Love at the Speed of Email (7 page)

I, in turn, lacked the inclination to rapidly absorb and
adopt the rules of this new world, a world where your grasp on preteen fashion,
pop culture, and boys all mattered terribly. Possibly I could have compensated
for my almost total lack of knowledge in these key areas with lashings of
gregarious charm, but at nine I lacked that, too. I was not what you would call
a sunny child.
 

So I read instead. I read desperately.

I read pretty much anything I could get my hands on. One of
the few good things I could see about living in the states was the ready
availability of books. Some weekends Mum and Dad would take us to the local
library’s used-book sale. Books were a quarter each. I had a cardboard box and
carte blanche. On those Saturday mornings I was in heaven.

Like many kids, I suspect, I was drawn to stories of
outsiders or children persevering against all odds in the face of hardship. I
devoured all of C.S. Lewis’ stories of Narnia and adored the novels of Frances
Hodgson Burnett, especially the ones featuring little girls who were raised in
India before being exiled to face great hardship in Britain. But I also strayed
into more adult territory. I trolled our bookshelves and the bookshelves of
family friends, and those bookshelves were gold mines for stories about
everything from religious persecution to murder, rape, civil war, child brides,
and honor killing.

“It would be nice,” my father commented dryly upon reading
the first draft of this chapter, “if you could manage
not
to make it sound like our personal library was stocked exclusively
with troubling filth.”

“Dad,” I explained, “that’s why I used the gold-mine
analogy. You don’t just stumble across gold; you have to dig for it. I worked
really hard to find that stuff in amongst all the boring family-friendly fare
you were prone to buying.”

Mum and Dad didn’t know everything I got into, of course.
After they caught me reading a tale set largely in a brothel in South Africa
and confiscated it, I got stealthier with censorable material. I also found
their hiding place – behind the pile of sweaters on the top shelf of the
wardrobe – and read the rest of that particular book in chunks during times
when they were both out of the house.

In retrospect, even at eleven I wasn’t reading largely for
pleasant diversion, for fun, for the literary equivalent of eating ice cream in
the middle of the day. I was extreme-reading – pushing boundaries – looking to
be shocked, scared, thrilled, and taught. I was reading to try to figure out
how to make sense of pain.

It is entirely possible that had we remained in Australia
throughout my childhood, I would still have spent the majority of these preteen
years feeling isolated and misunderstood. After all, in the midst of our
mobility I never doubted my parents’ love for me or for each other, but this
did not forestall an essential loneliness that was very deeply felt. I suspect
that I would still have grown into someone who feels compelled to explore the
juxtaposition of shadow and light, someone who is drawn to discover what lies
in the dark of life and of
ourselves
. But I also
suspect that the shocking extremes presented by life in Bangladesh and America
propelled me down this path earlier, and farther, than I may naturally have
ventured.

It was largely books that were my early companions on this
journey. They were stories of poverty and struggle, injustice and abuse,
violence and debauchery, yes. But they were also threaded through with honor
and courage, sacrifice and discipline, character and hope.

Many people seem to view “real life” as the gold standard by
which to interpret stories, but I don’t think that does novels justice. For me,
at least, the relationship between the real and fictional worlds was
reciprocal. These books named emotions, pointed to virtue and vice, and led me
into a deeper understanding of things I had already witnessed and experienced
myself. They also let me try on, like a child playing dress-up, experiences and
notions new to me. They acted as maps, mirrors, and magnifying glasses.

In those lonely childhood years, books also provided refuge.
They were havens and sanctums.

Did that make them home?
 

When the writing exercise ended after half an hour and we
were invited to share, I’d come up with only two ideas.

Set the scene in a bookstore. Or set it in an airport.

I hadn’t written a single word.

Canberra,
Australia

Perhaps one of the reasons I got so stuck in Hawaii when
asked to write about home is that my images of what home
should
be are so firmly anchored in place. But how can you have a
firm sense of a place as home when you’ve moved a dozen times and your longest
stint in any single city was from age one to seven? I can barely even remember
that house in Canberra.

There was a giant dog that lived next door, some sort of
Great Dane mix. It was as big as a small horse, and I was both fascinated and
terrified by its majestic, seemingly placid presence.

A bird flew into the kitchen window one day with a
tremendous bang and broke its neck. We buried the limp still-warm body in the
garden in a shoe box and marked the grave with a cross made out of
popsicle
sticks.

I shared a bedroom with my little sister. There was a foam
couch between our beds that we used as a bridge for silent post-bedtime
acrobatics. Michelle fell one night and took a chunk out of her eyebrow on the
metal frame of her bed. Blood
fountained
. Mum and Dad
were not impressed. That was the end of our late-night acrobatics.

I find it a little disturbing that the only clear memories I
have of my first real home in Canberra were apparently imprinted there by fear,
death, or injury. The details of happiness, it seems, take longer to settle in.

Los
Angeles, USA

I asked my sister and brother about this shortly after I
moved to Los Angeles. Through part happy accident and part good
trans-continental schedule coordination, they both managed to visit L.A. on the
same weekend. New to L.A. myself at that stage, I cast around for something
cool for the three of us to do and settled on the Huntington Gardens.

That Saturday we took a picnic blanket and wandered around
those green and manicured acres – through the rose garden, past the prickly and
bulbous cacti, and down a long shady pathway that wound through a stand of
bamboo. At the very bottom of the park, past a pond jammed with lilies, we
found what we were looking for: the Australian section.

We spread our picnic blanket on the grass under the gum
trees and lay down. Pale bark hung off the trunks in papery sheets, and, above,
dry gunmetal leaves rustled in the breeze. I took a deep breath, searching for
the eucalyptus signature, menthol.

I can’t remember which of the three of us suggested calling
Mum and Dad, but it was probably Michelle. Michelle tends to be the one who
remembers things like the fact that it would warm the cockles of our parents’
peripatetic little hearts to know that we were all together in the Australian
section of the
Hungtington
Gardens.

“We can’t call the
parentals
,”
Matt said. “We only have a mobile phone.”

“We can,” Michelle and I said at the same time and then
looked at each other and laughed.

“I’ve got Mum and Dad’s calling-card number memorized,” I
said proudly, since memorizing any string of digits is a noteworthy achievement
for me.

“Me, too,” Michelle said.

Matt did not give us the applause I thought was warranted.

“Are you two
still
using Mum and Dad’s calling card?” he asked.

“What?” I said. “Mum and Dad don’t care, as long as we also
use it to call them.”

Matt looked at me in silence, with eyes narrowed and just
the merest contemplative curl to his lips. Matt is very good at communicating
in silence. This particular silence said something like “Don’t you think, my
dear sister, that perhaps it’s time you got your own international calling
card?”

I answered him out loud.

“Aren’t Mum and Dad still paying for your car registration
and insurance?”

Matt’s wide grin appeared with all the sweet suddenness of
the sun coming out from behind clouds.

“That’s my tax for staying in Australia,” he said.
“With you two both gone, they’re pretty happy to have
one
of us still there.”

“Does Australia feel like home yet?” I asked. Like both
Michelle and me before him, after spending childhood and adolescence abroad,
Matt had returned to Australia to attend university. He’d now been back for
about four years.

“I don’t know,” Matt said slowly, shrugging. “I mean, we
left when I was one. What’s home supposed to feel like?”

I recognized the inarticulate confusion I’d stirred up and
rerouted, jumping to something else I’d been thinking through recently.

“Do you guys remember much about early childhood?” I asked.
“I feel like I can’t remember as much about it as other people say they can.
Some people talk about remembering things from when they were two or three, but
I struggle to remember anything much clearly before five, at the earliest.”

“Me, too,” Matt said.
“My memory’s crap.”

“Mine, too!” Michelle said. “I can hardly remember anything
from Bangladesh, and I was seven when we left! I was just talking about this in
counseling the other day.”

Michelle paused then, looking pensive.

Of the three of us, Michelle had made the most definitive
decisions about the place she would call home. The previous year, she had
married her high school sweetheart, Jed, and moved back to Maryland. This
transition hadn’t been entirely smooth, and as she’d essentially adopted America,
Michelle decided that she might as well experiment with one of the common
cultural mores and try seeing a counselor as well. From the little I’d heard
,
I was dubious as to whether this woman was going to be a
good fit.
  

 
“What’d she say?” I
asked.

“She …” Michelle paused again. “She said childhood memory
loss is common in abuse cases.”

“She said
what
?!?”
I asked, sitting up.

“She also wants you to come to a session with me next time
you’re in town,” Michelle continued. “She thinks it might help her understand
me better.”

“I
cannot
believe
that she
suggested to you
that you
may have been abused as a child in your second session with her,” I said. “That
is so dodgy.”

“I’d never even thought about it before, but do you think
it’s even a possibility?” Michelle asked, trying – and almost succeeding – to
sound as if my answer wasn’t that important.

“It’s
possible
, I
guess,” I said. “But it’s unlikely. Total amnesia about abuse does happen, but
it’s really not all that common. Plus, all three of us have the same problem
and we certainly weren’t being abused at home. Did she consider that perhaps a
lot of moving around as a child disrupted your ability to lay down early
memories?”

“No,” Michelle said.
“Just abuse.
So will you come to counseling with me next time you’re in town?”

“Yes,” I said, lying back down and looking up through the
leaves. As was often the case in L.A., there wasn’t a cloud in sight.

“In the meantime,” I said, “just tell her that when we were
little and people asked you questions, I used to tell them that you didn’t
talk,
then
I’d answer for you. And I don’t think that
you said the word
no
to me until you
were twelve. Also, I used to hide in your closet occasionally while you were
brushing your teeth at night and wait until you were in bed and it was all dark
and then jump out and scare you. I am very sorry about all of this now, truly I
am. But I do not believe it constitutes child abuse of the type your counselor
is probably thinking about.”

“You got off lightly,” Matt reminded
Michelle.
“She told me I was adopted.”

“
Awww
,” I said, smiling at the
memory. “I did. I even made you a fake birth certificate.”

“Okay,” Michelle said, clearly happy to let this go for the
time being. “Shall we call Mum and Dad?”

“Yes. Let’s ask them whether
they
think you were abused as a child,” I said.

“That is not funny,” Matt said sternly. “And do you want to
give Dad nightmares for a week? Even without the prospect of abuse, I reckon
he’d still be upset to think that we couldn’t remember things as well because
of all the moving around.”

“Why?” I said. “Are we not allowed to acknowledge that
growing up leapfrogging borders may just have come with some price tags
attached? Does it
all
have to be
positive? Would any of us trade our experiences despite those price tags?”

* * *

My memory improved with time. I do better with recalling our
later houses.

Brown carpet here, marble floors there.
Here a kidney-shaped swimming pool, there a swing set or a courtyard. Windows
sternly barred with black metal, or white wood clutching small clear panes, or
great glossy sheets of shatterproof glass that looked out from the 27th floor
and didn’t even open.

These places were all homes in their own fashion. They just
weren’t
home
, singular.

That was probably my other problem in Hawaii. I’ve always
had this sense that home
should
be
singular.
That you really have only one.

When I put these two ideas together – the singularity of
place that I’ve burdened the concept of home with – I understand better why
from this vantage point nowhere I’ve ever lived looks fully like home to me. It
has less to do with whether that place
felt
like a home during the time I lived there than with there being about a dozen
such places.