America Was Hard to Find

by Kathleen Alcott

  She found the ad in one of her parents’ papers, a humanitarian aid group with outposts along the Amazon, and within two weeks had obtained and returned the application, a few details forged or omitted. Somehow she believed that his presence would disqualify her so she ticked the box that said independent housing preferred (not recommended) and decided she would disclose the fact of her motherhood once they had met her, seen the seriousness of her face. From a chest in the attic she retrieved her old Spanish textbooks, their margins littered with additional vocabulary from the phone calls she’d had with Charlie—a language their parents wouldn’t learn and so the one they’d always communicated in—motherfucker, pubic hair, volcano, criminal, gonorrhea, devotion.

  When the letter arrived she read it barefoot outside, two fingers pinched on the raised flag of the mailbox. He was inside with her mother, trying to make a straight blue line on yellow paper.

  The next day she told a small lie in order to borrow the car—she wanted to attend a group for young mothers a few towns away—and they were in San Francisco in forty-five minutes flat, Wright made silent by the hills disappearing into the wash of fog. “We’re going to get our passports,” Fay said, her nose at his when she pulled him from the car seat. “Password,” he said. “Pass-port,” she corrected. The word was a gentle indictment of their life in this country, the first promise about their future she made blind.

  22.

  MORONA-SANTIAGO PROVINCE, ECUADOR, 1963

  Fay became the disgrace of the program almost as quickly as she had become its star, her foolishness considered as large as her sacrifice had been.

  Her high school Spanish was fluent in under two months, a magnet snapping into place. There were tiny towns that had been named after American companies, oil or chocolate, some officially and some still bearing another name that was never used. In stilted three-room homes on their outskirts she arrived in the evenings with bags of books and taught men deep in their forties to read. Daytimes she spent with children, writing out groups of words in chalk, having a natural feeling for teaching, knowing that only by presenting the knots of vocabulary that existed in their minds would she offer a way into English. She disregarded the American textbooks, hokey lists of hobbies and places that meant little to these children whose mothers were Shuar or Macabea, scuba diving, soda fountain. Instead she asked them to describe their lives and gave them the words they used most often, tools their fathers used to hunt, features of rivers. Her hair fallen into her face during sharp turns of enthusiasm, she listened for any unfamiliar phrases they used, exuberant or desultory, and learned them. There was a certain bird, a hoatzin, with a fantastical appearance skewing hideous; the distinctive smell was its defense against predators. It spent its life on bare branches that hung low and close to water, never hunted but very alone. Stinky turkey, they called it. When she could sense their attention growing porous she would pivot in the moody light and say, What am I to you, a stinky turkey? It always got a laugh. Her son was with her everywhere, a giggle that presaged a crash. He was like a celebrity, his presence burnishing the mundane. She avoided the stalls at the open-air markets that sold three- or four-foot-long coffins and then she began passing them on purpose, trying to identify what the feeling would urge her to do.

  Repatching her clothes until they were more that than the original, refusing to seek treatment after stepping on a nail, she was loved but ridiculed—by the people she helped, by the people who had trained her to help them. Her students, visiting her home, were confused to find domestic conditions equal to or worse than their own, and she ignored the question on their faces. What did it mean about a person if she could afford a new dress, a floor that was not dirt, but refused it, and did that make her more trustworthy or less? Claudette and James came to visit exactly once, and she put them on strict quarantine at their hotel room, where she brought what she had cooked over a fire at home and would not touch the room service they ordered, rotisserie chicken and flan. That their president had died was like the color of their eyes, something anyone could see, and that she would not say his name they took for a sign of her grief.

  What difference was this making in the long run, she began to ask her supervisors, a husband-and-wife team who tugged at visible crucifixes, Ted and Ellen. This changed the lives of a few individuals, but how did it address systemic poverty? She wrote letters, to people in the States, the man who had given her that newspaper in San Francisco, others like him, members of Students for a Democratic Society and then the Young Socialists of America. In March, on a bridge suspended by hundreds of bicycle tires, she removed a camera from the neck of an American tourist, a bald man who’d been framing a group of indigenous children, and pitched it in the river. In April Ellen and Ted called her in on the rumor she’d been discussing birth control with a girl of thirteen, and the gestures of Fay’s hands were too large and too quick, a palm slapped too many times on the desk, two fingers tapped to the temple to indicate where their brains should have been. Consider this a warning, they said, to which she said she would consider it little, if at all. In April Ellen asked that she distribute a certain shipment of diapers. A donation, Ellen said.

  The shipment had arrived without standard paperwork, Ellen said, and Fay would need to unpack a box and get a count. Her pocketknife wedged in her teeth, Ellen whistling nearby, Fay pushed some papers from the table, vocabulary sheets, color-by-number printouts of hooded figures around a manger. She knew the song Ellen was whistling, “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” and believed Ellen had chosen it with her in mind. Pulling out an individual diaper and unfolding it she was alarmed to see the words printed there, a slogan, a command. She had bought this brand before, blank.

  Red-or-yell-ow-black-or-white-they-are-prec-ious-to-his-sight. Because Ellen wouldn’t sing it, it was up to Fay to supply the lyrics in her mind.

  Choose——the diapers said. A logo sat dark under the text, ink to be animated by the small body that would stretch the surface. She put her hands where the legs would go, wrenching the fabric to its limit, trying to distort the advertisement.

  All-the-chil-dren-of-the-world.

  Everything A-OK, Ellen said, somewhere very far from her, a question Fay responded to with a gesture as anodyne, a ring made of thumb and pointer and the three fingers behind splayed and rigid. Stacking them in threes, she carried the twenty-one boxes to the company truck and drove them eighty minutes to a dump, Wright singing out the window and pointing at clouds that spoke to him with a carrot. There she emptied each, making sure the contents mingled, the diapers stiff and white settling against the frames of cars and halves of sinks. She never returned to be fired, never inquired after the last paycheck.

  Life would have to happen more deeply inside her, she decided. She had the job at the hotel in under a week, the room that came with it where she floated flowers in wooden bowls of water and taught her son about numbers, about animals and weather. At the school where she enrolled Wright, he was in love with a moon-faced boy who sang with his shirt pulled over his mouth, and in the room where they lived she believed he was happy, writing this boy notes though he could not really write, making drawings of his face that she taped for him by the mirror. How are you, someone said, and she said she was perfect, because her son was in love. He could read very early, he wanted a camera of his own. For his fifth birthday they took the interminable bus to Quito, rising from the rain forest to the cordillera. He walked up the aisle, asking other passengers how old they were.

  Her Luckies she gave up, because they were packed by people too young for not enough money, and replaced with papers and sacks of loamy tobacco. She went from writing two letters a week to ten, and became cold to her sister when she called, intoxicated, to do her impersonations of American actors or report in depth on the contents of Lloyd’s vomit. “What is it you actually care about,” Fay said. “Call me when you’re sober,” she said, surprised at herself but also not inclined to take any of it back. There was a pause and she heard Ch
arlie’s teeth around a bottle cap and the drop of a quarter into the jukebox. “Call me when you shit out whatever rotten thing it is you ate,” Charlie said.

  There was very little Fay needed, she thought. Her life was becoming a line.

  Book Two

  1966–1972

  Consider the genuine glories of the movement. The varied ways in which it retains the allegiance of its members. The subtlety and flexibility of its teachings. The loftiness of its ideals. Finally, what all this amounts to is the creation of a certain type: the member. Far from conspiring to overturn society, as many people suppose, the movement operates mostly upon itself, not upon the world. And for what end? To knit together ever more tightly those who belong.

  —Susan Sontag, “Old Complaints Revisited”

  1.

  MORONA-SANTIAGO PROVINCE, ECUADOR, 1966

  The day he met the man with the missing left finger, Wright had spent the morning building a town, murmuring to it about what it was. At the long picnic table of the dining loggia, sitting on his knees on the bench that ran the length of it, he arranged his blocks in great walls that he tore down with a violent push of a plastic truck. There was an earthquake, he decided, a bad one. The detritus lay on the sandstone floor, a curiosity to the birds who wandered in. He was furious and merciful, famous to the tiny people he had created of stones and matches—their beds were moss, their dreams his invention. It had rained until noon, the pressure unrelenting. The wide leaves of the mangroves still dripped water just beyond the open eastern wall, the wooden ledge he would lean over in test of his courage.

  At the inn where Fay cleaned and cooked in exchange for a suite, the owner, Lucinda, kept the news of the labor strikes on the radio. Fay and her son were something of a joke to the people who watched them go by, a unit whose lostness was so woven into them they could not see it. Her Spanish was effective but not without its eccentric flourishes, for she had studied certain tenses and subsets of vocabulary largely on her own, and she was respected but vaguely pitied there, someone whose real feeling was always disguised by a word only partially chosen.

  His mother and Randy appeared above him, casting shadow on the roads he had poured of sand, Fay’s eyelids hooded and her mouth a little open. Her skin was pink and damp and there was a smell to it, a slurry of salt and sweat. “Sweetheart,” she said, her wiry arm looped around the stranger’s abdomen. “This is my friend Randy. He runs a reading program at the prison.”

  The man did not treat Wright as other adults did, chucking him under the chin, offering him fruit. His name didn’t suit him, the jauntiness of it, the singsong conclusion. This was not a man, his posture communicated, who stopped to greet just anyone, who felt any pressure except the kind he generated on his own. His real name was the sound he made leaving a room, quickly. His real name was the doors he would not close.

  Randy only nodded at him, a gesture Wright had seen men offer others in a line of urinals, and shifted slightly in the jeans that sat high on his hips, noticeably worn around the five-button fly. On the lapel of his jacket, thin corduroy in pale blue, were many pins, mysterious symbols and exclamation marks. THEY ALSO DIE WHO STAND AND WATCH, one said. His eyes were very pale, his blond beard shot with gray. He resembled Paul Newman until he showed his bad teeth.

  “Far out,” he said, pointing at what Wright had made. “Can I?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer, just pushed the plastic ambulance down the thoroughfare. Then they were gone, laughing through the misty courtyard, disappearing into the room where, despite there being two beds, Wright and his mother had always slept together. Their quilt the color of sage, their lamp draped with her lilac scarf.

  Soon Lucinda came to get him. Would he like to go up to the roof with her and see the birds, the crested oropendolas who made sounds like bowling balls plunking into deep water. He wanted to make her happy so he took her hand, he climbed the ladder, he watched the small bodies light in the deep green of the leaves. But he could hear it still, his mother and that man alone together. She was laughing in bright bursts, and then it became so quiet he thought she had fallen asleep.

  “For god’s sake,” Lucinda said, when the noises came. “Is that necessary? Is he building a house with it?” She put her hands over his ears.

  Soon, his mother had often said, you’ll be teaching me, my love. Lucinda’s hands on his skin, the birds beyond them coupling and recoupling, in some way Wright knew that something had fallen away. It was a surprise in the way of a burglary, a mauling of native order, the arrangements we are not aware of having made until they are disrupted.

  RANDY HAD BEEN A SOLDIER, Wright soon learned, in a war America was still fighting. Transmissions from his native country were foreign to him, the footage of marches, the dubbed commercials for liquor, and he was curious about this war, his body eager to hear the stories and reenact them—make guns of his hands, the sounds of explosions with his fat, wet lips.

  The stories didn’t come. Wright’s disappointment at this, once he’d digested it, turned to dread, because when Randy did speak about it, unprompted, his voice changed. It spiked. He lifted the needle from the turntable, he abandoned meals, he calcified in the one chair in their hotel room and would not talk or move at all.

  Did he want to go, he asked his mother. He volunteered, yes, she said. But he hadn’t been given all the information. He was very poor, he had few options. It seemed to Wright she had given him several answers, testing out the effectiveness of each.

  2.

  Randy did not relax into life around the inn, the long breakfasts of instant coffee and juices of every color, Lucinda’s gassy baby learning to walk on the humus of the courtyard. He looked all day like someone waiting on a platform, someone who had no time for even the small, pleasant distractions. Reaching to stroke him, four-inch reddish tufts coming from her armpits, Fay seemed to grow calmer the more agitated Randy became. “You’re right,” she was fond of saying, a firm hand on his shoulder. He never spoke of the finger he had shot off in order to be discharged, and only in brave daydreams did Wright ask him. He always smoked without his hands, the lit thing bit down and finished in a minute.

  Randy was not ashamed to ask for money and Fay was happy to give it, glad to reach into her fringed suede purse to thumb off bills with a licked finger. When she was not making beds or cooking stew or switching out locks that the afternoon rains had slowly ruined, she had begun teaching yoga. She had taught herself, advertised by flyer, spent a week of early mornings with her machete clearing a space down the path behind the inn. It was not far from the waterfall. She learned to raise her voice.

  Before and after these classes Randy could be heard taking advantage of the new audience, quoting statistics about the death of Vietnamese children, naming the exponential increases in U.S. nuclear armament. Wright attended each, a devoted figure in the front row. His mother’s body, bent this way and that, was a testament to her way of being in the world, more than others, Wright thought, bound to it differently. Few people came, four or five women who were loyal, subjugated by bugs despite the citronella candles Fay placed around the perimeter. Randy often abandoned his straw mat halfway through the practice, stalking off from the topiary of upside-down bodies, the left feet high above the hips, to smoke between the enormous roots of an ancient tree. Fay never said anything about it. She smiled from the cloud of her linen caftan, protected by something no one could see.

  The language of it sometimes scared him, imperatives from which return seemed unlikely. Pull your face up to touch the sky, she would say. Breathe into your elbows. Feel how much of your body is water. Her voice became a parody of itself, throatier, punctuated more frequently by exhaled notes of contentment. After she had said her last om she fielded questions about positions, asked them to demonstrate then adjusted them, placing two firm hands on their lower back or tugging their heads up to elongate their necks. That his mother was as available to others as she was to him, as magnetic and imperious, had only just bec
ome clear. In his worst moments he fantasized, cold and jealous in the way of someone who needs to be touched, of cutting her hair in the middle of the night, moving the blades at a glacial speed in the total dark.

  If Randy loved to hear himself talk, Fay loved to hear herself listen. She took pride in the forty-degree tilt of her head, the murmur of agreement when it mattered most. There were few instances in which she could not tolerate being the silent receiver, few outrageous reactions she could not meet with some placid, clement response. Though Wright resented this about her, how much she shared herself with every person she met, it made the occasions when she snapped or bristled all the more frightening. He was always aware of the other part of her, ready to whip her braid forward and curl her upper lip. When Randy was the target the room became another place, the talismans of their lives taking on other meanings.

  THERE WERE MOMENTS HIS MOTHER was located so far within herself she could not be reached, and in hours like this Wright touched her, rubbing her back or braiding her hair. One such afternoon in March, Fay held her body in a twist on the bed, her right knee crossing her body above the left, a limp hand draped across the meeting of thigh and calf. Randy was out, one of his walks, through the pink and green gazebo in the town square and over the river. Wright lay behind her, whispering at himself, trying to make the strands even. He wanted the fine hands of an adult—the fingers that could tie the necessary knot, reach into the wallet and pay for things in shop windows.