First Comes Love, Then Comes Malaria

by Eve Brown-Waite

  “You mean I could be sick and not just crazy?” I wanted to hug this guy.

  “Either way, I don't think you're crazy. But there are lots of illnesses that could make you feel psychologically unstable.”

  My mood was lighter as I went off to the doctor, hoping he'd find something serious enough to explain my panic attacks and nearly permanent sense of dread, but not so serious that my name would end up on the memorial plaque of dead Peace Corps volunteers that I'd noticed on my way in. I decided to hold off calling John until I could tell him the good news that I was actually sick. But the physical and the lab tests revealed nothing. And I was even more depressed the next day, sitting in the volunteers' lounge.

  “Yeah, something I inhaled while butchering the chickens,” I overheard one volunteer say into a phone.

  “Just another week on antibiotics and I should be good to go,” said another.

  I eyeballed all the volunteers in the room. Damn, I thought, why can't I have tuberculosis?

  “You know, Eve, the Peace Corps is rough on a lot of volunteers,” my nurse gently told me when I returned to his office. “You're living in some pretty hard situations, dealing with all kinds of harsh things. A lot of volunteers find it hard to take. You know, it might be a good idea to go talk to one of our social workers.” I got the sense he thought he might have to talk me into this.

  “Can you get me an appointment today?” I asked.

  “I'll get you the next available appointment,” he said. “You might be with us for a little while.” He handed me a piece of paper. “Go downstairs to Returned Volunteer Services and they'll give you a couple of weeks' per diem. You'll need some money.” Cushy digs, free health care, and spending money to boot! It might have been a spa vacation, except for my racing thoughts and the fact that now I was walking the two miles to and from Peace Corps headquarters because being in the metro was setting off panic attacks.

  “Do you think I'll be able to get back in forty days?” I asked. Forty days is the longest a volunteer is allowed to be on medevac before being automatically separated from the Peace Corps. Not that I even knew if I wanted to go back to Ecuador.

  “Let's talk about that after you've had a few visits with the social worker,” the nurse said. Which was good, because at the moment, I was horribly confused. I wanted to go back to my life in Santo Domingo, which was finally falling into place. I also wanted to be with John, who was in America. I was petrified of going back to Ecuador and being plagued by anxiety, and equally frightened of staying in America and losing John because in addition to disappointing him, I was now crazy.

  For the next two weeks, I existed, with the other medevacs, in a kind of Peace Corps no-man's-land. We didn't work, but we did bathe—in hot water, no less. Could we even be considered Peace Corps volunteers anymore? We were Americans who took sightseeing tours of supermarkets, oohing and aahing our way up and down the aisles after our months of deprivation. The only thing I bought, however, were several tubes of sparkly bubble gum flavored toothpaste, because I thought the boys at the shelter would get a kick out of it.

  We had all been totally immersed in our host culture and now were in various stages of shock at being suddenly thrust back into America. We'd seek out tiny ethnic eateries, desperate for the food of our host countries or at least the chance to get amoebas. Anything to make us feel like we were still in the Peace Corps. At night, we'd all huddle around the hotel heating vents like tropical refugees. The others talked about their reasons for being there—a torn ligament, a uterine cyst, a mysterious fungus. I remained silent about my own shroud of anxiety and coveted their physical ailments. I actually found myself envious of a woman with a brain tumor.

  After I'd been in Washington for three days, I finally called John—and both my parents. Because I didn't have a convenient—but not too frightening—physical ailment to blame this all on, and I didn't want to fess up to losing my mind, I told them that my blood pressure was high. True enough, since with everything else that was going on, it was really high at the moment. But I told them not to worry, and not to think about coming down to D.C. I'd keep them posted.

  Three times a week I dragged myself, like a cold, wet blanket, into the social worker's office and tried to make sense of the panic that had taken over my life. For that one hour, I felt something other than crazy. It wasn't quite sanity, it just wasn't panic. I checked out the other clients on their way out when I went in or on their way in when I went out. I did a mental once-over but could never convince myself that any of them looked worse off than me.

  “Eve,” the social worker began after several sessions, “from what you've told me, it seems like the beginnings of your anxiety can be traced back to your friend's rape. So I have to ask you, have you ever been raped?”

  “No,” I answered, quite clear that I hadn't been. “But I did work at a rape crisis center before I joined the Peace Corps.”

  “Well, why did you choose that work? Had you had some personal experience in that area?”

  “No,” I said. “Although I always thought it was odd, the sense of connections I had with the kids who told me about being molested. Their stories always felt so familiar to me—like déjà vu. It was kind of odd.”

  “Well, were you ever molested? Maybe when you were a child?”

  “Molested? No.” I was silent for a few moments. “Molested? No. Well, what do you mean?”

  “I mean, Eve, did anyone ever do anything to you, sexually or physically, that you didn't want them to? Did anyone ever touch you in a way that you didn't want them to?”

  “No. Well, there was a guy who lived down the street and I used to babysit for his kids from the time I was thirteen until I went away to college. And, yeah, he was inappropriate all the time. I mean, he used to ask me to sit on his lap when he drove me home. And he'd push me up against the wall and kiss me on my way in or out of his house. And … Jesus Christ!” I stopped.

  It was the first time I had ever openly acknowledged what had happened. But the moment I said it, it was as familiar to me as dust. It was like I had unearthed an old photograph of myself and remembered everything about the moment that the picture was snapped. Just this one brief conversation, and the years of buried memories came flooding back.

  “I think you're going to need to work with a therapist around this issue for a while,” my counselor told me a few sessions later when I asked if she thought I should go back to Ecuador. “I suspect it will take a lot more than the time you have left on medevac.”

  “So that's it? This is how it all ends?” I asked later as the nurse unceremoniously signed the papers that medically separated me from the Peace Corps. Part of me was devastated—I was abandoning my boys and losing my newfound identity. I'd never get to say my goodbyes, never see my cozy little apartment again. But part of me was relieved—now I'd get to go home to comfort and, hopefully, to John.

  “I have a feeling this isn't the end for you,” the nurse said. “I don't know if it will be with the Peace Corps, but I have the feeling you'll get back overseas again.”

  But I didn't think I'd ever have the courage to go back. At that moment, it took all the courage I had to go downstairs and call John and tell him I was coming home.

  Answering machine, beep:

  Hi, John. It's Eve. I'm coming home. My train gets into Penn Station at four ten this afternoon. Will you meet me?

  These Eggs Aren't Getting Any Fresher

  I headed back to New York a mess. Sure, I was relieved that I wasn't actually going crazy. But I felt like a failure for not being able to “stick it out” in the Peace Corps and like an idiot for not recognizing the sexual abuse in my past. I was afraid of the reactions of friends back home once they realized that I hadn't been gone for two years. Heck, some of them might want their Swiss Army knives, Imodium, and water bottles back. But John's reaction was the one that meant the most to me. And the one I was most afraid of. I carried my bags and my uncertainty off the train in New York City and ther
e he was.

  “It's good to see you,” John said, scooping me into a hug.

  “Can I stay with you until I figure out what I'm going to do next?” I asked.

  “Of course. You can stay with me until you get settled.” I noticed that he hadn't said, You can stay with me until we're both old and gray and our teeth fall out and our ears are hairy, which, of course, was what I was hoping for.

  “Aren't you embarrassed to be with me? I'm a Peace Corps failure!”

  “Oh, Eve. You're not a failure. You went and you did some good and you got something out of it. No one expects you to stick it out no matter what. It's not an endurance contest. You are definitely not a failure.”

  I didn't believe a word he said, but I gladly took up residence, once again, under his African blanket. This was the best part of coming home. In fact, it was the only good part. As soon as I got home, I started therapy to try to stop the anxiety attacks. This meant dealing with the memories of childhood sexual abuse that had resurfaced. This is painful work under the best of circumstances. And I was not in the best of circumstances.

  In training they warned us about the difficulty of adjusting to life back in the States. I had laughed at that absurd notion back then. But now, as the rest of the world zipped purposefully around me, I had no idea what to do, where to go, or how to get there. Reverse culture shock hit me like an avalanche and I responded like a fart in a blizzard. I was lost without the things that had framed my life in Ecuador: my newfound sense of purpose at El Hogar; the Voice of America radio broadcaster reminding me every Monday night to take my malaria pill; the weekly arrival in my mailbox of the latest issue of Newsweek, which I would read from cover to cover before using it as toilet paper; weekends with Donna sleeping on my couch; writing detailed letters home each evening to document and make sense of my day; going to bed when the stars were clear above my balcony and waking up when the neighbor's annoying rooster started to crow. I had nothing now to help me make order of this strange world. And unlike Ecuador, it was a world with too much to do and too many choices.

  “Soup, soup, soup,” I whimpered. I was sweating and shaking in the supermarket. “I just want some soup.”

  “You're in the soup aisle,” a clerk said, pointing at the shelves full of soup all around me.

  “Too many choices!” I croaked. “I just want soup!”

  At the checkout counter the cashier asked, “How do you want to pay for this?”

  “Um, dollars?” I said, wondering if maybe they accepted sucres.

  “I mean cash or debit card,” she said impatiently.

  “Cash,” I said, still unclear about the whole debit card thing. When I'd left, people were just beginning to use debit cards to withdraw money from the handful of automatic teller machines, mostly in Manhattan. Now it seemed like you could get money out of walls on every street corner and debit cards were beginning to take the place of cash in people's wallets.

  “Maybe we should start looking for an apartment for you,” John said after I'd been staying with him for a few weeks.

  “Can't I just stay here?” As far as I was concerned, I had fulfilled my part of the bargain. I'd gone into the Peace Corps. Now wasn't it time for John to love me forever?

  “Here?” he asked, spreading his arms to fill most of the width of his tiny bedroom. “You really can't stay here very long.” Nice guy that he was, his roommates had stuck him with the tiniest bedroom in the apartment.

  “Why not?” I panicked at the thought of living alone. I needn't have panicked; I couldn't possibly afford my own apartment on my meager Peace Corps readjustment allowance.

  “Listen, Eve. I love you. But I never said we should live together. I'm not ready to commit to that.”

  “But what about that time on the Long Island Expressway? Remember when our helmets were stolen and you said we'd tell our grandchildren about this? Our grandchildren. What about that?”

  “That?” He seemed surprised. “I meant I'd tell my grandchildren and you'd tell yours. I didn't mean they'd be the same grandchildren.”

  I had been sure since the day we'd met that John and I were meant to be together. I'd gone to live in a Third-World swamp so that John would be sure of it too. And now, for the first time, it dawned on me that I could be wrong. I was devastated. I was dizzy. I was having a hard time breathing.

  “Evie, don't be a cling-on,” my mother said. “It'll scare him.” She was right, of course. But I was jobless, homeless, and a mess. The only thing I could think to do was to cling to John for dear life. “You've got to give John his space,” my mother advised. “He'll come around.”

  So I found a room in an apartment two miles away from John's and, just as important, one mile from my therapist. There was a bodega on the corner where I could get platanos and guavas, and a Latin American restaurant where I could order almuerzo and not have to make any choices. I found a job as a health educator, although the sum total of my experience in that area consisted of putting tampons in soda bottles. But the fact that I spoke Spanish seemed to be qualification enough for the job in the heavily Hispanic neighborhood.

  On the long subway rides to and from work, I'd keep my head buried in my latest self-help book, hoping to ward off anxiety attacks and appear more like a normal person. But without the certainty of John in my life, everything else felt as bleak as the subway tunnels we crept through. From where I sat, the future looked about as fuzzy as the platforms that whizzed by. I was giving John his space—not calling him every day, not expecting to see him all weekend, every weekend—but it was nearly killing me.

  “Hey, let's get you a cat,” my mother suggested when I was at my lowest. It was spring of 1989 and all eyes were glued to the grainy video coming from half a world away, as college students were staring down tanks in China. My mother found me an adorable, long-haired peaches-and-cream-colored kitten. I named her Beijing, in honor of the uprising, since “Tiananmen Square” didn't exactly roll off the tongue. And while Beijing didn't quite make up for not having John with me 24/7, she did help.

  With a little time and a lot of therapy, I managed to regain my balance while not completely sabotaging my relationship with John. I was no longer a “cling-on,” and he did stick around. For that, my mother dubbed him “Saint John.” I still would have preferred to be living with him. Let's face it, I wanted to be halfway to happily ever after already. But having John halfway across town beat not having him at all.

  John was studying at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, and once again, I found myself surrounded by people who'd been in Ouagadougou during the coup. Sure, now I could say “I'm an RPCV” like I was flashing my entry card into their secret club, but then whomever I was talking to would say something like “Oh, I was Togo, 1980 to ′82; Sara here was Zimbabwe, ′84 to '86; and James was Micronesia, ′72 to ′75. You?” And as soon as I said “Ecuador, 1988,” the whole gig was up. Everyone knew that your Peace Corps passport should be stamped for no less than two years. So there I'd be, like the awkward girl at the Girl Scout jamboree. All uniform, no merit badges.

  “It's all in your head, Eve,” John assured me. “Don't worry about it.” I worried anyway, but found it reassuring that John still loved me regardless of what was going on in my head.

  I enjoyed working as a health educator, even though the doctor I worked for had a well-earned reputation as a brilliant lunatic. I decided to get a graduate degree in public health, hoping to expand my career options. Unfortunately, my job at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital did not come with free tuition to Columbia's School of Public Health. But in addition to studying at Columbia, John was working in their admissions office. His job came with free tuition for employees and their immediate families.

  “Will you marry me, John?” I asked, only half joking.

  “I really don't think free tuition is a good enough reason to get married, Eve. Besides, I know it's kind of old-fashioned, but if there's going to be a proposal around here, I'd like t
o be the one to do it.”

  He was not so old-fashioned, however, that he was opposed to moving in together. By June our relationship was back on steady footing, and John's lease was running out. We found a lovely garden apartment with a bedroom that opened onto a small yard surrounded by rosebushes. Much to John's parents' dismay, their son, who was supposed to be the priest, was now the first member of the family to live in sin. A real shonda, his parents might have said if they spoke a word of Yiddish. My parents, who were each already working toward their third marriages, had no qualms about John and me shacking up.

  “So, will you marry me now?” I asked again, after we'd been living together two months. I wanted to make his parents happy, and besides, school was starting in a few weeks.

  “Let's just live together for a while longer,” he said. “We'll see how that goes.”

  Well, John wasn't exactly cooperating, but everything else in my life was falling quite nicely into place. I started a master's program at Hunter College's (considerably cheaper than Columbia's) school of public health. I found a new health education job at a hospital in Brooklyn. John and I both worked full-time, attended classes in the evenings, and came home to a purring Beijing in our little rose garden love shack each night.

  “Will you marry me now?” I asked when we'd been living together about a year. It was beginning to be a regular habit. By the third rejection, you'd think I'd catch on.

  “You know, I just don't think we should talk about marriage until we've been together long enough.”

  “Well, what exactly defines long enough?” I asked. I thought it was a rhetorical question.

  “Five years,” he said as if it was a rule that every guy knew. Maybe it was.

  I quickly did the math. It had been a year and a half since I'd been back. We'd been dating for nine months by the time I went to Ecuador, then another nine months while I was there. That totaled three years, but I was hoping to get extra credit for the time in Ecuador on account of how miserable I'd been without him. I thought I deserved it, like combat pay. Anyway, for me it certainly seemed like we'd been together long enough to talk about marriage. But, of course, I had known from the day we'd met that we were destined to be together. So every day after that was superfluous as far as I was concerned.