“Who would have ever thought that an ex-Peace Corps Volunteer would have been such a cruddy little bastard,” half-heartedly smiled Robin thinking about her husband David Calder. She liked strolling around the UCLA campus because it reminded her of happier days when she was an undergraduate, and later, when she trained there for the Peace Corps. Looking back, they were naive days, uncomplicated by the duplicity of adult deceptive words and actions; happy days when she still fancied herself as the next Emily Dickinson, though by her sophomore year in college she had stopped printing her poetic crap in favour of concentrating on world social awareness issues like the outbreaks of malaria in the underdeveloped countries, overpopulation, and global pollution in the irresponsible overdeveloped. Annoyed with herself at being so naive, she now couldn’t imagine that once upon a time she actually believed that she could really make a difference in the world. Hers were heroic fantasies of triumph solidly imprinted in her youthful mind; ideas to which she had faithfully adhered to in sublimated pleasure to cover up her ignorance. Now grown up, she viewed her youthful politics as amusing little white lies intended to combat her insecurities. From the very beginning, they were feel-good promises to a pretty little girl, from mommy and daddy, so that she would always be a winner. And so she remained a virgin to the world until she was invited to train for the Peace Corps to go to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and teach English. She was twenty one at the time and knew that somewhere beyond the sea there was a world for her to conquer.
She stopped and sat in the grass in front of Royce Hall on the UCLA quad and again found the beautiful Mexican-deco, pink-coloured building, pleasing to look at. The warmth of the building lovingly passed through her entire body, and she felt the afternoon sun melting on her. She looked straight ahead and tilted her head slightly up at the bluest of skies and felt the vigor of her youth. She breathed in the scent of the recently mowed fresh green grass and sensed the world as her own. The scene was one of calm, and she felt relaxed in its familiarity. It was the same picture she had often seen in her dreams. It was a scene recalling the calm and happy days before complications to prove oneself had set in. In her dream she was sitting on the green grass, like she had done so many times during PC training, when she wanted to feel alone, Royce Hall on her right. Like in her dream, she was now looking straight ahead at the warm setting sun, felt free of all the world, and she longed for the feeling of the fading day not to end. After all these years she still felt clean and memorably twenty-one whenever she walked the cool grounds of UCLA.
Tired memories of the young men and women who had been invited to the training program at UCLA that would eventually take them to Ethiopia swept through her mind. She couldn’t help it: the Peace Corps experience had been pivotal to what and who she now was. If she could, she would now re-invent the group as more normal, more flawed, in-the-raw human beings rather than the fragile bright-eyed people just out of college that they were then, full of uncertain idealism and nervy theatrics about maturity, and middle age, and old age, and endless other opinions. It was that silent fear of the real world that made them, “including myself,” huddle into the cloister of Peace Corps volunteerism, she thought. For some, the fear of what lay ahead evidenced itself in an insecure laughter that betrayed confused clumsiness and improbable assertiveness. She recalled how some, including herself, would gather around the dorm’s lounge piano, just before suppertime, and sing the tearjerker
“Go tell Aunt Molly the old grey goose is gone;
she died in the meadow, the old grey goose is gone.
The gander …”
How stupid, she thought.
*
The sound of pre-digital alarm clocks would go off at six am, or earlier, in the June-gloom Southern California marine layer rolling in each morning, and by seven a.m. various training classes would begin. With bright shining faces they were all in their places complaining of the ungodly hours but not too loudly lest they be cut from the training program and be sent home, a bizarre possibility full of implied failure, compliments of Peace Corps administrators.
Robin was thrilled to be part of the laughter and gestures of the group, and quickly succumbed to the grand exhibitionism of the new and still exotic responsibility that was just beginning. She would pretend to be startled, and girlish jump, at every tepid touch from one of the more bold male volunteers. And still desiring to be part of the in-crowd, weird laughter of familiarity, unreal, would surface on her lips and fill the acquaintanceship of the big deal gentle poking of her ribs, an act of intimacy as close to her breasts as common etiquette allowed. Weird with informality was her friendly reaction to the newly recognizable fellow travellers’ probing intimacy.
How embarrassing, she would think to herself; she had never behaved so stupidly before, never allowed anyone to poke her ribs, or anywhere else. Though unsure that her newly acquired PCV behaviour was acceptable, she did conform to the magic of being part of the group, of starting out as an equal, of not having to display all past baggage, good or bad; in effect, she shut her eyes and travelled incognito, in spite of the silly PC psychological testing. She desperately wanted to prove to herself, her best friends, and above all, her daddy back home that she wasn’t a freak, a nerd, or a geek loser; that she could make lots of friends like everybody else could. She would have done anything and everything to fit into the PC group and not be cut from the program, an event that might be construed as unforgivable failure by herself and all those around her. There was incomprehensible fear to have volunteered two years of your life to do noble work but to have some indifferent bureaucrats question your commitment. Worse, the unfathomable possibility of being removed from the program because of incompetence was particularly scary.
Five days into training, a disturbing storm swept through her body and mind: to be cut from the program would mean devastation; it would amount to smudging her ass black for the rest of her life; she had to go to Ethiopia. She knew very little of Ethiopia but suddenly she felt that her future as a productive human being passed through the highlands of Ethiopia.
It was a turning point in her young life, though she was too young to realize that imposing training programs, like stupid schooling, was simply one of those recurring events that are common but insignificant in life. She buckled down and made the PC training particularly significant, envisioning it as something full of the excitement that somehow would trash her insubstantial past and push her to grasp on to a most exciting future. So she excelled in everything the program called for, and poking of the ribs be damned. She had to go where her life could find a new start, a new continuity, and out of nowhere Ethiopia beamed quixotically at her. She became a best Volunteer not to be cut from the program. And with all her beauty, who could deny her?
It was on this road taken that she met her future husband David Calder, Dave to the group, whenever he would honkytonk on the lounge piano in Myra Hershey Hall, where the group had been housed. Immediately she had recognized that he was everything she wasn’t. In any other environment she would have pissed on him and walked away. Dave was one of those good looking boys whose rosy face was a pass to any convention. But for Robin, the ethical road having been cleared of compunctions by the need to fit, the ghost that might have protested to a more acceptable choice for a companion had been conveniently effaced out of the moral mind by the need to go to Ethiopia, and if plucky Dave would claim her as his girlfriend, he being a critical member of the training social group, then she would be in with everyone, including the daunting Big Daddy Peace Corps.
For several days she side-stared Dave, literally for the fuck of it, trying to find some unique quality in him, but to her dismay, all she could see was a vague immaturity, that in her mind, echoed nothing more than surface deep ‘nice guy’, but which somehow mysteriously led her to the sure and easy way to Addis Ababa, which at the time, was exactly what she was looking for.
It was another first for Robin to cautiously move in a continuous direction towards bubbly Dave who easily bounced around Royce Hall with his groupies, male and female, always in attendance. The guy wore sneakers before his time, which turned Robin off, but she found it curious that she attracted him. His head turned when she was around. His lustrous blue eyes, like a baby’s, evoked nothing but mother’s love for the world, and she had to admit they were sexually enticing. He was not the one that played the staid Aunt Molly tune on the piano; he was histrionically jazzy, which she likewise found amusing. Already his hairline had begun to recede and the crown of his head had lost most of his strawberry blond hair, “indicative of larger than normal amounts of testosterone”, his female friends would be in awe of him. Between his tennis shoes and his red nylon wrinkle-free windbreaker that reflected brightly on his white face, Dave took all the Peace Corps girls’ breathe away. But to Robin, he was an easy mark. He was too easy not to pass up, still an adolescent, and Robin was much smarter than he. She supressed all feelings of indifference and charged to charm Dave.
“Hey, Dave, you want to come up and see my bed?” one spied, brave, alone, afternoon moment, Robin teased that Peace Corps laughter at sparkling Dave.
Everybody wanted to see Robin’s bed.
It was that easy.
“What about your roommate?”
“Risk it, David,” she said as she led him to her room.
Robin locked the door behind her even though she knew that her roommate had an extra class that day and was at least an hour away.
It was more for Calder than herself.
She undressed quickly and stood tall in front of him smiling all her tantalizing purity to the lucky Dave. Her white nakedness shined like a Grecian statue in the twilight of Southern California afternoon. It wasn’t so much that she wanted to fuck at that moment as much as she felt she had to. She wanted to get it over as quickly as possible; what the fuck was the big deal? A tear came to her eye as he fucked her to a quick, silent climax. In his lucky afternoon he was never aware that it had been her first time, that he had deflowered a most beautiful girl. When he finished, she was surprised that it hadn’t hurt; she went and showered, and when she came back he had left the room.
And that’s the way it’s done.
*
“You mean to say, Robin, that all through high school and four years of college you stayed a virgin?” Kitty had asked in disbelief one day years later.
“Yeah,” Robin said to her trusted best friend, “and it still pisses me off that I had saved myself for so long only to have been plucked by an insensitive asshole like Calder,” she confessed about her now transparent husband in that strange laughter that was becoming more masculine with age.
“Oh, Robin, I’m so sorry; we never knew,” commiserated Kitty. It would have smacked of pity except that Kitty had a keen sense of sarcasm.
“What a bull-shitter you are, Kitty,” laughed Robin who never really needed Kitty’s expressions of sympathy.
“Of course you never mentioned anything about your sex life before, though we all assumed that you had to be doing it with somebody, from junior high times even, because you’re so beautiful, and we all thought somebody was corking you, because you’ve always been so secretive …”
“’fess up, Kitty, when was your first time?”
“I won’t tell you!”
“I bet you all thought it was my cousin …”
“Well, no, we thought it was your uncle; you know, the thin nosed lawyer,” and they both laughed.
“I won’t tell if you don’t tell,” said Kitty.
“At our age, we brag of such boosts, Kitty, so do tell,” said Robin.
“I’ll tell the others to call you Miss Chastity from now on,” giggled Kitty.
“Screw that scene, Kitty. After the first time all other times become only one other time. And I can truthfully tell you, Kitty, that there were many, many, other times. Every night the trainees would pair up and fuck their stressed-out brains. Whom you paired with was not ever an issue; we were all one great, big, happy family. It was almost incestuous. We fucked each other like kindergarten children playing in the toy-room.”
“What about the Peace Corps people? Didn’t they know what you were doing?”
“Sure they did. Some of the younger, gamier instructors, including the Ethiopians joined in the nightly fun.”
“Is it true what they say, Robin? That once you go black you never come back?”
And once again Robin’s mind wandered to the days of Addis Ababa, the ‘new flower’ days and to the tall and slender lover, Taferra, who simply would not fade away and whose huge loving eyes, over the years, continued to look into her heart; and each time she would have given anything to be with him for one more time.
She stupidly looked over her shoulder hoping to see his childlike face.
For two Peace Corps years he had been her beloved, courageously giving every sweet cell of his body and soul to her, but she always withholding, racially resisting, out of fear of his non-white skin.
“Hey, cuckoo bird; are you still with me?”
“Bullshit, Kitty. I went black, but I never left white, and did marry white, as you know,” Robin wistfully recalled.
“I was just wondering,” Kitty dissolved her curiosity.
“And let me tell you. The fucking didn’t stop with the training period. For the next two years we continued to fuck each other without concealment, thanks to the free condoms, courtesy of the Peace Corps. And every so often, we would stop by the Swedish Hospital in Addis Ababa to check our levels of syphilis and gonorrhoea.”
“All right Robin, that’s enough of the bullshit. I now think you’re pulling my leg. There’s just too much fucking in your story!”
Robin couldn’t stop laughing at her friend’s innocence. Sure she had exaggerated a bit, but Robin had never fucked as much as she did as a Peace Corps Volunteer.
“You know, Robin, Myrna’s sorority stories are no different than your Peace Corps stories; while you were fantasy fucking away in the PC, everybody was fantasy fucking each other in her sorority as well. You’ll never hear those kind of stories from me, though,” summed Kitty with a bit of phlegm in her voice.
“Well, what are friends for?” said Robin, after a moment’s exasperating delay, thick with discord, her eyes still focused on the sweet eucalyptus odors of Addis Ababa. They were masculine words, loaded with heavy feeling and short of friendly sentiment. They came out forcefully between Robins teeth and blew Kitty emotionally dry. She didn’t know why Robin said what she did about ‘friends’, the way she did; for her, friendship was a corny great big hug, an act of confessional openness. It wasn’t something to choke on. Friendship for Kitty was not a point of one-upmanship for selfish gain; it was an act of binding people in pleasure. She felt as if she somehow had offended Robin.
“If you want to know what friendship is, Robin, it’s the deep feeling of pleasure you sense when you are with your friend,” said Kitty.
“Oh Kitty! You are a great friend and I love being with you because you do give me great, great, deep, deep, pleasure,” smiled Robin in all honesty and took Kitty’s hand in hers, all hostility disappearing from her voice.
They took a cab to Sooky Rawko’s Bar on Pacific Highway in Santa Monica to meet Sharon and Myrna for vodka martinis, sushi, and sashimi delicacies, and always a half dozen oysters for Sharon.
*
Later that evening as she lay awake next to her husband she couldn’t get her Ethiopian lover out of her mind. Taferra had been a history teacher in the same school she had been assigned to teach English. He was young, no more than twenty five, and he walked with the superior peacock grace that the Amhara people have carried in their genes since the time of Solomon and Sheba. Robin had been amazed by the easy Ethiopian good looks when she first got to Addis Ababa. She, like most other Europeans, was pitilessly abused by the fine features and perfect complexion and colors of the Amhara and Tigre people. They walk with ease and when they sit it’s as if they’re sitting on flowers.
He instantly intimidated her. Tall and Ethiopian skinny, he fixated on her soul the first day he saw her shyly sipping her tea in the teacher’s lounge. She felt his intense presence and immediately understood that inevitably, soon, they would become lovers. The premonition was strong, they belonged together; she thought it was the appeal of the exotic that was unsettling her tummy. She was thrilled at the irrational, which made the prospect of fucking the Ethiopian more appealing, but not for one moment did she forget that she too was beautiful and that he had to acknowledge her presence or he’d be out of luck. She thought it ridiculous the way he carefully covered himself behind his always buttoned-down suit jacket faking it as blazer.
For the first month or so, the strange exchanges were limited to sparse side-glanced eye contact and greetings of “Good morning” and smiling “oops” whenever they bumped into each other in the school’s hallway or stairs. But there was no mistaking the powerful attraction that was sizzling between them. She sensed the delicate beauty of his light brown skin and every day that she saw him she couldn’t shake her persistent longing to be embraced and to be made pregnant by him. They both knew it was a matter of time.
One evening her doorbell rang and when she opened it he was standing there holding a passionate red rose. With a most serious hesitation on his face he waited for some seconds and then unabashedly walked into her life. She was terrorized by his unannounced presence.
He was as much in fear as she was.
“Where did you get a rose in Addis,” she broke the silence, and with those words she immediately became part of the family.
“Addis Ababa means ‘new flower’ in Amharic,” he said. “It was either an apple, or a new flower for the new teacher,” he said, the words trembling on his lips.
He was like a lost little puppy in her doorsteps. She couldn’t stand it any longer and took his hand and led him to her bed. They made up for the long anticipation of awaited lovemaking until the wee hours of the morning and in the end, when he parted, she was certain she was in love with him.
For the next two years he was the not so secret lover for whom she had travelled beyond the sea to Ethiopia. During that time that measured as a lifetime while it lasted, her heart was flooded with love full of tranquillity and cheer. She found the luxury to believe that she was in love with an Ethiopian, a stranger, lovely Taferra. She was enthralled by his gentle assertiveness, which made her forget her faraway American confinement; she was convinced that she had found her soul in his embracing laughter. His skin was beautiful to her touch. His lips and eyes became ancient springs of kindness that always pinned her with their liberating smile. Not until her Peace Corps tour was near the end did she see her white skin resurface again, that hers was not brown like his. She cried that day realizing that the Ethiopia Volunteer thing, including her Taferra, was but a whimsical dream paid by Uncle Sam. It was a lovely love affair that for sanity’s sake had to be extirpated, lovely as it had been, with all the surgical innocence of intercontinental flight detachment.
If Taferra was her special weekend flavoured lover, David Calder continued to be her everyday American lover, full of the playful sexuality that continued uninterrupted from the days of UCLA. And they weren’t the only two for whom she covered her bed with passion. She didn’t care. When the opportunity presented itself, often, because she was beautiful, she gleefully bit her lip and uncovered her breasts to another capricious adventure. She was far away from the disapproving eyes of those who might not have approved, like her parents, and she felt free; being sexually desirable was an opportunity not to be dismissed. Hers, too, was every young woman’s fantasized wish for many lovers to attend her infinite appetites. And for her, her fantasies were coming true, far beyond the sea, as she had often imagined as a little girl. She was young and beautiful and what was she supposed to do with her youth and beauty? The days of PC idealistic voluntarism were also of pure uncomplicated sexual experiences as well. It was as nature, and her immense beauty, had intended life to be. The libidinous exploration was a welcomed pleasurable landscapes of audacious freedom to be savored away from the discomfort of parental prying; prurient desires were to be enjoyed before conforming to one, servile, crushing husband in a social marriage of the rich, most often negotiated by daddy and others around her, presumed to last a lifetime. The holy tradition of a wedding that none would be able ‘to do apart’, were thoughts to be visited on a later date, after Ethiopia. And like the new Addis Ababa flower that she had become, she opened up her corolla with its precious petals to show the world what she had, a beauty to be cherished and abducted every time, far, far, away from home, where the deer and the antelope played, and no one could pass judgement on her.
She balanced the world between her long legs, but in her dreams and daydreams, daddy would intermittently appear with the same pained face that she knew as disapproval to remind her that he was shadowing her everywhere she might be; that Ethiopia was not that far removed from his California world that she could hide from him. And in that sexual rebelliousness that was her PCV world, her best friends would also appear in long letters, and she would wish she could forget them, but she could not. Shame was a forceful tormentor to all her innocent pleasures which should have been hers without regrets. The easy Peace Corps affairs, in time, became a bipolar world, voracious in her extended appetites, but laden with guilt; and she prayed that she be able to consciously keep the two apart without losing her mind.
The thought of daddy humbled her and when alone she would cry knowing full well that sadly he would not approve of her “coarse behavior” as he would invade her mind. In all her vulgar fucking, daddy was ever present, compounding her sins and sorrow with the unhappy thought that her white reality had David as her only means of accepted atonement. She knew well that no Ethiopian, no matter how bright or virtuous, how worthy or respectable, could match the sanity of David that daddy would accept. Conceding her neurotic self to the recesses of her lovely mind, she found comfort in the lie that there were only two lovers; that she was fucking Taferra out of love, and David out of daddy necessity only. Unfairly, she thought David stupid for actually believing that he was the heir apparent to her heart. But in moments of clarity, during the darkest moments of her bipolar mind, she knew that she had no huge love for anyone.
“Fuck them all,” she would say. “They’re driving me crazy.”
Six weeks before departing from Ethiopia, Robin found out she was pregnant. She told David of her condition and he was at first stupefied, then confused, and after very little consideration, all too thrilled to share in the great portentous event of the birth of his first child. There was some ambivalence on becoming a father so early in his life, but here was proof positive that his receding hairline was manly stuff. Proud of his physical strength to father children, there was no hesitation at the thrilling prospect of Robin becoming his wife, promiscuous as she was. Recalling that first time at UCLA, to David Calder she was a woman most desirable. He just wished that she had been a little more careful with whom she paired, but there was no longer fear of being dropped from the Ethie PC program, because they’d be going home soon, anyway.
They both politely swallowed the very little pride there was left, and they made plans to marry as soon as they returned to the States.
“I wonder if it’s a boy, or girl?” he would stupidly ask.
“Let it be a mystery to the end, David,” smiled Robin who then gracefully touched her lips on the dolt’s forehead.
For both David and Robin the two year Peace Corps tour in Ethiopia was the turning point in their lives. That experience brought misery to Robin and, soon after his return to the US, great wealth to bouncing David.
She never said anything to Taferra, but she knew that the baby was his. There was nothing to be said other than it would have been a beautiful mulatto. Their two year affair, tender and passionate as it was, she now understood, could never have ended happily in marriage, or in a prolonged pathetic romantic love affair fatefully doomed to tragic failure. Lucid now that her departure was nearing, she saw no room for Taferra in her American world and way of life. He was too delicate to survive outside the bewitching beauty of bloated Abyssinia. He could not be far removed from the miserable dirty little side streets of Addis Ababa that were nightly cleared of garbage by scavenging hyenas. He would have been swallowed alive, as she had done of him, by the anthropophagi of the free marketers of America.
Softly she sang the song he had taught her:
Antchi lidgi, wadda kouchi
Antchi degamo, wadda gini
“I love you too Taferra,” she cried to herself, on the plane, all the way to America.
Years later, when her mind had stabilized into the familiar reality of her traditions, the thought occurred to her that all memories are reworked fantasies, the censored wishes for a pleasant world. She realized that the Ethiopia of her Peace Corps mind was not a geographic location but the remnant fantasy of a twenty two year old easily impressionable American girl; that she could as much return to that faded fantasy as she could once again become twenty two years old.
The fantasy did linger on mostly without Taferra. It was a touching sentiment without hope of realization because it was illusory and, as any psychologist will tell you, illusions are there to fool you; that what once might have been passionate realities, in quick time they fade away into ill-defined fiction, as assuredly as lies tend to become truths the more you continue to repeat them.
“What a fantastic world, to freeze your life into illusions,” she often thought.
*
Though she knew whose baby it was she at the time said nothing to David. She needed a husband to keep the faith with daddy and David qualified; it was a no brainer, that as soon as she got to California she would abort her fetus, which she did right after the wedding.
Stressed out to almost panic condition, for a few days after her wedding to David, she kept throwing up every morning. Everyone happily assumed that she was pregnant, which she miserably was. No one suspected her unhappiness except, perhaps, her father who half-smiled a curious sideward glance as he walked her halfway down the church aisle; but it was much too late to wonder. ‘For better or for worse, in sickness and in health … till death do us part …’ It was a wretched wedding. Throughout the ceremony, and the expensive reception afterwards, Robin kept thinking of the embryo inside her and how to get rid of it. Dumb David was far, far away, from her mind, while Robin was temporarily mired in the Ethiopia within her.
And all her best friends kept hugging her and saying how happy they were for her on her luxurious wedding. Only Sharon felt Robin’s uneasiness.
The day after her honeymoon, secretly, with the help of her friend Myrna, who understood her friend’s condition, Robin had an afternoon abortion in an assembly line abortion clinic in East LA. The morning after her abortion she woke up in a pool of her blood that had warmly soiled her silken sheets. It was assumed that she had naturally aborted though nobody bothered to look. Compassionately, upon seeing the bloody misfortune that had befallen them, David comforted his wife and assured her, not to worry, that the Lord would bless them with more pregnancies.
There never were more pregnancies and though Robin didn’t deserve that fate, the good Lord working in His many ways, and unbeknownst to Robin at that time, and for a long time thereafter, medical second opinion sadly confirmed, time and again, that she would never again get pregnant. She tried to be defiant as daddy would have wanted her to be, but a gnawing remorse painfully cluttered her personality.
Two years after her abortion and still unable to adjust to her post-PC lifestyle, and against her husband’s and every friend’s advice, Robin decided to return to the source of her confusion, like all confused Volunteers want to do.
She bought a ticket to Addis Ababa.
“I have to see Taferra,” she said.
“You can never go back, Robin,” was David’s admonition.
She landed at Bole International Airport in Addis at six in the morning after a long flight from LA via Kennedy Airport. Overwhelmed by the clarity and freshness of the Addis air, she remembered the first time she disembarked at Bole as a PCV and felt the same eagerness and anticipation, as before; that she was doing the right thing to be there.
By the time she got to her hotel, she felt very alone. Though exhausted from the trip she was much too nervous to sleep. Suddenly she didn’t know what to do, she didn’t know where to look. Fear struck her in the midst of a strange African City, when Big Daddy Peace Corps wasn’t there to protect you, or to pluck you out and gently carry you back home in case of an emergency. What if something silly happened to her, like falling and breaking her neck? Who would take the time and effort to do the right thing on her dead behalf? She recalled the true story told to her by Taferra of Malcolm X, in fear of his life, being holed up in the same hotel years earlier, when he had fled Cairo after arriving there from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, believing that CIA agents, or somebody equally unfriendly, was out to get him. He holed up for days in the hotel trusting no one, never eating food until reassured it wasn’t poisoned, never going out, until the CIA, or trusted Ethiopian officials, or friends from Washington, or maybe the Peace Corps, assured him all was ten four, and that he could return to the USA, where safety awaited him.
Thinking herself naïve, or worse, succumbing to paranoia, she decided to go out and test her shaky knees.
On the walk to the Piazza, once the meeting place of ‘who was who’ in middle class Addis, excitement set in, mingling with the memory of having been there so many times before. She was hoping for a chance encounter but when she got there she found the Piazza more barren than she wished or remembered, and distraught, she went emotionally dumb. An old waiter in the St George’s Bar recognized her and with joy on his face, with full and happy gestures, was asking her many questions. Overwhelmed by the different reality than the one residing in her memory, she couldn’t utter a word to his cheery welcome.
She felt ridiculously tongue tied. She wasn’t afraid because she too recognized the old waiter but her brain was empty of any words, not even a “tenais talling”, a simple hello. She thought of asking if he had seen Taferra, but there was a long delay in even recalling her lover’s name. She stood before the old waiter, alone, feeling brain naked. After several dumb minutes, she walked away lost in an emotional abandonment of an Ethiopian fantasy that was once a wild, beautiful reality, but now jumbled and obsolete.
With welted eyes she walked away from St George’s Bar. Empty of feeling, she sauntered around the familiar filthy streets recalling and brutally relinquishing every romantic thought of the murky two year affair with an Ethiopian whom she now felt had been rightfully a stranger. Walking in the eucalyptus sweet smelling air of Addis, it became obvious to her that she was in the wrong place with a leftover romanticized hangover for a man who should have never existed for her, hard as she tried to imagine and be kind in her thoughts about him. Their affair had been a short fictitious story whose monotony made for barely existent memories. Taferra, as was all of Ethiopia, had been a fictional figure who one time long ago had been expressed by her wishful young girl’s mind into an unlikely love affair. How unfair she had been to Calder. She had to find Taferra and once and for all get him out of her mind.
After regaining some calmness, and her hands no longer trembled, she took a taxi, to the all-girls Princess Gennet Boarding School where she had taught English as a Peace Corps Volunteer two years earlier. The privacy walls around the school’s compound were as forbidding as she remembered them; they were there to protect the young female boarders whose favorite national pastime, as they liked to remind Peace Corps Volunteer Robin, was sex. When she entered the courtyard of the school, it took only seconds for the students to recognize their former teacher, and there were hugs and kisses and screams of happiness as all the girls rushed her with an enthusiasm reserved only for rock stars.
Again Robin was speechless, this time dumb with happiness, unable to respond to her former students’ stream of unending questions. They are such happy children without a chip on their shoulders, without an axe to grind, she thought. They were as she remembered them: all beautiful, with a tantalizing brown red hue complexion that made each and every face sparkle flawlessly. Such beauty, such exuberant comradery, such girlish innocence, such enthusiasm, such genuine friendship – what lovely Ethiopian qualities, she thought, as she finally reached out to touch her students.
Sadly she remembered her own high school experiences at Magnolia High in Sherman Oaks where she and her three best friends clung together in constant anxiety, lest their friendship, that timidly bound them together, but artlessly lacking the savage passion of endurance, might dissolve in stinking emptiness. That familiar timid love affair contrasted with the fiercely uninhibited Ethiopian welcome she was encountering. She recalled her own high school pathetic football pep rallies every fall, cheered on by dumpy coaches and dumb depressing unimportant high school ‘athletes’ who in monotone, cacophonous voices ‘lead’ the school gang in inane ‘school’ songs intended to inspire school spirit. They were tragic, pitiful acts, tedious in their badly rehearsed annual fall repetitions; Friday afternoon minor celebrations that couldn’t compare to the spontaneous, unrehearsed Ethiopian students’ enthusiasm now rushing before her with yelling and screaming to shower her, their former teacher, with love.
Strengthened by her ex-students’ expression of love, Robin found her way to the Principal’s office, an Indian woman of modest credentials.
“I wanted to ask you if Taferra is still with you,” shyly said Robin.
“Haven’t you heard? Taferra died soon after you left.”
Everyone, including the Principal were aware of the illicit affair between Robin and Taferra. She had silently disapproved then of her staff’s fucking on the side and she now gave the deadly news with relish.
Robin’s brain drained to her stomach and she fainted.
After she was revived, the lethal news continued. She was told that after she departed Ethiopia, Taferra became depressed, and soon after deranged, disoriented in speech and behaviour. He began to use foul language and even verbally molest his students. Whereas before he had been vain, he was now dishevelled and soon became fat from indifference as if malnourished. One fateful morning, as he made his way to school across an open field nearby, he dropped dead. It was said that by the time he was found amidst the weeds by a passer-by his bloated body was covered with millions of flies.
The image was too horrific for Robin’s mind to grasp. The fly infested stinking bloated body was too foreign for her memory of a once beautiful man, for no matter the previous thoughts, a lover decaying in an open field covered with buzzing flies became too appalling, too perverse, an image. She didn’t want to retain anything of Ethiopia.
“How stupid of me,” she said to herself as she walked away from Princess Gennet School, wishing never to return again.
“The whole Peace Corps thing has been an abortion,” she did not fail to see the irony.
The next day, she flew back to Los Angeles, aching only to see her best friends again. Sweet Southern California where the best fiends’ friendship could honestly be sustained by Grey Goose vodka and the many reds and whites of Napa and France.
*
David Calder did tolerantly suffer all Robin’s bullshit because being the son-in-law of Robert Sargent, owner and CEO of Pioneer Bank, was a cool position to be in: his father-in-law graciously had promoted him to Executive Vice President, Human Resources, after his marriage to Robin. After returning from Ethiopia, in his altruistically soaked bright mind there was some ambivalence in his seemingly Peace Corps idealism, and the greedy capitalist contradictory shit, but he was enough of a realist to accept that morality had more to do with politics than with some antagonistic notions of right and wrong. Like sex, everybody was doing it, so he too dropped the altruism and became a capitalist. He also knew from historical accounts that all women everywhere throughout the centuries had been considered morally inferior to men. To think otherwise would have been abnormal. Shit, you could’ve tested David a million different ways, as Peace Corps had done, and he would have always come out normal.