Origins of the Universe and What It All Means

by Carole Firstman

  “River,” I read. “Rio. Thanks.”

  Somewhere deep in the jungle (had the driver-guide not spoken English, I’d have been sure we were hopelessly lost, never to be found), we left our motorized boat and walked along a slippery village path that led to an elevated boardwalk through a flooded palm forest.

  My mother stopped and pointed. Two giant electric-blue butterflies clung to huge leaves overhead. “It’s an omen,” she said.

  “Yes, a good one,” I said. I took out my phrasebook and turned to the dictionary. “Butterfly: mariposa. Blue: azul.” That’s when it dawned on me that we weren’t so different, my mother and I. There we were, in a strange land far from home, carrying slightly different items—lip gloss in my pack, Pepto-Bismol tablets in hers. Practical items for different reasons, things a person might need on an adventure through the jungle. The jungle. How many daughters and mothers have canoed the Amazon River together? There we were, living the Wild Kingdom adventure. This time there was no television, no thirteen-inch Zenith to fight over. Just us, two butterflies, and a Spanish-English dictionary. “Dos mariposas es bonitas azul” I said.

  “Si.”

  Then finally, the last leg of the journey: a peaceful, twenty-minute paddle in traditional dugout canoes through the swamp to the lodge.

  jun•gle: A wilderness of dense overgrowth; a place or situation of ruthless competition. My mother and I have always been competitive with each other, even though we outwardly appear to be opposites. Granola Granny and Girly Girl. But secretly, we vie for some unnamed, intangible prize.

  com•pe•ti•tion: My therapist once asked me, “Is your mother jealous of you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you jealous of her?”

  “No. We’re just so...opposite.”

  As we approached the lodge, I was shocked to see the locals swimming in the black water, diving from the dock and frolicking without a care. Kids and adults alike played and splashed and laughed, just like the public pool in my hometown. “Aren’t there piranhas?” my mother asked our guide. That’s when we were told that yes, there are piranhas here, but unless you’re gushing blood from a main artery, there’s no danger of attack. Evidently there are forty to sixty piranha species, some much more aggressive than others. It’s the really aggressive ones we hear about, the ones that make world headlines. The ones featured in Loney Planet. The Tupi devilfish of legend.

  Sacha Lodge would be home sweet stilted home for the next several days, the closest thing to luxury one will find in Amazonia. The main building is literally a tree house about six feet above the water—three stories high with a dining room on the bottom floor, a bar on the second floor, a small library on the third floor, and a little observation deck on top. Boardwalks lead to seven duplexlike, thatched-roof cabins. Each room features a flush toilet, hot water (a rarity in this neck of the woods), and screened walls. A generator provides electricity from 6 a.m. until 10 p.m. Accommodations fit for Farrah.

  For the first three days in the jungle, I was able to keep up the arduous pace of my diehard travel companions. Before sunrise the first morning, we pulled on our Wellies—knee-high rubber boots—and hiked through the fauna. A bare-chested native guide, a black-haired man with a round face, blazed the way with machete in hand. Bringing up the rear was our other guide, the Australian woman with pointy red hair.

  The trail led us through pristine high ground where the rainforest canopy reaches its greatest height. Hundreds of fifty-foot kapok trees towered above, their roots forming huge buttresses and stilts to give support on thin soil. That afternoon, we climbed to the top of a 130-foot observation tower perched above the biggest kapok of all. It was there, high above the canopy, that my mother leaned against the damp wood rail of the observation platform and peered through her binoculars.

  “It’s a three-toed sloth,” she said, giddy with childlike excitement. With an outstretched arm, she pointed in the sloth’s general direction while keeping the binoculars pressed firmly against her face. Watching her revel in her discovery reminded me of Marlin Perkins’s narration, the episodes we’d watch when I was a kid, how I’d dream of exploring exotic jungles and faraway lands. And now here we were, traipsing among spotted toucans, parrots, monkeys, and snakes.

  “This is the life,” my mother said when the sloth had finally climbed out of sight, and I agreed.

  I realized then that, although we weren’t getting along particularly better at that moment than we had during the day, at least we weren’t not getting along. In fact, we were having a pretty good time. Standing in the sky-high treetop, spotting exotic animals in their natural habitat, we shared an experience, did something that most mothers and daughters would never do. We had embarked on an adventure, and now, in the thick of it, halfway through the journey, the three-toed sloth brought the old Wild Kingdom show to life. Real life. Real time. No closed door. No dictionary or heavy sighs. We’d grown past that, at least for now, for this moment.

  Twenty-Nine

  That evening we all piled into a single dugout canoe to search for caiman, the alligators of South America. In the dead of night we paddled silently through the swamp. With six people in one canoe, it would have been easy to tip over. Our native guide called out in caiman-language grunts—a deep, throaty grumble. And then, when something in the darkness grunted back, a sharp stabbing pain shot from my belly up through my throat. With a flashlight clutched between his teeth and the machete tucked into the waist of his shorts, the guide got out of the boat, walked barefoot through the waist-deep water, and picked up a two-foot-long baby caiman. Its eyes reflected the light and its vertical pupils narrowed to knife-thin slits. The guide clamped the caiman’s long, teeth-filled mouth shut with one hand and pinned its writhing tail under his arm. Its glowing yellow eyes made me gasp. “You want to touch?” the guide asked, and brought it over so we could have a look.

  I wondered where Momma Caiman was. Any momma of any species will protect its young, will attack and kill any perceived threat. Momma bears will rip a man from limb to limb to protect their cubs. Momma humans can lift cars to save their children. My mother would do anything for me. That’s what mommas do—they turn off the television, they get their Ph.D. and buy a house and put food on the table. They buy you dictionaries. They make mistakes and they’re hard to get along with and they disapprove of things they don’t understand. But I understand, so she must have done something right. I understand that we each have our own definitions of what makes a woman. I need not define our relationship by our differences. I understand that my mother saves packets of saltine crackers while I imagine Wonder Woman somersaulting from a crashing plane. And that’s okay, it’s all okay. That’s what mommas do; they remember the Wild Kingdom dream and they stuff snacks into fanny packs in case we’re hungry later.

  “You touch?” the guide said again. How many teeth does a momma caiman have, I wondered. As the guide stepped closer, I protested and squirmed involuntarily. The canoe tipped side to side and almost flipped us out. “No move!” the guide yelled at me, and henceforth I was banned from nighttime canoe rides.

  a•dap•ta•tion: The ability of a species to survive in a particular ecological niche, especially because of alterations of form or behavior brought about through natural selection. It’s not like the Amazon trip fixed everything. We still annoyed each other plenty, believe me—we still do. But we’ve learned to work around each other’s quirks. Or just give each other space. Every creature requires a certain amount of unencumbered habitat, a zone of no-enter-dom. I stopped slamming the door in my mother’s house years ago. Now we find other ways to keep a wide berth, sometimes wider and sometimes narrower, but a tacit agreement exists. And it mostly works.

  Thirty

  By day three, I’d gotten the hang of jungle life. There are some simple rules to living in Tarzan’s kingdom:

  a)Everything is sopping wet all the time—your clothes, your bath towel, your bed sheets. Your shirt will actually mold while
you’re wearing it. There’s nothing you can do about this.

  b)The drinking water is brown. It’s filtered water from the river. The brown is tannin and harmless (so I’m told), so pretend it’s flavorless tea and enjoy.

  c)The insects are huge. If you wake during the night to find a beetle the size of a dinner plate clinging to the cabin screen or the wall next to your head, don’t scream. It will wake Momma Caiman under your boardwalk, and she’s already perturbed.

  d)Don’t wear makeup, not even mascara. It doesn’t fit the safari-vest image, and it just slides off in the humidity anyway. Clear lip gloss is okay.

  e)A Swiss Army knife is every woman’s best friend. Scrape the muck from under your fingernails; trim your bangs; flick dime-sized ants off your pillow and wrestle your crackers from their mandibles.

  By day four, I really needed a day off. Between the day hikes and nighttime scary noises, I was worn out. “Go on without me,” I told the Rambo chicks as they tromped into the jungle.

  My mother reached into her fanny pack and handed me packages of pulverized Saltines. “Here, I saved these for you,” she said.

  “Thanks. I’m going to nap in my hammock, then do a little Lonely Planet reading. I might even go for a dip—I’ve seen the locals do it. It’s safe.”

  But now, in the middle of this black lagoon—what a fool, I said to myself.

  I was alone in caiman territory. In deep water. How deep? I pulled my arms through the water, but I got nowhere. I wondered how long it would take a school of piranhas to devour my flesh, clean my skeleton of all muscle, tendons, and cartilage. Would my bones float to the surface or settle into the mud? Or I could simply drown out there. Panic and flail and choke. Sink below the surface in a frenzy—down to the dark depths of the Tupi devilfish, like a Domino’s Pizza delivery to the underbelly of the Amazon.

  What’s a girl like me doing in a place like this, I wondered. A girl...like me?

  e•vac•u•a•tion: 1) Expulsion, as of contents. 2) Physiology: discharge, as of waste matter through excretory passages, especially from the bowels. 3) Removal of persons from an endangered area. 4) Get me the hell outta here.

  Girl like me, I thought.

  Lid still on. Ears above water.

  There is no other girl like me.

  In my head, Marlin Perkins narrated the scene. The camera panned around, focused on me, and Wild Kingdom’s sky sang: “... you can count on when the going’s rough….”

  I was a Charlie’s Angel, holding the bad guys at bay. “Freeze, motherfuckers,” I said out loud and took another stroke—or maybe I just thought the words.

  Arm out, stroke. Lid on. Stroke.

  Stand back, all evil fish, all things creepy and crawly. I swim where I dare!

  I roared in unison with the howler monkeys above and glided with ease toward the marshy bank.

  Stroke and glide.

  Because like my mommy said, I am so much more.

  PART IV

  Starry Nights

  Thirty-One

  Visalia, California (2013)—

  My father telephones from Mexico to ask how things are going. I answer in half-truths.

  “How’s my house?” he asks.

  “Great,” I tell him. I don’t tell him I’ve let a friend move in for free.

  “How’s my stuff?”

  “Good,” I tell him.

  I tell him that the one hundred and one legal-size boxes from Office Depot that he packed during his last visit home have been moved into the shed. (Save for a brief return to Visalia several months after the three-week-visit-with-a-vague-return-date scheme—just long enough to box his belongings—he’s stayed in Mexico. So far, so good.) My father still has hopes that my brother will arrange to have the boxes shipped via an international moving company, but the fact that it would cost ten times more to ship the stuff than it would to replace most of it has my brother stalling. I tell my dad that shipping is expensive. I tell him that because my brother lives half of the time here and half of the time there, he might drive to Mexico with my dad’s stuff sometime in the (vague) future.

  I don’t tell him that other than the one hundred and one boxes in the shed, almost everything is gone. My brother and I got rid of the furniture and knick-knacks and clothes and DVDs and magazines and, yes, even the massive porn collection that took up half the garage cabinets. I don’t remind him that when he left two-plus years ago he vowed (promised?) he wasn’t coming back, not ever, that Mexico would be permanent, that my brother and I should keep or otherwise dispose of his stuff—all his stuff—other than the Office Depot boxes. I don’t tell him that we gave much of it away, some to charity, but most—even the porn—to a pair of men fortuitously cruising the neighborhood in a broken-down pickup and asking for scrap metal. It was their lucky day. I don’t tell him we did this to make room for my friend. I don’t tell him we let my friend move in as barter for maintaining the place, how David and I are planning things out for when David moves to Mexico for good, how I’m up to my eyeballs as it is and maintaining yet another a vacant house will put me over the edge. I don’t tell him about my friend moving in because I don’t want to hurt his feelings. I don’t tell him for fear he’ll get territorial and rush back to Visalia, to his rightful house, to his boxes, to me.

  “How’s your mom?” he asks.

  I tell him I’m in the middle of cleaning out Mom’s house in Three Rivers because she’ll never live there again, and it’s a huge mess because she’s a lifelong hoarder, you know, and the junk’s piled sky high inside and out like in the old sitcom Sanford and Son—not to mention the rats’ nests in the enclosed porch where Mom used to sleep on cool summer nights, oh my God I think she slept among rats, and the rodent poop, how it’s all over her art studio, in every junk-filled box and on every pile of old papers and in between papers and inside boxes of dried paints, and junk and junk and junk, and old photos, and junk, and wadded clothes jammed between this and that, and junk and dust, and why are there random dishes and silverware in the box with extension cords and income tax returns and unopened boxes of Kleenex and canned corn, and did I mention the rat poop and junk, or maybe it’s mice, you know hantavirus is a life-threatening disease spread to humans through contact with contaminated dust from mice droppings and it’s really dusty out there in the art studio and I’ve had a headache for days—and it’s a forty-minute drive each direction from her house to mine and I don’t have time for the house-cleaning project or my school or my job, what with taking her to therapy and the doctors and keeping her engaged each day so she does more than watch the paint peel from the walls—and to make it a thousand times worse, she’s a complete and utter pill when I try to engage her because she doesn’t want to be engaged, she just wants to be left alone in the dark and not be spoken to, but she does want me to hover over her and fill her cup with peach Snapple and adjust her pillow and wiggle her big toe and smooth her blanket—just not talk to her while I do it—in other words, even though she’s officially out of my house, even with the paid caregivers on duty—thank God we can afford the assisted living—I’m still a caregiver/slave and I might be stretched a little thin right now, and well, to be honest, I don’t sleep well at night—in fact I hardly sleep at all and I haven’t for a year now since she had the aortic dissection and succession of strokes and the ICUs and hospitals and rehab hospitals and skilled nursing facilities and then home health care at my house, and then finally, thank God for assisted living and everyone who’s helped—the nurses, the therapists, my husband, Aunt Tonya, Mom’s best friend, the other few friends I haven’t managed to alienate because I’ve pretty much dropped out of sight what with all these new responsibilities that have taken over my life, and how I get annoyed even with people trying to help, even my friends or Mom’s friends who are older and wiser and full of advice because, you know, I get tired of everyone giving me advice when they haven’t lived a single day in my life...they tell me what I need to do,you need to blah-blah-blah they say, but th
ey don’t really fucking know what it takes, I mean really takes, and how most of it doesn’t work and there are only so many hours in the goddamn day—well, they all tell me I’m a bit edgy (no fucking kidding) and that perhaps, just perhaps, I should go back to yoga or take a day off or get an antianxiety prescription. Like maybe Xanax.

  “Oh, Carole, I’m so sorry,” he says. “I wish there was something I could do to help your mom.” And then he starts to cry. He says he wants to be by her side, just lie down on the floor next to her bed and tell her how much he loves her. “Do you think she would understand?” he asks. “Maybe that would help her get better. Should I fly back to see her?”

  I tell my father now’s not a good time to visit.

  When I study that old photo, the one I showed my mother recently, the one of four-year-old me standing next to the laundry basket wearing my mother’s bra, I imagine what fills the penumbra, the unseen area that lies beyond the framed border. I imagine my father, young again, holding the camera to his eye, his finger pushing the lever, the square flashcube illuminating the room while the aperture clicks open, then shut. I imagine the contents of my parents’ house back then, the silverware with little starbursts patterned into the handles and the reel-to-reel tape recorder and the peace-sign pendent in my father’s bottom desk drawer—and how, like all of us, my parents accumulated and periodically purged throughout their lives, purged during their moves from house to house, their shifts from marriage to divorce, from phases of interest to disinterest, from hobby to hobby, from career goals to accomplishments and compromised settlements. I imagine the one hundred and one boxes currently in my father’s shed and wonder how he decided what was worthy of packing, worthy of saving. When I think about the decision process my father must have gone through—what to keep and what to discard, and the fact that he did so with the knowledge that he’s coming close to the end of his life—well, this prompts me to reflect on my own life, decisions I’ve made, things I’ve acquired or let go, whether or not I’ve acquired the right contents for my life, tangible or otherwise.