of extraordinary space ordinary people could never afford.

Ours had contracted into a grocery-list relationship—finances, children, housekeeping. We concentrated on logistics, cautiously withholding, careful of what we said to one another in case it was used against us later. We were competitive with one another about the difficulties each of us faced in our everyday lives, as if to announce our individual happiness to one another was the final infidelity. And instead of disclosing our souls, we recounted complaints and kept score of the ways in which we had irritated one another or let each other down. After that we had nothing left to say.

I asked Charlie if he could imagine me dead, really wanting to know. He said, “What kind of question is that?”

“It doesn’t have to be a tragic death,” I pointed out. “I could be painlessly evaporated. Gently vaporized by a bunch of angels. Raptured into heaven.”

Charlie was quiet for a bit. Then he said, “Yes, sometimes I do.”

“Me too,” I said.

Death is the great silencer into which people can pour their interpretations of love and loss and longing. But divorce is a choice, and it’s hard to listen to the inevitable rancorous fallout and shaky insecurity it engenders. The social disease of a breakup threatens and destabilizes, and all but the closest of friends—and sometimes even they—recede from the threat it poses. Marriage, with all its fairy-tale promise, its allure of security, and its impression of superior morality, is something we hold up as a badge of honor. Politicians and sports stars rise on the borrowed capital of long and steady marriages; they fall on their discreditable failures.

We had made every effort. There had been the trial separations, the cultish weekend marriage seminars encouraging conjugal spirituality, a couple of disastrous vacations without the children when I missed them so much it only served to highlight that we were better parents than we were romantic partners. There had been dozens of couples’ counseling sessions with the accompanying rules about holding a relationship together by using safe words, or by setting up date nights. But the suggestions filled me with dread. I couldn’t grasp the concept of safe words—“There are no bad words,” I’ve always taught my children. “Only bad ways to use good words.” And our attempts at date nights had increasingly ended in silent standoffs or out-and-out fights.

I had begun to understand that neither of us was wrong, and neither was either of us right. But we saw the world so differently that it seemed to me as if Charlie was living in a different space and time than I was. He saw the world in concrete terms, rationally, and as if the place were solid and the systems set in place were dependable. Charlie never questioned his own sanity, although he sometimes questioned mine. I saw the world as something fluid; I expected irrationality and surprises. I could not tell the difference between inspiration and mild madness, and most of the time I did not think the gap between the two was important.

A month earlier I had gone to our local public library and walked down the aisle of relationship-related books, piling volume after volume into my arms. I made it as far as the help desk with the books before I pictured myself running into an acquaintance in the checkout line or in the parking lot. How would I explain these titles?
The Emergency Divorce Handbook for Women; Helping Your Kids Cope with Divorce the Sandcastles Way; Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay: A Step-by-Step Guide to Help You Decide Whether to Stay In or Get Out of Your Relationship; Coming Apart: Why Relationships End and How to Live Through the End of Yours
. My panic escalated. Even if I managed to negotiate my way out of our small-town public library parking lot without bumping into half a dozen people I knew, how would I get the books into the house unobserved? What if Charlie saw them? Worse, what if the children saw them?

I dumped the books on the shelving cart by the door and hurried out of the library into the high-altitude sunshine, inexplicit in its cheerful clarity. What I wanted more than anything was a sign that told me unequivocally whether or not to divorce Charlie—a thunderclap from the heavens, maybe, words written in clouds, something as unambiguous as the sensation in my whole shocked body the first time I met him and knew without any doubt he was the love of my life.

I drove home, and found myself walking into the house as if it might hold the answer to that question. We’d built the house together more than ten years earlier but even so it had never really felt mine. Although I can’t say it felt as if it belonged to Charlie either. Domestically our two cultures had come into opposition like participants in a nominally friendly sports competition and clashed more aggressively than was necessary. It turned out Charlie prefers clean, modern lines. My taste leans toward the sort of thing that would not be out of place in a brimming African farmhouse. Now Charlie’s low-slung, shiny leather sofa faced my canvas-covered, dog-stained, allergy-hot-zone sofa over the coffee table on which there was a buffer zone of shared interests: a book of Lee Miller’s war photography; a biography of Paul Bowles; orange candles on Japanese-print-inspired holders; Charlie’s weekly newspaper; a world atlas; bills; the children’s homework.

The kids weren’t home from school yet, Charlie was still at work. I went online and ordered a variety of books, from those that promised to rescue a rocky marriage to the sorts of fresh-from-the-fray divorcée memoirs I would ordinarily have avoided. I got used paperbacks because I knew I wouldn’t want them on my shelves after I’d read them. If the marriage survived, they would be a threat—always suggestively winking up from my shelves on the days our union reverted rocky. If the marriage didn’t survive, I knew I wouldn’t want to be reminded of this day forever afterward by their presence.

When they arrived, I stashed the books in their anonymous brown packages behind my collection of obscure Africana, where I knew they were unlikely to be discovered. Every time I went on assignment or to a speaking engagement I stuffed a few volumes into my carry-on. I was distressed to find that many came in the telltale, rippled condition of women on the brink; read in the bath, wept upon, or both. I imagined their previous owners propped on the edge of the steaming tub, taps running, tears streaming. I read them hurriedly, in increasing dismay, and left them in the backs of airplane seats, in airports, in hotel rooms—a guilty trail of contagion.
The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A Twenty-Five-Year Landmark Study
disturbed me so much I tore it into parts and discarded the fragments in separate gas station garbage bins across South Dakota and Nebraska.

Like alcoholic memoirs and their twelve steps to freedom and recovery, divorcée memoirs seem to follow a familiar path: the grim realization that the marriage is truly over; the reluctant acceptance that the unhappy liaison has an ungodly power over the couple; the terror and dislocation that preceded and followed the actual awful act of divorce; the new man and renewed belief in the old lies about love. I had begun to give up on these books at the first mention of a woman collapsing with grief on the kitchen or the bathroom floor. Why always these two rooms? Couldn’t anyone fall over anywhere more comfortable? The sitting room perhaps, the bedroom even? It was only later I discovered that women dissolve in these two places for good reason: the kitchen because it is the place from which we have nurtured our soon-to-be devastated families, and the bathroom because it is private.

“I think it’s over,” I said, stopping Charlie at the front door one morning in mid-August. Even as I spoke, I could hear the mix of anxiety and finality in my voice, as if for several months we had both been watching over a dying relative whose time had finally come. It sounded to me as if I were warning Charlie: if he walked out the door now, he would miss what we had all been waiting for, the moment of death.

“What’s over?” Charlie asked.

“This,” I said, and I gestured us, and the house, and by implication everything we had collected and made together. Our family, the shelves of books, the rows of pills on the bathroom shelf, the boxes of old tax returns in the garage, the photo albums showing us on vacation in Central and South America, the Shona sculpture of a mother with child, the eccentrically beautiful pink-and-cream rug made from homegrown Zambian wool woven for us by Vanessa as a wedding present. “It’s the beach,” she had explained unhelpfully when I stared at the wavy design in puzzlement. “With rocks.”

“Not now,” Charlie said. “If you want to discuss this some other time, we can schedule a meeting.”

“Schedule a meeting?” I said. “I’m not your business partner.”

“Don’t yell.”

“I’m not yelling,” I said.

“You are.”

Then I was.

Cecily came down from the kitchen and stood between us, tiny and fragile-looking in her ready-for-preschool braids, her backpack seeming to double her size. For too long our children had done this, inserting themselves between us and the words that might finally blow us apart. “So right now?” Charlie asked. “You really want to do this right now?”

I didn’t, but I couldn’t help myself. Cecily was a burgeoning part of my hysteria. I wanted her world to be predictable, safe, and, above all, normal. I wanted all my children to be able to say of their childhoods that they were if not idyllic, then at least uneventful. I didn’t want our children losing their house, or their sense of family. I wanted them swaddled in continuity and predictability. In other words, I wanted for my children what I’d never had and what I seemed unable and unwilling and far too unbelieving to create for myself: a solid, obvious, and unassailable sense of self attached to an immovable home, the same address for decades, routines and traditions. “Yes,” I said. Then, “No. No, of course not.”

I had broken the sacred six-word vow of silence:
Not in front of the children.
But I was keeping the sacred six-word vow of parenthood:
For the sake of the children.
For the sake of the children we wouldn’t talk about this now, or maybe ever. For the sake of the children, there would be days made normal by after-school sports and by PTO meetings and by cupcakes on their birthdays. For the sake of the children we would pretend everything was okay until our marriage went from cold war to nuclear winter, and maybe even then.

Charlie scooped up Cecily. “I’m leaving,” he said. “E-mail me with some times we can meet. When you’re calmer.”

They left, Cecily yelling, “Hearts and kisses! Hearts and kisses!” and waving as she always did until the corner in the driveway rendered her invisible to me. I went up to my office, a small room—more of a landing than anything else, a stage stop from which I could easily monitor the comings and goings of the home. It would have been, if the house had had a heart, exactly there, suspended over the belly of the kitchen, and the incubating warmth of the children’s bedroom. I turned on my computer and started the day’s writing. There had been a time, ten or fifteen years ago, that I had believed I could write my way out of anything. For years I had even kept a sticky note on my computer that said exactly that: “You can write your way out of this.”