Dear Exile

by Hilary Liftin

  It’s Presidents’ Day but I’m in the office. Busy, as you can see. My eyes hurt. I don’t love my job but my boss, Cindy (she gets mad about being called “boss”), is very cool and we keep working as we power-walk down the halls and even when we’re in the bathroom stalls and when I told my grandfather that he said, “Now I’m worried. Are you both straight?” I wasn’t quite sure how to respond. I didn’t even know he knew the word straight meant anything other than not crooked.

  I think my plan will work. I keep having to remind myself that I don’t have to do it forever, and that my learning curve is high. Although this job isn’t ideal, it’s what they call a career move. But the commute to Westchester is brutal, and I do it at least three days a week. The rest of the time I’m in the Soho office. The company is Kafkaesque. I’m still totally unsettled, confused, have no real definition of what my job is, and yet am busy all the time. I’m getting a reputation for excusing myself from meetings abruptly, but if I didn’t I wouldn’t be able to accomplish a thing. I’m a little tired of trying to explain what I do, but what’s surprising is how much fun I’m having. When we’re not in meetings, the office I share with Cindy is something of a social gathering area. Who knows why? We always have to send our work friends away so we can be productive. It reminds me of how I used to study in the library at college. You know how I like that. Pretending to try to work.

  That New Year’s guy Nick, who was in the Number One spot, fell off the board entirely last week when we had drinks and he told me that his ex-girlfriend to whom he hasn’t spoken since they fought and broke up five months ago called him and they met up and were fighting and he kissed her. As he was telling me that he needed time to figure all this out, it became all the more clear to me that he’s perfect! (Just kidding.) My question is, why, why, why have I been designated long-term ambassador for the lonely? That’s me, I venture out into foreign lands, negotiate, cajole, support the needs of both sides (him and me); I’ve tried scrubbing, even spraying, still . . . Nick is a perfect example of . . . of whatever it is that I do wrong or the world does wrong to me. A few days ago we were walking through deep snowdrifts. I was wearing a colorful scarf; he was making me laugh; and I felt like the apple-cheeked happy girl, the one who sometimes has a boyfriend and sometimes does not but is always cheered by hope and possibility. And then, mere hours later—not even enough time for me to blame myself—I am in a bar having a “talk,” and saying to him, “So it’s all bad timing, right?. . . Right?” I’m saying that and I’m thinking, All over the world men are leaving their old girlfriends for new girlfriends, but not right here in Orson’s Bar. Nope, not Orson’s. In Orson’s it goes the other way. It’s not that I’ll miss him. I barely knew him. But it makes me sad that we never got to the breakfast in bed part, the Sunday crossword on Saturday night part. When I have a nightmare I want to be able to fling my arm around a safe body. I want there to be one person who knows me better than anyone else. Is that so wrong? (No, Kate, thanks, but you don’t count. It needs to be a mutually exclusive thing.)

  I know that you are hot and being slowly poisoned by drinking oil. Even so, what you have to concede is that couples have it better under all circumstances. Being single means carrying groceries home, eating them, reading, and eventually falling asleep and waking up and doing it all again. But when you’re in a couple you carry groceries together. Someone slices while you dice; someone sits on the toilet lid to talk while you brush; and when you settle down to read, someone’s leg flops over your leg, a reminder that you are attractive, that you are loved, that even in your solitary activities someone is considering you, that life has meaning. Not only am I alone every night, but I actively, painfully miss my yet-unfound Dave every day as if he were lost at sea.

  Don’t get me wrong. I am full of joy. Even in my disappointment, my youthful exuberance persists. Depression is a stranger to me. Love is an accordion. And yes, sigh, even though Nick is gone I know there are others. This includes, I’m ashamed to admit, Jason the heartbreaker, whom I slept with just one more time, which, when coupled with the last time, had the effect of giving a single event a second dimension. That is, once there are two points there is a line and once there is a line there is a visible direction and once there is direction there is desire and that’s why I have to quit. What can I say? I’m a sucker for a scruffy drummer with a four a.m. bedtime. But I hadn’t yet gotten your letter forbidding me to mention or interact with him. I take your orders. I am resolved and don’t feel that it will be too difficult. And, last and least on the boy report, Byron was quoted as having said that going out with me was like going out with a man. Apparently he believes that he cooked and cleaned and made us a home and that I took it all for granted. Eve told him: You’re just saying that because Hilary is the only woman you’ve ever respected and you don’t know how to express it. Byron agreed.

  My malarial African friend, are you going to contract weird diseases where giraffes explode out of your skin? Are you wearing hats constantly I hope? What do you use your electric outlet for? Do you have a TV? (Trivial, I know.) Are you having the same experience as Dave or different experiences? Is one of you happier? Is one of you dirtier? How is all this hardship affecting your married life? Are you ever homesick so that you want to cry?

  I miss you both just terribly and am working very hard to make sure the world keeps turning so that winter turns to summer and summer turns back to winter and then it all happens again or another half a time and then you’re back. At this point you are using up so much of my love supply that wars might start. Luckily, you’re working for the Peace Corps, so no one’s getting too rambunctious. Happy Valentine’s Day, sweethearts.

  —H

  RAMISI

  February 28

  Hi Hilary,

  Why, oh why does everyone who writes me expect that Dave and I will have begun fighting now that we’re married and in Kenya? We haven’t. Not in the least. In fact, the only thing we ever fought about has been eliminated since here it’s too hot for covers. There is one thing that drives us apart, which is the fact that Dave laughs every time I fart (not funny) (probably a sign of a serious disease). And that he keeps bringing up the fact that once, in New York, when picking out food for dinner, I claimed that I only liked black beans. As you know, this is not really a very appropriate attitude considering our current bean selections. In all truthfulness, we’re closer than ever. I love being here with David.

  I now wear a slip when I teach. I am the T.O.D. this week (that would be Teacher on Duty). That means I have to fill out a bunch of papers every day for various reasons, like: student needs to wear pata patas instead of regulation footwear because she has a “wound” on her foot, or student needs to leave school to get paraffin to burn for light to study by, or student must go to a tailor because her skirt is ripped. I am the one who is supposed to open each morning with a speech about how poorly the kids are measuring up, and I am the one who is supposed to whip them all with a cane for infractions. The week began with the headmaster putting the stripped bamboo cane on my desk in the staff room. He knows I’m not going to touch it.

  We got a nice letter from our Peace Corps boss that read thus: “Hi Kate and Dave, Kate I hope you are feeling better. FYI we got the technician’s report on your filtered, treated drinking water and it read ‘Unfit for Human Consumption.’ See attached. We’ll see!” Wouldn’t that mean to you that we have no safe drinking water? And wouldn’t it bespeak of problems? It’s ironic since otherwise they’ve taken incredibly good care of us medically. They taught us everything from how to grind up eggshells for calcium to how to keep ourselves protected from the AIDS virus, which, in Nairobi, one in ten people have. We’ll have to take a trip into the city to see what’s going on. I don’t want to have two-headed babies or to continue being sick all the time.

  When we shared the “Unfit for Human Consumption” report and the chemical breakdown of the water in the staff room (in it are fecal material from a nearby choo and pestici
des left from the sugar plantation), the other teachers’ interest soon turned to semijokes about it being “unfit for white man’s consumption.” The general tone was that everyone’s been drinking the water with no problem for ten years and now we come in with Western technology and say it’s not okay, that they have to spend lots of money to change, what could be done about it anyway, and, really, even if it was radioactive and had mercury and lead in it, “we’d drink it if we got thirsty.” Yet another Kate-and-Dave-only crisis. I get so frustrated! Things could be done—if not moving the choo, trucking in water (it happens a lot in the drier areas), or digging a new borehole, couldn’t we at least boil the water for the students who live at the school? Especially since there have been numerous problems with diarrhea outbreaks and stomachaches? But no, we are told the children are fine. It’s tricky to be telling people that their ways aren’t good enough. I don’t know if they don’t want to hear it from us whites, if they don’t want to contest “God’s will,” or if they just don’t care. We’re telling our students to boil the water themselves, but the fuel costs money, so they probably can’t.

  Just now I had my glass of said water in the form of hot tea that’s about half sugar and a quarter yellowy, uddery milk. Nice on a 104-degree day. But I also had some fried cassava with salt and hot red pepper which was excellent.

  About Jason: oh, Hilary.

  About Nick: oh, Nick.

  And by the way, are you and your boss both straight? (Unlike Josh Stack?) And what relation at all does that have with talking about work in the bathroom? Or is your grandpappy just a little off his loop? And talking about your friends at work does not count as telling me what you do. I’m beginning to think you work for the CIA.

  Oh Hilary, you might be interested to know that to celebrate the end of the fasting and praying of Ramadan, our neighbors invited us over for goat, mango gravy, and Jell-O substitute. Shabina, who is sixteen and not allowed out of the house (even for schooling) because she might have sex, decorated my hands in the traditional Swahili way by making designs with henna on my palms so that I sort of look like Dax on Deep Space Nine except it’s not on my forehead and it will come off in a month or so. She’s really quite talented at it. When we got over there, I was immediately whisked into the kitchen with the women to decorate ourselves, chat, and munch tasty treats as we cooked. Dave told me later that the men slaughtered the goat (!), drank homebrew (known to cause blindness), ate piles of unripe mangoes with hot pepper on them (known to cause digestive trouble), and sprayed each other with a cockroach killer called DOOM (known to cause neurological damage) to repel insects. Isn’t it nice to be a girl?

  Just so that you can picture my hand completely, I lost my wedding ring in the dirty laundry water that we dump in the choo. We got another ring that is brass and lots of other women wear them with no trouble because they have black skin so their adjoining fingers don’t turn an alarming shade of green. On the same hand, along with the henna patterns, brass ring, green smudges, and calluses, I now have a nice blistery rash like poison ivy, which we finally learned is caused by eating cashew nuts that are not all the way cooked or by standing in the smoke while they are roasting. Both of which we, naively, did.

  Kariuki, a teacher, just asked if we had ever studied Descartes and I tried desperately to remember your joke about him, but I can’t.

  To answer your trivial question (you are forgiven), the man who owns the wrecked sugar factory is the only one who has a TV. Therefore, the electricity comes on when there’s a show he wants to watch, but now the generator’s broken. That means the village hasn’t gathered around the screen lately, and maybe won’t ever again. Another sign of Ramisi’s slow decay.

  While riding our bikes home, we were stopped by a guy with a bow and arrow who asked which way the baboon went, then shook our hands and ran off. As will I now.

  Love,

  K

  RAMISI

  March 7

  Hil,

  Right now it’s evening and the entire acre-square courtyard, the center of Ramisi, is burning. Smoke is blowing through our house, and the firelight is lighting the room instead of a lantern. Shabina told us it’s necessary to burn the grass down every so often to keep away the poisonous snakes and mosquitoes.

  Things here are hell, as usual; we can’t quite believe how bad it is. We’re in a daze. The chores aren’t so draining now that the neighbors have explained the best way to do things and we’ve done them a few times. The school’s repression and badness-for-kids, however, is, so far, unabating (is that a word?). I mean, although it seems it cannot go on like this, it has been able to and may continue to. Doctors have it easy, I think. If a person is bleeding, everyone agrees that the wound has to be treated. Without blood or pus to indicate a universally accepted problem, what am I supposed to do here? What I see as a wound to be treated, like polluted water or a dependence on the cane in the classroom, no one else I know sees as a problem. Peace Corps says we are invited here by the Kenyan government to help in the way Kenyans want us to help. In this case, that’s following their lead, teaching their syllabus, in their way. Peace Corps says it’s arrogant and irresponsible and maybe even colonialist to decide to do anything else. But there’s just no way I’m going to spend two years here teaching kids to sit down and shut up and accept whatever stupidly unfair situations are imposed on them by people with big sticks.

  Today Khadija and Amina, two of my form fours, tried to strangle a third girl they suspected of squealing on them as ringleaders of last week’s walkout. Quite probably, some teachers are thinking that this has occurred since I wouldn’t cane anyone this week, although I of course attribute it to the fact that the students are constantly abused. The girls are at the police station right now. Mohammed voiced concerns initially that the police would be too brutal on them (which says a lot since he canes them pretty hard), but other teachers decided that would be good discipline. Jesus H.Christ is about all I say about school nowadays—it applies most of the time.

  In fact, the whole situation is beginning to make me crazy. I feel myself talking too much and too loudly when I think about it. I feel jittery and, when in the house, cry easily. I think it’s because Dave and I feel so strongly that what is going on is horrible, and everyone around us thinks it’s just fine. Of course, it’s all about what a person is raised to believe, it could all be called culture, but I wasn’t raised to believe this, and I can’t be open-minded about it. Maybe I should say that I don’t want to be open-minded about it. Cultural assimilation is all fine and good when it’s about not having electricity, eating unfamiliar food, and gesturing for people to come nearer with your palm facing down, not up, but abusing those “below” you is something else entirely. And on top of that, I don’t know if this stuff is really Kenyan culture or the culture left over from British colonialism, or culture created by poverty and hopelessness. You see how I rant and rave these days?

  The end of the term is approaching, so we’ll go by bus to the northern border, where we’ll take a boat and go to an island. And drink and eat and walk on the beach. And try to grow some sanity back.

  Love,

  Kate

  P.S. Here is a poem we’re studying that I copied for you:

  THE BELOVED

  by A.R.Cliff-Lubin

  Lapobo,

  Tall but not too tall,

  Short but not too short,

  She is of medium size.

  Lapobo,

  Her teeth are not as ash,

  Nor the color of maize flour,

  Her teeth are white as fresh milk.

  The whiteness of her teeth

  When I think of her

  Makes food drop from my hand.

  Lapobo,

  Black but not too black,

  Brown but not too brown,

  Her skin is just between black and brown.

  Lapobo,

  Her heels have no cracks.

  Her palms are smooth and tender to touch.

 
; Her eyes—Ho they can destroy anybody.

  NEW YORK CITY

  March 18

  Descartes walks into a bar.

  Bartender says: Would you like a beer?

  Descartes says: I think not, and, poof! he disappears.

  Dear K8,

  I’m pretty angry about your water situation. In my world, you’d ask your director what she plans to do about the report that says it’s “unfit for human consumption” and cc: her boss. This is how working for a big company with a stagnant company culture has made me think (and did I ever talk about “company culture” before this job?). But you must take action on this.

  As you probably anticipated, my favorite part of the poem you sent me is the tall but not too tall part. (I just remembered you were sort of in my dream—there was someone that I saw from the back and I was like I think that’s Kate but then I thought, No it couldn’t be, she’s in Africa. So you see you’re even too far away for dreams. Trippy, huh?) So with these dire circumstances, do you feel like your energies are worth it? I mean, you and Dave are very valuable resources, not to mention people, and I think you should only suffer if there’s at least some payoff for the community. Then again, that which does not kill you makes you stronger. But make sure you keep evaluating this, since we (those who love you) can’t do so from here.

  Speaking of our “company culture,” some of it isn’t so stagnant. Don’t get the idea that I’m into computers because I am a hundred percent not. I’m a nature lover with a log-cabin fantasy. Please don’t forget that. Anyway, at work we can do this thing on the computers called instant messaging. It’s as fast as talking on the phone, but you’re typing on the computer. Losers like my boss, Cindy (who, like me, is straight, thank you very much), and me, and my new work friend Keith (who gets mad when I call him that because he claims that we are friend friends) all sometimes do this with each other and we just crack up. It’s like discovering the pleasure of passing notes in high school. (It’s just so funny, but I realize I should probably save this “humor” for my autobiography, which I intend to call You Had to Be There.) Even though Cindy and I share an office where we sit back to back, sometimes she’ll instant-message me. She could just turn around and talk. Then she’ll call me on the phone, which is totally ridiculous, so I’ll type, “I’m not answering that” and “Cut it out.” Do you see how infantile this is? For some reason it makes us weep with silent laughter. My chat “handle” is “luckyh,” and Cindy and Keith and a few other work friends sometimes call me Lucky, which I like. It’s like in college, when I changed my mantra from “my life is hell” to “I have a lust for life” and things got better. If they just call me Lucky long enough maybe I’ll actually get lucky.