“You did,” I say. “We’re rehearsing for a show tonight.”
“An Arabic show?” His head jerks around to stare at me. Yep, there they are. Those deep dark Arab eyes.
“Yes. Well, Arab Americans are in it, too. And the star will be a brilliant elder poet from the old country who’s going to be saying poems spontaneously as the music plays. That is the heart of the show. I heard he can go on for an hour without a script or anything, in the old Bedouin tradition. He makes it up.” I say this famous elder’s name, though I can’t remember it now.
And the driver starts crying. First he tries to pretend he’s coughing. But I can tell from the trembling of his shoulders. Then I see, in the car mirror, wet pools in his eyes. We’re at a really long stoplight behind a bus. He wipes his eyes with the back of his hand.
“Do you know him?” I ask. “You must! Where are you from?”
“I am from southern Lebanon. I know the poems of this man you mention since I was a child. Yes. They are inside my body. I think my father heard him once and I also heard a tape of him. Ya’Allah, I cannot believe he is in the city of New York. I thought he was a hundred years old many years ago.”
“Maybe he was. I haven’t seen him yet, but they say he has some years on him. Say, do you want some free tickets to the show? Here you go!”
I throw the bright green tickets into the front seat.
We’re in Greenwich Village already, and I’m hopping out at the café. The taxi door is open. I poke a ten over the seat, but he brushes it away. “No! You have given me tickets to hear the music of my soul! I will see the poet who lives inside my heart forever. I could never take money. Never, never!” He’s yelling passionately and people on the sidewalk are glancing at us. Maybe they think we’re arguing over the fare—which we are, but not in the way they might think.
“Friend, the tickets were free. Driving is your job! You need to take money!”
“Keep your money. I refuse it. Life is music, not money. Everything is music!”
My small jet had landed somewhat rockily, in a rainstorm in Santa Barbara.
I took a very deep breath. It is always so good to be on ground again.
Joe of Rose Cab was standing outside the airport next to his car wearing a damp wide straw hat and carrying an umbrella. He held it over my head so I wouldn’t be drenched as I climbed into his taxi. He said, “Was your plane flight very rough?”
“It wasn’t great,” I said. “The pilot told us our flight would be ‘deteriorating’ for the last fifteen minutes. It gave me a headache. I like bigger planes.”
The rain was coming down in strong sheets. Joe paused to go around large puddles in our lane. I could not place his accent. I noticed his meter was not running as we drove and asked him about it. “I am giving a gift,” he said mysteriously.
Normally I ask people where they are from, but that day I was just wishing to be home in Texas asleep in my bed. Maybe he is Latino, I thought drowsily. That hat looks South American. Maybe he is from Paraguay or Bolivia.
At the hotel, which did not have a doorman, Joe got out of the car and carried my luggage all the way to the elevator inside the lobby. When I pulled out money, he put up his hand to push it away. “Later,” he said. He touched the brim of his hat with an old-world courtesy. “Do you need to go anywhere else?”
I said, “Well, yes, actually. After I take a nap and recover.” I told him my schedule for the next two days. “So, you’ll come back and get me? Do you want me to pay you for all the trips together, or what?”
Joe just shrugged.
I watched him cross the lobby with a slight stoop, his neat cotton khaki-colored shirt tucked perfectly into his darker khaki pants. Honduras? Guatemala?
Hours later he was right on time, waiting outside the hotel. He drove me across town to see Katherine, a second cousin of my mom’s who had materialized in our lives only a few years earlier. A cheerful Christian Scientist in her eighties, she had told my mom and me that our long-dead German Lutheran ancestors were not nearly as goody-goody as my mom had believed them to be. They had all kinds of normal flaws. This was refreshing news. My mom had felt burdened by their piety all her life. Katherine told us we could give that up. She had baked an incredible moist lemon cake especially for us.
I was excited to see her again. When I stepped out of the cab at her place, Joe pushed my money away again. “No, no, you pay nothing. This is free. It’s on me.”
“But why? I don’t know why you’re being so nice to me!”
Joe smiled and shook his head. He promised to take me to work the next morning, too.
I felt mystified. I asked Katherine, “Do Santa Barbara taxi drivers ever refuse to take money from you?”
She said, “Never.”
When she and I called a taxi to take us to a famous burrito restaurant, the driver took our money like any normal driver would.
The next morning Joe was sipping coffee in the hotel lobby as he waited for me. “Hello, Mr. Generous,” I said. He looked away. Maybe I should have worried that he was going to do something bizarre, but he seemed so completely trustworthy. He wouldn’t take money for that trip, either. “Joe,” I said. “What’s going on here? This is your job, right? So you have to take money when you drive people in your cab. Right?”
He shrugged. “I don’t feel like it. Don’t ask me.”
So I said, “Tomorrow why don’t you charge me double when you take me back to the airport, since I need to go there at five A.M.?”
He said, “Five A.M., four, it’s all the same to me. I’ll be here.”
I tried to press a ten into his hand, saying, “This is just a tip,” but he wouldn’t take it. Very strange. So I made my plan. I’d slip a wad of bills into his hand at the airport and run away as fast as I could. Then he couldn’t give it back.
At five A.M. the next day he was leaning against the taxi with his eyes wide open and his arms crossed on his chest, peacefully. When he saw me, he raced forward to grab my bags. In the car he said, “It’s a beautiful morning, isn’t it? Not like when you arrived. You’ll have a smooth flight today.”
We drove alongside the fabulous blue ocean. The highway was calm. Even the seagulls were asleep. I said, “It must feel great to live in such a beautiful place.”
He didn’t answer.
So I said, “How long have you lived here?”
An early surfer ran across the sand with an orange surfboard. I said, “Joe, where were you born? I’ve been trying to figure it out, but I can’t.”
He sighed.
Some days I forget where I’m from, too, and I realize it’s not everyone’s favorite question, but it’s always a curiosity.
Then it struck me. The sadness in those eyes.
It was the same sigh I have been hearing all my life from my father, my uncles, my cousins, every one of them. How dumb could I be?
“I am from,” he said softly, “Jer-u-sa-lem.” He articulated the syllables very clearly, as if I might never have heard them before.
I slapped the back of his seat and he jumped.
“So is my father, Joe!”
He turned to look at me.
I said, “You are Palestinian?” and he nodded. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t recognized his accent. Maybe, after years of mingling with California immigrants, his accent had absorbed so many mixed-spice lilts into its nubby texture. Everyone was in there now. Every lonely driver and yard worker and dishwasher and maid.
He turned his head and said, “I thought you seemed familiar too. Hmmmm. I never tell anyone where I am from anymore unless they ask me. It is a sad place to be from these days. All days. Very sad.”
I said, “Oh Joe, I know! Do you still have family over there?”
He nodded. “Everyone is there. Very bad days for them. My family is trapped. They can’t move. They are too scared. It is like living in a prison. They can’t come, they can’t go. I wish they could move here, but it’s so hard and they feel attached to home, even i
f the situation is terrible.”
“No one knows the real stories,” I said. “I mean, unless you are there or have been there. People read the newspapers and they have no idea of the things that go on.” Then I said, “My grandmother lived to be a hundred and six in the village of Sinjil.”
“I know that village well,” he said, veering around the yellow cones that mean construction. “The village that used to be famous for grapes. They don’t have them anymore, and no one knows why. Well, your grandmother had a long life. Hopefully she had a scrap of happiness in it. People aren’t living that long now. People are dying in the streets. Too many young people ran away. No futures for them. Everything broke.”
At that point his voice broke, too.
Joe, crying in the front seat. Me, crying in the back.
I repeated his words. “Everything broke,” patting his shoulder over the seat, realizing he had been “giving me a gift” without any idea we shared the same ethnicity. Now it would be even harder to get him to take money.
But surely the whole point of him being in this country was to make money to send home. Moments later I would press a fistful of twenties on him as he resisted, poking them straight into his pocket, then dashing away with my little suitcase on wheels, tears streaming down my cheeks.
But before that I said, “And here you are in California, all that trouble so far away.”
“And here I am,” he said soberly—Joe, who surely wasn’t Joe to begin with, staring hard through the taxi window, careful to take the right lane to Departures.
Roses
A TAXI DRIVER AT WASHINGTON NATIONAL Airport points at my hat, then at his. We are wearing the exact same beige woolen cap with a rolled brim like Afghani freedom fighters wear on the evening news.
Of course, since we are in the heavily cosmopolitan metropolis of government and embassies and culture and art and history, we could be wearing all sorts of garb.
“I got mine in Peshawar, Pakistan, a long time ago,” I say, grinning. “Where did you get yours?”
“Peshawar!” He waves his hand happily in the air. “I am from Peshawar! Why were you there? Why didn’t you come to see me?”
We’re pulling out onto the highway. I always love staring down into the Potomac as one lands here, catching glimpses of familiar monuments in the distance, imagining George Washington taking a little twilight stroll on his riverfront property with his hands folded behind his back and his white ponytail bouncing.
Cars, cars, cars. Virginia license plates mixed with D.C. license plates and their disgruntled TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION slogan. I don’t blame them one bit. Anyway, it’s better than New Hampshire’s LIVE FREE OR DIE, which seems so melodramatic.
I say to my Hat Brother, “Well, I was visiting schools in your country! I was visiting marketplaces and poets. But you, tell me, do you like living here in this place of power?”
He says, “Yes, it’s very nice, but it’s getting too expensive.”
I say, “I do not know what young people will do.”
He says, “I do not know what anyone will do.”
Then he asks, “How many rose bushes do you have?”
This is a surprise. On me?
“You mean at home?” I ask.
“Yes, yes!” He is whizzing around a bus.
Somehow I don’t feel like the first person he’s ever asked this question to.
I have to close my eyes and count them in my mind. There’s the tall climbing white one and the raggedy-leafed yellow one and the sturdy red one and…
“Ummmm—seven, I think. Five big ones and two small. One of them is the child of the largest climbing rosebush in the United States, in Tombstone, Arizona. That one’s as big as a small house. Mine is pretty big, too. The ancestor plant of the rosebush came from Scotland originally. The baby was brought to me in a coffee can. A couple of the rosebushes aren’t doing very well; they might be dead. What about you?”
He turns his head proudly, “I have eighty!”
“Eighty rose bushes?”
“Yes, eighty here in America. My yard here is not very big, so they are close together. Perhaps they would be a little happier with more breathing space. And guess how many I have back home in Pakistan?”
“I have no idea. Tell me.”
“Four hundred!”
“Goodness! So many! It sounds like a lot of work!” I say.
He stares at me in his rearview mirror disapprovingly.
“No, my friend, it is not work; it is beauty. Where there is beauty, work doesn’t matter. You could work night and day, and the result would be more beauty. I have been in the United States only six years, or I would have more roses here. Of course there were the climate differences to learn about, and I don’t have as many people to help me here. In fact, I have no one. Many times I find myself gardening by the light of the moon. Or the light from the post in the alleyway. I am thinking to buy some of those flaming torches I saw in a movie, to make light in the dark for gardening.”
We’re passing the old post office building with its ornate towers and cornices. The National Gallery with the World of Art tucked inside. “Who’s taking care of all those rosebushes back home?”
“My friends and relatives.” His voice sounds wistful now. “I send them money. Rosebushes are cheaper over there, of course. In the United States each one costs more. I buy them at the end of the season to enjoy the discount. Then I must tend them indoors till the perfect planting moment. Since my mission here was to make money to send home, I really can’t be splurging as much as I would like to, so now I am working with small shoots, rooting them to have a new bush. I am trying to marry some of my bushes. It is a difficult procedure, but I have had a few successes lately.”
I am always impressed by masses of flowers since I feel excited at home when even a single flower blooms. It takes a certain amount of bravado—and money, he’s right—to plant masses.
In fact, we’re passing giant beds of red and yellow tulips in the center of the median as we speak. Cities have plenty of money. I say, “Look, even in this wind, the tulips are keeping their heads on! That’s amazing!”
He turns his head and smiles ruefully. “Of course, Madam, they are nature. Nature is very strong. They are doing what nature is supposed to do.”
We reach the hotel, and I feel sorry. I would have liked to ask for gardening tips. Did he feed his roses coffee grounds as Mexican women do? Did he sprinkle ice around their roots to pep them up? Did the roses help him feel less lonely far from his country? Did he plan to go home someday? Could a few inhalations of rose scent help him feel the world was a friendlier place? Did he cut blooming roses for vases in his rooms? Or was he a non-cutter?
I pulled the rolled brim of my brown wool hat down dramatically around my face before I paid him. He lifted the brim of his hat as if he were tipping it gallantly. It was a very versatile hat. And the whole time I was in Washington, I kept wishing I were back home in Texas, puttering around my yard with the silver bucket and the trowel and the hose, taking care of my roses.
Backseat
IT WAS HARD FOR THE THREE-YEAR-OLD BOY to understand where his two great-great-aunties had gone.
They died, in their nineties, within three weeks of each other. He was used to them riding around in our backseat. We’d visited enchilada cafés, peach stands, flower stalls, yard sales. We’d go out in the mornings and stay gone much of the day, until it got too hot for them—stopping anywhere anyone wanted to stop. We’d look at the old tiled gate in Brackenridge Park. We’d feed the ducks. Once we drove around a little lake three times just so they could watch the sunset.
The aunts wore flowery dresses and gauzy blouses and stockings rolled below their knees. My son liked to feel the nylon. He tickled the aunties on their ankles and they tickled his belly. He would flop around on their beds and couches giggling, in between our jaunts into the world.
They all pointed out the window a lot. He rode in his car seat on the passenger
side in front and kept his head turned around to look at them. They touched his long wavy hair, his soft skin. They were surprised by the cooing sweet burbles that popped out of their own mouths. Neither of them had ever had children of her own. Della said he was the first child she had ever loved and good thing he showed up, because she was almost ready to check out and how sad it would be to leave without loving a child. Leonora said, “That’s my boy!” We were their personal taxi drivers.
To say “They died” didn’t satisfy him.
“But where are they?” he kept demanding. “Why can’t we go get them? Where are the sugar cookies?”
One day I actually took him to their graves, and he pounded on Leonora’s tombstone as if it were a door. He said, “Come back here! Open up!”
I started crying. A pale feather flew in front of my face right then and I grabbed it and gave it to him. “Maybe this is a message,” I said. He took it back to the car, but didn’t hold on to it long. What kind of comfort is a feather?
We were out driving, just the two of us, a few weeks after the second startling departure. When people you love die, the world feels abandoned, even in traffic. We were looking for a place that sold tall expandable silver poles to hold up purple martin houses, and we had the name of the place scribbled on a small white scrap of paper. A hardware store man had written it down for us, as well as the pole’s dimensions and the way to ask for it. Hardware lingo. And my son said it again, “Where are they? I want a taco!”
“Some people would say they’re in heaven,” I said. “Heaven is supposed to be a nice, peaceful, pretty place. I think they both believed they were going to heaven.”
“Where is heaven?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if I believe in it.”
“Is it like the rose nursery?”
We were always driving the aunties to the south side of town to an old Dutch plant nursery, where they would exclaim ecstatically over plump roses, poke their noses into intoxicating petals, and try to find a cheap one. Della found a radiant red Don Juan rosebush once for ninety-five cents. I think the “9” in front of the dot on the tag ($9.95 regular price) had washed away in a rain. The manager, with a bemused expression, actually let her have it for ninety-five cents.
I'll Ask You Three Times, Are You OK? Page 10
