Love at the Speed of Email (20 page)

By this time both of my siblings, who had witnessed this
whole gift exchange, were literally rolling on the floor. I think it was probably
half the screaming rubber chicken and half the fact that
I
was
not
laughing.

“I am not using that chicken in my workshops, Mum,” I said.

“Why not?” she asked.
“It’s
perfect.”

“Mum!” I said. “I’m already fighting an uphill battle. I am
young and a
woman,
and I’m trying to teach
disaster-relief workers about stress and trauma. If I bring out that chicken I
will blow any respect points I have earned from having worked in jail and with
the police and traveling solo around the Balkans. I do not yet have the years
or the moxie to pull off that chicken during a workshop. I know my limits.”

This
was the
chicken that my mother went to find the night I brought Mike home. Lo and
behold, she came back with not one but
two
bright yellow chickens.

“Look,” she said, holding up the new, fuzzy one. “I found a
new chicken. Check it out!”

My mother closed her hands around the neck of this new
chicken and it began to writhe in her grasp. Large, alarmed plastic eyes
protruded from its head as if on springs, and a pointy red tongue shot out of
its beak and fell sideways, limp.

I couldn’t look at Mike, so I looked at my sister instead.
Michelle was looking back and
me
and giggling with her
hand over her mouth in that way that you laugh when you’ve just seen someone
fall down a flight of stairs at the library with an armful of books. The way
you laugh when you know you
shouldn’t
be laughing.

We all admired the choking chicken routine for a moment, and
then I let desperation and
curiosity compel
me to open
my mouth –
someone
had to say
something.

“What happens when you press that button?” I asked
,
pointing at the “Press here” button buried in the yellow
feathers on the chicken’s chest.
 

“I don’t know,” Mum said intrigued, “I’ve never done that. I
didn’t even know that was there.”

As she touched the button, a familiar song started to play
and the toy chicken, eyes wiggling maniacally, began to dance.

“The chicken dance!”
Michelle and
Mike exclaimed at about the same time.

“What’s the chicken dance?” My mother asked, marveling at
the new skill of this wondrous chicken.

“You’ve never seen the chicken dance?” Michelle asked.

“It goes like this!” Mike said, leaping up, sticking his
hands in his armpits and starting to jump around the kitchen, singing.
 

“Come-on,” Mike urged us.
 

Michelle, still giggling, apparently
deciding that
she
had nothing to lose
and joined in without hesitating.

I stood there for a second with the plate of leftovers I’d
been warming up for Mike in my hand.

How exactly had we descended to the level of performing the
chicken dance in a brightly lit kitchen in front of my parents within fifteen
minutes of walking into the house?

Then I sighed, put the plate down, and joined in.
 

* * *

When I came downstairs on the second morning of his stay,
Mike was already up. He was sitting on the porch swing on the back deck,
staring out across the cane fields and the river, out to the blue sweep of sea
neatly hemmed by a ribbon of beach.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hey,” I said. “Where’s everyone?”

“Your parents are around somewhere,” he said. “Want some
coffee?”

“Please,” I said, sitting down on the swing beside him.
“Morning is not my time.”

“I know,” he said with a small sigh. “It’s my time.”

“I know,” I said.

“I
don’t
know what
you take in your coffee, though,” he said.

“Milk,” I said.
“One sugar.”

He started to get up and paused.

“
Lis
,” he said, “
what
are we going to do?”

It felt like he didn’t really need an answer right then, but
I answered anyway.

“We have time. We’ll figure it out.”

As Mike started to stand again, the screen door slid open
and my mother stepped onto the deck.

“You two,” she said to me.

“Yeah?”

“Your father and I are out tonight, so you can cook for
yourselves, eat leftovers, or find some other option.”

I looked at Mike.

“Do you want to go on a hot date tonight?” I asked him.

“Who with?” he said.

“Me,” I said.

“Well then, how can I say no to that?”

* * *

After dinner that night I waited for Mike to kiss me. He
never did.

We walked along the riverbank, licking our ice cream cones,
until we found a free bench. We sat. I dripped chocolate down my white pants. I
listened to the wind snap the flags above us against the poles. I shivered in
the unseasonably cool breeze and wondered whether Mike would notice and put an
arm around me to help keep me warm.

He didn’t.

I thought about scooting over and kissing
him
but decided against it. The guy was
in my country, at my house, and surrounded by my family and friends. The least
I could do was respect his personal space.

Part of my brain was listening to what Mike was talking
about, and another part was busy mulling over the question he had asked me that
morning.

What were we going to do?

Our three months of emails had been flavored by friendly
frankness that had strayed into barely perceptible flirting on only a handful
of occasions. I guess I’d assumed that it would be different face-to-face –
that if we were going to work, a different sort of energy would immediately
enter the equation.

It didn’t. Not that night. Not for the entire first week he
was there. Not even during a classic and completely unscripted moment on day
four when I took Mike to meet my grandparents.

That day my grandfather, cheerful and garrulous as always,
talked at length about a documentary he’d just seen on crocodile farming in the
Northern Territory and then pressed the DVD on us so that we could take it home
and watch it ourselves. But it was my grandmother who was in particularly fine
form. She served Mike tea in china teacups and delicious slices of cake, and
somewhere in there she also served him the totally out-of-context and
completely inaccurate statement (delivered with the utmost gravity) that I was
“definitely going to adopt two black African babies very soon.”

Mike looked at me, puzzled. I hadn’t let him in on any
adoption plans. In the moment, I could only smile and hope he understood that
this was because
there weren’t any
.

But I can’t blame
all
the embarrassing moments that occurred that afternoon on my grandparents. The
last one was all me.

“Darling,” my grandmother said, handing me three of my own
books just as we were leaving, “can you sign these, please? One of them is ours
and two are to give away.”

I sat down the deck, twiddling the pen while I tried to
figure out what to write inside my grandparents’ book.

“What do you think,” I began, looking up at Mike, who was
standing in front of me. At that precise moment the pen flew out of my hands,
up into the air, and straight down my cleavage like a guided missile.

Mike didn’t say a word. His lips twitched, but he turned his
head and looked out at the river while I, blushing, retrieved the pen from
where it had lodged itself firmly in my bra.

That entire first week, Mike kept a maddeningly respectful
distance. We went walking, we played board games,
we
spent hours and hours sitting on the porch swing together, talking. He didn’t
make a move. He didn’t even
look
at
me wrong. I started to wonder if he was even interested.

* * *

More than our first kiss, more than any particular words,
the
real emotional landmark for me was the first time Mike
reached for me.
  

We were on the porch swing talking, not of the letters that
we had written to each other but of the ones we’d written before that: my
essays and the five years’ worth of mass emails he’d sent to me.

“What did you learn?” Mike asked, laughing, when I told him
how carefully I’d combed through his old letters.

“I learned that I don’t ever want to move to Tajikistan,” I
said.

Mike groaned at the reference to the toughest year of his
life.

“Well, that proves that you don’t need to experience
something firsthand to learn a valuable lesson,” he said.

We fell silent. Mike was sprawled down the length of the
porch swing, his head resting near my shoulder. My arm lay along the back of
the chair, behind him.

“It’s funny that you say Tajikistan was your personal
Waterloo,” I said. “If I’d had to guess, I might have guessed Uganda. Your
letters from Uganda were very … raw.”

“Where do I begin?”
one of his first letters from Uganda had started …

How can I relate
northern Uganda to you when I feel often overwhelmed and confused by it myself?

The war here is
silent. No gunshots at night right now. Just occasional nights when the rebels
abduct a few children to either conscript them as army/sex slaves or chop off
their fingers/ears/lips and then release them back so as to promote as much
fear as possible within the population.

The villagers are
terrified of the rebels. So they’ve migrated to centralized camps for
“internally displaced peoples” (IDPs) where they can supposedly be protected by
the government army. It’s just, the war has been going on for 18 years now and
the government doesn’t seem to give a lick whether the rebels mutilate and kill
the pesky northerners. And the government troops that are supposedly protecting
people in the IDP camps sleep in the center of the camps, surrounded by the
IDPs. Who’s protecting who?

The camps are awful.
Masses of children with big eyes wearing tattered clothing, all
with bulging bellies and flies buzzing around their faces.
Idle men who used to farm fields sitting around getting drunk.
Women walking long distances to collect water from dirty ponds using dirty
plastic containers. Thatched mud and straw huts crammed so closely together
that when the dry, dusty wind blows a cooking fire too far, the whole tinderbox
camp goes up in flames.
Piles of feces all over the ground.
Desperate people begging me and expecting me to help them.

Mike fingered the stem of the wine glass he was holding as
he thought about what I’d said about his Uganda emails. The drops of water
beading the smooth surface of the glass reflected a dozen blue horizons. We
watched them rotate as the glass turned. Nothing else stirred under the hot,
heavy silence of that summer afternoon. We were an unfathomable distance from
the desperation of those camps.

“Uganda
was
raw,”
Mike said. “But Tajikistan was harder. When I arrived in Tajikistan I thought I
was extraordinary and indestructible. I thought that if I could live in
solidarity with the poor and
love
Tajikistan and work hard enough, then the changes I wanted for that place and
those people would happen and things would make sense. All of these
expectations collided with a hard reality, and I was the one who broke.” He
shrugged. “By the time I got to Uganda… I don’t know how you’d say it. I was
less idealistic? I was less arrogant? I’d stopped expecting to feel as if I
were saving the world every day. I’d accepted that humanitarian moments are
rarer than you’d think in this work.”

That was right, I remembered. He’d written about
humanitarian moments in the second half of that letter from Uganda:

Sunday I was the ugly
mzungo
(foreigner). We work six days a week. I was looking
forward to being able to sit on the veranda reading and sipping a cold glass of
water that Sunday. I was looking forward to being able to eat lunch (we don’t
eat while we’re in the camps because we just can’t eat food in front of the
people). I was looking forward to being able to forget, if only for a day,
that on the other side of those iron gates are
naked
children with bloated bellies. But there’s a cholera outbreak in
Pabbo
camp now, so Saturday night it was decided that we
would work again on Sunday.
 

So Sunday I arrived at
the office early. I figured the earlier we left the office, the earlier we could
finish our work and the earlier I would be able to get home. There was just one
hurdle in this plan: my staff. Rather than arrive early in the morning as we
had agreed, they arrived late. And then, after leaving the office two hours
behind schedule, we had to spend an additional half-hour getting some supplies
they had forgotten.

The day in the camp
was long, hot, frustrating, and as time went on I became more and more the ugly
mzungo
. You
know,
the
foreigner who is short on patience and stressed out about everything.
 

Late in the day, after
we had analyzed water from our last point, I was walking back from a spring.
The spring is located about 10 minutes from the huts on the edge of the camp.
It’s a beautiful walk though lush banana trees, paddies bursting with amber
rice shocks, rolling fields of cassava and sweet potatoes. Several women
carrying yellow jerry cans to the spring passed us as we walked back to our
truck. And just at that moment, right in the midst of all my ugliness that
stemmed from the frustrating day at the end of a wearisome week, just at that
moment I realized that I was catching a glimpse of something really beautiful:
a snapshot of what life must have been like for these people before the start
of the war 18 years ago. And hopefully a snapshot of what life will be like for
these people someday when the war ends.