Jomo laughed. ‘Maybe fifteen years ago,’ he said. ‘But you’ve mellowed with age.’
‘It’s as if, over the years, we’ve become grafted onto each other,’ Mariam said. ‘Sometimes I can’t get any perspective on him.’
‘It sounds pretty good from where I’m sitting,’ Jomo said.
‘It does? Which part?’
‘Being grafted to a person you love.’
She was about to ask him how things were going with Giselle when they bumped into a couple Jomo knew from their class. After introductions – his name was Nat, his wife’s name was Rachel, their two-month-old baby was named Plum – Jomo and his acquaintances plunged into the usual reunion power-download of the last five years of their lives, while Plum slept within the largest baby buggy Mariam had ever seen.
Mariam zoned out of their conversation, silently composing a haiku inspired by her favorite William Carlos Williams poem.
This is just to say
we’ve named our new daughter Plum
so sweet and so bold
Rachel had begun to monopolize the conversation with a disquisition on her baby. Two months since the birth of Plum and Rachel was still decompressing, marveling at the fact that she and Nat had made a human and it had emerged from her own body. Mariam remembered that feeling. She had even kept in the freezer, for an embarrassingly long time, the mucus plug that had dislodged from her cervix early in Alexis’s birth, the ‘show’, the first sign that she was going to be birthing a baby. As if it were a relic from the body of a saint! Gross.
All women, after having their first baby, secretly believe they have invented pregnancy, birth, the feat of creation. She’d felt it too, after Alexis. But now that she was further along the path of motherhood, Mariam was sometimes put off by the self-involvement of the first-timers. Mariam remembered, when Alexis was very young, looking at women with older children and thinking, But they can’t have loved their baby as much as I love mine.
Blinded by love. That was what it meant to be a parent, she thought, and not just to a newborn. At the end of the orientation day for the incoming kindergarten class – the class Alexis would be in – Mariam had watched the other parents waiting in the schoolyard as their children broke off from the group and ran toward them. On both the parents’ and children’s faces was transporting joy at being reunited. We are all just the same, she’d thought. Risking everything by loving our children so desperately. When Alexis had begun to sprint toward her, Mariam had turned into a puddle of maternal love, watching her little girl approaching on her skinny legs, her giant satchel jiggling up and down on her back.
The toughest thing about parenting, though, was that doing it right meant parenting yourself into obsolescence. By the time Alexis and Eva – into whom she would have poured everything she had – were eighteen and heading to college, they would, ideally, love her and Rowan, but they would no longer need them. It was no surprise to her that parents had breakdowns when their kids left home. What other job rewards two decades of exceeding all the key performance indicators with redundancy and unemployment?
Goddamn him, she was missing Rowan again. She wanted to tell him about Rachel and baby Plum.
She would need to head back soon and sort things out with him or the girls would pick up that something was wrong. They had a sixth sense about even the slightest shift in the currents between their parents. They were extremely lucky, of course, if this was what counted as a crisis for them.
Maybe there should be a form of marriage therapy that involved spouse-deprivation, Mariam thought. She loved Rowan to bits, but she sometimes wished she could microdose rather than overdose on him.
Rowan had a recurring nightmare that Mariam had left him for someone else. He would wake from it in tears, edging closer to her in the bed, or mention it to her in the morning with a hug. She had started joking to him that one day this nightmare would be his fondest dream – my crazy wife has FINALLY left me for someone else! Yet she was grateful that his unconscious visited this nightmare on him regularly; it was like a psychic prod to remind him to value her.
She, on the other hand, had a different recurring nightmare. She would be on the prowl for a man, or having sex with some strange man, and enjoying it, and then gradually it would dawn on the dream-Mariam that she was married, and had children, and then her horror would grow: where was Rowan, where were the girls? She too would wake and scoot closer to Rowan’s side of the bed. She didn’t tell him about these dreams because they only ended as nightmares. But now it occurred to her that perhaps Rowan’s nightmares also started out as lovely dreams in which he was blissfully screwing some other woman, real or imagined.
Mariam tuned back in to the conversation. Nat was telling Jomo that he and Rachel were going out for breakfast after a family meditation session in the new serenity room in Kirkland House; all the undergraduate residences had one now, as a measure to ease student stress and anxiety, and build resilience.
Part of Mariam wanted to make fun of the precious millennials who’d managed to get into Harvard without learning anything useful along the way – like how to be resilient! She could just imagine them lounging in their serenity rooms, eating free cookies and expecting constant emotional hand-holding. But another part of her wished something like that had existed when she’d been at college.
Maybe this was her chance to get the weekend back on track.
She asked the couple for directions to the serenity room within Kirkland House and hugged Jomo goodbye, saying she’d see him later.
The serenity room was down in the basement, off one of the underground corridors that, in the coldest weather, students used to get to the dining hall without going outside. It was, Mariam realized, the room that had once been the headquarters of Jomo’s beer-brewing club for seniors, which must now be defunct.
Back then it had been an unheated, unpainted room with the ambience of a broom closet. She was impressed by the care that had been taken in decorating the room for its new purpose. It had been wallpapered in a soothing shade of yellow and had shaggy carpet that was comfortable to kneel on. There were several hanging basket chairs – the ones that you could curl up in like a pupa inside a cocoon – and beanbags dotted all over the place. The overhead lights were off; fake candles flickered on the bookshelves.
There was a woman on the far side of the room, sitting cross-legged inside a hanging basket, deep in meditation. She did not turn around when Mariam entered.
Mariam put her shoes on the rack and quietly got settled on a beanbag in the corner.
For a while, she couldn’t really decide what to say to God.
Meditation, mindfulness, prayer – all of it had the same end goal of achieving inner peace. But what about outer peace? Right at the moment when she and everyone like her should be out on the streets protesting for world peace, here she was seeking peace only for herself. It was a form of retreat, she knew. It was the late-capitalist, consumerist way. Instead of pushing for political change, everybody sat at home, lost in the fascinating squishy mazes of their own minds.
Oh, shut up, she said to her inner skeptic, who often came up with this kind of shit.
The woman across the room breathed out loudly with what sounded like ujjayi breath.
Mariam tried some deep breathing herself, waiting for God to communicate with her.
And suddenly she was back in Damascus, a bustling city that, for all she knew, the civil war had by now turned into a devastated shadow city, unrecognizable to those who had once loved (who still loved) it as it had been: imperfect but alive, the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. How could she be so ignorant about what had befallen Damascus? Life went on there, she presumed, though she had not bothered to find out how.
It was now too hard to get a tourist visa to visit – her father had tried, without luck, when it became clear that he did not have much time left to live. The only images she had seen of Syrian cities in the past years were of hellholes of destruction and du
st, but perhaps Damascus had been spared the worst of it.
What was God trying to say to her by flooding her mind with these memories? Who knew. This was the problem with her untutored version of prayer.
She tried to reconstruct the place in her mind, as it had been in the relative tranquility of the summer of 2004.
The fresh orange juice sold by a street vendor outside the Al Haramain Hotel, beside a never-finished mosque, covered with vines.
The seven gates to the walled Old City.
Men with kettles of coffee on their backs, juggling glasses. Barrels of corncobs. Watermelons stored in fountains to keep cool.
The marble floor of the vast, open-air courtyard at the center of the Umayyad Mosque, people relaxing at its edges. Children playing a game of catch, people reading and picnicking and snoozing in the shade.
Inside, out of the sun, the rows and rows of bare upturned feet as the women on their side of the mosque knelt and bent in prayer, in unison, so beautiful to watch. Little girls trying to learn the ropes from their mothers and grandmothers, imitating their flowing movements.
And the surprise of seeing Syrian Christian pilgrims, come to visit the shrine within the mosque dedicated to John the Baptist. It was one of the things Mariam had loved the most about the city and its monuments – they acknowledged the warp and weft of religious history. The mosque had once been a Roman temple honoring Jupiter, and later a Christian cathedral. It was many things, to many people. It had been difficult to get her brain around this fluidity, trained as it was to seek out distinguishing categories and boundaries.
For reasons now incomprehensible to her, she and Rowan had not visited the mountain town her father’s family was from, Ma’loula, where it was rumored Aramaic was still spoken. They’d decided instead to visit a famous crusader castle near Homs. They had assumed they would be able to visit another time, in one year, or five, or fifteen. How wrong they had been.
It was to this mountain town that her father had wanted to travel when he was dying, in order to drink the holy water that his parents had told him seeped from the cliff face beside the Greek Orthodox monastery there. A quiet place where Christians and Muslims sat together, washing their eyes with water said to bring health and happiness to people of all faiths. When her father had investigated a visit, he’d been told that the monastery had been desecrated in the conflict, part of it burned to the ground, its holy relics destroyed.
‘Mariam?’
She opened her eyes with a start.
One of the T3s – Wenona – was peering at her in the fake candlelight. Mariam had been sharing a spiritual space with a person she despised.
‘It is you!’ Wenona exclaimed. ‘I looked for you guys at the Barker Center drinks last night. Did you all go someplace else after dinner?’ She didn’t wait for Mariam to respond. ‘You didn’t miss much. Weak drinks and sloppy finger food. Bad lighting, too.’
Mariam said nothing. Wenona had not been the ringleader of the three; that was Tiffany, through and through. Wenona was nothing but a leaf, going whichever way the gusts of power blew.
Watching President Reese’s inauguration on TV, mostly through her fingers because her hands kept flying to her face in disbelief, Mariam had spotted Wenona, along with Tiffany and Kashvi, seated in the second row of the section of the president’s family and friends. They’d been dressed in their winter finery, tapping on Fred’s shoulder to whisper in his ear, their eyes gleaming.
Mariam mumbled something about Rowan and the kids, escaping from Wenona as quickly as she could. She followed the underground passage to their entryway and climbed the stairs to the suite.
There was nobody there. She lay down on one of the unmade single beds and looked out the window.
Rowan always went on about her amazing, trouble-free natural births. But a few days after Eva was born, once she was back home, Mariam had gone to the bathroom in the night after a feed and woken up on the tiled floor, her face in a pool of her own dark blood.
It had been very peaceful lying there. Cold, but peaceful. It had felt like the first real rest she’d had for days, weeks, years. After some time, her father had touched her shoulder, and helped her sit up.
Rowan had soon shattered the peace – and saved her life – by discovering her and realizing she was bleeding out. In the hospital, she was told by a doctor that she was lucky to be alive, that she’d had a rare postpartum hemorrhage.
She and Rowan had not told anybody about this episode, not even their families. Mariam had recovered after an operation and a transfusion, and she’d soon climbed back on the merry-go-round of Newbornland. It had been an agreement between them, that they didn’t want her beautiful birth – her perfect birth – marred by this afterbirth drama.
But she had also never told Rowan about her vision of her father, and the religious epiphany of sensing her father’s presence beside her as she lay dying. It was time for her to tell him, about all of it.
The sun was streaming through the window onto the bed. She remembered morning light exactly like it from her time living in this room as a student.
She began to feel bad for how she’d just snubbed Wenona. In the meditation room, of all places.
The Red Book was lying facedown on the bed. Mariam flipped through until she found Wenona’s entry. She started reading, expecting to find confirmation of Wenona’s ghastliness. Instead, she found this:
Before our ten-year reunion, I dieted for months, and took up kickboxing, so I could fit into the same dress I’d worn the day we all graduated in 2003. I got my hair straightened and my make-up done professionally before every event.
I was single, you see. And I didn’t want anyone to think it was my fault I was alone. If I looked good enough, I told myself, maybe anyone who asked would believe me when I said I was single by choice. I didn’t even go to the Friday night Singles Mixer, though a guy I’ve always liked told me he was going to be there. I secretly believed that I was rotten inside, and that anybody who met me could sense this straightaway.
In the five years since, I’ve remained unlucky in love. There. I’ve said it. I’m still single. What has changed is that I’m no longer embarrassed to admit it. Thanks to therapy, I’ve come to see that I wouldn’t have become a doctor if I hadn’t been searching for a way to stop thinking of myself as a broken, defective, bad human being. I wouldn’t have been able to follow my passion for treating unusual medical conditions with the same single-mindedness (ha!) if I’d been playing my part as half of a couple.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m looking for a husband. I’ll be first in the door at this year’s Singles Mixer. (John Merrick, say you’ll be there too?)
But I’m also okay with a few more years where I’m left in workaholic peace to study rare syndromes that modern medicine has barely explored. In my clinic in Austin, I’ve worked with patients who are allergic to water, or who have alien-hand syndrome, or auto-brewery syndrome (yes, they can spontaneously get drunk without drinking alcohol – but trust me, it’s not as fun as it sounds). Some of my patients suffer from Alice-in-Wonderland syndrome, or pica disease, where all they want to eat is clay and chalk. Most of my patients were never taken seriously until they came to see me. They were told it’s all in their minds. I don’t always have a cure for the diseases they present with – not yet – but I won’t stop looking until I drop dead from exhaustion.
I’ve gained a few pounds since 2013, sure. I hardly make it to the gym anymore. It doesn’t matter. I bought a new dress today, and Spanx to go under it. I’ll get my hair done before the dinner-dance, and I’ll wear my very best shoes. Like Alice, I’ll step through the looking glass into Underland – and onto our old campus.
Chapter 10: Eloise
Saturday afternoon of Reunion Weekend
(May 26, 2018)
Eloise was so sunburned it felt as if she were lying on Ned Noya’s bed of hot coals. It was somewhat of an achievement to get this burned in May, even with her freckled skin, even after spending a
ll morning in a swimsuit and sarong, and then going tramping with Jules in the hottest noon hour.
She was in too much discomfort to lie on her back to nap. She turned onto her shoulder – which was marginally less painful – so that she was facing Binx, who was fast asleep beside her on their bed.
Binx had also soaked up some sun during the fifth-reunion float-building contest earlier in the day. Her olive skin went straight to brown, unlike Eloise’s, who would need a lot of foundation to cover her red nose and look presentable at the dinner-dance at Winthrop House that evening.
Asleep, Binx looked like a woodland nymph curled up in a forest clearing, with her pointy ears and long eyelashes, and her ribs showing through her skin. She was naked from top to toe, and Eloise was filled with tenderness looking at her. The indecision of the past year had taken its toll on her wife, too. The evidence had been there under her eyes – Binx wasting away beneath that gray tunic – but Eloise had chosen not to see it.
She was still coming to grips with what had become clear the night before. Elly+ had been right. All Binx wanted was to make Eloise happy. Convincing Binx that they shouldn’t go ahead with the surrogacy had been easy in comparison to what now lay before Eloise: accepting that in marrying Binx she had, at some unconscious level, chosen to be the one in charge, the one to make the most painful decisions on behalf of both of them.
There had been a game Eloise had played as a child where she and a friend leaned against each other until one person suddenly stepped away, leaving the other to fall forward. That was how she’d felt when Binx said that she did not care either way if they had a child or not. In floating the idea of using a gestational surrogate, Binx had believed she was supporting Eloise in her desire to have a baby, while insulating her from the inevitable sacrifices of becoming a parent: the effect on her body, her mind, her career, her professional standing.
Life After Truth Page 20
