by Laura Newman
So it came to be that Dorje was indeed taken in by the Newari. They were not in a habit of this, especially in these times, but one of the cooks was quite taken by the idea of a girl riding her bike to Kathmandu and championed her passage. What she would remember most about the trip is drinking warm milk. She would remember Chomolungma, the highest mountain in the world. The thin razor’s edge of the exact summit is the boundary line between Tibet and Nepal. Wind will decide the nationality of the single falling snowflake, and if it lands in Tibet, the Chinese will try to claim it. Dorje slept out on a borrowed sheepskin blanket, looking at the night sky. Chomolungma, Holy Mother, stars catching on her shoulders. Hillary and Tenzing walked to the top in 1953 and an irritating line of people sleeping on her back would soon follow, but there’s no conquering Everest.
Some might say it would be easier to walk to the top of the highest mountain in the world than to walk away from your family.
At last, Kathmandu. The traders dispersed at ancient Maru Square, a caravanserai built by the Newari in the twelfth century at the crossroads of the Indian and Tibetan trading routes. In the bustle, Dorje was ignored. At any rate, the Newari had no responsibility to her. She wandered on into the maze of shrines, temples, royal lodges with pagoda roofs, markets. She was stunned and hungry. There were some who were looking for people like her. A man came up to her and asked, “Are you lost, child?” His words fluttered around her but did not quite dovetail. He asked again in Tibetan and she understood. He touched her arm. She did not flinch. He pressed a little harder. “Come with me. I have food.” He gripped her wrist. It excited him. He would take the wench home and break her in and then trade her to the brothel in the Thamal district for more go-rounds with slightly less angular girls who had bathed. He would feed her first; he wasn’t an animal. He had done this several times before. He placed his arm around her waist like a grandpa to urge her forward. But their passage was stopped by a monk, suddenly in front of them. He had been watching, too. “Come with me,” he said, putting out his hand. “I am the safer choice.” Dorje thought he was the Dalai Lama so she took his hand.
Let’s leave Dorje and the monk there for now, holding hands …
… and go to Miami, Florida, 1966, the year Magnolia Augusta Van Zandt was born.
Magnolia came out howling, and her anthem would ever be John Mellencamp’s, “Authority Song,” I fight authority and authority always wins. Her mother, Avery, intended to call her Lia, but that was too soft a sound and it was Maggie from day one. Maggie weighed in at nine pounds three ounces and she threw that weight around. Maggie’s daddy, Jack, who wasn’t going to have to stay home with the little howler, thought her perfect. His first child.
The new family went home and Jack went back to his medical residency at the hospital. It’s what men did. Jack grew up in Miami and there was something about the clear sunlight, the way it glinted off the glass buildings and turned the Atlantic to steel, that made him want to be a surgeon. It was such a blue-sky-and-silver town, everything looked like it was cut with a knife. Plus, there are a lot of old people in Miami. No shortage there.
Jack met Avery while he was in med school. She was a waitress at the Cuba Mama Café, where the Cuban sandwiches could not be beat. She looked so out of place. Most of the waitresses seemed almost to dance salsa steps while they slung the hash, and they had trashy mouths and hair held back by bandanas. Beautiful. But then there was Avery, this sort of misplaced southern belle, awkward and blond and like she didn’t hear the same music as the other girls. Jack didn’t know how she got the job. She would have fit better at Howard Johnson’s, where the old men overtip a girl like her. But she was so sincere about the job. So sincerely awkward. One day he was sitting in her section and as he opened his book-style, large plastic menu she tipped the coffee pot to fill his cup. The two actions intersected and she poured the coffee right down the crease of the menu and onto the crease of his pants. Before Jack could even react to the heat she grabbed his glass of ice water and threw it on him. Half of it splashed up on his shirt. Then for an instant they just looked at each other. Avery spoke first, saying, “Would you like some eggs with your coffee, sir?” and Jack just had to marry her.
Maggie announced herself two years later. Avery never wanted to be anything more than a wife and mother, and maybe write a few folk songs on her guitar. She was happy to bake a cake. When Jack came home, she always had on heels. Until Maggie. Then things got a little raggedy but Jack didn’t mind. He never needed perfection, Avery was never that to him.
Maggie caterwauled for the first six months of her life. It must be said that Avery loved her daughter best when she was sleeping, her little fingers in tight fists. Maggie spent quite a lot of time in her plastic baby seat perched atop the clothes dryer, lights low, dryer on. The hum of the dryer, the escaping heat, the small pitch side to side like a faerie boat. It lulled the baby to sleep and sometimes Avery, not really intending to, would sleep too. Until the timer went off like a fucker.
But Maggie did like the folk songs. So they had that.
Around the time Jack became Ginsu Knife Certified (as Avery teased him), the Vietnam conflict escalated into war. Two years earlier, when North Vietnam did or did not fire on the USS Maddox floating serenely in the Golf of Tonkin, America had the moral initiative it needed for Congress to write President Johnson a blank check. Operation Rolling Thunder, or at least the media event, got underway. Jack’s brother was already over there. Now that Jack was a doctor, some combustible combination of patriotism and history made him want to volunteer. To somehow protect his brother, his country, the grainy footage of Vietnam on the CBS Evening News, it all distilled into his decision. He would carry knives instead of a gun and stitch the wounded world back together. Walter Cronkite was like a grandfather practically admonishing him to enlist, you coward.
Avery was not amused. But it happened, and Jack went to Nam as an officer and M.A.S.H. surgeon. What Jack found out was that war is badass. Soldiers and civilians came to his surgery looking like they had been attacked by tigers—one of them had. In less than a year Jack contracted Tourette’s of the heart. He took to cussing like a son of a bitch, but so did everyone else. He developed facial tics, but so did everyone else. He sometimes used his own ether, not so common. When he woke up he shook like a dog come out of the river. None of this was a problem for the U.S. Army, but the tics in his hands were. Accidentally slicing the femoral artery of a patient on the operating table and earning the nickname Jack the Ripper among the nurses got him reassigned to Da Nang on the South China Sea.
Jack spent the rest of his war as chief medical officer of the free clinic for the Da Nang prostitutes. This was a fairly successful attempt by the Army to keep U.S. servicemen from catching the clap.
While Jack was sifting for his sanity in the hourglass of China Beach, Avery and Maggie continued their own little war. Maggie would-not-could-not eat those peas. Maggie hated pink. Maggie would only sleep if she could sleep next to Mama and when she did she ended up sideways and kicked her mother all night long. Maggie put her pudgy hand around the stem of one of Avery’s prize parrot tulips in their pocket garden. “Maggie, don’t even think about it!” her mother warned. Her daughter stared back her, hand still around the stem. “I’m thinking about it,” the two-and-a-half-year-old said, serious as lead. The mother/daughter war waged and both of them wanted Jack back.
When Jack came home he would not find the wife he left. Somewhere along the line Avery changed out her full skirts for bellbottoms she hand-embroidered, thought about burning her bra, and wrote some damn straight war-protest songs on her guitar. Jack would be proud of this new wife, a sort of hippie debutante. She grew out her flip and her ears stuck out, just a little bit, of her now straight blond hair. While Avery never marched on Washington she did seep Maggie in a tie-dyed attitude, which frankly increased Maggie’s rage against the machine stance, especially against her mother. So Avery’s protes
t phase was not to her personal benefit.
When Jack was discharged he was certain that the only thing he wanted to slice was the Thanksgiving turkey. Avery was tired of the the rumba of Miami and Jack was just tired. They moved to Panama City, Florida, near Avery’s sister, and bought a bungalow on the Gulf Coast. Nothing much to speak of, but the house had a nice view and siding faded to the perfect shade of sea-glass blue. Jack became a family physician with a small practice for small injuries and things that can be fixed with pills. He played golf on Fridays. Two more babies followed, Violet Camille, seven years Maggie’s junior, and then a son, Ashley Grant, just eleven months later. Maggie was not amused. But Avery was, because these new babies ate their peas.
Then came Eloise, September 23, 1975.
The Van Zandts had experienced hurricane evacuations before so they had very little anxiety. They packed up the station wagon with the essentials, which mostly meant diapers. No doubt they would be back in the morning. As a running joke, they hoped the high winds would knock down the old oak in the backyard that was too expensive to remove. They headed inland to a Motel 6. They stayed one day too long.
A school of silver ballyhoo got caught up in the excitement of Eloise. The little fish were sucked into the swirl of the hurricane and had a somewhere-over-the-rainbow experience. An E-Ticket ride. After Eloise completely destroyed the Van Zandts’ house (but left the tree), the ballyhoo were deposited among the exposed foundations in a displaced ocean puddle. A kindergarten class of seasick ballyhoo survived, at least for a few days. Maggie saw them when the family returned, although she was looking for her bedroom.
Well, that was that. The house was splinters. Avery took the kids back to the Motel 6 and Jack volunteered long hours for the Red Cross. Two nights later Jack called to say he was on his way home, would pick up pizza. “Hurry,” said Avery, “Maggie’s in fine form tonight.” While her parents were processing the loss like adults, not without grief but with logic, Maggie was just a kid. She was ping-ponging around the motel room, out of control over the loss of “EVERYTHING, MOM I LOST EVERYTHING!”
Jack and Avery did not know it, but they were in the eye of the storm; it wasn’t over yet, it hadn’t even hit full velocity. Maggie couldn’t contain herself. Her little red pony, her canopy bed, the glow-in-the-dark stars pasted to her ceiling. Her Snow White silverware and plate! It was a never-ending list. She felt like puking. Her mother kept telling her to sit down. Violet was singsonging, “Maggie’s in trouble, Maggie’s in trouble,” like it made her happy, which it did. Ash was eating his peas, but suddenly decided to fling them around the room. Her mother’s voice was escalating. Maggie let out a rebel yell, opened the front door of the motel room; they were on the second floor. She ran down the steps, around the swimming pool and out onto the twilight street. Avery freaked. She put Violet and Ash into the empty bathtub, which had just presented itself as the playpen, and ran after Maggie yelling her name like a magpie.
Here’s where the hurricane really hit. Avery ran down Maggie. It didn’t take that long, as Maggie was only nine. But back in the playpen, little Violet, just two years old, stood up, pulling on the faucet for leverage. The water came on. Ouch, hot. Violet, no fool, pulled herself up and fell out of the tub. She hit her head and started to cry. Ash, just barely a year old, had no such skills. He was at the back end of the tub. If the drain worked properly, the hurricane would have flowed right down the pipes. But the drain was a little rusty and not open all the way. The water started to reach Ash. He tried to pull away, but of course he only slipped and slid further into hot water. Then he cried too, but with an urgency that was so intense Violet shut up.
Avery picked Maggie up and beat her bottom to almost child abuse levels, she was just so frustrated. She hurried back to the motel. Halfway up the steps she heard Ash and literally dropped Maggie and her heart at the same time. When she saw her son she knew nothing would ever be the same again. It would always be before this day, and after this day. Maggie knew it too. She was certain her mother would never love her again. She might have been right.
Avery lifted her son into her arms and three days later laid him to earth. Ash to ashes. Avery stayed in the hurricane for a very long time.
In the aftermath Jack made the unilateral decision to move his family to Sedona, Arizona. A place of cultivated peace. If the evening news so much as reported on tropical storms, the channel was changed. In the dry reds and golds, the cactus, they never spoke of the past. They were no longer Southerners. They wore cowboy boots. Violet’s boots were pink and she stomped over the bridge of sighs without difficulty. She had no memory whatsoever of the Eloise Event. Guiltless. Maggie hated her and her pink foam curlers. Her turquoise-colored barrettes. You’re the one who turned on the water, she thought, but never said.
The fights between Maggie and Avery ended. Because really there was only one fight left. The guilt between them a cactus of the heart. Who was more at fault—Maggie for running out the door or Avery for putting the babies in the bathtub? It was a ball they bounced between them, a hot potato. Avery, at her core, knew she shouldn’t blame a nine-year-old. Jack tried his best to intervene—”You shouldn’t blame anyone.” Maggie remained the apple of his eye, but even with her father’s sustained affection, in her self-punishment she downgraded herself. Pink Lady to Macintosh. As a teenager she sneaked tattoos onto her body in hidden, painful places. And once a year Maggie, without anyone knowing it was on purpose, seared her palm on the kitchen burner or burned her thigh with the iron. Small flagellations.
Years gathered. Maggie graduated from high school and moved out. She attended the Sedona Center for Arts and Technology to study textiles and design. She thought moving away from her mother would make her feel better, or feel less, but pencils fell out of hands and all her designs were violent. Her concerned drawing teacher said she knew a good therapist who had helped her overcome great grief. (She didn’t mention that her great grief was menopause.)
Maggie went. But because it was Sedona her therapist was really just a New Age acolyte with crystals in the window and a sideline of essential oils. He talked of guilt and self-loathing. Forgiveness, or at least transference. She could blame the whole thing on her mother like every other American kid. And then forgive her mother! Massage. She should do something artistic, or take a trip … (LSD?) No! Somewhere far away and out of her comfort zone (comfort what?) like Kathmandu.
Kathmandu. Maggie left her therapist and rolled the name around like a talisman in her pocket. Nearly every college student, and certainly those living in Sedona, had heard of, dreamed of the Hippie Trail. Istanbul, Goa, Bangkok, Kathmandu. Lyrical, mythical places. Really, just a backpack away.
Maggie continued her classes and worked night shifts at The Vortex. The club was an underground Ecstasy rave, and Maggie’s job was to sell lollypops and water to dancing idiots while they fell in love with each other and said really really really important things that they couldn’t remember the next day. But the tips were good.
In late August of 1990 she bought a ticket to Kathmandu. Leaving on a jet plane, don’t know when I’ll be back again. Like her mother, Maggie loved a good folk song.
Maggie’s body and psyche have grown used to the American Southwest. She wears her cowboy boots without irony. What she values is space, the lone saguaro cactus in the Sonoran Desert. She believes her weekend hikes up the difficult Cathedral Rock and Bear Mountain trails have conditioned her for Nepal. Kathmandu just laughs at that concept.
Walking out of the small airport Maggie is sure she will see the Himalayas. What on earth would the earth’s highest mountain range hide behind? But the Himalayas are not so very easy to find. Nor is a taxi. A sudden rush of male humanity offers to carry Maggie’s luggage. Although she only has one bag, she feels forced to choose a porter, which immediately becomes three men ushering her into the dilapidated taxi of their choice. As she reaches into her bag to get a few dollars for the
porters, hands come in the window. Voices, dirty nails, car engine revving, the driver looking at her, cigarette smoke. She gives them too much money. The hands depart, the cab departs. Maggie sinks back into the small sojourn of the cab, exhausted by thirty-six hours of travel and ten minutes of interaction. She checks into the Kantapur Temple House, an oasis of teak and quiet, showers, and goes to bed. She falls asleep thinking she should have gone to Hawaii.
In the morning Maggie stands at the gate of the Temple House. Inside, she hears the little bells of the hotel’s Buddhist garden. Outside is the dark carnival of Thamel, Kathmandu’s tourist zone, and she has to go through a puddle of mud to get there. She jumps the puddle and goes.
Kathmandu comes at Maggie like a landslide: Goats, rats both dead and alive, unattended cows and unattended cow shit. Long-haired sheep from Tibet painted pink on their backs marking them for dead sheep walking. Vendors, vendors, vendors. Meat without refrigeration. Dark clouds of flies on the meat. Narrow streets. Women in saris, pops of color. Power lines in great clots of tangled wires balled up and dangerously hanging. Piles of garbage, strata of garbage; fresh orange peels could almost be pretty. Cars, bikes, rickshaws, all carrying items that are sticking out. Goats on motorbikes, pink sheep on top of busses. Walkers, walkers, walkers, hawkers, hawkers, hawkers. Food smells. Nuts with spices, fruit on bicycles. Tiger Balm, buy my Tiger Balm. Children. Buddha Eyes painted on stupas, imploring everyone to tolerant chaos.
