Contents May Have Shifted

by Pam Houston

It is already below freezing, an hour before sunset, when we take off on the camels, Rick on Don Quixote, me on Ali Baba, Sasan (which means poet, he tells us, in Arabic, or trickster) on foot. In his Yankees cap and leather jacket, Sasan looks more New Jersey than Tunisia though he speaks French, Spanish, and Arabic, and is, he said, learning English a little at a time.

  Sasan tells us repeatedly how tired he is, which comes as a relief after all those smiling guys in Douz who couldn’t stop talking right up in our faces, who wanted to sell us a tablecloth their grandmother made, or a camel ride, or a rug. He makes a big deal of telling us how strong Ali Baba is, twice the strength of Don Quixote, and I look appreciatively down at Ali Baba’s giant feet, less like hooves and more like bedroom slippers, padding slowly, steadily, and soundlessly across the dunes that are washed golden and deeply shadowed in the waning light.

  We haven’t gone half a mile when Sasan says the camels need a rest. I raise one eyebrow at Rick. I thought the whole point of camels was that they could walk hundreds of miles between oases, without a blade of grass or a drink or a nap.

  Sasan throws his shoulder into Ali Baba’s chest and makes a gurgling noise deep in his throat. Ali Baba drops to his knees, groaning in return.

  We sit on the crest of a cold dune to watch the sun—now a ball of hot lava—pour itself onto the desert floor, Sasan between Rick and me. Sasan takes my hand and pours sand into it. “Farina,” he purrs, drawing out all the vowels, making gentle circles in my palm. I take my hand back and dig both palms under the sand, but his hand finds mine and continues to draw circles.

  Besides a low dune here and there, the Sahara stretches out forever flat in all directions, and Rick asks Sasan how camel drivers keep from getting lost.

  “We know the desert like we know the faces of our mothers and fathers,” he says. “We sleep in the day and navigate by the stars.”

  I try not to roll my eyes. What Sasan doesn’t know is that I used to be a river guide, used to be married to an African safari guide, and this particular brand of guidely bullshit is old news and worldwide. What I don’t know is that while he is turning circles in my palm with his left hand, he is turning circles in Rick’s palm with his right.

  Another mile down the camel trail, Ali Baba peels off in one direction, Don Quixote in another. Apparently, Ali Baba is the camel in error.

  “Turn him, Pam!” Sasan yells, but I have no reins, and leg pressure has no effect.

  We are nearly a mile apart by the time Sasan trots over.

  “I ride with you,” he says, slinging himself up in the saddle behind me, making a different sort of throaty noise that encourages Ali Baba to trot.

  A camel trot is not the world’s smoothest gait, and the saddle is not meant for two. First I realize that what I am feeling banging up against my ass is Sasan’s little erection, then I realize that his holding on to me right at tit level is no accident. I think, How old and ugly must one get before this shit stops happening, grit my teeth, and focus on not falling off.

  “Is this how you ride in America?” he shouts, like a guy in a Wind Song commercial.

  Then the five-gallon water bottle that has been tied to the saddle falls off, and he jumps down to get it. When he tries to remount I say, “No,” and he says, “But I am so tired,” and I say, “Okay then, you ride, I walk.”

  When we catch up to Rick, who has the hood up on his nifty new Obi-Wan Kenobi jacket and has missed the whole thing, I say, “Predicament,” and he says, “Klepto?” and I say, “No . . . but egregious.”

  Minutes later we arrive at a fake Bedouin campsite and meet the French people who will be sharing our camp for the night: the dapper grandfather; his blue-haired wife; his son Eric; Eric’s ironic, bookish girlfriend, Madeline; and their four-year-old son Esteban. Immediately we start sticking so tight to them that they probably go home and tell the same kinds of stories we tell about Sasan about us.

  Around the campfire, in the icy icy night under a million stars, Rick tells Esteban a story about a camel who comes out of the sky and reaches down to chew the leaves of the trees over Esteban’s head. When he is finished Esteban puts his head in my lap in a way that makes me miss Madison and I think, I wonder if I give off some different kind of scent to all children now.

  When I first smelled the blankets on the cots in our tent I thought, No way am I getting my face near them, but then ice started to form in our water bottles and right now I would eat one of these blankets if it would warm me up on the inside, or make me know what to do if Sasan comes in here later looking for a threesome and wielding some big camel jockey knife.

  In the morning, the dunes are covered with a thin layer of ice that sparkles in the low sun like water. Rick stands to his full height in front of Sasan as we prepare to remount the camels. “Today,” Rick says, and pauses, forcing Sasan to look right at him, “the woman rides alone.”

  74. Creede, Colorado

  The first thing Rick’s father wants to know when they arrive is which one is his bathroom.

  “That’s not,” I say, “exactly the way it works around here.”

  “Well,” he says, “then just tell me which one you will be using.”

  “It all depends, really, on what you want to do,” I say. “If you want to take a bath, you use the pretty bathroom, if you are up to something more utilitarian, the ugly one might do.”

  “But which one should we use?” he says, and I sigh, point to the pretty bathroom.

  All of a sudden I can see my house through Rick’s parents’ eyes, Jude’s giant painting of the ear of corn with the bright red word hallelujah scrawled over the top of it, four $200 organic cotton dog beds taking up most all the space on the living room floor, the set of tiny silver opium weights lovingly carried back from Laos.

  We settle in to watch the Texas Rangers play the Tampa Bay Rays and Rick’s dad calls the Rangers right fielder a gentleman three times before I realize what he means by that is black.

  All year long Rick’s mother has been sending me email slide shows called things like Tears of a Woman and The Bright Red Hat which contain a lot of roses and baby’s breath and women with strong shoulders and big hearts finally realizing, at sixty, that looks don’t matter and they can conquer the world.

  The first time I was in her big house in Texas with Rick’s dad and all five brothers playing a computer bowling game where you hold a little box in your hand and hurl your upper body at the screen, she crossed the room to give me a hug and said, “It can all be a little overwhelming,” and I knew that she knew I didn’t want her to ever let go.

  Now the whole upper half of her body is inside my oven and she is scrubbing like somebody half her age. “I was afraid we might start a fire,” she says to me, under her armpit. This from the mother of a fifty-year-old man who takes all of the spoiled food that is in his refrigerator—rancid salami, deep green cottage cheese, half and half that has gone solid as Play-Doh—and moves it up to his freezer.

  “I don’t know if you know this,” his mother whispered in my ear the night before, “but there are no hand towels in the pretty bathroom.” I nodded solemnly and didn’t tell her that it would be an accident if there were any hand towels in the entire house.

  During the seventh-inning stretch the commentators mention, but do not explain, the team’s recent shortening of their name from the Devil Rays to the Rays, the incorporation of a sun into their logo, and their decision to retain the cutout of the sea creature (Mobula Mobular, from the family Myliobatidae) on their sleeves.

  I say, “I don’t know, but it seems to me that when the biologist or fisherman or maritime explorer made the decision to call that particular ocean-dwelling animal a devil ray, the conversation could have been over at that point.”

  Rick clears his throat and Rick’s mother nods politely.

  “It’s still the devil,” Rick’s father says.

  75. Boulder, Colorado

  At the Flatiron Circus Camp Celebration, I have to sit right behind Sofr
ee and watch her enact good parenting for hours while a whole bunch of little girls warm up on trapezes for careers as Cirque du Soleil performers or worse, while their butch and buff trainers look beatifically on. This is especially trippy after reading Margaret Atwood’s latest, a futuristic universe where women only have two choices, to work as strippers with embedded fish scales or without them, and penises are pretty much blamed for everything wrong with the world.

  It is midsummer and Sofree is wearing a sleeveless top that shows off her best feature I have seen so far . . . very prettily shaped shoulders. She looks animated and happy, greeting everyone in the audience, turning around now and then to offer me a trembly smile.

  For a little while after the Boulderado lunch date it looked like Sofree and I might be friends. She may have been the subject of every fight Rick and I had, but she was also the only person who understood exactly how it felt to fight him. One time, only seconds after Rick had stormed out of Folsom Street Coffee, Sofree sailed in on his backdraft and bought me a Mexican hot chocolate. When I told her what he’d said, that I’d been responsible for every one of the worst days of his life, she shook tears from her eyes, said, “No, Pam, remember? That was me.”

  We took a few walks together while Rick was in the shop, and on one warm afternoon in Chautauqua Park she said, “Eventually I realized that Rick likes living in that hole of his own making, and the only way I could be in relationship with him was to get down in there too. But it wasn’t my hole. It was never my hole. Once I stopped believing when he said I was the cause of his trouble, it was easy as can be to climb right out.”

  The air around her sentence felt charged with prophecy, like when I’d bring a guy home from college and my mom would say something like, “Any boy who wears a hat at the dinner table will never be faithful,” and though I didn’t want her to turn out to be right, she somehow already was.

  A couple months later Sofree called to wish me a Happy Valentine’s Day, because, she said, she knew Rick wouldn’t, and when he—in fact—didn’t, it started to seem like two trains had left the station and were traveling on a collision course and I was driving at least one of them. When Rick came right out and asked me whose side I was on, the answer could only be, My own.

  The day after circus camp, Madison and I take the dogs to the playground and she spends several hours flinging herself at the highest bar on what we used to call a jungle gym but is now called a play structure, and flipping all kinds of ways over the top. Then we play freeze tag with the dogs, which is extra fun because the dogs can’t figure out the rules, especially Liam.

  Even though it is our weekend, Sofree needs Madison for two hours for a special family party and I am in charge of seeing that she gets there. When we get one block from the corner where we are supposed to meet, Madison starts limping badly, and Sofree rushes over and sweeps her up in her arms. When Sofree brings her back to Rick’s that night Madison is wearing an Ace bandage and Sofree violates the mediation agreement by carrying her all the way inside.

  Madison wants to sleep in the fuzzy brown Phantom Menace coat we brought her back from Tunisia. Of course the Berbers were wearing coats like that a thousand years before George Lucas came along.

  At the store in Tozeur we haggled over the price in four languages, and Rick finally said, in Spanish, “Amigo, from my heart, I have to make a bargain with you or my woman will think I don’t have any balls,” and that is when the guy almost started to like him.

  The next morning Madison wakes with the coat turned around backwards and goes charging after the dogs again, Ace bandage slapping the asphalt, and Rick gets an email from Sofree that says she is having a crisis in her being.

  Where else would she have it, Cinder says, in her vagina?

  Here’s the thing about jealousy: it eats your heart from the inside out and makes you so unlikable even the dogs get skeptical.

  “Love is supposed to feel good,” Nora always tells me, “at least fifty-one percent of the time.”

  76. Kairouan, Tunisia

  All we want is a fast pass through the fourth-holiest city in Islam, and enough couscous to get us through the day. Few things in life make Rick happier than a Roman ruin, and even though it is 700 kilometers away, I have promised I will get him to Thuburbo Majus by closing time.

  We start the day in Tataouine, drive first to Medenne and then to Gabes. It is Eid al-Adha Eve, the Festival of Sacrifice commemorating the willingness of Ibrahim to kill his son Ishmael as an act of obedience to God, but then God lets him off the hook and tells him to slaughter a sheep instead. As a result there are more trucks than usual on the narrow motorways, hundreds of decapitated sheep hanging for sale along the sides of the road, and women, sitting on makeshift tables, selling ristras and olive branches to every third car that passes.

  If when I say the driving is aggressive in Tunisia, you think of Boston, or even Rome, you are not even in the ballpark. The roads are single-lane, shoulderless, windy, and poorly engineered, and it is not uncommon, when looking in your rearview mirror, to see a car that is in the process of passing you, being passed by another car. At a stoplight, the instant the light changes, the eighth car deep will honk loudly at the seventh car, and sometimes even grind against it, bumper to bumper. The white piece-of-shit Punto we have rented has significant dents in every single panel, the brights stick on, and the horn doesn’t work. But we have come to love the Punto, because in it, moving, is the only place we are safe from being hawked.

  It is the low season in Tunisia, and the hawkers outnumber tourists twenty to one. If we stop the car just long enough to take a picture, somebody comes running up the road and tries to sell us a rug. The worst part is that when we try to explain that we just stopped to take a picture of the hilltop village, with the golden Sahara spread out on one side of it, and the blue Mediterranean on the other, and that buying a 16-by-24 Persian rug that weighs 300 pounds and costs—for us, special—$2,500 wasn’t on our to-do list for this morning, the rug men get unimaginably angry, as if we have insulted their mother, or carelessly run over their feet.

  In Mides, an old Berber town on the Algerian border, there was a hawker who wanted to sell us, not a rug, but himself, as a guide. He said, “You go to the Algerian border, you American, you maybe have a problem, but you go with me, and then nix problem, nix problem.”

  To Rick, he said, “I like you because you talk seriously to me,” and then he asked Rick if Rick liked him, and Rick said, “I am pleased to make your acquaintance,” which I thought was a brilliant piece of evasion, but when Rick finally insisted we did not want a guide for any price he leaned over and spit on the ground right next to Rick’s foot.

  By the time we got to the Algerian border it was late afternoon and there were goats and a goat girl coming down the mountain. There was the call to prayer ringing out of the mosque in the village, and there was a weird border station fortress that looked like a torture chamber in an Xbox game, and little white posts all along the mountaintop marking the boundary. Below was a twisted river canyon, and tables and tables full of a rock called desert rose, which was either a great gift or worthless, depending which way the hawkers were trying to haggle.

  Now, in the fourth-holiest city in Islam, I am trying hard not to pause too long at a stop sign, not to miss a light, and we get almost to the wall of the Medina before there is a red light I just can’t run, and that is when the guy comes up and bangs on my window, points up ahead to where the Great Mosque is, and says, “Madame! Madame! S’il vous plaît!”

  I shake my head no, and the light changes, and I hit the gas and he follows on his moped. I drive too fast for the cobblestone streets, but he has the moped pegged, gunning for our back window. I hang a left and a left and a left, and then finally a left that turns almost all the way back on itself, and it feels just like The French Connection until a man steps out into the street in front of me and I slam on the brakes and the moped man slams hard into my rear bumper. I jump out of the car and so does Rick
.

  The man is picking himself up off the cobblestones, doesn’t appear to be injured or dead.

  “Go away!” I shriek, at a volume and intensity that surprises me.

  The man walks up to me, gets right in my face, rubbing his arm as if it is hurt, then rubbing the tips of his fingers together for money.

  “Leave us alone!” It’s me again. Just full-on shrieking.

  There are men drinking coffee on porches all around us, watching, impassive. There are always men drinking coffee on porches everywhere in Tunisia. Where the hell, I wonder, are all the women in this country, anyway?

  “Get out of here!” I shriek. Rick is watching me now too. He has never heard me make sounds like these. The man is still rubbing the tips of his fingers together. It occurs to me that I am about to strike him. Somewhere, right at this minute, in a land not so far from here, a man has just hurled both of his shoes at George W. Bush.

  “Get out of here,” Rick says, calmly, from the other side of the Punto, and the man turns and pushes his moped in the other direction.

  We get back in the car and turn toward the Medina.

  “I’ve got to get out of this country,” I say to Rick.

  77. St. Helena, California

  In the car, driving down Highway 29 on the way to AKA Bistro. Willow starts telling a story about a 911 call she heard about on TV in which a woman was reporting a drunk driver.

  “So the dispatcher said, ‘On what highway?’ ” Willow says, “and the woman said, ‘Highway 29,’ and the dispatcher said, ‘In the direction of St. Helena or in the direction of Calistoga?’ and the woman said, ‘In the direction of Calistoga,’ and the dispatcher said, ‘Are you in view of them now?’ and the woman paused for a minute and said, ‘No, see, them is me.’”

  I say, “Was this last night?” because we were driving on Highway 29 last night on the way home from dinner, and Willow says, “No, it was about a week ago,” and I say, “Well, what was it, somebody’s desperate cry for help or just a prank?” and Willow says, “I guess the woman knew she shouldn’t have been on the road,” and Nora says, “Is this some kind of amnesty program the wineries have put in place to get more business?” and I say, “Well, why didn’t she just pull over and take the keys out of the ignition?” and Willow says, “I just thought it was funny that she said them is me,” and Nora says, “Wait, I was driving on Highway 29 last night, and I’ve been taking Vicodin for my tooth infection,” and I say, “Don’t worry, it couldn’t have been you because you’d remember if you called the police,” and she says, “Oh yeah,” and I say, “Hold on a minute, this didn’t really happen on Highway 29 between St. Helena and Calistoga, did it?” and Willow says, “My God, I suck as a storyteller.”