My Life with Bob

by Pamela Paul

  You know that experience of reading thoughts you haven’t yet articulated to yourself? I, too, was about to be trapped by my own fears into a future I didn’t want. I was doing what was expected of me, though I wasn’t sure where those expectations had come from or whose, precisely, they were. Now Thalia Zepatos was saying, Don’t let that happen.

  I had to get out of Quaker Oats. Back in the interview room, I looked up at the Cinnamon Life emissary, with his charcoal-gray poise and careful hair and targeted gaze. His fingers, complete with wedding band, clunky class ring, and manicured nails, drummed the desktop with just the teensiest note of impatience. Despite hours dissecting manuals on interview skills, I felt ill prepared—and, worryingly, inappropriate, as if I’d already done something that negatively impacted his bottom line.

  “I like our cereal, too,” my interrogator finally agreed with a chuckle. He stared at me with intention. “But really, why do you want to work for Quaker Oats?”

  I had no idea.

  “You’re right,” I said, beaten once and for all. “I don’t actually want to work at Quaker Oats. I’m sorry to have wasted your time.” I gathered my belongings and excused myself. On the way out of Career Services, I canceled my remaining appointments on the recruitment schedule.

  It had been the honest answer. I did not want to work at Quaker Oats. I wanted to be a writer, which was impossible. I wanted to work in magazine or book publishing, but the starting salary at Farrar, Straus & Giroux was $14,500; a “good” editorial salary was $17,000, and I couldn’t afford that. In those days, moving back in with your parents simply wasn’t allowed. Moreover, my mother had divorced her second husband and moved into a one-bedroom apartment in the city. I’d never had a bedroom at my father’s. Both of them literally didn’t have room for me, which was frankly fine.

  The trouble was finding an alternative. My bank account was nearly empty. Every check I’d gotten as a child had gone directly into college savings and now college was over. I’d worked on-campus jobs as part of my financial aid package, first helping fund-raise for the school’s athletic programs from wealthy donors and then catering to prominent alumni and other dignitaries at luxury events on campus that rewarded them for their gifts. Both jobs demonstrated that in terms of money there were two worlds at college: the people who had it easy and the people who helped make those people’s lives even easier. I didn’t enjoy that second job, and the first wasn’t right for me.

  There was of course the option to stay in school. I’d had one other ambition before graduation, which was to get a graduate degree; I knew I wasn’t done learning. I could keep reading, get a doctorate in history, and stay in school forever. My favorite history professor smiled sadly when I stated my intentions.

  “Think about where you’d like to be after grad school,” he said. “Because you won’t be in New York. You won’t be at a school like this. You will teach somewhere in Iowa, and not at the main state campus but at some small offshoot out in a pasture. And unless you have someone to pay for it, you will also owe thousands of dollars.” It wasn’t personal, he assured me. There just were no jobs. The period I was interested in—the world wars—wasn’t fashionable in a grad school market held tight in the grip of deconstruction and post-Marxian analysis.

  “You don’t want to go to grad school,” he said gently.

  Was I really so predictable? Much as I loved New York, there was something depressing about going off to college only to have a professor tell you that you ought to turn around and go home. It was also depressing to think I couldn’t somehow superstar my way through grad school into a tenure-track position. Perhaps my run of academic successes up to that point—the hard-earned grades, the coveted acceptance to Brown, the scholarships—had used up my lifelong share. Perhaps they didn’t add up to that much anyway. (Third place, third place.)

  I must have done something wrong. If a failed interview with Quaker Oats was where my experiences had led, those experiences must have been fairly limited. Perhaps they hadn’t been the right experiences.

  Trudging down the main commercial drag on campus, I was plagued with doubt. How were you supposed to make a lifelong decision when you had so little experience? If you weren’t fitting into the future this environment had created, perhaps a new environment was necessary.

  And that’s where A Journey of One’s Own fit in. What Thalia Zepatos’s book did was allow me to start an entirely new story for myself, one with no foreseeable ending. You could abandon the career rush altogether—not giving up, exactly, just opting out.

  What I had to do, I decided, was challenge all of the assumptions and wrong-footed moves I’d made that led to that Quaker Oats interview. I’d do something that would quite possibly make me miserable. Maybe even try to do something that would make me miserable. I had made a few such moves before: joining the college rugby team because I was bad at sports and the gospel choir because I was an atheist who couldn’t sing. But the field of risk now was much greater than an afternoon extracurricular activity. It was my life. It could end up being a terrible mistake.

  But I couldn’t help wondering: What would it be like to pick up and go somewhere else, somewhere I had zero interest in, a place with a different religion, a different ethnicity, an unknown language? A place where I would be in the minority. A place where I knew no one. Somewhere you couldn’t go about your usual routine, diligently checking off boxes and getting things done. A place that challenged each moment of your day: no morning dose of coffee, no New York Times over a toasted sesame bagel, no level-six StairMaster workout, no dispiriting crush on the guy in the next cubicle.

  I could go somewhere where none of these activities were even possible, some remote country, a place Cap’n Crunch had never sailed. To me, a history major of the most occidental school, the world was Weimar Germany, Charles de Gaulle, and the Gettysburg Address. I had to get out of there. I needed a place where the mind-set—the whole philosophy—was different, a non–Judeo-Christian culture where each of my moments would be challenged. Asia, I decided. I knew nothing about the entire continent beyond the grossest generalizations. I had never been part of those students who became enamored of Japanese design or wrote papers about Mao Zedong. I hated Benihana.

  Reading the motivational passages in A Journey of One’s Own (“Women actively explore the inner as well as the outer landscapes of our journeys—we don’t just take in the sights, we are changed by the things we see and the people we meet”), I hatched a plan for someone else, someone who wasn’t quite me but, rather, the Thalia-like person I wanted to be. Maybe instead of just reading about other women’s stories, I could become a person worthy of my own.

  Thalia Zepatos wouldn’t have wound up at Quaker Oats. Thalia Zepatos, whoever she was (she is now a marriage equality activist, according to the Internet), had lived in a tribal village in the Golden Triangle. If only I knew what the Golden Triangle was, I might live there too.

  What A Journey of One’s Own started, other books helped along, including the tiny, blurry photographs in the Lonely Planet guides at the college bookstore. Bearded men descending on the Ganges, saffron-robed monks floating in the rain, betel-lipped women folded over sodden fields. What were they thinking about, what were their days like, what did they want to do with their lives? I read these books, marked them down in Bob (yes, travel guides count), and fantasized about their contents before drifting off to sleep. One of these countries would be my destination.

  By process of elimination—Nepal had no jobs, Indonesia was too volatile, India was impractical—the answer became Thailand. For its Buddhism, its jungles, its relative prosperity and stability, and, most important, its unfamiliarity. I knew nobody in Thailand nor did I know anyone who’d ever been there. (American college students who backpacked in those days tended to favor Nepal or Latin America over Southeast Asia; Thailand wasn’t on the circuit.) I knew nothing about Theravada Buddhism, orchid cultivation, or the language. I had eaten Thai food only once and had never
even seen The King and I. I had neither preconceptions nor expectations.

  After the Quaker Oats debacle, I took the decisive next step of purchasing a shiny copy of Fodor’s Exploring Thailand for a steep $21.95. I clutched it to my chest like a Girl Scout pin, daydreaming about possible encounters with people based on the book I was carrying. It’s the perennial reader’s fantasy, the hope that the right book will magically spur strangers into intimate and telling conversations or elevate your standing in the eyes of people you already know.

  “What’s with the book?” someone, perhaps a professor or a desired acquaintance or an old boyfriend, would ask in this imagined scenario.

  “Oh, this?” I’d respond blithely, relishing their fascination. “I’m moving to Thailand.” Nobody I knew did such a thing. All the go-getters were going into investment banking and consulting; the arty types often relied on trust funds; the brainy ones and preprofessionals escaped into grad school. Everyone else scrambled, desperate not to be left behind. They had plans.

  This was before gap years were in vogue. This was before the Internet shrunk the world and everyone was just a text away. Letters traveled slowly and international calls cost a fortune. In 1993, tossing your college degree into the wind and moving to a remote town in a third-world country with no job was the equivalent of someone today flinging his iPhone into the sea and joining a religious cult in rural Kentucky where everyone speaks Esperanto and reassembles old Hyundais for money. It made no sense, and it probably meant something was wrong with you.

  Well, I’d show them. Summoning the heroes previously met only in books, I began to fancy myself a kind of female Joseph Conrad, departing from my native land, traveling over distant seas, defying convention or at least the expectations of my classmates, professors, and family members. This was my way of joining the Merchant Marine. The more I defended my decision to other people, several of whom thought I was throwing away a promising career, the more I started to believe in it. I told my mom, I told Career Services, and I told my roommates, all of whom had secured smart jobs in major cities. I told my father, who liked to read about the Far East in Paul Theroux’s books and watch it on the Discovery Channel; for him, travel was something done from a recliner.

  “That’s wonderful, Pammy,” he said. “I’m not paying for your plane ticket.”

  Now that I’d told everyone, announcing my plans repeatedly, a retraction would have meant an inconceivable embarrassment. I sold my 1985 Honda and bought a nonrefundable one-way ticket to Chiang Mai, a small city of 150,000 people (“really an overgrown village,” according to the books) nestled in the hills of northern Thailand.

  By March, “What are you going to do next year?” became the standard campus greeting, replacing “How did the interview go?” Everyone was telling each other what offers they’d taken, salaries, cities, significant others, where she was, where he was, where they were all going. They were moving along.

  “Really, Thailand?” people would say when I shared my vision. (Sometimes—I am sorry to report—“Taiwan?”)

  “Maybe for two or three years,” I’d reply casually, saying something vague about adventure and opportunity and the expectations of women and why the hell not. I would free myself from material possessions while I was at it, packing a single suitcase, minimal clothing, a few books, and, of course, Bob. I cut off my hair and colored the remaining blond pixie dark brown. I willed myself to feel tougher about the fact that I hadn’t had the guts to go for what I’d really wanted.

  “You’re so brave!” people would finally say, probably for lack of anything else. Perhaps they were writing me off. I didn’t necessarily feel like I could take credit for the move. It seemed more like 5 percent of me had made a firm decision and dragged the unwitting other 95 percent along. I had no idea whether a new lifestyle would make me feel more fulfilled or whether it would prove I’d been happy all along and merely unappreciative. This wasn’t something that could be figured out by reading a book. Sometimes you need to go out and search for the answer. But it took a book to push me along.

  CHAPTER 9

  Anna Karenina

  Heroines

  Every girl has her heroines. Mine were the ones who had motivated me in biographies, ever since I was eight years old, curled up in my favorite part of the children’s library, the back wall where, neatly arranged in alphabetical order, were my sacred lives: Abigail Adams, Louisa May Alcott, Clara Barton …

  If I wanted to know what other girls my age had done and where it led them, I consulted these books, these people who had already lived well, for instruction. I listened to them, tried to follow in their footsteps and learn from their mistakes. In their stories, and with the wisdom of hindsight, any awkward childhood encounter or passing trauma could be seen as a necessary step toward a greater future.

  Poor misunderstood Helen Keller needed that moment of frustration by the water pump. Jane Addams had to suffer her childhood illness and the death of her mother when she was only two years old. I’d never be as good as Florence Nightingale or Dolley Madison (the name Pamela, which my mother had chosen because it was the title of the first English novel, also meant “selfish,” my Baby Name Guide cruelly informed me), but I could try. Maybe the kid at recess telling me the flood was over when my hand-me-down Lee jeans were too short was a hardship I needed to suffer.

  Bookish girls tend to mark phases of their lives by periods of intense character identification. For almost a century and a half, we’ve fluctuated between seasons of Amy and Meg and Jo, imagining ourselves alternately the prettiest or the eldest or the most ambitious of the Little Women. But every girl who aspired to become a writer fancied herself as strong and independent Jo.

  When I was ten, I aimed to be as clever as Nancy Drew, resolving any dilemma with purpose and grit. On the cusp of junior high, I was turned on to horse-girl books by my friend Ericka, who actually rode horses. (I was too scared.) She got me involved in a series starring a girl named Francesca, my next role model. Both Ericka and Francesca had long, shiny chestnut-brown hair that was nothing like my mess of dirty blond. Horse girls were strong and fearless and altruistic; they knew how to jump.

  Schoolgirls of the seventies muddled through childhood in the guise of one Judy Blume heroine or another (Sally J. Freedman occupying a central role), just the way girls today work through Hermione and Tris and Katniss Everdeen. If something happened to one of them that had happened to you, it meant you weren’t a freak; there was precedent. And if you could find out what they did about it, you might find your own solution, or at least learn what not to do. Through them, you could envisage an alternate existence, heroic or tragic or just more interesting than your own.

  In the fall of 1993, at age twenty-two, I chose Anna Karenina. I was living in a foreign country, with little purpose other than to put myself in the way of challenge. I’d just moved to the outskirts of Chiang Mai, a small city in northern Thailand, and Anna Karenina offered an appropriate parallel. She, too, was isolated from her people. She, too, acted independently and wasn’t necessarily rewarded for it. She was a modern woman bucking expectations, and, at least I liked to believe, so was I.

  I had a few thousand dollars in savings and a suitcase. My Thai, feebly informed by the GI Prep Course Language Tapes I’d listened to the summer before my move—“Where is the airfield?”; “Is it a comedy or a tragedy?”—was not a bankable asset. I didn’t know anyone and I didn’t have a job.

  At least I’d picked the right country. I was thrilled to be in Thailand and dazzled by Thai culture, with its gentle appreciation of aesthetics, its spicy cuisine, and its reverence for tradition. I loved the charmingly antiquated cinematic tribute to the king, which played before the feature film in every movie house. I just needed to figure out what, if any, kind of heroine I could be in this new and very strange scenario, and then discover my storyline.

  After a period of fitful acclimating to a world in which I understood approximately 4 percent of what was going on aroun
d me, I managed to land part-time work teaching English, French, and history at various schools. I found a language tutor and I found a new home on a place called the Farm—more of an untended fruit orchard than an agricultural endeavor—in a small, elevated teak house with an outdoor kitchen and a bare pipe poking out of the ground for a sink. It felt authentically Thai rather than tourist-friendly, and I even found a Thai roommate, a minuscule college student named Nai Noi. Or she found me.

  Nai Noi was a “play” name meaning Sir Small; her real name, Acheeraya, meant “genius.” All Thais have an official given name, used infrequently, and a descriptive play name, like Sweet or Fat or Water Heart (which meant generous). Though she was an English major at Chiang Mai University, Nai Noi was unlike anyone I’d encountered in college. She was in her sixth year after changing majors, and she still had two years to go. She seemed to never read any of the assigned books nor did she want to read mine, rarely did homework, and didn’t once ask me for help. Having dated a student on the Princeton in Asia program a couple of years earlier, she was completely fluent in English anyway.

  We weren’t alone. There were scorpions in our backyard and a large geckolike creature called a Toogaeh who lived under the eave of the roof and croaked out “Too gaeh, too gaeh, too gaeh … gaeh,” the final syllable sounding a note of weary melancholia, every night at exactly ten thirty, poking out its head to bid us good night. When I woke up my first morning there and instinctively grabbed the glass of water I’d set by the book on my nightstand, my hand tingled. I half opened an eye. Just inches from my face, my hand was pulsating within a swarm of black ants. “Get out of our water,” they said.

  The ants had entered through the open wooden slats of the wall and marched in single file toward the glass alongside my bed, behind my toes, and over my pillow before plunging into my glass, pleased with the welcoming beverage I’d provided. I can’t say I welcomed them in return. It was hard to read in bed at night surrounded by the incessant movement of small shiny black creatures and even harder to fall asleep knowing of their relentless forward march, but there was no way to get rid of them in a room with open walls. They distracted me. I was reminded of a cruelty my brother Roger inflicted on me on a regular basis when we were kids: I’d be peacefully reading in bed, when, as the mood struck, he’d fling open my bedroom door, which didn’t have a proper latch, and wiggle his hand through; the peripheral movement made concentrating on the page impossible. Getting up to chase him out only compounded the interruption.