The Measure of My Powers: A Memoir of Food, Misery, and Paris

by Jackie Kai Ellis

  FRESH FRAISES DU BOIS or alpine strawberries if you can find them in the summer.

  RADISHES, with good butter from the fromagier and fleur de sel.

  OYSTERS eaten right at the stall on plastic plates. At some stalls, they will pour white wine into the empty shells for you to drink.

  THE CONGO

  {2012}

  TRYING TO FORGET DOESN’T REALLY WORK.

  IN FACT, IT’S PRETTY MUCH THE SAME AS REMEMBERING.

  But I tried to forget anyway, AND TO IGNORE THE FACT THAT I WAS REMEMBERING YOU ALL THE TIME.

  Rebecca Stead, When You Reach Me

  I KEPT SOME OF MY STORIES HIDDEN INSIDE ME FOR A long time. I would tell the ones about Paris and eating pastries until my soul vibrated with excitement, or the one of how I came to open Beaucoup Bakery. But for many years, I danced around certain memories that I held closer to me than those, if that was even possible, wary not to step on them. They weren’t memories that I valued more; rather, there were simply shades in each story I didn’t yet understand. So I guarded them, untouched, and some things that started out simply being unspoken became private things. Like gravity, there must be a law of nature that says that the longer a memory is silent, the further back it moves, without relevance or reason to tell it.

  “When I was traveling through Rwanda to the DRC…” I mentioned matter-of-factly to a friend one day.

  “Wait, you were in the Congo?” she interrupted.

  After living in Paris for about four months, we left. G wanted to visit his sister in the DRC. She worked as a gorilla conservationist, and it was an opportunity for me to see a world that was so extremely foreign to me, even more so at the time, since I had traveled very little. I was enthusiastic to experience something different.

  When we landed in Rwanda, I noticed that not only did the French language have a different sound from the one I had been hearing for months in Paris, but even the beauty was different. Bright neons and primary patterns wrapped around bodies and into fabric sculptures adorning the crowns of majestic women. I studied the yellow tulip-shaped skirts that hugged their plump and sturdy curves, and moved with rhythmic ease.

  G’s sister and her Congolese boyfriend were waiting for us in a car at the Kigali airport, ready to escort us across the border into the DRC. As we caught up during the four-hour drive, I observed the landscape. Bright metal shacks dotted lush tropical hills in multitudes of greens, a hot white light reflecting off their roofs. Women walked along the roadside with bundles balanced on their heads, and children horsed around with stained and tattered T-shirts and bare feet.

  Along the way we stopped at a little general store on the side of a dirt road that sold essentials, like water, cookies, and snacks. It was dirty and dark inside, the only daylight coming through the front door. Everything was unfamiliar. The cookies were in strange and artificially bright packaging and the bottles of water looked a little dusty and dubious. After an exchange between the shopkeeper and G’s sister about the actual price of the water—I was told later that there were higher “white” prices than prices for locals—we paid and turned to leave. I looked back at the shopkeeper and was startled to catch an expression on his face that was tainted with hostility.

  When we arrived at the border of the DRC, it was nighttime, and I was tired from travel so I followed my sister-in-law’s movements. If she went left or sat down, I mimicked her blankly. I didn’t understand what was happening, so I was obedient, handing over my passport when asked, sitting there for hours while she argued with the border guards in a tiny waiting room with butter-colored walls filled with a crowd of locals. After the heated negotiation, we followed the usual process of entering the country as non-locals and slipped a few American bills into hidden hands. Then we crossed over and headed for Goma.

  I

  THE GROUND IN GOMA WAS LIKE A RAPID, BLACK RIVER frozen in time. A volcano had recently erupted, leaving the roads in a bad state, but no one there really cared much about things that the average North American might consider a terrifying crisis. I wondered if the locals had to prioritize their panic amid what seemed like so many other daily concerns, or if they all became numb when there was just too much to worry about.

  We spent a few days watching life: eating local fruits, going to the dressmaker, socializing with UN aid workers in their “off time,” drinking beer at Congolese clubs, and hopping onto the backs of “moto-taxis” to zip from one local joint to the next.

  Only one person could sit on the back of each moto with the driver, and when the group of us traveled together, G’s sister always kept a keen eye on where her brother and I were within the cluster of bikes, for “safety,” she vaguely said. On our way home from dinner one night, we took motos as usual. I balanced on the back of one, hanging on to the driver’s shirt, feeling the night air filter through the scarf wrapped around my hair and face, protecting me from the clouds of dirt. My driver fell to the back of the pack and slowed down so much that the high-pitched hum of other bikes began to soften. The driver spoke to me, asking me where I was from, turning his head back to tell me I was beautiful and that he wanted to take me elsewhere. I wasn’t quite sure I understood, so I pretended not to hear and demanded he speed up. The more he persisted in talking to me and the farther back we fell, the more forceful I became, until I was nearly yelling in broken French, insisting that he speed up, “Non! Je ne comprends pas! Allez plus vite! Maintenant!!”

  He revved the engine and the moto began to move quickly again. The others had stopped to wait by the side of the road near our home, and once the bike I was on stopped, I got off as quickly as I could, my heart pumping hard in my chest.

  II

  WE TRAVERSED THE COUNTRY TOWARD THE VIRUNGA mountains in search of gorillas. We sat in the back of an open NGO truck, looking out at passing parched farms and little huts, bouncing and being tossed by the wildly uneven roads. Children ran beside the truck with their hands out, asking for candy, but when they realized we didn’t have any, they began shouting and spitting at us. I was startled and a little apologetic—this was a glimpse of a life so removed from my own story, but it all passed by too quickly, and I couldn’t make sense of it.

  On the day we planned to hike, I awoke in our small hut, zipped cozily into my sleeping bag. After a sparse breakfast of tea and dry biscuits from a package, the four of us walked into the morning light through tuber fields, headed for the base of the mountains. For eight hours, we tracked a trail of broken branches and footprints through fire ant nests, branches oozing sticky black sap, and thick, heavy brush at times coming up to my waist that we cleared just enough to pass by. After hours of wandering, we came to a small clearing. There, sitting fifteen feet away, was an animal so wild and so powerful that my frailness was immediately heightened in comparison. We didn’t need to prepare for this encounter; the only rule our guides gave us just before we started our trek was to stay calm if four hundred pounds of dense muscle approached us—“If they charge, don’t run, or they’ll think you have a reason to.”

  I stood unmoving, regardless of attack or lack thereof, watching the silverback intently. All of my senses were engaged, and the adrenaline made them more acute. I took a quiet breath in and was amazed that he smelled like a human, so pungent that my nostrils tingled with the acrid scent of body odor. The sound of twigs breaking in another direction made me look away, and I saw that his band was sitting nearby. Like awkward houseguests, we observed a baby playing, the father asserting himself, mothers chewing lazily on branches.

  We stood there for a long while, and finally, just before dusk, we turned to leave. We descended quickly back through the tuber fields and excited exchanges bubbled between us as we recounted the experience back to each other like children. In my broken French, a little phrase among many I fought hard to learn, autant que (as far as), fell fluidly from me, and I felt a shift in the way the language lived in my mind.

  III

  THREE YEARS LATER, AS I WAS LOOKING THROUGH THE phot
os of our Congo trip and was reminded of G, I remembered a funny moment we shared and then a painful one. I thought of him, something I had been afraid to do for some time. We had separated a year or two after the trip and up until that moment, it had been too painful to think of every part of our marriage and the ending of it. But for whatever reason I felt ready that day, and moments I had forgotten began to skip and dance around in my mind again. A single photo of our hut at the base of the mountains brought back memories of walking along those tall grasses at dawn, on my way to the outhouse, the sun just rising beside the mountains which were just misty silhouettes. I remembered fighting with G over some socks I had borrowed from him and unintentionally ruined on the hike. The image conjured in me the complexity of emotions the evening we slept in the little hut. The commitment I had to G, the loneliness I felt beside him, the anguish between us. These memories filled the little cracks in my past that I had refused to think about for so long to form a fuller, more honest memory. I could see that it was a beautiful one, too, because I could now remember the adventures we also shared, without the desire to forget.

  TELL ME I’M BEAUTIFUL

  {2012}

  MUDDY WATER, let stand, BECOMES CLEAR.

  Lao-Tzu

  …AND WHAT IF HE JUST TOLD ME? THREE WORDS THAT I so desperately needed to hear in the places I hide my deepest doubt. What if he did, in those moments, believe for me the thing I had no way to believe for myself…that I was beautiful?

  These were questions that methodically cycled in my mind. I stood on both ends of the teeter-totter, getting off one end, climbing on the other, examining, covered in, focusing so intently on perspectives from all sides that my eyes felt blurry. And then, just to be sure, I would stand back, circling the entire scene to make sure there wasn’t some hidden clue I had missed. Something that would give me clarity.

  Maybe G was right. Maybe I shouldn’t even be asking. I mean, he has a point. Maybe I shouldn’t be relying on anyone for my own self-worth. Maybe it’s true that by asking it is just a sign that I don’t believe it for myself, and that no matter what he says, it wouldn’t matter anyway. I can see that.

  Does he think I am beautiful, though? Maybe it’s not such a hard thing for him to say, as my husband. I hear it all the time on TV. It doesn’t seem like an uncommon request.

  But maybe he’s right, that our society supports unhealthy behaviors like this, acting as crutches to true self-worth. And he may be right: what does beauty have to do with anything anyway? A materialistic concern that means nothing! I don’t want to be materialistic. I don’t want to put value on things that don’t ultimately matter to being a good person. Maybe it matters too much to me, and I should stop caring about things like this.

  But maybe I just need to hear it, to feel appreciated once in a while. To feel loved. At the end of the day, would it really hurt? It seems so simple; why does everything need to be so difficult?

  Maybe he’s tired of helping me out. I’ve probably exasperated him. I’ve probably asked him too many times. And maybe I wouldn’t need these verbal affirmations if I truly loved myself. Maybe needing to feel appreciated is just a symptom of not appreciating myself. I need to appreciate myself more. I shouldn’t need approval from anyone.

  This cycle would continue like this with many topics. Like in the movie Groundhog Day, I repeated it until it felt like insanity. On and on, I tormented myself trying to gain clarity, second-guessing my second, third, fourth, fifth guesses.

  “You don’t know yourself as much as I know you,” he would explain to me plainly. And in the end, I’d choose to trust his word over mine, not only because I simply didn’t know how to trust myself, but also because I didn’t even know I existed at all.

  Was he right? Maybe there’s something wrong with me for even wanting it. It’s a serious issue I have. I need to work on this.

  I

  IN THE SPRING OF 2012, I WAS ATTEMPTING TO RECLAIM some form of a personal life after being so absorbed by opening the bakery. I had never been so fulfilled, and each night I slept peacefully, the way people do when they are happy. I felt empowered by this far-fetched dream that had become my reality, but I was also exhausted from devoting every single cell of my body to making it happen. Once Beaucoup was beginning to run smoothly, I decided to start focusing on my life again by taking walks, eating out, and hiring a French tutor to converse with me for two hours a week.

  My tutor was a handsome bohemian from the south of France, with sharp, intricate features and a comforting, melodic accent, like a lullaby. We talked about life, the past, and painful lessons. O inspired me toward an exploration of myself in the world. Between corrections on grammar and pronunciation—ahn-terresant, pas in-terresant—he would ask me what my goals in life were, what I thought about love, and what little things inspired me, and I would ask him the same. We would often meet outside a covered market close to the bakery, sitting in the sun on a pier by the water. He would tell me all about the woman who broke his heart a few years before, that they were so young, and that he always regretted that it had ended. I shared with him the lessons I was turning over in my mind. I had been discovering who I was (passionate, hopeful, and flawed), the person I ached to be (still passionate and hopeful, but perhaps a little less flawed), and was struggling to get there as quickly as possible.

  In the years I was depressed, I lived much like a shadow, and after that intense struggle, when I eventually shed the heaviness of it, I was determined to never go back.

  But I was impatient. I worked incessantly to watch, analyze, and correct myself; I learned everything I could and worried that if I stopped for a moment I would never get there, wherever “there” was. I was running as hard as I could toward happiness and wholeness because it made me feel alive, but also to try to get to the place where depression wouldn’t find me again. When I spotted slight flaws in my happiness, I would become disheartened, but I still forged ahead.

  “Do you know the meaning of the word apte?” O asked me one afternoon in French, as we chatted at length about the act of learning in life.

  “Is it the same as the English word?” I responded in my wobbly French.

  “C’est un peu différent. One can have knowledge and one can have skill, but to be truly capable of living it, the understanding must reside in one’s body. Sometimes it is not up to us when we can finally live the lessons we know in our minds; it must reach our heart.”

  The moment I heard this, I stopped running. I felt the small muscles that were shouldering the disappointment, guilt, expectation, and determination to be happy simply let go and rest in détente. The word apte seemed to give me precious permission to live, exactly as I was, in the space between here and there.

  “I can only do so much,” I thought, realizing that no matter how hard I tried to run from the darkness, toward the light, no matter how hard I worked to get away from my fears, to force my mind, to control my desires, to learn, to change myself, to be, life had its own timing and its own wisdom.

  I let go of the breath I had been holding for so long. Apte.

  Years later I reminded O about this word engraved on me like a tattoo, but he barely remembered the conversation. Amusing how a passing comment to someone can become an entire world that another inhabits, informing the way they see. We laughed at our differing memories, chalking it up to a combination of my flawed French and my lush imagination, which created the meaning behind this beautiful word that I’ve held on my lips for so many years. Apte.

  II

  I WAS DOING EVERYTHING IN MY POWER TO MAKE THE marriage work, including begging for counseling, reading self-help relationship books on my own, assuming the blame, changing, shifting to any position, any place…just to try. I remember pleading with G one night, “Please, if there is anything I can do, say, be, let me!” But there was nothing, just a sad, silent emptiness, still in that stale room.

  I tried everything, and everywhere I went I hit a wall. I didn’t know what else to try, and I was
exhausted. So in our last year together, I took one last shot. I took a step back, switched gears, and took a logical, pragmatic approach: I suggested that we check in each week, every Monday evening, to brainstorm ideas on how to save our failing marriage. I managed this approach as if it was a project with goals, action plans, deliverables, and key indicators of measurable success. I recorded minutes for the meetings and performed follow-ups for accountability. But it didn’t take long for me to sense that my ideas were dismissed, and deliverables were left incomplete, with only pages of minutes saved on my laptop as evidence of the efforts.

  III

  “WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?”

  It was the first time he had ever asked me this question. It signaled the breaking of his own pride, that even he was admitting he didn’t know the answer.

  “I just want you to tell me I’m beautiful.”

  “I can’t do that,” he said simply. No pause.

  I know that many people have had similar experiences in relationships. They try and try, beyond what they thought was even possible, and then one day, like the sound of a small twig breaking, a switch flips, and they know it’s over, that it’s out of their control.

  After breaking apart the puzzle of our marriage and reassembling it in countless ways, a thought finally settled in my body, one true thing I didn’t need to dissect: I had needs. I needed to feel like I was beautiful to the man I loved. I needed to be met halfway, for my needs to be acknowledged and respected. I saw that I could not force G or anyone to understand; I had no control over it, and no longer needed to. Wrong or right, I didn’t have to justify my needs or fight for the right to have them.