Origins of the Universe and What It All Means

by Carole Firstman

  She doesn’t answer the question. “I’ve been thinking about the stupidest things all day,” she says. “While I watched the paint peel.”

  Ah, humor. Her brain is healing. I savor each nuance like this, any sign of cognitive improvement.

  My mother says she’s been thinking about her childhood, and about her life with my father during the ten years they were married (the first time), and how she can’t believe she put up with his behavior, especially back when they were newlyweds.

  Her prefrontal lobes are waking up.

  She recounts stories I already know—about the tent in the backyard, about the girlfriends who moved in with us—but I listen intently and ask lots of questions because it’s good for her to talk. Cognitively therapeutic.

  “My brain must have atrophied when I was a kid. When I lived in Arkansas,” she says of her traumatic teenage years. “Because otherwise, why did I put up with your father?”

  So instead of watching Monk or transferring photographs, I listen to my mother recount various episodes in her life, about how in hindsight she wishes she would have done some things differently, and how other choices she’s grateful for.

  “The Amazon?” I ask.

  “I didn’t like it.”

  “No?”

  “But I loved it,” she says. “I’m glad we went. Somewhere I saved the magazine article you wrote. Find it at my house.”

  “It’s here in the box. An essay, though, not an article.” I’m compelled to correct her, as the terms are nuanced, significant to me. Yes, my first published travel essay. Not an article—just the facts, ma’am—but an actual essay. A new beginning for me, a do-over—from third-grade teacher and moonlighting stringer newspaper reporter to literary writer. A transition from one career to the next.

  “Let me see.” She holds the open magazine in her lap but does not read the words. She sits in silence. She’s thinking, lost in thought. Today begins what will be my mother’s ongoing recall of isolated events—sporadic, unexpected slivers of time during the next several weeks where she flits momentarily from one memory to the next, relating snippets of her life, of my life, in no particular order, neither chronological nor discernibly associative. Random memories in random order. Articulated, reanimated, in sparse detail. But at least that’s something. For now, though, she just gazes at the wall and rests her one good hand on the open the magazine for less than a minute. “Okay.”

  “Okay what?” I know what.

  “I’m done.”

  “So what do you want?” I know what she wants. But I make her tell me in words.

  “Put it away.”

  A bird flutters briefly outside the sliding door. It rests for a moment on the bistro table next to the hedge, then darts back up to the white sky again, disappearing.

  Twenty-Six

  Amazon River, Ecuador (1997)—

  I was swimming alone, deep in the Amazon jungle. Pure bliss. The deep, black water of Laguna El Pilche was a cool, refreshing respite from the unrelenting humidity of the rainforest. I was treading water in the center of a muddy lagoon, about fifty feet from a swampy bank where countless water lilies, ferns, and orchids sprouted in thick masses. In the distance I could see the thatched roof of Sacha Lodge, a group of huts I’d called home for the past several days. The huts were empty. I glided farther toward the middle of the lagoon, turned onto my back, and closed my eyes. Floating belly up with my ears submerged, I heard the distinctive roar of approaching howler monkeys, their treetop cries rolling through the canopy like far-off thunder. Ah, the beauty of untamed nature.

  beau•ty: The quality present in a thing or person that gives intense pleasure or deep satisfaction to the mind.

  na•ture: It’s my nature to define things. There’s something soothing about the organized, categorized labeling of things and concepts, a shorthand to and for myself.

  def•i•ni•tion: It’s difficult to define my experience in the river. There’s the sheer adventure of it, of course. And then there’s all the backstory that leads up to the moment of clarification, the contextualized mother-daughter interactions of the past that eventually rise to the surface. Perhaps words like “parent” and “child” are impossible to define.

  I’d been informed by the locals a few days before that the piranhas in these waters didn’t bother people, so it was safe to swim. “As long as you’re not bleeding profusely, like from an artery,” I’d been told by an English-speaking guide, a young Australian woman with pointy red hair and an accent like Crocodile Dundee. “The piranhas stay down at the bottom, where it’s cold and dark. Feel free to swim—all the locals do it.”

  So there I was. Swimming. Alone. In the Amazon. Thinking about...piranhas?

  I’d read about various water-lurking creepy crawlies of the Amazon: Electric eels that produce shocks of six hundred volts; stingrays that deliver a crippling sting; and the tiny candiru catfish that can swim up the human urethra and become lodged there by implanting its sharp spines. Of course, we’ve all heard of the dreaded piranha. The name piranha literally means “devilfish” in Tupi, the indigenous language of this region. Little devils with razor-sharp teeth and an aggressive appetite for live meat. Sometimes human meat. A large school of these carnivorous fish were reportedly responsible for the deaths of some three hundred people several years back when their boat capsized in the Amazon River—but that was in Óbidos, Brazil, miles and miles from here. How many miles? My edition of Lonely Planet didn’t say.

  death: the total and permanent cessation of all vital functions; accompanied by a bright light, and then what?

  And what about the animals I’d seen myself, just hours or days before? The anacondas—one of the largest species of snakes in the world, known to occasionally attack fishermen. I’d spotted them curled in the trees the previous day, and I’d read that they often lurk just beneath the water, with only their nostrils poking above the surface. And the caiman—a species of alligator that floats silently down the river at night. I was pretty sure one slept beneath my hut during the day.

  From my floating position in the middle of the lagoon, my eyes jolted open and my head snapped upright. Why aren’t the locals swimming today, I wondered.

  Was there something I should have known? Perhaps it was a piranha-alert day, a safety warning system I didn’t know about, like the tornado watches of the Midwest or the smog alerts of California.

  Piranha Alert Day.

  Perhaps I haven’t made the best choice, I thought.

  The huts, the boardwalk, the marshy bank—they were a million miles away. A mild panic rose in my chest, but I managed to swallow the fear and keep my wits. Inside me, the panic cowered inside a little box the size of a ring box—I knew that if I cracked the lid just a smidgen, it would overrun me.

  Keep it down, I thought. The lid is on. On.

  I sidestroked toward the dock, kicking hard and keeping my head upright.

  Ears above water, I said to myself. Lid still on. What’s a girl like me doing in a place like this? A girly girl. In a place like this? Lid on. Ears above. A girl like me.

  I’ve always been a girly girl. As a child, I idolized both Farrah Fawcett (who played Jill Munroe in Charlie’s Angels) and Lynda Carter (former Miss World 1972, who starred in Wonder Woman). Thursday nights found me glued to the thirteen-inch Zenith television in our family’s living room. I marveled at Linda Carter’s ability to deflect speeding bullets with a flick of the wrist and a few gold bangle bracelets. And when Farrah would capture the bad guys at the end of a harrowing chase and pull a tiny weapon from her stylish high-heeled boot, I, too, would extend my arms, clasp my hands together, and stare down the barrel of my double-finger imaginary gun. “Freeze, sucker!” Farrah and I shouted in unison, our heads tilted, long blond hair spilling over one shoulder.

  tel•e•vi•sion: As a teenager, I spent an inordinate amount of time in my room with the door closed. The TV kept me company. I plugged it into the hot switch so that whenever I entered the roo
m and switched the light on, the TV blinked to life.

  i•con: I didn’t watch the Farrah Fawcett special on TV when she had cancer. To see her suffer, anyone suffer from cancer—I can’t do it. Maybe it’s the American I-can-do-anything attitude I’ve been steeped in, but I intensely believe (even when I know it’s not rational) that we are what we think, and that a positive attitude can banish any disease. I could never admit this to anyone, but part of me actually believes that only losers die of cancer. A flawed, illogical belief, I know. It stems from my neurotic need for control.

  I remember my mother’s protests. “Turn that off,” she’d shout at the television. As a microbiologist and college professor, she had no appreciation for perfectly coifed women who flailed about in sequined corsets and blindly took orders from a faceless man on the telephone. “We’re so much more than...that,” she would silently imply with a sharp glare and dismissive head shake, then flip the dial to Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.

  “Wild Kingdom?” I’d cry.

  “That or nothing. How ’bout nothing?”

  “Might as well read the freakin’ dictionary. So boring,” I’d say.

  “Fine.” She’d push the button and the screen went black. “Then it’s nothing. Enjoy the dictionary.”

  Just to be spiteful, to prove my point, I’d grab the paperback Webster’s, plop myself down on the couch with the deepest sigh I could muster, and proceed to read. Fake reading, really, just to prove a point. To save face. I’m reading the dictionary because I choose to, not because I lost this battle, I glared across the room.

  bat•tles: Things we had. An act of separation, even when one longs for closeness. Even when one doesn’t realize one longs for said closeness.

  Secretly, though, I enjoyed Wild Kingdom. I dreamed of venturing into the bush, standing inside zoologist Marlin Perkins’s open jeep. I imagined myself the cameraperson, wheeling into the Amazon, the theme song magically emanating from an amber sky: “Mutual of Omaha: we’re people you can count on when the going’s rough.” As the music faded, I’d wrestle an angry boa constrictor with one arm, steady the camera with the other. The snake would wrap itself around my neck, but I’d manage to free myself from its grip just in time. Gasping for breath, I’d sweep the camera back again for a panoramic view of the jungle marsh, the defeated serpent vanishing into the river.

  Twenty-Seven

  So when my mother invited me, Miss Girly Girl All Grown Up, to join her and her backpack-totin’, Ph.D.-holdin’, super-cool women friends to tromp through the ancient pyramids of South America and float down the Amazon River, how could I say no? “Count me in!” I said, because I am so much more than puffy hair and color-coordinated outfits. And thus began our five-week mother-daughter trek.

  Me: the inexperienced tenderfoot, with five strong, globetrotting women. It was my chance to fit in, to prove myself to my mother. So cool, so tough, so independent.

  Me: hiking boots; quick-dry cargo pants with legs that zip off to make shorts (practical, yet stylish); and a khaki safari vest with a million snap-shut, zipper-lock pouches. Because I was eager to prove my backpack-tourism toughness to the group early on, I’d even fashioned a hook that allowed my Swiss Army knife to dangle boldly from my outer vest pocket (the breast pocket where I secretly kept my lip gloss and mascara), like a bright red talisman of go-get-’em, hear-me-roar spirit. I secretly fancied myself a Charlie’s Angel turned Rambo.

  We’d been traveling nonstop for a month prior to our descent into the Amazon—through the mountains, along the coast, through villages and cities and every ancient burial ground in between. I was exhausted. I looked forward to our next stop: Sacha Lodge, set deep in the rainforest of the Upper Amazon River. I could relax, nap, and just take it easy for a few days. How much activity could there be in the jungle, after all?

  stress: The physical pressure, pull, or other force exerted on one thing by another; strain; what I caused my mother; what my mother inflicted upon me. Past, present, and future.

  trau•ma: Just being with my mother causes me trauma. We have an odd energy together, strained. Why am I here? Remember the battles? I should have stayed home.

  Getting to the lodge turned out to be an adventure in itself. From high in the Andes Mountains of central Ecuador, we took a forty-five-minute plane ride from the bustling megacity of Quito to the remote port town of El Coca. Before boarding a twelve-passenger plane, we each stepped on a scale—our seat assignments were determined by the scale’s readout, so as to distribute our collective weight evenly. “You on the right,” the copilot instructed with a wave of his arm as we stepped into the plane, “and you on the left.” I sat in front, right behind the pilot. My mother sat one row back on the left. While we seemed to be polar opposites, Dr. Rambo Microbiologist vs. Miss Glitter Lips, we apparently balanced each other out.

  Once we were in the air, the copilot also acted as our flight attendant. He turned from his seat in the cockpit, stood before me, and filled a platter with packages of crackers and small bottles of juice. “Take one and pass it back,” he announced in broken English as he handed me the goods. “And the last person please send the plate forward again.”

  I heard the crinkle of cellophane behind me and I knew my mother was filling her fanny pack with Saltines. Always preparing. Rambo in action. When the cracker basket came back my way again, I purposefully did not take any more—out of stubborn habit, I suppose—simply because my mother had.

  It was a bumpy ride over the Eastern Andes, and the turbulence made drinking juice through a straw almost impossible, if not comical. I suspect the pilots were secretly amused. Stupid Americanos.

  While in an airplane, it’s best not to think about the possibility of a crash, at least that’s my theory. Like not thinking about cancer. Or a heart attack. Or stroke. If you don’t give it mental energy, it’s not as likely to happen. Crashing is for losers.

  So while I tried not to think about crashing into the Andes’ snow-covered peaks, I accidentally did think about crashing, which made me think of Linda Carter and Farrah Fawcett. Who would be more likely to survive a fiery plane crash—Wonder Woman or Charlie’s Angel? Wonder Woman would definitely have the edge, what with her superpowers. She’d probably somersault out the open door of the plane as it plunged downward. The engine coughs and sputters toward the mountainside, flames shooting along the underside of the wings. And just as the plane pierces the mountain nose first, Wonder Woman lands squarely on her feet a safe distance away from the explosion. Yes, Wonder Woman would have the advantage. Farrah would still be in her seat, braced for impact with her head between her knees, buried in the carnage of metal and plastic and foam seat cushions melting in a ball of fire. Melting in the snow. Farrah would melt.

  She was only on the show for one full season, along with six guest appearances during later seasons. Funny how we equate her with the other angels, since she probably had the shortest stint, much shorter than Kate Jackson. Kate was the smart one, sensible and serious. But we remember Farrah. She jiggled and bounced as she ran through the city’s back alleys in leopard-print slingbacks. Barbie-like. Sort of dumb, with that gigglish laugh, but graceful in a shallow sort of way. She always came through, though; the bad guys never got away. Decades after the show, when her career was in the dumps, she rolled her naked body all over a huge canvas, smearing herself in paint. It sold for tens of thousands of dollars, I think. She was actually an accomplished sculptor, made a large collection of pieces. And just a few years ago she appeared on David Letterman, so vacuous and distracted that everyone thought she was high, including Letterman. I don’t think so. It was a publicity move. She was relying on her old parlor tricks, the I’m-dumb-and-cute shtick. It failed. I guess we expected more from her. We expected that she’d have grown up.

  No, Farrah. You’re so much more than...that, I thought, as I pushed “off” on the remote control.

  Twenty-Eight

  Once on the ground, we piled our bags and ourselves into the back o
f a flatbed truck for a ride across town. The hot, humid atmosphere in El Coca was quite a shock after the chilly altitude of Quito. But even more of a shock were the oil-covered black dirt roads and the all-pervasive evidence of the oil industry. It made me ashamed of my car back home, of my car-dependent lifestyle. I felt shallow, self-centered, the me-centric American. The me who watches television and drives to the mall to buy makeup and clothes, the me who can afford preventive health care and adventure vacations to underdeveloped countries, the me who spent ten times more money on round-ticket airfare from Los Angeles to Quito than a family in El Coca makes in a year.

  The flatbed delivered us to the bank of the muddy Napo River, one of the Amazon’s one thousand tributaries. From there we took a three-hour trip in a covered, motorized canoe. It rained furiously all the while. Although the Napo is half a mile wide in some places, it is often surprisingly shallow. Since pushing a large canoe full of people off a sandbar was not something the crew wanted to do, we zigzagged down the river following the deepest channels, avoiding trees that had fallen in recent floods.

  We passed many indigenous Quichua communities situated along the riverbanks, where small, thatched-roof houses stood on stilts and children played in chacras, small gardens growing coffee, bananas, and yucca. Mommas chasing babies with other babies strapped on their backs.

  There’s a bond that my mother and I share. We’re so different and we often don’t get along, but she’ll always be my mom. A month before we left for Ecuador, she bought me a Lonely Planet book and a Spanish-English phrasebook. “There’s a dictionary in the back,” she said as I thumbed through the Getting Around and Shopping sections of the phrasebook. “You can look up a word in either language.”