In the beginning—these three words my daily bread, recited at the kitchen table in our shack in Shawnee, the Bible open in front of me. Before then, just as the Korean War was beginning, I remember my mother humming honky-tonk as she fried spuds for our dinner, two-stepping to the table in an imaginary waltz. She was the daughter of a Methodist circuit preacher who extolled separation from the world, and his wife, who bowed her head in submission and held her tongue even as she secreted away the money she made selling eggs, a penny at a time added to the sock hidden beneath the nest of her beloved Rhode Island Red, a hen so fierce and prone to peck that my grandfather gave it wide berth.
My mother loved to tell the story: how my grandmother scraped and saved until she had enough for a train ticket back to her family in Pawhuska, then rose one morning, fixed her husband a big pot of pork hocks and brown beans—enough to last him a week—made bacon and extra biscuits so he wouldn’t have to go without breakfast, ironed his handkerchiefs and starched his shirts, then told him that one of the ladies of the church was having female troubles and needed her care. My grandmother walked out the door with a bundle of biscuits under one arm, her infant daughter in the other, went straight to the train station, didn’t even leave a note. My grandfather refused to divorce her, would never forgive the way she had deceived him, but maybe he should have known—the way that women have always lied, risking their souls to save their sorry lives.
It was eighteen years later when my father, two weeks hitchhiking Route 66 and still no job, came looking for work at the Osage County Fair and first laid eyes on my mother—a rodeo princess pitching cow chips for charity. He must have fallen in love with her right then—the way she could clean up pretty as a new nickel or muck down on her knees in manure, that sunshine smile never breaking. She brought him home to meet her mother, and I like to imagine that moment: the three of them at the table, the late light warm through the window, and all of them laughing at their good fortune—to have found one another, to share the sweet fruit of that pie.
My parents were married that winter, and the next winter, I was born. When my father was drafted, my mother and I moved in with my grandmother to wait out the war. Two years later, the official from the State Department arrived, telling how my father had died in the Home-by-Christmas Offensive, that the president was sorry, as was the nation. My only memories of him reside in the stories my mother told.
And then, that summer I turned seven, the cancer came up through my mother’s bones like it had been biding its time, took what smile was left, took her teeth and blanched her skin to parchment. I would lie in our bed and cradle my dolly in a tea towel while my mother wept and prayed that God would take her and my grandmother offered another spoonful of laudanum. When, finally, God answered my mother’s prayers, and then, only a few months later, my grandmother was felled by a blood clot that the doctor said had bubbled up from her broken heart, I was ordered into my grandfather’s custody.
He came to the city orphanage in his old Ford pickup, and I watched from the doorway as he approached, a lean man, sinewy and straight, with a strong way of moving forward, like he was forcing his way through water. Pinched felt hat, starched white shirt, black tie and trousers—only the seams of his brogans, caked with mud, gave him away for the scabland farmer he was when not in the pulpit.
My nurse had dressed me in a modest blouse and jumper, but I refused the hard shoes she offered and wore instead my mother’s old riding boots, an extra sock stuffed in each toe. The first thing my grandfather did was have me open my suitcase. My doll, my mother’s rhinestone tiara, her wedding ring—all worldly, my grandfather said, the devil’s tricks and trinkets, and he left them with the orphanage to pawn.
I wailed all the way to Shawnee, but my grandfather didn’t speak a word. By the time we took the road south that led to the flat edge of town—that marginal land where the poorest whites and poorer blacks scraped out a living—I had cried myself into a snubbing stupor. He held my door, waited patiently as I climbed down and stood facing the narrow two-room shack with its broken foundation and sagging roof, the outhouse in back a haphazard construction of split pine. I trailed him through the kitchen, its walls papered with newsprint, pasted with flour and water, stained dark with soot, and into the bedroom, where he placed my suitcase on the horsehair mattress. He peered down at me, laid his hand on top of my head. “God will keep us,” he said, pulled the door shut, and left me alone.
From the room’s single window, I saw that he had changed into his patched work clothes, and I watched as he hitched the jenny mule, threw the reins over his shoulders, and returned to the plot he’d been plowing. What I found in that house was little: tenpenny nails in the wall, hung with my grandfather’s good hat and suit; a two-door cupboard that held Karo, flour, sugar, a salted ham hock; an oilcloth-covered table and two weak chairs; a short-wicked kerosene lantern; a potbellied stove streaked with creosote; the cot that my grandfather had set in the kitchen and covered with an old wool blanket so that I might have the bed. I moved to the porch, found the washbasin, the straight razor, the leather strop, and a cropped piece of flannel that he used for a towel. I sat on the single-plank step and watched him chuck the mule up one row and down another until he put the plow away, came and stood in front of me, wiping the sweat from his brow.
“Where’s my dinner, sister?” he asked gently. I hadn’t thought to feed him, didn’t know how. He led me back to the cupboard, showed me the cast-iron skillet, the knife, how to make red-eye gravy with the ham drippings, flour, and salt. Over the next week, we would eat that ham right down to the bone, boil it for soup on Saturday, crack it for marrow. I learned what it meant to be hungry, learned that Sundays meant more food and a healthy helping of God’s word.
Because he now had a child to care for, my grandfather left the circuit, and he counted it as God’s goodwill that a small congregation east of the city was in need of a pastor. The parishioners, some white, most black, folded us in, and though I had no siblings, they called me Sister Gin. I wasn’t yet old enough to understand what the townspeople might think—that poor little white girl—and spent the Sabbath wedged in a hard oak pew between skin that ran from pale pink to sallow, dusky to dark. My grandfather’s dictates were absolute, but in his eyes, all of God’s children, red and yellow, black and white, were bound by the same mortal sin, given the same chance at redemption. I sat in fascinated horror, the sanctified moaning around me, as I listened to my grandfather’s hellfire sermons that foretold the woe of every unsaved soul. Blood to the horse’s bridle, flames licking the flesh—the punishment that would come my way if I didn’t repent, but no matter how hard I considered my deeds, I didn’t yet know what sins to confess.
After the hymns had been sung—happy are the faithful dead!—the churchwomen prepared a fellowship meal at one shack or another. Your color didn’t matter when it came to who was served and where, but whether you were male or female did. The men were fed where they sat, their wives fixing their plates before their own, wise to their husbands’ predilections: Brother Fink ate only the chicken’s legs, thighs, and the tail he called the pope’s nose; Brother Jackson required that his food be layered—a mound of potatoes topped with meat and smothered with a generosity of gravy. The boys not old enough to be in the men’s circle and the girls too young for kitchen help were called in next, made to scrub their faces, and put to the table. Only after the men and the children were served did the women eat: bread heels, chicken backs, the wateriest remains of corn pudding. They ate with babies nursing at their breasts and whispered their hushed stories of hard births and tumorous wombs, jumping up when called to bring another biscuit or glass of sweet tea to the men, whose talk was of dropping wheat prices, Nazi spies, and the local criminal element that ran bootleg out of the bottoms and carried razor-sharp knives. I sat quiet in whatever corner I could find, acting like I wasn’t listening, but what I heard told me all that I needed to know: that the world was fallen, that my only hope lay in the grace and glory of God, that Satan was waiting for me to falter at every turn, that he might appear to me as the Angel of Light, deceive me with his wicked tongue, and lead me to hell as his bride.
How many times did I rouse from some nightmare, call out for my mother to save me? I might have left the trappings of my old life behind, but my grief had packed up and moved right along with me, shaped and weighted as though it had a life of its own. I woke one night so sure that the devil had found me that I ran to the cot in the kitchen, told my grandfather that I could feel that grief lying right there beside me like a panting black dog. He lit a candle, took a vial of oil from the corner of the cupboard, made the sign of the cross on my forehead, and pressed his palms to my ears. “Demon, by the authority given to me by the Lord Jesus Christ, I command that you leave this child!” He gripped my head tighter, shook it like a gourd. “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, come out of her, I command you!” He drew his hands away so quickly that the suction nearly deafened me. When I opened my eyes, I saw the tears pooling in the dark shallows of his face, his mouth arched as though that demon had leaped right out of me and into him. I went back to my bed, now cold, and wished I had never left it, had kept my hurt to myself. Silence was a lesson I learned well—how to mute my body, my voice, my heart.
That fall, my first day of school, my grandfather rode me to town on the mule because the pickup had broken down and no amount of prayer would fix it. As we approached the playground, I saw all the white children pointing and laughing until the pretty young teacher came out to scold them. If I hadn’t understood it before, I knew it then: we were different, I was different, not only a member of the Holy Roller church but an orphan from the south edge of town who lived where most whites wouldn’t. I slid from the mule’s broad back, kept my head down, and followed the teacher into the room, where she showed me my desk and placed a picture book in my hands. “You can read for a while,” she said kindly, and left me to lose myself in the pages even as the other students filed in and began reciting their numbers. From that point on, books became my solace, my escape. I brought them home from the library, hid them from the eyes of my grandfather, who believed that only the word of God had a place in his house, that stories outside of the scripture might lead me astray.
I completed elementary, kept growing, went with the junior high nurse to buy what my grandfather called my unmentionables—soft-cupped brassieres, panties, sanitary belts and napkins—then stood in my bedroom, confounded by the hooks and straps, ashamed that my grandfather would no longer meet my eyes when I came in from the outhouse. From him, I learned that I was the daughter of Eve, a danger to myself, a temptation to those around me. Couldn’t wear pants, only skirts that covered my knees. Couldn’t wear makeup or jewelry to draw the attention of men. Couldn’t cut my hair, which was my veil of modesty. Couldn’t preach because Paul said so. Suffer not a woman. When revival came and the Spirit descended, the sisters who were slain fell flat on their backs, arms raised to heaven, ecstatic in their possession, and I was the one whose charge it was to hasten forward and cover their legs with the lap cloths that they themselves had sewn so that their modesty might be maintained. What would it feel like, I wondered, to give myself over so completely, to fall under such a spell? But not even the fear that I would spend my eternal life in hell brought the call that would lead me to kneel at the altar, lay myself at the feet of the Lord, and the church people noticed. I learned to pretend the conviction I did not feel, to pray with my mouth open, my eyes closed, my hands raised to heaven. I was saved—couldn’t they see? Born again. It was a lie I didn’t realize I was living, a way to survive the surly dictates of that thing called faith.
Who knows what gives rise to our sensibilities? Maybe it was some seed of resistance sown in me by my grandmother that allowed me to keep my soul to myself. Maybe it was just the way I was—turned funny, I heard them say. They didn’t even bother to hide their mouths. No matter the color of my skin, I was the kind of girl they watched from the corners of their eyes, the kind of girl that brought them to predictions—headed to ruin if I didn’t get my head straight, my heart right with God. I wasn’t like them, wasn’t like anybody I knew.
It was the characters in books who spoke to me, reflected some secret part of myself. When the librarian handed me To Kill a Mockingbird, I read it straight through, then hid it beneath my bed. “I lost it,” I told the librarian. “I’ll work check-in and checkout during recess to pay.” She was satisfied, and so was I. It was a sin that I was jealous of and wanted to keep—the worst sin of all.
Walking home from school one afternoon, the September air thick with gray aphids, Anne of Green Gables open in my hands, I found a girl asleep on her sack, cotton tufting her hair. Fall harvest meant more hours in the field for the black children of South Town, the season’s sun beating down, the long, long sack trailing behind like an earthbound anchor. Maybe that was when I began to understand that, no matter how different I was, my life would never be as hard as hers. I sat at the edge of the patch and watched her for a long time, then tore away one page of the book and then another, planting them in the soil beneath her bare feet as though they might sprout like Jack’s magic beanstalk and carry her aloft, as though I were feeding the girl her dreams.
When the librarian discovered the ruined book, she said that two was too many and sent me home with a bill. That was the first time I lied outright to my grandfather. Ignoring any lessons I might have learned about false accusation, I described in detail how Tug Larson, the schoolyard bully, had knocked the novel from my hands. “He grabbed me,” I said, “and pushed me down.” I cried and showed my grandfather the bruises I had pinched on my arms to convince him how wounded I was. He grew solemn, said he would talk with the boy, but I insisted it would only make things worse, that he was already being given detention, and shouldn’t I forgive? My grandfather was placated, and I felt a surge of relief and tingling possibility. I had transgressed, might confess and be forgiven, but I had discovered something that intrigued me even more: I could lie and not be struck dead in my shoes.
I remembered my grandmother’s ways, used the last of our flour and lard to bake half a batch of sugar cookies, told my grandfather I was taking them to Sister Woody, an elderly parishioner who lived down the road, and he nodded his approval at my charity. I felt like skipping as I made my way out the door. I had no destination, only a desire to be free. I walked an easy two miles, ate half the cookies, fed the rest to the crows, turned around, and came home happy with the news that Sister Woody’s health was improving.
I became braver, told bigger lies, and walked the farmland for hours or hid with my book in the neighbor’s barn. In gym class, I let my body have its joy, leaping and sprinting ahead of my classmates. When my teacher suggested I try out for girls’ basketball, I forged a careful note home that said I was helping clean the blackboards after school. I made the team and for the first time felt part of something, like I might be someone’s friend, running up and down the half-court and hollering back and forth like it was a normal thing for a girl to do. I skipped the communal showers, unable to imagine letting myself be seen naked, left my knee-length trunks and sleeveless top in my locker, and ran as fast as I could, hoping to beat my grandfather home. He would sit down to the dinner I made him and never say a word about my wild hair, my ruddy skin, and I believed I had fooled him until the evening he rode into town on the mule and appeared at practice still in his farm clothes, pulled out the worn Bible, and filled the gymnasium with his voice. “ ‘The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are an abomination unto the Lord thy God!’ ” He clapped the good book closed, pointed me to the door, and I slunk out, shamed not by my sin but by the looks of pity on the faces of my teammates. Once home, he sent me to my room and sat at the foot of my bed, studying me with intense sadness, as though he might see the workings of my deceitful soul. “I can’t let you burn in hell,” he said, and raised the leather strop. The fierceness of his whipping came up through my bones, rattled like dry seeds in my ears. After, he held me and cried. Maybe that’s why I can forgive him. He only meant to save me.
Why couldn’t I just obey? Drinking, smoking, dancing, bowling, playing cards, going to movies, wading with the Butler boys down at the creek—all sins. To question my grandfather’s rules and the law of his God was mutiny, any plans to rebel an act of treason. Yet even with the punishment I knew was coming, I’d slide open the sash I’d waxed with paraffin, drop to the ground, and walk to Chester’s Drug, where I would sit at the end of the counter and watch the boys peacock, the girls preen while the jukebox played Elvis, Roy Orbison, the Miracles.
The only one who paid me any mind those times was Juney Clooney, a white girl too pretty for her own good, the church ladies said, but I envied her grace, the way she tipped back her soda, ponytail hanging down like a plumb bob. She would pour me a glass of her Nehi, something in her smile almost sad. Maybe I was the only one who wasn’t surprised when her place at the counter came up empty, one of the few who knew the truth of what had happened between her and Baby Buckle.
Buckle was a childlike man, rolled flesh at his neck, rounded shoulders and soft hips, waist cinched by a wide leather belt and a brass buckle the size of a saucer. He worked right there at Chester’s Drug as a delivery boy. Chester and his wife always said that Buckle showed up one Christmas Eve, abandoned as a baby on their doorstep, cold as slab marble, but rumor held he was Chester’s son by Hazel Twig, a young mixed-race woman from our side of town who cleaned the store once a week until she up and disappeared. Because that is what happened when girls got themselves in trouble. They were sent to the home for unwed mothers or simply sent away, anything to erase the family’s shame, absolve the father’s guilt.
It was Juney’s twin brother, Jules, who came stumbling into the store one day, his shotgun loaded, hollering that he’d gone home for lunch and found Juney crying. She told him that Buckle had come to make a delivery, caught her alone frying gizzards, and dragged her into the pantry. I sat stone still as the other boys piled into their pickups. They found him beneath that big walnut tree at Bowman’s Corner, asleep with his pants at his ankles. They didn’t stop to ask, just noosed him up with his own belt, buckle splitting his mouth like a bit. It wasn’t but a few days later that I came in on Juney’s mother, confessing to my grandfather that it wasn’t Buckle who had raped her daughter but Juney’s own daddy, who told her to blame Buckle or he’d kill her and her mother too. All that Buckle did was pick the wrong tree to do his business behind. But what good would it have done for me to tell, and who would believe me? I had read the stories of courage and conviction, but sometimes the truth seemed worse than the lie. I sat quiet at the counter, kept my secrets to myself.
What I remember of high school: not the football games and dances I wasn’t allowed to attend, not overnights with the girlfriends I didn’t have, but the romances and mysteries that kept me company. My grandfather demanded from me humility, modesty, and temperance, but when I read Little Women, Gone with the Wind, Murder on the Orient Express, I entered into the realm of everything knowable, anything possible, if only I were smart enough, pretty enough, and brave.
In my imagination, I had traveled to that place of dark-haired princes and veiled sultanas, knew the thousand and one tales that kept Scheherazade alive, dreamed that I might do the same, weave a web of stories so enthralling that the man I loved would be spared the agony of having to kill me, but if someone had told me that I would soon be living in Arabia, I would have laughed. And no matter the number of romances I read, I never dreamed that someone like Mason McPhee would kiss me—my long skirt, those awful shoes, straw from the henhouse tasseling my socks. But Mason. Highest-scoring point guard, on full-ride scholarship to Oklahoma State, once and former prom king, the pride of Shawnee! Homecoming, the first parade of my life, Mason an honored guest riding high in a convertible Chevrolet, everyone calling his name. Only our hometown astronaut, Gordo Cooper, had a bigger crowd, and he’d orbited the Earth in a spaceship.
I wore my best wool skirt, rolled it up just a little. If my grandfather had seen me that way, he’d have whipped me into next Sunday. I thought I might look like Rita Hayworth, auburn hair to my waist, loose and undone, and maybe I did. Maybe that’s what Mason saw. “Virginia!” He cupped his hands like a megaphone. “Ginny Mae Mitchell!” I was struck dumb, as though he were the first ever to call my name.
Here’s the truth of it: watching him smile and wave from that car, I made the decision right then. When he asked me out for a Coke, I thought, This is it, my one chance with a man like Mason McPhee. I waited until my grandfather was asleep and slid open my window, not a creak or scratch to betray me.
That Coke was the sweetest thing. I couldn’t believe I was there at the soda fountain with Mason, the other boys slapping his shoulder. The girls looked at me like they’d never seen me before. Maybe because I didn’t know what to say, Mason talked and talked. About basketball, all the hours he had practiced in back of his house, a bicycle rim bolted to a pine. How his sharecropper father would come in off the tractor, challenge him to a game of Horse, and they would play past dark, nine games, ten, until Mason’s mother called that she was feeding their dinner to the hogs. Mason always knew he would go to college and was studying prelaw, meant to be the finest public defender to come out of Pottawatomie County, maybe even a judge. He was sure that he could make a difference. He railed against the war in Vietnam and segregation, told me about the marches and protests he attended. “This world right here isn’t real,” he said, and tapped the café table. “You,” he said, resting his hand over mine, “you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. We’ve got to think bigger, do bigger things, like the Reverend King says.”
I didn’t know the words of famous men, only the verses of the Bible I had been raised on, but I believed everything that Mason told me, as though they were truths I had felt but never knew how to say. All I could do was nod, take in the shock of light hair fallen across his forehead, those blue, blue eyes, his only flaw a small scar at the right corner of his mouth that folded in like a dimple. He hadn’t seen it coming, pitched by the boy picking rocks, the two of them sweating for ten cents an hour, clearing the Cooks’ field free of stones. Even that wound seemed worthy, a testament to work and withstanding.
“I should get you on home,” he said. He held my eyes for a moment, and when I didn’t look away, he brought my palm to his lips. And then it was easy enough to slide into his old sprung sedan, ride that road out of town, find that little stand of post oak. He ran his hand beneath my hair. “You smell just like ripe wheat,” he said, “just like honey from the hive.”
I should say I tried to stop him, but what reason would I have now to lie? Another few days and he would be gone back to the city, another world, but after we finished, he held me close like he feared I might slip away. When he lit a cigarette, I lifted my face.
“Can I have one?” It was the first thing I had asked of him, as though opening my body had loosened my tongue.
“I bet you don’t even know how,” he said.
I moved my hand to his, eased the cigarette from his fingers, and he crooked a smile. “You’re damned determined, aren’t you?”
Maybe just damned, I thought, but not a single cell of my body believed it was true.
After I told him to, he dropped me at Bowman’s Corner, and I walked the flat mile back home. I wanted to keep the night inside me a little while longer. All those stars. That piece of moon. “You only think you know what you want,” my grandfather once said to me, but this time, I was sure.
By Christmas, I couldn’t lie anymore—my grandfather had been watching my rags. He wasn’t crying when he whipped me but making sounds like he was dying. I couldn’t help but curl up, even though some part of me wanted to give him my belly, let him beat the baby right out of me. Maybe he was more afraid than I was, and the truth is, I wasn’t afraid at all. I believed that I was done being afraid.
That night, I waited until he fell asleep in his cot, the strop still coiling his fist like a copperhead, before pulling on my mother’s old riding boots, soft and slick in the soles, and sliding out of my window. When my feet hit the ground, I was running, cutting straight across those open fields, leaping the ditches, falling over stones. By the time I reached Chester’s Drug, my knees were bleeding, my palms burning raw. I called from the pay phone at the corner, nickels dropping down, heard Christmas carols, men’s laughter in the background. When I told Mason, he didn’t even hesitate, just said he would do right by me. It was an honorable thing. I knew it then and I know it now. A right and honorable thing.
He drove in from Stillwater, picked me up at the corner, and took me to Oklahoma City, where we lied about my age to the justice of the peace. A thin band from the pawnshop, a little bit of gold, and I was Mrs. Mason McPhee. There was nothing my grandfather could do but what he did—he shunned me, wouldn’t even speak my name.
Mason’s parents offered that I could live with them while he went back to college, but he said he wanted to do this on his own, it was his responsibility, and I knew he meant me. He told his coach he’d lay out for a while, get a job and save up, return in the fall, but when a slicker came up from Texas, recruiting for Zapata Off-Shore, fanning money and mouthing promises of plenty, Mason didn’t hesitate, signed on as a roughneck, and said we were headed to Houston. I wish now I had talked whatever sense I had left, insisted that he go back to school, but I believed that, as a wife, I had only two choices: follow his lead, or leave.
We packed up everything we owned, made the trip in a day, and found a little rental behind Basta’s Funeral Parlor, peach-colored stucco with a redbud out front. I kept the back curtains closed against the hearse pulling away, the parade of cars with their lights on. But the parking lot had a basketball hoop, the mortician watered the lawn green, and the tulip trees lining the lane filled the evening air with their sweet perfume. Sometimes I wish we had stayed right there, making our way dollar by dollar, but Mason never let the grass grow under his feet. The only way he knew how to move was up.
Those first weeks, he’d come home from the oil rig black as a coal miner, all the shininess of his life gone. We lived on stew meat, sacks of beans, thought an onion was a special thing. I’d get up each morning, pull on his old jeans and long-tailed shirt, sweep the floor, sew a little, then fry spuds for dinner just like my mother did, the baby in me heavy and kicking, already wanting out. Mason, he’d eat the food right down to the plate, tell me how good it was, then go to bed, asleep before his head hit the pillow. I’d start scrubbing his clothes because they were the only ones he had, hang them by the stove to dry, iron them in the morning. Only when I tucked into our single bed, borax still burning my knuckles, did he wake, just long enough to kiss my neck, make love in that tired, sweet way, and then we would sleep.
Mason believed in giving his all no matter what, never complained, just did his job better than the next guy, kept the muscle moving the metal that pumped the oil that kept the profit and every man’s paycheck coming in. Some of the drillers were Okies like us, others Creoles trucked in off the bayous, Czechs just off the boat—to Mason, all the same. I’d never known a white man to step aside for a black, but that’s what Mason did. Like me, he sometimes forgot to even think of color, and I loved him more for it, but I knew what some of the other men were thinking as they watched him, gauging his sympathies, their mouths twisting with the names they called him behind his back. If I had first been drawn to the vision of him sitting high in that convertible Chevrolet, what I came to cherish was his fairness, his compassion and belief that he could change things, make the world a better place, so different from what I had been taught: that man had fallen so far, there was no way to pick him up again.
When a Chickasaw running a cable got sliced clean through and his pregnant widow lay in the dirt at the base of the rig for two days until her family came to carry her away, I wrote her a letter, and Mason sealed in what money we’d saved. “She’s lucky they found him at all. Sometimes there isn’t much left,” he said, and I remembered a woman in Shawnee whose husband had disappeared in the oil patch, vanished without a trace, she told my grandfather, like he’d been caught up in the Rapture. She’d come to our shack for assurance that she hadn’t been left behind, and I watched the two of them kneel in the kitchen, my grandfather’s hands on her shoulders, her lips quivering in prayer. The next day they found her husband, who had fallen through the floor of the platform and been impaled on a rod, thigh to throat. “Just like a scarecrow,” the crew boss said. “Even his hat was still on.” I learned early that people can disappear just like that—the wink of an eye and they’re gone.
Houston seemed like the center of the world back then, people coming in from all over, derrickhands, engineers, toolpushers, and boilermen—Mason’s friends, every one. Weekends meant cocktail parties, pinochle parties, jamborees at the Bill Mraz Dance Hall, where Mason taught me to polka, my maternity smock billowing as we twirled. I watched the other women smoke their cigarettes, drink whiskey sours, cross their legs, nylons swishing. They belonged to that world that my grandfather had feared would find me. I didn’t know how to talk to them, what to say, but Mason, he fit right in. That smile, quick and easy. Sometimes, when he grew quiet, refilled his whiskey again, I feared he was thinking about the way things might have been if he hadn’t married me but Sally Richardson, his prom queen, blond hair, narrow waist, a daddy who owned the Buick dealership. No man wanted a ruined woman—wasn’t that what I’d been told? Yet there I was, dancing the night away with Mason McPhee, having the time of my life.
We bought a white bassinet, a pale yellow blanket with satin trim, set up the extra bedroom as a nursery, and I spent my days washing walls, sewing curtains, until all I had to do was sit and wait, even as the near-spring air perked the robins into frenzies and the redbuds swelled fat. When I told Mason I wanted to learn how to drive, have some way to get out when he was gone, he veed his forehead. “Streets are too busy around here,” he said. “I’ll take you to the country one of these days, let you bust around where nothing can get in your way.” I bided my time, beat him out of bed one Saturday before dawn, climbed behind the wheel of his old sedan, and eased it around the block. I thought I could steal those minutes, the sky just beginning to pink, teach myself all that I needed to know, but when Mason stepped out later that morning to find the car bumped up onto the curb, he lit a cigarette, looked at me with one eye squinted shut, but didn’t say a word. He got in, drove away, and I thought he was angry, but he returned an hour later from the used-car lot in a pretty little two-tone Fairlane. “Best to go along with whatever you set your mind to,” he said, grinning as he moved to the passenger seat. “Telling you no is like pouring gas on a fire.”
I slid behind the wheel, drove twice around the block, and felt right at home, as though I were meant to hit the road a little faster. Mason pointed to the highway, and we headed south, Dean Martin on the radio, past the new domed stadium, so big I couldn’t take it in, and on to where pumpjacks levered the horizon, the ranchland split open and paved into cul-de-sacs, fresh-built houses strung out like charms on a bracelet, NASA families in every one. I checked the rearview, saw the new high-rises, steel beams piercing the haze, and thought of our dead president’s call to put a man on the moon. Even then, some part of me understood we wanted to own it all, up, down, earth to sky.
When Mason pointed to the Mobil, I slowed and turned in, afraid I’d dent the fender if I pulled too close, but the attendant motioned me forward. While Mason got out and helped clean the windshield, I focused on the flying red horse. Pegasus, I remembered. I had wanted to go to college and become an English teacher, but even if I hadn’t gotten in trouble, my grandfather wouldn’t have let me. Worldly education hardened your heart against God, he said, and filled your head with ideas.
I watched Mason walk back to the Fairlane, tipping a bottle of Dr Pepper still dripping ice, the heat shirring the air between us. His hair grown a little too long, a pack of cigarettes rolled in the sleeve of his white T-shirt, his jeans riding low on his hips—I felt a lick of lust mixed with guilt, that baby right there inside me.
“Hey, doll.” He slipped in, handed me the soda, and I drank in deep swallows. I toed the accelerator, directing the car away from the attendant, who stood in his billed cap like a soldier at attention.
My stomach pressed against the rub of the steering wheel brought me back to the road. I had been thinking about names and considered the constellations I’d memorized, library book and flashlight held beneath the covers so that my grandfather wouldn’t know that I was studying the stars like a necromancer.
“What about Cassie for a girl?” I asked. “Cassiopeia.”
Mason sucked his teeth. “Boy?”
“Percy? Perseus McPhee.” I signaled left, then changed my mind, kept going.
“Where are you coming up with these names, anyway?” Mason began drumming the car top, singing along with the radio, his voice an easy blend in the low keys as I guided us through the evening streets, taking the long way, air through the windows heavy with the smoke of backyard barbecues.
That night, I woke to the sheets slick and cooling beneath me, the pain gripping my back, the ache in my thighs. At the hospital, while the doctor scraped and pulled then called for his ether, the nun held my shoulders. It was just as well, she said—something had been wrong for the baby to die like that, as though I should feel lucky. “Do you want him baptized?” she asked, but I turned my head away. I didn’t have the words for what I was feeling, raw and empty, nothing that I could name. When the doctor told me I could no longer bear children, I thought, This is the punishment my grandfather promised me. This is what I deserve.
When, a few days later, Mason drove me home from the hospital, he circled around, kept the tulip trees between us and the funeral home. He went in ahead, pulled shut the door to the nursery. I’d never see that room again. He set the blue ceramic baby bootie that the nun had given us on the kitchen sill, a small tangle of variegated ivy sprouting from its center.
I quit the cocktail parties, spent my days with the doors and windows closed. When the Chronicle landed on our porch with its stories of race riots, women burning their bras, men burning their draft cards, the flag, burning, I let it lay. When the evening news gave a tally of the weekly body count in Vietnam, I turned it off because I didn’t want to know. I focused on my chores, what I was made for. By the time Mason came home from work, I had the bed tucked tight, the floors scrubbed, the laundry on the line, a brambleberry pie bubbling in the oven. I’d once filled my diary with stories of romance, imagined I might someday be a writer, but what right did I have to dream? Only at night, Mason shooting baskets for hours, the sound of the ball hitting asphalt, bouncing, hitting again, did I allow myself to sit on the couch and read. The Texas sky clouding over, a storm moving in—those seemed the stillest of times, as though I were suspended, hovering outside my own life.
I looked up one evening to see Mason standing there and felt the old fear, my grandfather snatching the book from my hands. But Mason, he sat down beside me, touched my forehead as though I were a child sick with fever, pushed the hair from my face. He smelled like the fields after spring burn. Out the window, I saw the sun not yet set, the days grown longer without me.
“You need more than this,” he said, and pulled me to him. “We got to get you better.”
The next morning, he told me to get dressed, that we were going to town. It seemed like the hardest thing I had ever done. Gordo Cooper had set the record, eight days in orbit, long enough to fly a man to the moon, yet I couldn’t even step out my door. I stood in my slip for a good half hour, staring at the closet, nothing to wear but the schoolgirl’s wool skirt I’d brought with me from Shawnee and a few maternity dresses—the trappings of someone else’s life. I picked out the smock I’d worn to the polka, belted it with a sash, found my one pair of flats and realized I’d been barefoot for weeks. I tied my hair, traced my eyebrows with the burned head of a match, added a little rouge—enough sin, my grandfather would say, to bring on more. He didn’t know his great-grandson was dead. Maybe he never would.
The first thing Mason did was to drive me to the Sonic for lunch. He held my hand while the carhop skated out and took our order.
“You look real nice, Gin,” Mason said.
I straightened my sash, kept my eyes down. “It’s not much,” I said.
“It doesn’t take much. You’re always beautiful.” He pulled me to his shoulder, let his burger get cold while I cried, then drove me to Foley’s, sat and watched while I tried on dresses, blouses, a new kind of stretch pants, the saleswomen clucking. By the time we got home, I had a wardrobe, a word I’d never spoken before. I used every hanger we owned. We made love standing up in the kitchen, me in my shiny patent leathers. Shameless, I thought, but who was there to see? Any remnant of belief I might have had in an all-knowing God was gone.
Mason had me sit down while he scrambled some eggs. I watched as he cut my toast into triangles, thought how he wasn’t like any man I’d ever known, then raised my eyes to the ivy that had grown and tacked itself to the wall above the sink. I’d started to pull it free once, but I couldn’t bear the noise of it ripping, the rusty imprint of its rooting like dabs of dried blood. Every time I started to feel happy, the world came back to knock me down like happiness was something I had to pay for.
“I don’t want to be here anymore,” I said. I didn’t know if I meant in that house or in Houston. Maybe I meant my own life. “I wish we could leave this all behind.”
Mason didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to. My dead mother’s voice was already in my head: Be careful what you wish for.
The next day, Mason came home lit up like a firecracker. His supervisor had recommended him to an Aramco recruiter. “Drilling foreman,” he said. “Double my salary, maybe more, tax-free. All we have to do is move to Arabia.”
I couldn’t hear what he was telling me, so he said it again. “Saudi Arabia, a place called Abqaiq, all fenced and guarded. Everything we want, just like living in a country club.” He sat me down, had me imagine: our own home, private swimming pool, golf course, movie theater, the best doctors money could buy—and all of it paid for by the Arabian American Oil Company. “When we get back, we’ll have enough money to buy you all the new clothes you want.” He held my shoulders, bent a little to look into my eyes. “Nice house, big diamond ring, that’s what you want, isn’t it, Gin?” I tried to remember if I had ever wanted such things. He gave me a squeeze, a little shake as though he needed to get something out of me. “I don’t want to be just scraping by for the rest of my life,” he said. “I was on my way somewhere. I need to feel that again.”
I rested my ear against his chest, felt his heart pounding fast, already racing ahead.
Over the next few weeks, what we couldn’t sell, we gave away. When Mason carried the bassinet out the door, free to a derrickman whose wife was expecting their third, I watched through the kitchen window, gave the ivy a little more water. Maybe the next wife would find it there, let it grow. Maybe she’d think it too much trouble and tear it free, planning wallpaper, a double coat of eggshell enamel.
I packed all the clothes I owned, my new pair of shoes, my mother’s old boots. “Best to leave the books at home,” Mason said, but I folded Gone with the Wind into my sweater anyway. Valentine’s Day, 1967, the redbuds near bursting, I boarded the first plane of my life, smart in my new Jantzen suit. Other passengers arranged their blankets and pillows, settling in for the flight to New York. Behind us, several rows of women chatted and laughed.
Mason motioned to the back. “Aramco wives being shipped over. You could be with them instead of me.”
I stole a glance to where they giggled like schoolgirls, then turned and rested my head on Mason’s shoulder. I’d never been comfortable in the company of women, unsure of what they expected of me. With men, at least, I knew.
Mason pulled my knuckles to his lips, kissed them twice. “For luck,” he said. I clutched his hand a little tighter, smelled the aftershave he’d slapped on the back of his neck where the barber had clipped him too close. “I look like a farm boy,” he had said, fingering the line where his tan met the pale stripe of skin. “That’s because you are,” I answered, and he had grown quiet, as though that were a part of himself he wanted to forget.
I peered out the small window of the plane, saw the gray Gulf of Mexico falling away. Our layover in New York I remember only as a dim hotel room filled with the noise of the bar below, Aramco and Bechtel men laying in a last good drunk before hitting the dry desert. A short stop in Montreal, where we took on more passengers, and then the ocean crossing.
It was like a dream, flying through that night. I remember Mason held in a white pool of light, studying his book of Arabic phrases, and then people leaving their seats, gathering in the aisles to smoke and drink until the plane took on the feel of a flying lounge, Johnny Rivers piping through the speakers. I thought I wouldn’t be able to sleep, but I did. When Mason lifted the shade, we were landing in Amsterdam, the sun spreading across the horizon like paint spilled from a can. A stop in Athens to refuel, and then on to Beirut, where we left the jet and boarded a four-engine prop scoured shiny by sand.
“From here, it’s the milk run to Dhahran,” Mason said. “Six countries in three days—not bad for a couple of Okies from Shawnee.” He still looked crisp in his new Arrow shirt, but I felt woozy, my cheeks flushed.
We crossed into Arabia and followed the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, leapfrogging along, scattering herds of camels from the water wells Aramco had drilled, landing on oiled strips to unload geologists, small engines, and crates of eggs that were replaced by bundles of letters, trunks, and packages, grinning American golfers carrying their clubs, a single Arab in gold rings and flowing robes. When the plane abruptly banked, sending everything that wasn’t strapped or bolted to the lee of the fuselage, I screamed and grabbed for Mason’s arm. The Arab man smiled. “It is only the wind,” he said simply, as though it were the answer to any number of things, and I felt myself blush. I wanted to tell him what I knew of wind—the tornadoes tipping from the yellowing sky, hot gales that sapped the sweet from the corn. How my grandfather would strip an ear, scrape a few kernels with his teeth. “Could be worse,” he’d say. He remembered the powder-dry soil, the roof-high drifts, his own family’s house buried in the till of once-fertile fields. I looked out the window, saw the dunes undulating for miles. Like the sand, that dust was everywhere, sifted into the cavities and creases of everything living and dead, and I understood how it was that the Okies and Texans might find the desert familiar, the suffocating heat a manageable thing.
The Tapline ran before us like an ink-dark tattoo, broken only by mounds of sand bridging the routes of nomadic migration. In the distance, a vast pool of light, the sun, and the sea that melded with the sky to a single canvas. And then I saw the flares. Mason had told me that even the astronauts could see them from space, giant flames burning off gas at the wellheads. The Dhahran Airport appeared like a white cathedral: pillars, arches like wings, control tower shaped like a minaret. All that light flowing in. We stepped off the plane, and it was like opening an oven. A furnace blast. A heat you had to lean into or be knocked down.
I stood stunned by the hours we’d lost in flight until Mason took my arm and steered me across the tarmac. Inside, I watched the Arab official search through my clothes while a clutch of women cloaked in black silently waited to board. The Saudi man who accompanied them, dressed in a fine-cut suit and white head scarf, sat placidly, intent upon the activity my luggage elicited. The customs official took one look at the cover of my book—Scarlett and Rhett in an ardent embrace—handed it to an attendant, and clapped the suitcase closed before flourishing a stick of chalk between us and marking my bags with bold checks. When I started to protest, Mason tapped my elbow, shook his head.
The company driver who waited for us outside of customs stood with his hands folded, calm as a monk, as though the weight of his garments didn’t bother him a bit. Red-and-white-checked head scarf secured with a black leather cord, a creamy ankle-length nightshirt that buttoned from neck to hem—he must be suffocating, I thought, and remembered how my mother had wrapped me in sheets to break fever.
“Peace be upon you.” His took off his dark glasses, and his eyes wrinkled at the corners as he shook our hands. “I am Abdullah al-Jahni. Welcome among friends.”
“And upon you peace.” Mason motioned me forward. “This is my wife, Mrs. Virginia McPhee.”
Abdullah reached out, gave my hand a warm, single shake. I had imagined Arab men as either rough and brutish or courtly and cosseted, draped in the robes of a prince, but Abdullah was neither. He seemed a few years older than Mason, his face not as handsome but somehow more interesting, as though I might study it for a long time and discover something new each second. I took in his angular profile and steeply sloped nose, his thin mustache and carefully groomed beard that followed the line of his jaw, his wide mouth full of impossibly white teeth, but it was his eyes, half-lidded and deeply set, that intrigued me. His gaze moved from me to Mason to the baggage handlers and beyond in fluid and precise observation, as though he were committing each detail to memory or guarding himself against surprise. He led us to a dun-colored Land Cruiser that might once have been green, where he instructed the airport workers on the loading of our luggage. When he stepped off the curb, he gathered his skirts like a woman, and I realized that I was staring. He opened the door so that I could climb into the backseat, Mason in front. I lifted my nose to the cracked window as we passed a series of raw buildings and rough settlements before heading southwest, deeper into the desert. What I smelled was almost nothing. I opened my mouth to taste it, and a memory came to me. Fourth of July, a church potluck and fireworks over the creek, and it was my job to sit on the ice-cream maker as my grandfather cranked, my patience helped along by the chipped knobs of salted ice that I sucked and savored like candy.
The land humped and flattened, broken by bunches of yellowing grass plowed through with sand. The dry streambeds bristled with spring flowers, their oranges and purples and reds like the burst of fireworks. Even now, I don’t know how to describe the sudden emptiness that crowded in once we left the airport. No trees, no mountains, just the horizon ribboned with clouds that seemed to smoke right off the desert floor and into the sapphire sky. The minimal traffic—a black Jeep, a large white donkey laden with palm fronds, a few people on foot—seemed oblivious to the rules of the road: no sidewalks, no lanes, no limits. I braced myself against the seat as Abdullah veered to miss a rattletrap pickup, men packing the bed, balanced on the bumpers, clinging to any handhold. He never slowed, just kept a steady speed to pull us out of the sand and back onto the road.
“I thought Texas drivers were bad,” Mason said.
“Better than an American driving a camel.” Abdullah grinned. “Truly, that is sad.”
I noted the way the men sat the humped animals, some with one leg crooked like they were riding sidesaddle, others kneeling astride or straddling with their ankles crossed at the camel’s neck. They urged their mounts faster by lifting their arms, shaking the reins until the animals broke into a jarring canter, and I wondered how they kept their seats. Other camels roamed free like cattle on open range, their colors the colors of the desert: bone, buff, and straw. Flies rose thick off a road-killed carcass—a young camel left to rot, Abdullah told us, because it hadn’t been slaughtered in accordance with Islamic law and was therefore haram—forbidden—and could not be eaten.
Mason and Abdullah began an easy conversation about the hierarchies of the Saudi royalty, future drilling sites, and new machinery, and I relaxed back, happy to be left to my study until I saw a wavering dark line in the distance that seemed to loom large, then small, like a film out of focus. I squinted but couldn’t tell how far away we were—a half mile? Five? It was as though the desert existed in two dimensions and nothing in my vision was true. I sat forward and pointed.
“What is that?” I asked Abdullah.
“Bedu,” Abdullah answered. “People of the tent. With the new opportunities, there are fewer of us who remain in the desert.”
As we drew closer, I peered at the caravan, the men in their robes and white scarves, daggers belted at their waists, the women in long colorful skirts, their hair, faces, and shoulders draped in black, balancing baskets and buckets on top of their heads. Young girls herded the long-eared goats, laughing and calling freely. I could see how thin they were, the children’s bones showing through, the adults short and wiry, yet compared to the somber group in the airport, they seemed jaunty as a band of Gypsies.
“Where are they going?” I asked Abdullah.
His chuckle, low and easy, made me feel happy. “Farther,” he said.
A few miles more and a maze of geometric houses broke the soft sand swells—Dammam, Abdullah told us, new homes for Saudi workers, part of the Aramco housing program that allowed purchase through loans and payroll deduction.
“A company town,” Mason observed.
“Some might say that the entire country is a company town,” Abdullah said.
I scooted forward, took in the warm smell of his woody cologne. “Where do you live?” I asked.
“In the black tent,” Abdullah said.
Mason considered. “But you’ve been with the company for a while?”
“First as an errand boy in Dhahran,” Abdullah said, “where I was allowed into school.” He offered a modest smile. “I was selected to attend university in Texas.”
Mason squinted against the smoke of his cigarette. “You have a degree?”
“Petroleum engineering,” Abdullah said.
Mason studied him for a moment before going back to his cigarette, and I knew that he was thinking about that life he had left behind, who he might have been if not for me.
More miles, more sand, and we all grew quiet, as though the heat that screwed down and the expanding emptiness were nothing worth noting. I had seen stretches of barren plain in Oklahoma and Texas but never the kind of infinite sweep that lay before me, the sand that moved like an animal rippling its hide, sloughing its skin, shifting, lying down, rising again. We were thirty minutes southwest of the airport when I saw a settlement erupting from the flatness.
“Abqaiq,” Abdullah said, and steered us toward the compound, backlit by the steady blow of flames from the nearby plant that filled the air with the stench of sulfur.
“Will it always smell like that?” I asked.
“It is the smell of money,” Abdullah said. “Abqaiq is where the crude oil from the southern fields is piped to be stabilized before being pumped on to the port at Ras Tanura.”
Mason eyed the intricate network of valves, drums, spheres, and columns. “That’s one big operation,” he said.
“The largest in the world,” Abdullah said.
Mason nodded. “Like everything else in this place.”
Sand gave way to portable trailers and a series of small apartments. As we neared the main gate, I saw the bunkerlike suqs that functioned as a private marketplace, enclosed and attached to the main compound, Abdullah said, so that the company wives could shop without leaving camp. We approached the tall gareed fence made of chain-link woven with palm fronds, where Abdullah nodded to the pleasantly rotund Arab manning the guard station. He was no taller than I was, his mustache like twin exclamation points punctuating his mouth. He smiled broadly and waved us through.
“His name is Habib walud Tariq walud Khalid Al-Jahni,” Abdullah said, “but with Americans, he goes by Habib. He is my cousin. We Bedu are like the sand, you see. We are everywhere, part of everything, beginning to end.”
Abqaiq opened itself like an onion, at its center an oasis of green. Sand drifted against the buildings’ foundations, powdered the driveways, sidewalks, and lawns that were broken by hedges of jasmine, clutches of periwinkle, hibiscus, and oleander. The road, lined with acacia and date palms, smoothed into an avenue wide enough to land an airplane in case of emergency. In the distance, we could see the golf course, barren as a moonscape, its greens nothing more than oiled sand.
Abdullah gave us a motor tour past the post office, commissary, medical clinic, fire station, taxi stand, and bus stop. He pointed to a flat-roofed complex. “Your recreation center and pool,” he said, then circled around to a large ranch-style that sat a little more separate from the others: white stucco, flowering vines creeping up its sheltering veranda, a row of young roses just beginning to bud. Mason pointed across the street to where a basketball hoop stood anchored in asphalt and gave me a thumbs-up.
“Your new home,” Abdullah said. “With your permission, the houseboy and gardener who attended the previous residents have asked if you will consider keeping them on.”
Mason looked at me, shrugged. “Guess they know the place.”
Abdullah removed his dark glasses. “Please,” he said, and led us from the car to where two men appeared on the front lawn. He gestured respectfully to the elder. “This is Faris bin Ahmad, who will tend your flowers.”
The old Arab, grizzled beard resting on his chest, mumbled a few words before dipping away and disappearing around the back of the house. I looked to Abdullah, who nodded, his manner more stiff. “And this is Yash Sharma,” he said, “the houseboy.”
I expected to see just that—a boy—but Yash was older than Mason by a decade, his dark hair fixed with pomade. He gave a slight bow while balancing a rusty bicycle against his hip. “I have left a light meal for you and will arrive in the morning to prepare your breakfast,” he said. He straddled his bike and rode for the gate, wheels squeaking, the creases of his white shirt and khaki pants still crisp despite the sweltering humidity. I looked to Abdullah, who tightened his smile. “The departure of their previous employer was unexpected,” he said. “The furniture, too, has been left behind. You may decide whether or not to keep it.”
He waited as we stepped to the porch. When I turned to invite him in, Mason caught my arm. “We don’t know the rules,” he whispered. It seemed rude to leave Abdullah in the heat, but I followed Mason inside. On our left, a gilded mirror hung above a burled console table, across from a deep coat closet, empty except for a large umbrella whose use I could not imagine. Straight ahead was the big kitchen with its four-burner range, frost-free Frigidaire, breakfast bar, and walk-in pantry stocked with flour, sugar, spices, and canned goods. On our left, the living room with its TV, console hi-fi, red ginger-jar lamp, matching easy chairs, and sofa positioned atop a Persian rug, and then the dining room with its swinging doors back to the kitchen. Down the hallway hung with an elaborately embroidered tapestry of a white unicorn in a pen, past the linen closet that held plush towels and percale sheets, was the guest bathroom and bedroom, a furnished study, and then the master bedroom with its double closet and our very own tub and shower. Mason rested his hands on my shoulders.
“Think it will do?” he asked.
“I’ve never been inside a place this nice,” I said, as though he might not know.
“Well, it’s ours now.” Mason smiled so big that the scar at his mouth disappeared. “I’ll tell Abdullah we’ll take it,” he said.
The meal that Yash had left in the refrigerator was neatly arranged on a platter that I pulled out and placed on the counter. When Mason returned, he lifted a sandwich wedge, sniffed, took a bite, and shrugged. I savored the meat mixed with tart pickles and spices. We ate standing, cleaning the plate of everything, including every slice of whatever it was that wasn’t apple or orange or even pear but something like a peach that wasn’t a peach. I washed the dishes before following Mason to the shower, confused by the twin toilets, or the toilet that wasn’t a toilet but a porcelain bowl that seemed something I might wash my feet in, then crawled between the sheets that were somehow crisp and soft at the same time. We kissed and rolled to our backs, still holding to each other’s hand as though we were tethered and might float apart if we dared to let go. I thought I was tired, but I lay awake for a long time, listening to the sounds outside our window, rustles and reeps and mewls. Lizards, Mason said when I asked, or maybe a desert fox.
Instead of feeling frightened by the foreignness of it, I felt a kind of anticipation I hadn’t known since stealing away to his car, the world larger than it was before. Already, our last night in Houston seemed years ago, and I remember how Mason had taken me to see The Sound of Music, how I had been mesmerized by the dream unfolding before me. When I look back and think of us in that dark theater, I feel the air beginning to shift. Mason was still the man I thought I knew. And who was I? A girl I no longer recognize, her blank face flickering in the light of the movie screen.
If I could stop this story right here, would I? “The education of Mrs. Gin,” Yash once answered when I asked him what it all would come to. It would be the last time I saw Yash, but I didn’t understand that then. All I knew was that he could sometimes tell me what I wanted to know, and sometimes what I needed to know, and, in the end, nothing that would save me from myself.