22 WEEKS: HEADING SOUTH
Antigua, 2011
“This is a-MAZ-ing,” I said as the valet escorted us to our room. The lounge was built over a pond; a splash-shaped aquamarine swimming pool hosted lazy tea-slurping loungers; narrow paths through lush trees connected health, fitness, and spa cabanas. Everything was perched on the edge of a pristinely turquoise bay. “We’re so lucky.” Jon and I had both been looking forward to this dream vacay for weeks. We’d decided that, for our last chance at travel (ever?) we’d literally splash out, participate in ten days of luxurious, postcard, aquatic silence. Antigua, less touristed than other Caribbean islands, seemed like an idyllic spot for our final patch of calm before the offspring storm.
Travel, in all its hecticness, had always soothed me. When Bubbie dashed with me in my stroller between preschool and dance class, I called her “my airplane”; the clicking of that seat belt has since been my most exhilarating sound. Flying promised somewhere new and exciting, a place where you didn’t have to answer e-mails or questions except “chicken or beef?”, the ability to read with good light and coffee delivered to your seat, a host of on-demand movies starring Adam Sandler that you’d never pay to see but always kind of wanted to. Flying (emphasis on lying?) meant you were suspended between realities, free from time or currency constraints, eating extra meals, touching strangers. I never had a fear of flying! What scared me was landing, where you had to declare who you are, what you do, where you’re coming from.
Even my family holidays had always been a pleasant reprieve. Every summer we’d drive to Vermont, the air sweet and soft like maple syrup on my cheeks. We’d stay in motels and, for a few hours, our unpacked room was neat and sparse, smelling of pine, teasing me with the false hope that life could be otherwise. The sheets were starched white, and I’d fall asleep next to Mom, not even a novel between us, listening to the Eurythmics on my yellow Sony Walkman. Sweet dreams are made of this. In college, when I felt lost, I got lost professionally. I had a freelance job writing for a guidebook, literally finding my way. If I launched myself into exile, I could perhaps learn to control the sentiment. I was most at peace when my constant feeling of being foreign was actually true.
But not this time. Unfortunately a different storm had begun earlier that morning at JFK when I was overwhelmed by nausea. Pregnancy, I’d thought: this too shall pass. So far it hadn’t. We reached the beach chalet only to realize that I had to climb a flight of stairs to get to our room. “I’m not sure I can do this,” I whispered to Jon, scared at how weak I felt—the weakest in my pregnancy so far. He supported me as I slowly made my way up to the water-view suite, trying to focus on the rhythmic sound of ocean waves, the soundtrack I’d so been longing for.
“It’ll pass soon,” I said, lying down for a nap. But waking twenty minutes later with cramps, I took my temperature. Fever. I knew: this was bad. Colitis strikes again. Over the past weeks, I’d spent days carefully trekking to surgeons in state-of-the-art facilities to find one who was both a world specialist in my irregular abdominal anatomy and available at the exact scheduled time of my C-section so he could assist my OB. Up to now, I’d been completely fine. But, thousands of miles away on a random tropical island, voilà.
I stayed in bed, glimpsing the oceanic horizon and blush sunset above my fresh, fluffy duvet as Jon went to explore. He returned with Gatorades, compliments of the fitness club, and the good news that the hotel manager had arranged for a cab to take me to the local emergency room, just to confirm that this was a simple stomach flu. Jon and I grabbed the drinks and a few gift bananas and made it to the car, which, as I feared, headed back along the same exceptionally winding road from the airport. The driver progressed at approximately one mile per hour; Jon requested slightly more speed. “I don’t want to rattle the baby,” he kept saying, as I kept nearly vomiting into the lush green night.
The trajectory along this “highway,” set along mountainous paths and junglelike verdure, had no cell reception, or at least not for more than several consecutive seconds; Jon found it impossible to reach any doctors—in NY, London, even Canada. “And now, a news report about the large number of deaths due to negligence at the Saint John hospital,” blared through the radio speakers. Jon and I both froze and stared at each other. Especially when, less than a minute later, we arrived at that very place. Our driver dropped us off at the emergency room door, and told us he’d wait outside.
We entered the ER and were met by at least a hundred silent stares. Unlike everyone else waiting for a doctor, we were clearly flummoxed tourists. We noted a desk and a man standing behind it—with a machine gun strapped across his back. I nudged Jon. “Is this where we check in?” he meekly asked.
The man nodded. I wrote my name down. There were no seats. Everyone stared.
“I need to go to the bathroom,” I whispered and Jon and I inched toward a bathroomy-looking chamber. It was strewn with toilet paper, liquids, even blood.
“No hospitality basket?” I said, and then: “Let’s get out of here.” We swiftly headed right back out the door we’d come in.
We stepped quickly through the busy parking lot scanning for a car that resembled the white minivan that had brought us, only to find they all did.
“Here!” a man called and waved us over. Was it even our driver? I cramped in pain, or anxiety.
“I’ve talked to people,” he said. Calls were coming in to his various wireless devices that were blessed with suspect amounts of reception. “I have ideas for where to take you,” he said, not even asking why we’d walked straight out.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said, pangs thrashing across my stomach.
He gestured to the front of the hospital, the main entrance. Jon and I went in—it was quiet—and tried to explain to another guard (smaller gun) that we needed help. He shrugged. At least he pointed me to a restroom that less resembled a crime scene.
By the time we were back in the car, the entire country of Antigua knew of my predicament, and the driver’s phone was ringing off the hook, if hooks still existed. “I’m taking you to a maternity hospital,” he announced, which sounded promising, but the next thing we knew our car was headed along tiny dirt paths, running through gangs of boys loitering on fences, inches away from our windows, staring inside. “Drive faster,” Jon reminded the driver when we nearly sheared the side of a meandering cow.
The maternity hospital was a pink bungalow in a field in the middle of more fields. The driver parked on a muddy patch near the gate. I hobbled in and tried to explain to a nurse that I had a stomach flu and a history of abdominal surgery, but as the medical jargon gushed from my trembling lips, I could tell I was addressing the wrong audience. She looked at me kindly and said, “If you’re not giving birth right this second, there’s nothing we can do. Good night.”
“Take us back to the hotel, please,” I begged the driver.
“OK,” he said. “But just one more place—a drugstore. It’s on the way!”
Another twenty-minute drive, this time through nearly pitch-black surrounds, found us at a mall that was closed for the night.
“Seriously. Hotel.”
At last, I fell asleep, feverish, on my billion thread-count sheets, praying I’d be better after a rest.
• • •
THE NEXT MORNING, the manager told us he’d arranged for Antigua’s hotel doctor to stop by ASAP, which turned out to be three p.m. The physician was certainly friendly, jovially reporting on his other tourist patients who were losing limbs by the minute, explaining that he was having trouble locating his syringes because his three-year-old son enjoyed rummaging through his bag, and continually taking calls while trying to draw blood, finally forcing Jon to threaten that if he didn’t focus on my veins Jon would throw his phone into the ocean. The chuckling doctor happily agreed to silence his cell, and spent a long time relaying how there was only one lab on the island and it shut at four p.m. So stop chatting and start blood letting! I wanted to cry.
Fortunately, he texted us to say he’d made it with my specimens in time. “I’ll be back tonight.” At nine p.m., when I still had not eaten and was watching reruns of Anthony Bourdain (which I’d seen for the first time only that morning) he jauntily knocked on the door. “Infection, dehydration,” he happily announced. Then asked: “Do you have Internet?”
“Um, yeah,” Jon responded, flipping open his laptop.
“Google is great,” Doctor Internet, as we would now call him, exclaimed. “I like to check with both British and American associations to see what drugs to give during pregnancy. Also, I’ll need to give you IV fluids.”
An IV? I prayed he wasn’t Googling how to do that.
Finally, Jon made contact with doctors abroad who said fluids wouldn’t hurt. But the needle will, I thought, scared by the image of a rusty point niggling through my tired skin, injecting unknown liquids into my inner tubes.
Too bad Dr. I. hadn’t brought an IV stand. “Some hotels have suit racks I can use! I’ll get a nurse. Be back soon.”
At eleven p.m. he arrived with one; the nurse spent an hour standing and holding the IV bag over my head. Together, we watched more Bourdain. After that, I felt a bit more alive. “You look so much better,” Jon said, massaging my feet. I tried to find solace in the sleek geometry of the glass coffee table, but it seemed transparent, flimsy.
The next day, I was still unable to swallow a bite. “We have to get out of here,” I said. Earlier, Jon, with his stay-put Blitz tendencies, kept saying we should wait for the bug to pass. He’d been winning out over my Holocaustic “flee to Russia” instincts. Now, however, he nodded.
Too bad there were no seats to anywhere in the continental US. Jon got on the phone with AmEx insurance: our options were either a helicopter airlift or being squeezed into business class in two days, at an outrageous surcharge. “Fine,” I conceded, praying that I’d stay stable until then.
I did, but the weather didn’t. If I’d been kept up before by cramps, I was now woken by howling winds and the sensation that our beautiful beach bungalow was being whipped, that the specially imported wooden walls might topple in on us.
Finally, two mornings later, feeling a bit stronger and able to keep down half a slice of bread, I placed the few items I’d unpacked back into my suitcase, swallowed suspect antibiotics left by Dr. I., and prayed that our tickets would be honored in what was now known as the biggest hurricane of the season.
The makeshift island airport was absolute chaos but at least they allowed me to sit on top of a desk instead of stand in the throngs. The flight even seemed to be leaving on time. Until it didn’t. Hours of waiting ensued as rains and winds picked up and, we found out, the tarmac cracked in half, making it impossible to take off.
Finally, late in the evening, we were called to our plane. There was no gate, no bus, no tunnel, and we had to walk in the storm down the runway to the door of the aircraft. I instinctively used both arms to protect my stomach from the rain. It’s not just me anymore. A decade ago, visiting a beach resort with a husband would have been unimaginable, not to mention the safest kind of travel I’d ever done, bordering on boring. But now, even that was fraught with risks. The fetus was so fragile, I was so fragile, it was all so fragile. I sat down and the large, leathery business class seats taunted me in my soaking clothes. Luxury means nothing. I was going to be a parent, for God’s sake. I needed to plan cautiously, be the doctor, the police, the pilot of my family.
WHITE COUP
Cape Town, 2000
“You’re doing well,” Nigel said, as I changed lanes, even though this autobahn of a road featured approximately three cars per hour. “Really well.”
“Thanks,” I said, pressing harder on the gas, wondering if he was complimenting my driving or his teaching. His three years on me sometimes felt like thirty.
We were in South Africa, just outside Cape Town, in my rental white coupe, the arctic air-conditioning blasting across our tanned faces and reminding me of the windstorms that swept through the city, blowing hikers right off Table Mountain.
I was driving on the wrong side of the road.
I quickly glimpsed out the window at the magnificent desert. The sand white like snow, the opposite but almost the same as where I grew up. I was as far away as I could be, the literal end of the world. I’d been travel-writing for a couple of years, taking time off college to traipse across Europe, a proud nomad, my backpack like my shell. When I’d told Mom about this post-graduation gig she’d been delighted, mistakenly assuming I was spending the month in Cape Cod. Then she panicked, which only strengthened my resolve.
I stepped on the gas again. Then I quickly glanced the other way at Nigel, whose beaked face stared straight ahead, watching the road. He was always watching the road. Careful. Prepared. When he heard about this travel stint, he took unpaid leave from his London financial analyst job to join me, to protect me in this dangerous, beautiful land. He had ordered a care package of sunscreen and antidiarrheals to be waiting for me at the hostel when I arrived from Boston. He’d included a note saying how much he loved me, how excited he was to see me in forty-eight hours.
We met when I escaped Harvard to write in Vienna, where I’d fallen in love with the city’s design museum, its slick wall hung neatly with historical sofas, colorful like candy. I then paraded with my mere pack through hostels in Slovakia, Hungary, Germany, and the Netherlands before stopping to take a breath for a few months in London, where I sublet a basement room near Hyde Park and got a research job at the Science Museum, my entrée into the world of sleek design and cool space. A roommate introduced me to Nigel, a thin, self-deprecating, aspiring cartoonist who’d grown up working class but studied at Oxford, his background complicated, his identity confused. “Charmed to meet you,” he said, his eyes twinkling, his understated allure reminding me of my first crush, Kermit the Frog. I was sitting on our floor, which I hoped made me seem adventurous. Really, I liked being close to the ground with nowhere to fall.
“Charmed ditto.”
After a drunken first date, and after I called him (taking control!) we ended up a passionate pair. Far enough from home, I was finally able to forget my history. We fell into each other instantly, sensing our mutual shyness and odd pasts, but never discussing them. Instead, we mocked the art world (but secretly craved its acceptance). Nigel got me and judged nothing. He bought me jewelry and clothes, attracted to my whole body.
Over the next two years, as I travel-wrote in Paris and then returned to Harvard, he quit jobs to join me. He showed up in my rooms, ready to carry my bags, fix my furniture, anything I wanted. At first, I glowed in his attention, happy for help with the things I’d always had to do alone. But slowly, his dedication began to confuse me. He arrived as a surprise the weekend before my thesis was due to feed me, make photocopies, glue images. “Thanks,” I kept saying but I’d felt edgy. I’d spent my whole life doing my own homework. I didn’t need help with that. Then again, he was there when I pushed PRINT, calming my panic attack, telling me it was time to let go. Despite my moods, we kept coming back together, folding into each other’s lives like two ends of a collar.
He was the best. My first true love.
And all I could think was that, if I just moved the steering wheel a tiny bit to the right, the passenger side would gently ram into the mountain and I’d kill him. I began to focus on the minutiae of the plan—all it would take was two inches of movement of my wrist, less than that of my ankle, and a relationship would be trashed, a whole life ended.
“Careful here,” he said.
You be careful, I wanted to say.
We were driving through a shantytown, which always sounded to me like a kind of low-alcohol Caribbean drink, a euphemism for the pungent poverty. I’ll have a shantytown and a fried plantain salad, thanks. We were on the highway, protected from the criminal potential of the fenced-in town, but what I had to be careful of were the kids who used the highway as a soccer field, kicking balls, as I’d done in my suburban Canadian street hockey days. Only, not on a highway in a country with no laws about speed. Really, no laws at all. I slowed down, scared of hitting someone, amazed at how two cultures lived together, in the same exact space, but used it differently, their lives askew. A playing field for the blacks, a mode of express travel for the whites. All the cars in that country were white, as if to emphasize the difference.
“Turn here,” Nigel said, forever the cartographer.
I turned and parked.
We walked together to the wooden-slatted hut from which pylons of smoke and of cackles rose to the sky. Nigel was as short as I was, and at times thinner, an old man and a little boy wrapped into one. He explained to the Afrikaans hostess that we had a reservation for the special eleven-course barbecue. South Africans, I thought, had no problems indulging—that is, white South Africans. I did not know about the others.
I sat down at my place in the shade—we were the smallest table, being just two of us in this group-oriented culture—and let myself take in the surrounds. The ocean in front of me was Matisse blue, the coast empty except for our culinary camp and the chefs (all black) who were barbecuing in the pit in the hot sunlight.
Nigel smiled for both of us. “It’s so beautiful. I can’t wait to show you the rest of the country.”
“Mm,” I mumbled, wishing he would get his own guidebook to write.
The first course was ready. Apparently it had just been fished out of the sea moments before. Alive to dead in seconds. Nigel and I waited in the line next to the pit. A server topped my plate. It was some form of tentacle, grilled, simple white zeros. I took it back to the table, where Nigel moved his chair closer to mine.
I let him, but did not reach out to touch him.
Our neighbors, a party of at least ten, were cutting dried fish off the netting décor and popping them into their mouths. They told one another jokes, laughed loudly.
“Eat it like this,” Nigel said to me, serious, placing the grilled seafood on his tongue. Eating an almost-alive octopus leg was nothing for an Englishman who grew up in a small town. But it was everything for me, who’d been eating unkosher meat only since Peter. I was still unused to opening my walls to so many new things.
I scrunched the circle into the fork prongs, and without thinking, stuffed it in my mouth quickly, as if I was killing a spider.
• • •
THAT NIGHT WE arrived at the small hotel outside Stellenbosch that I had to review.
“The only room available has two single beds,” the receptionist said.
“Fine,” I said.
“No!” Nigel insisted.
I glared at him. This was my work.
And, I’d been relieved.
“It’s just for two nights,” I said, sweaty from the long drive.
“I came all the way here to be with you,” he hissed. “We’re a couple, and are getting a double bed.”
The more I ran, the more he chased. The more he chased, the more I ran.
“We’ll push them together,” I whispered. “It’ll be the same.”
“Find another room,” he told the woman.
Thankfully, her long tie-dyed dress matched her demeanor and she calmly flipped through a binder. “I’ll make it work.”
Nigel grinned. I felt sick. He’d recently been diagnosed with depression, and I made him happy, he claimed. But was it actually me that he desired, or just any filling for his holes? He wanted me too much, and wanted too much from me—to save him, to give him joy, purpose.
Like Mom.
I was beginning to worry that everyone I let in was crazy.
“Let’s have a great few days here,” I said. “And when we get back to Cape Town, let’s spend a few days apart, to reinvigorate things.”
“Fine,” he said, and downed the water from his bottle.
I breathed.
• • •
FREEDOM, I THOUGHT, unpacking in my solo room back at the Cape Town hostel. Once the romance floodgates had been unlocked, my physical confidence upped and my reliance on alcohol cemented, I realized: I didn’t want to be locked into “my first.” Cape Town was a party and I wanted a part. By that evening, after just minimal flirting during my day’s research, the hostel phone was ringing for me. House parties, dinners, dates. “Sure, let me check my calendar.” I was Woman, see me soar. “Yes, yes, yes.” I kissed random boys at clubs and fell into bed with a Swiss banker who then ignored me even though we lived down the hall from each other, and I didn’t even mind. In the mirror, I saw firm muscles, dark skin, sultry eyes. I was the anti-me. I drank beers at breakfast, made out with the maintenance man who days later started seeing my friend—Derek. And then, Chris. The pool boy at a local hotel. Sweet, exotic; he invited me to a staff barbecue but was too shy to make eye contact until the others left. We ended up spending the night on his tiny bed, in the basement room below the deck where he lived.
The morning after, he asked for my address at home so he could write me letters. Seriously? Why? Then he kissed me and stressed that we’d used good quality protection. “It’s really important here,” he said. “AIDS is rampant.”
I jolted up, covering myself with his sheet. Of course it was.
What the fuck was I doing?
• • •
I NEED TO MOVE. My hair was wet, my legs were still damp. The shower hadn’t washed away anything. Go go go.
I fumbled for my keys. I’d take my white car on one last trip. A deletion journey. All the way south. To the Cape of Good Hope.
What did Nigel even know about me, about my past? Nothing. I’d sent him back to England in pain. The one person who liked me, who’d care for me, I shipped off.
What am I doing?
I stepped on the gas, flashing to a scene from Campden when I was three years old. I was sitting on Bubbie’s white toilet, my feet perched on a white child’s stool, my book Pig and the Blue Flag perched on my thighs, when I heard the neighbors’ German accents floating in through the open sash window. For years, they’d been fighting with Bubbie about her tree whose leaves fell onto their part of the yard, and Bubbie called them Hitler, but now they were discussing dinner. “Potatoes, wine, pork,” rang out, simple syllables jolting me out of my story, crystal clear as if they were directly intended for the crescent-shaped entrance to my ear. There I was, half naked, exposed, in my most vulnerable position, and confronted by the voice of the enemy, unkosher meat right in Bubbie’s bathroom. Warmth crawled up the back of my neck, and I pulled Pig over my upper thighs. Then I shot up, leaving wet traces along the inside of my leg, and climbed onto the bath ledge where I peeked at their heads and shopping bags through the window. Suddenly, my sweat turned cool, my world sliced itself open and I understood: I could hear and see them but they could not see me, safe, in Bubbie’s toilet. It was not always a two-way street. Relationships were not reciprocal. We didn’t know how we impacted the people around us.
I stepped on the gas even harder. South Africa had no traffic rules, no public bus system, no barriers to protect hikers along the mountain. It was the land of private police, a country where you clutched your purse, even in your own house. Fishing nets, but no safety nets. Everyone was responsible for herself. There was no one looking out for me, no one. Bubbie is gone. Perhaps how it had always been, but it seemed so obvious here.
I drove alone, like Thelma sans Louise, all the way south, until there was no more land, no more Africa. The farthest tip. Cape Point. I got out. In front of me—ocean.
The sun blazed, but the water was Antarctic. I was alone, but surrounded by penguins, who looked cute, but smelled like vinegar.
The taste of metal lingered in my mouth. I tried to recall if there were any holes around Chris’ tongue piercing, any way for our blood to mingle.
I noted two penguins having sex. They squawked wildly. Had I even felt it? I was amassing notches on some bedpost that no one would ever count. My nakedness was just another costume. Overinvolved or underinvolved, walls that were too-thick or too-thin, it made no difference.
I was writing a travel guide, but I had no idea where I was going. I could have done a million smart things; instead, here I was, unable to take responsibility for my actions and how they affected others. Just like my mother, I thought.
I was at the edge of the world, teetering on the brink of the hemisphere. Harvard, Europe, Africa. Dorm, hostel, sublet. I’d been pretending to be adventurous, a confident self-contained unit, when really I was just running away, hiding. I wanted to be unattached but I was totally disconnected, empty.
I had no stuff at all, and still, chaos.