I'll Ask You Three Times, Are You OK?

by Naomi Shihab Nye

  Beth and I had ridden a Greyhound bus from Texas to Wisconsin. We were encamped at my aunt’s tourist cabins on a glistening lake outside Eagle River, working as her maids and looking for a summer adventure. I would snap out the fresh sheets and Beth would grab the other ends. We wrapped the lumpy mattresses for the next unsuspecting guests who did not realize that my aunt, the owner of the cabins, was extremely difficult.

  “Why are you up here?” asked the truck driver, who seemed slightly grumpy but not dangerous.

  “We are here because my grandfather is dying here,” I said. “We are working as maids for my aunt, who lost nine babies and has become very bitter. We may have made a mistake to come.”

  “Nine babies?” he said. “That is terrible. Miscarriages?”

  “Some were miscarriages. Others actually got born and died soon after birth.”

  “That’s very sad. But why do you hitchhike?”

  “We don’t have a car. We don’t even have driver’s licenses.”

  “Why doesn’t your aunt drive you?” We were passing signs for Wisconsin dairy products, with large wedges of yellow cheese painted on them.

  “She is too bitter. We would also rather ride with someone we don’t know than someone who drinks beer after breakfast.”

  He eyed us carefully. Maybe he thought we were just big complainers.

  “I wouldn’t hitchhike if I were you,” he said in a serious tone. “If I had a daughter your age, I would not want her to hitchhike. Please take my advice. Don’t do this again.”

  “Are you going to beat us up?” asked Beth. We were passing between two deep forests right then. I shuddered.

  “No, I am not,” he said. “But someone else might. I know the world of truckers better than you do, and I advise you to get driver’s licenses or take a taxi whenever you can.”

  I said, “Are there taxis out here?”

  Later Beth would always say, “Remember when I asked the truck driver if he was going to beat us up?”

  And I would always say, “Stop it, Beth.”

  Shortly after we were back in Texas, my grandfather died. A few years later my aunt startled everyone by having a stroke and dying, too. She was very young to die. I would regret that my last word to her, when she called us lazy losers for quitting after ten days, had been “Bitch!” I had never said that word out loud before, and it seems awfully shameful now. How strange to believe in peace on a world level and not be able to get along with members of your own family.

  I would think of the truck driver and his advice about taxis and how I never hitchhiked again and the way he stared at me when I said, “Nine babies” and how it had been so easy to tell someone I never saw before another person’s deep life tragedy. Maybe that was wrong to do. On a train to Oklahoma once, a young man named Leo sitting in the seat in front of me told me he was running away from his own wedding. He showed me the rings.

  Taxi, North from Jerusalem

  THE ARAB DRIVER THREATENED TO STOP because my friend and I were kissing madly in his backseat. You just did not do that in the Middle East. It was unthinkable, sensational, rude.

  “I stop here, yes! You get out. You walk!”

  He peered into his rearview mirror at us and we did not care.

  We pretended we did not speak English or Arabic.

  We spoke only the language of kissing in that land of love and faith and fighting.

  Kissing was addictive. Once you started…

  He drove slowly but he did not stop.

  My family lived eight miles north of the walled city, out in the rough countryside.

  I have no memory of why my friend was in the taxi with me. He lived downtown in Jerusalem, inside the wall. We had been to a concert or a film. Bus service stopped at sundown. You had to take a taxi if no one was picking you up. My friend would have had to take a return taxi trip home without me. Maybe he was being a gentleman.

  My father thought no boys were gentlemen. He would have been horrified and furious to know I was kissing anyone in a semipublic place, in his conservative homeland, witnessed by a driver who could spread the word among all the other drivers: “That girl kisses.” It must have been awkward for the driver, who was no doubt a distant cousin of my father, since everyone who walked the Jerusalem streets was a distant cousin of everyone else back then. The seat was cool—folds of black leather, rounded seams. The taxi, with windows wide open, rolled between the dark meadows and hillsides of old Palestine, studded with the mounded bodies of slumbering sheep among the stones. We were living a single year there that would change our lives forever.

  I was kissing someone I would see again ten years later on the other side of the earth. Then I would say to him, “You talk too much. You chatter. Man oh man, could you ever be quiet for at least sixty seconds?”

  He would say, “What do you mean, ‘chatter’?”

  How cruel. I am, perhaps, the biggest chatterbox on earth.

  We would stand in the fading light between nearly dead trees in the state of Tennessee and I would say, “No, I don’t think I can marry you after all. I need more silence in my days,” and he would say, “Okay then.” We would ride a swinging cable car to the top of a mountain, stand apart from each other, and never kiss once. We would look down on three states and say, “Okay, it’s over.”

  Not one more word would ever pass between us.

  In the years that followed I have thought of the uncomfortable taxi driver more than the person I kissed in his car.

  What Happens

  YOU OPEN YOUR HAND. YOU REACH OUT FOR something. I want, I want, give it to me. First the soft rabbit, the shiny spoon. The bath toy. You open your hand to the world and expect the world to put something back in it.

  Transaction.

  Once the transactions begin, the baby gets interesting.

  In school a raised hand means you have a question, or you know. Sometimes the arm is very heavy. It is hard to raise up, but something tells you your life will be worse if you don’t. I’ll take a guess.

  Years later, on a city street, you lift your arm, freeze your fingers at a certain imploring angle or wave them back and forth and expect something to stop for you. Pick you up. Drive you. Drop you off.

  Sometimes there is a meter. You try not to watch it. Watching makes the numbers increase more quickly. You try to notice the scene outside the window. Cardboard boxes being unloaded in front of delicatessens. A large sack of fresh clams on top of a pile of groceries on a rolling dolly. Sunlight is falling onto the clams. “Get those clams into a refrigerator quickly,” you want to call out the window. But they are not your clams and you are gone, gone, gone.

  Sometimes there is a set price. Sometimes, especially in other countries, you can’t understand what the price is going to be and you still take the taxi, worried for the whole ride. Then at the other end there is some negotiating to deal with. Sometimes it is easy.

  Many times you get a bonus. A taxi driver tells you one wondrous thing during the journey. It rings in your ears all day.

  An impeccably neat driver from Ghana in Washington, D.C., told me he could solve all the government’s problems in two weeks, if given the chance. But no one had asked for his advice yet.

  A late night driver in Pittsburgh said, “I dream about staircases under the bed going down to other worlds. Do you?”

  “No,” I said. “But it sounds interesting.”

  “Do you think I should write about it? Make it be a story or something?” he said.

  “You bet. I think people should write about everything.”

  Before I stepped out of his car, he said, “Do you know the secret to success?”

  “No,” I said, thinking it might be a joke or something.

  He said solemnly, “Oh, I thought you might. You don’t really seem like a regular person.”

  An African-American driver in D.C. whose dad was a lawyer said he misses the old days when you could tell a person’s profession by what he or she carried. “Like, housepai
nters carried ladders. Lawyers carried briefcases. Now everyone carries briefcases. Chimney sweeps carried those big ol’ brooms.”

  “Chimney sweeps? You used to see them?”

  “Hell, yes. I loved them. They were everywhere.”

  On the Isle of Mull, Scotland, a driver let us out near a boat dock. He pointed to a boat that had a sign on the side of it: THIS IS NOT THE ULVA FERRY. “That’s your boat,” he said. We were going to the Isle of Staffa, to see flocks of puffins. No people live on Staffa. The driver said, “Aye, then, you’ll have a bonnie wee walk over there among the birdies. Puffins let you get very close up. Since they don’t know about people, they’re not afraid of us.” We’d passed the Dervaig Church on the way to the dock and he said, “There’s a bonnie wee church.” He told us not to pet any seal pups if we saw them sunning. “They have very sharp teeth.” He said he liked Mull because there were so many places where, “even on a beautiful day, you never see more than one person.”

  In New Orleans I stayed at a hotel with tiny towels and a trick shower, but I loved that city so much it didn’t matter. On my way to the airport I said to the taxi driver, “Gee this is a wonderful place. Everything is delicious—food, music, architecture…. I guess most people feel that way.”

  He nodded his tall head without speaking, but I could see him smiling in the mirror.

  “Where you from, miss?”

  “Texas.”

  “Most Texans like Louisiana, yes,” he said, nodding more.

  We were passing a cemetery with elaborate white monuments like miniature castles.

  I said, “And do most Louisianans like Texas?”

  He looked to one side, spoke softly. “Not a lot.”

  Taxis lined up glistening in rain outside Heathrow.

  Rounded, old-fashioned black sedans.

  Suddenly we’re driving between cobblestone walks and houses with flowerpot chimneys. Radio tuned to British accent news. Driver chatting about traffic toward Suffolk County.

  Astonishing how planes just deposit us in different countries and the taxis wait to pick us up! I will never take it for granted. It is a central miracle of existence, right up there next to breathing.

  Taxis in Jordan late at night would stop no matter what word we called out. They could see in the dark. Swooping up and down the steep hills of Amman, they pulled up neatly to curbs without even screeching.

  I did experiments. I called out, “Hope! Pain!” in English, and they stopped just as surely as if I had said, “Taxi!”

  “Yes, madam, where you like to be going?” Bowling alley? All-night café?

  One taxi driver in Jordan said, “I really like books of Mark Twain, you ever read Mark Twain?”

  Sometimes your driver is so bad you have to leap out.

  Coleman and I jumped out once in New York City when our driver from Afghanistan, shouting angrily into a telephone, was nipping curbs, swerving, and slamming on brakes at random moments in the crowded streets. He steered in such a jolting, haphazard manner that we threw money at him and escaped at a stoplight, dragging our book bags. I grabbed a light pole for balance. Coleman stood on the pavement, breathing deeply. “Oh man,” he said, “I could tell it was going to get worse.”

  The minute I got into a taxi in Philadelphia, the driver said, “I love Star Trek, do you?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “But once I attended a Star Trek convention and our son won second prize in the costume contest.”

  “Fantastic. Who was he?”

  “Data. The pale guy?”

  “You bet. So your boy likes it?”

  “Loves it. So does my husband.”

  “But you never watch with them?”

  “Never once.”

  He paused for a second, shaking his head.

  Then he launched into his selected autobiography.

  “Well, when my best friend got killed a few years ago, I turned to the Tibetan Book of the Dead for comfort. Have you ever read it? It really helps. I have it on a tape here in my car. If we were going farther, I’d play it. My dreams are much clearer when I don’t eat meat. Yours, too? I went to a health food store a few months ago and bought bottled water and soybeans. After eating them for a few days, my dreams grew the clearest ever. When I ate a pork chop later, I threw up. Of course life can’t end. Don’t you agree? It must go on in cycles. Reincarnation is the most obvious thing in the world. Check out those trees. They’re dead as hell, then they’re alive again. Recently my wife was stomping on ants in our kitchen and I asked her to consider all the backs she’d broken and families she’d disrupted. She called me a piss-ant and told me to shut up. But I meant it.”

  When he dropped me off, I honestly could not remember where I was, or why I was going there. My head felt like a speed dial. I liked it. And usually I only like going slow.

  At the book signing after my reading, a woman in a gray winter coat said, “Please sign this book for my cat. He really likes your poetry. His name is Ed. E-D for Ed.”

  I stared at her hard and she wasn’t smiling.

  So I signed the book, “To Ed, Happy poetry and purring! Love, Hamilton.”

  She snatched the book away from me and stared at it. “Who is Hamilton?”

  “My cat.”

  She slammed the book back down on the table. “No! He doesn’t want your cat’s name, he wants yours. Sign it again!”

  So I crossed out Hamilton and wrote my own name, tentatively. My script had a shaky look.

  Then she slapped an aging chocolate chip cookie on the table and said, “Eat it! Ed sent it to you!”

  I popped it in my pocket and thanked her, oh my Friskies, you bet I did. I said I’d eat it later.

  How much I wished the same Star Trek taxi guy would pick me up again afterward so I could tell him this. But I got a silent guy listening to a ball game.

  The Thread

  IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO FOLLOW THE THREAD IN advance of things happening. You can only detect it later, trailing out behind you.

  If Dubby had not guided me to my first class on the first day of college, he might never have suffered his beloved white GTO being smashed up against a telephone pole, thanks to my calico cat that needed a ride.

  Dubby and the cat had one thing in common, besides the accident. They both went by initials, not names.

  The cat was DC and Dubby was, legally, W.I. I had imagined that DC, attached to the cat when it came to us, meant Dear Cat, but no one ever confirmed this. Surely it did not mean the capital city of our land. Dubby’s mom, who had five sons, had given her youngest the initials W.I. as a designation at birth, in memory of his grandfather, Washington Irving Davis, who was always called “Mr. W.I.” As he grew, people called him Dubby—later still he would shorten it to “Dub.”

  And what does GTO stand for? I still don’t know. It was a car. It was a popular car.

  Eventually it stood for: Good-bye To Our Outings.

  On my first day of college my father had dropped me off by the school fountain and said, “Good luck.” I would be living with my parents and brother at home a few miles away from campus instead of in a dorm. College seemed overwhelming.

  Dubby looked so confident and friendly when I met him on the steps of the campus bookstore. He had thick, bright red hair hanging straight to his shoulders. He stood out. I hadn’t even seen his car yet. I asked for directions. He pointed me toward a building where my first class was located. He was a sophomore. He knew things.

  The first class went okay. It was English. English always felt like a friendly universe. Books to read, papers to write. I could do that.

  The next class, psychology, had sixty people in it and focused on the behavioral patterns of rats. We would test their feeding patterns with tiny food pellets and Skinner boxes, small “laboratory conditioning chambers” with levers. We would conduct friendly noninvasive experiments, keeping charts, writing up our results. I forget what this was supposed to demonstrate. Having raised rats for a few years in high school as a pr
ivate hobby, I felt pretty confident about this, too. But statistics had never before been involved.

  When the teacher, a small, edgy man who resembled my old favorite white rat Ralph, assigned us partners for the entire semester, my partner turned out to be Dubby. I couldn’t believe it since he was practically the only person on the campus I’d spoken to so far. Dubby turned around in his chair and waved at me.

  We were fairly vigilant about our rat feeding for the first few months, then things started falling apart. I developed bronchitis with a high fever and had to stay home for a whole week. The doctor was mad at me for being a vegetarian. He said I was anemic and had to eat meat if I wanted to get well. My mother made me chicken soup. I hated it. I dreamed of lamb chops weeping on a plate. I dreamed of eating rats. I tossed and turned in my sweaty bed.

  Dubby, on his own with our experiment, forgot to keep the chart up-to-date. I kept phoning to remind him, but he was never at home. Dubby was an extremely talented guitarist and singer. He told me his band practiced a lot. When I caught up with him by phone one midnight, he said, “Oh God. I forgot.” We would not be able to tally our final rat results if sections of our chart were empty.

  At midterm our professor posted a list of students who weren’t doing so well and we were on it. Dubby wasn’t worried. I was horrified. I pressed my face to the rat cage, begging our boys to work overtime.

  I had failed my third test for a driver’s license—once I hit the rubber cones between lanes, once I bashed into the curb while parallel parking, once I argued with the driving teacher who told me to turn left after urging me into the right lane. Was this a trick? The Texas Department of Public Safety said I had to wait three months before attempting to get a license again. So I was Dubby’s frequent passenger, but he was nice about it. If you were proud of your car, you didn’t mind driving people around.

  Dubby’s GTO was sleek and white, with a roaring loud engine, stock 389 cubic inches, and triple-barrel carburetors with progressive linkage. If you didn’t press the accelerator too hard, only one of the carburetors kicked in. So you could save gas. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but I accumulated a lot of information.