by Wendy Dale
If it had been me, I would never have deserted someone who had gotten me out of a prison. I would have thought, This person really loves me. I really owe this person one. But then again, I would never have wound up in jail in the first place—and maybe that was the point. I had thought that having an interesting life would be what Francisco and I had in common—when all along the common ground I should have been looking for was someone who had never been incarcerated.
I wasn’t sure who I hated more—Francisco for never having taken care of me or myself for being so stupid, for thinking that giving was the same as receiving. I told myself that now at least the only person I would have to take care of was myself, but I missed him in spite of myself. Missing someone I hated—it didn’t make a lot of sense, but I didn’t care. Neither did my emotions.
Over the next week, each hour that went by was excruciating. All I wanted to do was lie in bed and think about how terrible my life was. I had nothing, no place to go. I had lost the man I loved. I had given up my home, my freelance writing business, my savings. I suddenly understood what the beige carpet must feel. I had been stepped on and sullied and squashed, and then I had been ripped up and replaced without a second’s thought.
Anyone else would have gone home. That’s what people did when they got in trouble. They went back to the house they grew up in, to the town where everyone knew their name. They went back to homemade dinners made by Mom. They recuperated in the bedroom they had grown up in, slept in a bed still surrounded by trophies and out-of-date posters that had remained in the exact same spot since high school. Subsisting on a steady diet of love and homemade baked goods, a person could recover. It just took enough time, enough hugs, enough chocolate-chip cookies.
I wanted to go back to my childhood home and rest, but to which one? There had been so many. There had been my parents’ married student housing dorm in Tucson, the little house out in the desert near Palm Springs, the Victorian home in South Carolina, the Tudor-style structure in Minnesota, even the “station wagon house” in Tennessee, the only time I had been required to share a “room” with my two sisters.
Which house would I go back to? It didn’t matter. I’d take any of them. I had the strangest urge to go and knock on the doors of all the places I had lived. I imagined a kindly older couple opening the door and asking me in. Maybe they would have lost a daughter who would have been just about my age and they’d beg me, please, wouldn’t I think of staying with them for just a little while? It would be such a comfort to them. I would wake in the morning to fresh orange juice and toast. She would teach me how to quilt and he would proudly show me his prize daffodils, which had won him three blue ribbons at the state fair.
One day, while making fresh bread, I would be inspired to confide in her and I would tell her my history in the house, how I had nursed wounded animals back to health here, how I had collected fireflies in a jar. I would thank her for keeping the bedroom just as her daughter had left it and I would tell her that I knew it meant a lot to her girl. I would lower my voice and confess my dirty secret. Trying to hold back the emotion, I would tell her my parents had disassembled my room before I had even left home. I would explain that I had gone to Germany for my senior year as an exchange student (the old woman would be impressed by that), but when I came back, my posters, my trophies, my clothes, my tapes, my books— all of these things were gone. My sister Heather had taken over my room.
The kindly older woman would look at me with eyes full of compassion, clasp my hand, and ask what I had done. I would lower my gaze and admit: “The basement. They made me sleep in the basement.”
And then I would feel better because I had finally said it out loud. It would all be okay. They were going to take care of me. I was home.
Chapter Twelve
Livin’ Bolivian
What I needed was a miracle. Was this too much to ask? It didn’t seem like an entirely unrealistic request. After all, the past two and a half years had been full of serendipitous twists. I had defied incredible odds when I had run into Saúl in Costa Rica. There had been Francisco’s brush with Fabiola at the prison when we had needed an attorney. And the day that Francisco had walked out of the gates of La Reforma would always be a miraculous occurrence for me, no matter what had happened afterward.
All I needed was one more tiny dose of magic. Not an excessively large miracle. Just your everyday standard-sized supernatural occurrence—a good job offer, for instance, or a friend who was going abroad and needed someone to housesit for a year. There were lots of possibilities.
But nothing happened. I was still working at my temp job at the City Attorney’s Office wondering what to do next. I was sending out a stream of résumés for local jobs I was overqualified for but so far had received no response. And I had been calling up everybody I knew, but no one had an extra house they were looking to fill.
If this were a fictitious story, I could have concocted a miracle. I would have made up some fabulous ending: Ed McMahon shows up with a one-million-dollar check, I use the money to go to Spain, and then fall in love with a matador who has a penchant for sequins and overly tight clothing but is otherwise perfect in every way. It would be the granddaddy of all finales. But I can’t invent the facts here. This is all true. And what really happened was the smallest most unassuming miracle of all. It was no bigger than a thought.
I had been running at the track (which was now a standard part of my daily routine) while pondering the nature of war. It was a subject that occupied a good portion of my thoughts these days—thinking about conflicts plaguing the countries I had visited was so much more pleasant than dwelling on my own problems. But a neuron must have misfired or a cerebral connection got crossed, because somehow these two disparate subjects got interconnected.
“They’re fighting because they want to.” It was such an easy phrase, such a simple yet effective philosophy when trying to understand world events, yet I had never applied it to my own life.
As I thought it over, my relationship with my parents actually did have a lot in common with guerrilla war. Here I was, hiding out from them, depriving them of information of my whereabouts, and reappearing whenever it suited me to deliver a deliberate attack. What was more guerrilla-like than that? I had figured this was normal behavior for a daughter-parent relationship, but now I was starting to suspect that maybe this was normal behavior only for a person intent on overthrowing a right-wing dictatorship.
I was angry and full of resentment, fighting a battle against the people who had raised me. And if I was incapable of getting along with my own family—my own flesh and blood, people who shared the same race, nationality, and genetic makeup—what chance did Muslims have of understanding Jews? What were the odds that the United States would sit down with Castro, that Colombia would achieve peace? If I couldn’t resolve my personal issues, how could I expect entire nations to come to an agreement? With people like me, what chance was there for world peace?
What followed was a brilliant moment of clarity, in which I suddenly grasped the answer that could change my life as well as the world. It was this:
War is like chocolate ice cream.
(I know, I know. It sounds more like a Ben & Jerry’s tag line than a recipe for world peace, but just bear with me for a minute.) My life experiences had led me to a simple conclusion: There were lots of people running around stressing the virtues of chocolate ice cream and I would never see eye to eye with them. I was a cookies-and-cream, butter-pecan, mint-chocolate-chip girl myself. You could try to convince me that chocolate ice cream was a worthy cause, that it had never done anything to hurt me, that it was a well-meaning and virtuous flavor, but still you’d never get me to come out in favor of it.
Now, if you couldn’t persuade me to give a frozen dairy-based dessert a chance, what was the likelihood that you’d get me to change my religion, alter my political stance, diminish my attachment to a certain disputed piece of land? About as probable as the sudden popularity of salmon-f
lavored ice milk.
What I suddenly grasped was that peace didn’t come about by convincing someone to see a conflict from your point of view. Getting along with someone else didn’t necessarily mean agreeing with them. Disputes ceased when you were able to view the other’s person’s opinion as wrong yet accept their privilege to cling to it anyway.
I finally understood that a war ended when being at peace became more important than being right.
Any story can be constructed in many ways. Any conflict has at least two different viewpoints. Take the facts and reorder them and you can come up with a handful of contradictory conclusions.
I had used this reasoning to get Francisco released on bail. The judge had seen a criminal and a flight-risk; I showed him a family man with a long history in Costa Rica. All I had done was present the other side of the story.
And if I had been able to do this for Francisco, perhaps my mother also deserved this same PR makeover. I needed to review the evidence, see the conflict from her point of view. I would reconstruct the story, build my image of her from scratch.
That horrible night so many years ago when I had called my mother from a pay phone to tell her I had become suddenly homeless, what had really happened? Thinking it over, I hadn’t really been looking for help. The truth was, I had just called to rub the situation in her face, to let her know how much I was suffering to go to college as a result of the fact that she and my father wouldn’t pay for it. I wouldn’t have gone home had she begged me to. It would have meant the end of my studies at UCLA. But I had wanted her to ask me anyway. I had been seeking just a smidgen of security, any small sign that my parents would come through for me, not necessarily that night but in the future, that if the time ever came when I was really desperate, if I really had nowhere left to go, that they wouldn’t let me down. But no, nothing.
I had carried that night in my mind for so many years now, evidence that I would always have to face my problems alone, but maybe my conclusion had been premature. Maybe my mother had meant something else. It wasn’t that she hadn’t wanted to help. She just hadn’t known how.
Unlike my uncle who felt the need to control everyone around him, my relationship with my mother had always been based on her faith in my ability to make my own decisions. She had never second-guessed me. She believed in me. If I didn’t want to go to Arizona, she wasn’t going to force me.
Standing alone and afraid at a pay phone in front of my nine-hundred-dollar Mazda parked in the bad part of La Cienega, I hadn’t wanted to go to Arizona, I just wanted the invitation. “I’m homeless” meant “Tell me that you’ll be there for me.” But my mother hadn’t understood this—nuance had never been her strong point. All these years I had blamed my mother for not caring about me when the only thing she was really guilty of was an inability to read between the lines.
Could it possibly be as simple as that? All this time, it was just a misunderstanding? I needed to find out. Trembling, I picked up the phone in Michael and Sharon’s living room, dialed my parents’ extremely long number, and after a few rings there was my mother’s voice, the same way it had sounded so long ago. It had taken me eight years to finally tell her what was on my mind, yet I accomplished it in only five words. I took a deep breath and asked, “Mom, can I come home?”
The road home is never easy. There are always enchanted forests to be crossed, yellow-brick roads to be taken, Greyhound bus rides to be endured. Getting to Cochabamba was going to require a long international flight plus two trips by land, one of which was going to be made on a rickety bus winding its way down through the arid and cold mountainous terrain around La Paz—at thirteen thousand feet, it was the highest capital city in the world. But I didn’t mind. Even when our bus was forced to pull off to the shoulder somewhere in the Bolivian altiplano and wait idle in the chilly air for four hours while road workers made repairs to the pavement (a process that occurred every day from noon to six), I remained in a good mood. It had taken me nearly a decade to find my way home—what were a few hours more?
Thirty-one hours after I had left Gainesville, I was finally in a cab headed toward my parents’ house. The movement of the taxi swirled up a cloud of dust (I was beginning to feel like a Charles Schultz character), but through the haze I could still make out the lofty peak of Mount Tunari in the distance. I scanned the outskirts of the city, and curiously enough, the whole area reminded me of southern California. It was all blue skies and green towering mountains.
The city itself was quaint. It was filled with colonial architecture, artsy cafés, and airy plazas. And how could you not love a place with cobblestone streets! As we bumped our way along the irregular path (I couldn’t refuse the childish urge to make the sound “aaaaah,” which came out in staccato bursts as a result of all the bouncing), I decided that no one in their right mind would ever give up a cobblestone street in exchange for a smooth ride. Sometimes beauty had to outweigh convenience.
I assumed we were heading the right way, but my directions had been given to me by my mother. Instead of consisting of useful information, they contained entertaining tidbits such as “We live on the street with the video store that’s owned by the communist.” However, as we drove around the perimeter of the newly constructed Mariscal Park, the cabdriver and I weren’t having any luck spotting either video stores or Marxists.
“According to my directions, it’s on the north side of the park. Is this the north side?”
The cabdriver nodded.
“Wait a minute. Up ahead. What does that sign say?”
Sure enough, it was a video store. This had to be the street. We made a right and followed the road. Just two more blocks and we’d be there.
Seated in my parents’ living room, everyone wanted to talk first. I felt like the prodigal son, only instead of being welcomed back with a fattened calf, I was being showered with attention and funny stories. In fact, there was so much chatter going on, I became convinced that my family members had spent the past two years taking notes of the important things they wanted to tell their eldest daughter whenever they saw her next. I could just imagine the journal entries made by my father:
The history of Bolivia, especially the part about Patiño’s tin mines. She’ll need to know about that to lead a fulfilling life.
Mining practices of Croatian immigrants to Bolivia in the early twentieth century. Don’t forget to mention early smelting practices, which should provide Wendy with lots of funny stories, not to mention a solid background in the melting temperatures of alloys.
An explanation of Bolivian vegetation broken down by climate zone. She’ll need this in case she wants to make a salad.
My father had gotten the first half hour practically to himself, a rare opportunity since most conversations were dominated by my talkative mother. My brother had added a few quips here and there, but my mother had remained surprisingly silent, apparently at a loss to add anything to the esoteric subjects my father insisted on tackling. However, the restraint finally proved too much for her and she suggested a change of topic. “Hey Wendy, you want to hear about how we found our maid?”
“Sure. Why not?” I said. I wanted to hear about everything that I’d missed.
“Well, they’ve really simplified the process of finding good help here,” she said enthusiastically, sitting up in her chair. “It’s all very well organized. See, they have a maid market. You go there and they all line up and you check them out—you can ask them any questions you want. I chose Vicenta. She looked very well groomed and has proven to be a good cook.”
My father, the intellectual. My mother, the aspiring slave master. These were the people I had been born to. They spent the rest of that evening cracking me up, filling my head with strange and funny images of my new home, painting a picture of all there was to do and look forward to in the months to come. It was going to be a vacation of sorts—I was in a foreign country with no obligations and no job.
There was a sense of poetic justice to this. I had
found irresponsibility at my parents’ house. After all, I had tried to use travel as a stand-in for the childhood I had never had, which, looking back, hadn’t been such a far-fetched idea. When you’re a child, everything is bright and new and amazing, and that’s what going to an unfamiliar place is like—foreign places are always new. All of a sudden you are transported to an infantile state, unable to speak the language and unaware of the rules.
Travel is like the high drama of youth. It’s the best and worst at the same time. One minute you are flung to the depths of despair, the next, you feel the giddy, exaggerated joy of an adolescent. For me, it had been a chance to make rash decisions, to take wild risks, to lose everything knowing I’d still have plenty of time to earn it all back.
Of course, even foreign places grow familiar given enough time; even novelty grows old. Some would argue that this is what makes travel pointless. And in a sense, it’s true—childhoods never last. But everyone deserves one.
Even if they have to wait until they are twenty-seven years old.
I spent the next eight months in relative happiness, living out the carefree adolescence I had never had. I slept in. I ate rich new foods. I left a trail of crumbs in the living room, and since I had a maid following behind me with a dust cloth, I never had to clean anything up.
I read books in Spanish and in English. I walked around the center of town with my brother. I learned the names of a half-dozen different kinds of potato while shopping in the open-air market with my mother. I made friends with an amazing group of artists who threw extravagant parties with live music in a nineteenth-century adobe structure that looked like an ancient church. Occasionally when I felt restless, I’d take a long-distance bus ride up into the mountains and stare out the window at my old friends the llamas, which always brought back memories of my childhood.
