White Dresses

by Mary Pflum Peterson

Walking in through the front door, I had been stunned. The debris in the hallway that had once consisted of newspapers and magazines and laundry baskets full of school supplies had multiplied. The kitchen table was piled high with random items from the grocery store—­jars of peanut butter and jelly and paper towels that had not managed to make their way into the cabinets, which were now overflowing with cans of soup and boxes of pasta and bags of flour and jars of sauce that had expired one and two years ago. Grocery store bags littered the kitchen floor, full of boxes of cereal and oatmeal and cans of Diet Coke—­all untouched. Some bags contained perishable food—­bread, hot dog buns—­that lay decaying. Peering through the plastic wrap, I saw the mold growing and cried out, looking for a garbage can. But there were only small wastebaskets to be found. And all of these were full.

  While the kitchen floor was strewn with food, the refrigerator was oddly barren. I looked in vain for something to eat but found nothing other than a few cartons of yogurt that had long since expired and taken up residence in the small white refrigerator my mother had somehow purchased to replace the big old avocado refrigerator that hadn’t worked properly since I was in the sixth or seventh grade.

  In the living room sat a television that no longer worked. Beside it sat its smaller replacement. The floor surrounding the televisions was piled high with blankets, towels, plastic bags filled with this and that: boxes of plastic utensils, a scarf with the price tags still on it, a set of discount thank-­you notecards still sealed in their plastic wrapper, a packet of pink foam rollers, three sets of clip-­on earrings that still bore the bright orange sale stickers from Shopko. The dining room was unrecognizable—­a room where half-­unpacked suitcases, old record players, a 1980s desktop computer she’d borrowed from school, and a stack of unopened mail had come to die. And the staircase that led to the upstairs was little better. It was riddled with random items—­unopened vacuum cleaner bags, boxes of Kleenex, a new game of Boggle still sealed in its wrapper—­without rhyme or reason.

  But far worse than the sight of the mess was the smell that permeated the place. While our home had long been cluttered, it had not smelled when I was a child. Not reeked, anyway. If anything, my mother had worked to disguise the clutter of my childhood with good smells: fresh flowers, scented candles.

  But now it was different. Now the smell on the main floor of the house was wretched. It made me want to vomit. It smelled as if the whole house were a litter box that had not been cleaned for weeks, maybe months, on end. The odor confounded me, as my beloved childhood cat, Blackie, had died two years before, after living to the ripe old age of twenty-­one.

  “Where’s that smell coming from?” I asked my mother, unable to hide the look of disgust on my face. I worried that my clothes—­the suits and dresses that I’d brought home in my suitcase, the ones I’d carefully saved to buy in exotic locations like London and Paris, where I’d traveled for stories or on weekend getaways—­would pick up the smell the way my clothes picked up the smell of cigarettes when I stayed in smoking rooms in hotels or spent time in my father’s home.

  “I’ll get a maid to come in,” my mother said absently before blurting out, “Do you want to call Kim?” She was anxious to change the subject. “I know that she’ll want to see you.”

  I had come home for the holidays, but, of course, there were no Christmas decorations to be found. My mother, the former nun who continued to attend Mass on a near-­daily basis, had given up putting up large Christmas decorations in the house, including a tree, when Anthony and I left for college. And this particular Christmas, even the small decorations were absent. There wasn’t so much as an artificial wreath or Christmas candle to be found in the house.

  “Getting decorations down out of the garage—­it’s just too much,” she said.

  “I could hire someone to help you,” I offered. “I’m sure there’s a kid in the neighborhood who would love to make some money. Or someone from town? From church?” I offered.

  “Christmas is in the church,” she said firmly. “It doesn’t need to be in the house. Besides, I told you, it’s too much.”

  Everything, it turned out, was too much for Anne Diener Pflum, since her beloved parents had died.

  When Al and Aurelia Diener were alive, they served as my mother’s touchstones, the sun around which she found purpose in revolving. The convent had failed her. My father had failed her. My brother had moved to Texas to marry my new sister-­in-­law, and I had moved to the other side of the world. So in a way we had left her, too. Her siblings were spread throughout the nation. And those few friends she had in Beaver Dam called less and less and less.

  But Al and Aurelia Diener—­and her home state of Indiana—­had remained her true things. Two or three times a year, she had happily piled into her aging, un-­air-­conditioned car and made the ten-­hour trek to Indiana. At times, the visits lasted little more than a day. But she was thrilled with the contact, happy to throw her arms around her father, whom she still called Daddy, and to talk with her mother, whose approval she still sought even at the age of sixty. And every Sunday, without fail, she looked forward to the weekly phone calls they would place to their Annie, after all parties were home from Mass.

  Now, in the wake of their deaths, the phone was largely silent on Sundays. She sometimes talked to her sister Kathy in Colorado. And her sister Mimi sometimes called from Rochester, New York. But it wasn’t the same without her parents. And my mother’s will to remain in the land of the living—­or at least in the land of the Christmas decorations—­waned.

  “Is this mold?” I had asked her during that last visit, pointing to, but afraid to touch, film on a lampshade in the living room.

  “Should we maybe get rid of this?” I pressed, unable to stop my nose from wrinkling. “I bet we could find some new lamps at Shopko or Walmart. They both have decent home goods sections. It could be my Christmas present to you?”

  I looked at her hopefully. Shopping for the house, I reasoned, might be fun. It might be cheery. It might make both of us feel better.

  “Why don’t you call Kim?” my mother asked, repeating her earlier request.

  I wanted desperately to wave a magic wand, to call in a cavalry, but there was no one to call. My brother had moved on to his new life in Texas. My father had moved on to a new house and new friends in Florida. And my mother was moving on—­internally, anyway—­to a place that was harder and harder for me to reach.

  She remained in that distant place when I eventually introduced her to Mesut in Indianapolis.

  The location was my mother’s suggestion.

  “Indianapolis is a perfect meeting spot,” my mother offered. “I can stop there on my way to visit Mother’s and Daddy’s graves. It might even give me a chance to visit Trudy’s and Dad Diener’s graves.”

  If I couldn’t bring him to Beaver Dam, Indianapolis wasn’t an entirely bad idea, I conceded. It would enable me to introduce Mesut on that same visit to some of my father’s relatives and show him the Pflum family farm in southern Indiana.

  “All right,” I agreed, “if that’s what you want.”

  “It’s for the best right now if you want me to meet Mesut,” she said.

  “And if,” she added, “you’re really that serious about him.”

  I was serious. I knew it was this or nothing.

  We ultimately met at a bustling breakfast café on a hot August morning. I sat nervously beside Mesut at the window table my mother requested. My mother sat across from us, wearing a new pink cotton short-­sleeved blouse and matching pants she’d purchased from Beaver Dam’s Shopko. I knew this because the price tags had still been attached when I hugged her that morning, and I’d had to help her to remove them.

  Her hair was now entirely silver. She’d given up on the hair dye. And her face was red from the summer sun. She never could be bothered with sunscreen.

  I watched that red
face, those deep brown eyes, studying Mesut as he finished off his plate of eggs. Then came the questions, one after the other:

  “So, Mesut,” my mother asked, “how long do you intend to be a cameraman?”

  “Would you say you’re very religious?”

  “Could you see yourself living here in the U.S.? Someplace like here? Like Indianapolis?”

  Mesut answered each question perfectly. He’d be a cameraman as long as he could, but he had other interests: history, tourism, maybe business. He was Muslim, since that’s the way he was raised, but he had friends of all religions. He liked what he’d seen of the U.S. as there were so many opportunities.

  “And besides, Mary is from the U.S., isn’t she?” he said, smiling and taking my hand. “She is wonderful. The States are wonderful.”

  My mother nodded politely, asked some more questions. About his siblings. About his travels. About the weather. But it was clear that, no matter how well he answered any questions, he was failing her test.

  Two hours later, as we said goodbye on the street adjacent to the restaurant—­my mother to head to her parents’ graves, and Mesut and me to head down to visit my father’s relatives—­she asked me to walk with her to her car.

  When we were almost to her parking space, she pulled me to her in a hug.

  “Mary,” she whispered into my ear. Her tone was urgent. “What are you doing?”

  “What do you mean?” I whispered back.

  “You know what I mean,” she said, louder now. “What. Are. You. Doing?”

  A lump formed in my throat as I pulled away from her grasp and studied her face. Slowly, I shook my head. She thought this was some sort of game I was playing. She thought that because she wasn’t taking my relationship seriously, I shouldn’t either.

  “I’m. Living. My. Life.”

  I spoke to her through gritted teeth, the way I used to when I was a child.

  My mother shook her head right back at me. “Is that what it is? Living your life? You’re flitting around. First you’re in this country. Then that one. You have this address. Then that one. You never stop.”

  “What are you trying to say, Mother?” I demanded. My cheeks were flushed now. I could feel them burning, out of both rage and embarrassment.

  “Do you know where you’re going?” my mother asked. Her tone was low and direct, the way she’d always told me, during my years on the high school forensics team, mine should be when driving home the critical points in a speech. “Are you running away from something? Or to something?”

  I took another step back from my mother. “I could ask you the same thing.”

  My mother nodded, wordlessly hugged me once more, then got into her beat-­up old car. I watched her drive away in silence, then returned to my rental car, where Mesut stood waiting for me and wrapped his arm around my waist.

  “Your mother,” he said. “She is all alone. It makes me sad.”

  I nodded. “It makes me sad, too.”

  Much to my mother’s chagrin, Mesut and I grew closer. As I transitioned into a position at CNN that allowed me to divide my time between Istanbul and Atlanta and to report for the CNN feature shows Earth Matters and Science and Technology Week, we increasingly traveled to far-­flung areas to cover stories together—­he with the trusty camera, me with the notebook. We traveled to cover Europe’s worst cyanide spill. We trekked to Transylvania in the midst of a blizzard. He made me feel more protected than any man I had ever known. Never more so than when we journeyed to the Khyber Pass.

  It was January 2001, and we were on a harrowing trek through the area connecting Afghanistan to Pakistan, that mountainous region famously inhabited by foot runners bearing arms and electronics, dealers bearing weaponry, and a number of footholds and caves ideal for terrorists in search of places to hide. Osama bin Laden was on the run, and I had hired a driver and a guide and joined forces with Mesut and his mighty camera to bring to the world the story of a suffering population of Afghan refugees looking for peace and stability in an unstable region ruled by the Taliban.

  The assignment was an intense one. Western women—­particularly blond Western women like me, who wore blue jeans and leather jackets instead of burkas—­were not the norm in the region. I sat in the backseat of the car with Mesut. An armed guard and my interpreter sat in the front with our driver. We spent the day in what aid workers call a tent village—­a collection of hundreds of tents, inhabited by Afghan families desperate to get their children to safer ground.

  In the course of our visit, we’d gotten good pictures and compelling interviews. And I’d gotten the chance to play with many of the children.

  Each time I put my notebook or backpack down, the children ran to follow me, stroking my head as I bent down as if I were a dog.

  “Why are they petting me?” I asked my guard, laughing. Their little fingers tickled.

  “They touch you because you are like—­how do I say this?” He paused. “Like a unicorn. Yellow hair is something they have not seen so they want to touch you to make sure it’s real.”

  I liked this idea of being a unicorn and smiled some more. The children were delighted. But as I laughed, a representative for the villagers, wearing a long robe, shook his head, expressing his discontent.

  “You should not let the children touch you,” he told me sternly through the interpreter.

  “Why?” I asked, exchanging glances with Mesut. “They’re just children. I don’t mind.”

  “I’m not worried about them,” he said. “It’s you. Several of the children have died in recent weeks. They carry much disease.”

  I looked at the children. There were a dozen of them, a mixture of boys and girls. All were small, ages five to twelve. Their eyes were large and brown and seemed to dance in the light of the sun.

  “They don’t look sick,” I told Mesut. I would know if they were sick, I told myself.

  Two hours after we arrived at the tent village, we were back on the road. That’s when trouble began. As we wound our way around the hilly terrain, our driver motioned to our guide.

  “What is he saying?” Mesut asked the guard, his eyes widening.

  “He says there is a checkpoint ahead,” answered the guide.

  Mesut possessed many gifts—­and a sixth sense like none I’ve ever encountered was chief among them.

  “But why?” Mesut asked, seeing the blockade in the road from a distance of a quarter mile. “There was no checkpoint when we came. Why is there a roadblock now? What are they checking?”

  The driver shrugged.

  Turning to me, Mesut flashed a look of concern. “I don’t like this, Tatlim,” he said, using his favorite pet name for me, the Turkish equivalent of “my sweet.”

  “Don’t stop,” he said to the driver in a tone that bordered on a bark. “Go faster! Hit the gas!”

  Nodding in agreement, the interpreter reiterated the orders to the driver, this time in his native tongue.

  As the driver sped up, Mesut pushed me down in the backseat so that my head—­and my blond hair, the dead giveaway to the locals that I was a Westerner—­was out of sight. I felt the car accelerate, then heard the noise—­like a car backfiring—­as we sped through the checkpoint. It was gunfire.

  “Was that what I think it was?” I asked, my head still beneath Mesut.

  “Yes, Tatlim,” Mesut said.

  “How did you know?”

  “I just did,” Mesut said with a shrug. It wasn’t a shrug of arrogance. It was the Mesut shrug—­one of a natural, easy confidence.

  It would be a few months before Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl would be kidnapped and later beheaded in Pakistan—­and before dozens more American and European journalists met with angry, anti-­Western kidnappers, often at makeshift checkpoints like the one Mesut had known to blow through. But Mesut was anxious about my fate in Pa
kistan even then.

  It turned out that checkpoints and gunfire weren’t the only things I should have been afraid of on my trip to the region.

  First came the layoff: When I arrived back in Karachi the next day, I received a call from my then boss at CNN, Peter Dyk­stra, who informed me on a static-­filled cell-­phone call that my show and my job had been eliminated sometime when I was in the mountains of Afghanistan. The brand-­new merger between AOL and Time Warner had been solidified during my journey to Pakistan, and as “cost-­saving measures,” hundreds of positions at CNN were eliminated. Mine was one of them.

  “Our shows are canceled,” Peter said, referring to Earth Matters and Science and Technology Week.

  “Are you telling me I’m fired?” I asked, straining to hear Peter on the bad phone lines, and to make sense of being cut from a network just a day after having my car shot at.

  “I’m afraid so,” responded Peter’s distorted voice. “If it makes you feel any better, you’re in good company. More than four hundred ­people have been let go.

  “I hope you understand why I had to call you now before you returned home. If I’d waited until you got back, it would be a new month and you’d be entitled to another month of benefits. And AOL doesn’t like the idea of spending extra money.”

  At this, Peter laughed nervously. And I hung up.

  Then, not long after the phone call, came the fever. A bad one.

  By the morning, it had climbed to more than 104 degrees. And by the time I arrived back in Istanbul, my temperature was accompanied by a cough so tight and dry it made me feel as if my entire chest might break apart. Each time I hacked, I was left with a taste of metal in my mouth that I later learned was blood.

  Concerned, Mesut took me to Istanbul’s International Hospital. The young female doctor who examined me that day had a good grasp of the English language but struggled to explain to me what was wrong.

  “You have inhaled something, no?” she asked, looking at me with concerned brown eyes. “You were around sick ­people on your journey, no?”