by Amy Ragsdale
“Give us a call so we know what’s happening,” I’d called after her. We allowed her to do things we would never let her do at home, like sleep over in some other town, or go to parties and come home at five in the morning. We knew she was solid and trusted her to call if she was in trouble, and we usually met some of the players, so we could at least make sure they weren’t totally scuzzy. But mostly we just crossed our fingers. We were so eager for her to connect that we canned most of the rules.
However, on that Sunday, Victor had knocked on the door just as Skyler woke, so he was feeling beleaguered. Peter and I had tried to convince Skyler that it was okay to just say you had other things to do, that you didn’t always have to give a reason.
“I do say that. They just aren’t like that here. They don’t leave. There’s not a day when there aren’t tons of people knocking on the door!” His voice was shifting into fifth gear.
Even Molly, normally even keeled, was on edge that Sunday, stomping her foot in frustration, about what we could only guess. “I’m not upset. I’m just tired. Never mind!”
Peter, on a deadline to submit a new book proposal, had retreated into the greater isolation of our bedroom. He had his earphones on to block us out.
By dinnertime, Molly was telling me to “chill out.” She’d taken to correcting our Portuguese, justifiably because she was quickly outstripping us, but in that way that stemmed from embarrassment at her parents’ ineptness. I knew I was snappish but felt it was not my fault. I felt I was being robbed of my pleasure in this place. I was ready to find someone to blame.
I wondered if I were “hitting the wall.” When Peter and I had taken our five-month honeymoon trip through China, we’d hit the wall at two months. In Mozambique, it had been a little later. The wall is the point when one can’t put a good face on the adventure anymore. The exoticism is wearing off. The pride of “wow, look at this cool thing we’re doing” has begun to wither. Life just seems hard, one long struggle. And maybe now, too, we were starting to need a break from each other.
It was probably good that I needed to make the two-hour trip to Praia do Francês to rent a beach house for the upcoming visit of our American friends. I’d begun to cry stirring sugar into the passion fruit juice.
The next morning, I threw a bathing suit and towel into my straw bag and slipped out the front door. In ten minutes, I’d made it down the ridge, passing the woodcarver, the bakery, and the market, and was in line at the bank before a set of four ATMs. I was lucky; there was money. Almost running now, I managed to wave down the van just as it was pulling out. I squeezed onto the end of a row of three seats. The man next to me was plugged into headphones, but I could still hear his music.
We barreled over cobblestones, picking up more passengers on our way out of town, until all fifteen seats were full and a man with a hooked nose sat on a plastic stool in the side aisle next to me, pinning my other leg. I took out my book, The Handmaid’s Tale, a cheery little story about oppressed women in a hyperconservative religious society. No one read, at least not in public, at least not in this part of Brazil. All these silent people were either listening to my seatmate’s music or just thinking or sleeping and dreaming. I imagined our van—a metal bubble full of thoughts and dreams, careening down the road. My thoughts were still angry—angry about the whining, the self-pity; angry that my family should criticize me about my snappish tone. Me, Atlas, holding up our world, keeping everyone else’s precarious mental states afloat!
I closed my book on my lap and looked out at the spindly trunks of coconut palms flitting by. The man in the headphones fiddled. The music shifted. Now it was in English. “I’ll always be there for you . . .” the man’s voice crooned. My eyes began to fill. Who, I wondered, was there for me? I could see the ocean now, brilliant turquoise with a ruffle of purest white where it hit the sand. Why was I having such a hard time?
At 10:00 am, we swung into the Praia do Francês roundabout, and the van slowed to let me out. I paid and started the walk to the real estate office. Sweat began to trickle down the center of my back, like water being eased out of a dam and into the chute.
The business at the real estate office went surprisingly quickly. I counted out the deposit, the equivalent of $550 in cash, shook the agent’s hand, and stopped to smear sunscreen on my bare arms in the shade of the office porch. There were vans passing almost every hour on their way to Penedo. I wondered when to go home. I turned and headed to the beach.
It wasn’t as crowded as on weekends. The tide was out, making the sweep of hard sand look especially inviting. I stood in the shade of an almond tree and decided to rent a beach chair and umbrella from a guy wearing eyeliner and foundation. He’d risen up from behind the counter of an open-air restaurant, where he’d been sleeping on a makeshift mattress.
The water was delicious, warm on the surface and cool underneath. I swam in a calm lagoon created by a long reef and looked at the ripples of sun on my arms through the film of water.
Talk about multi-use. There were people in the water, not swimming so much, mostly sitting submerged up to their shoulders, in straw hats and baseball caps. Then there were the fishermen, like the white-mustachioed man standing on the beach watching his lines, which extended way out into the lagoon from rods planted in pipes sunk into the sand. Then there was the guy snorkeling with the harpoon gun, and finally there was the flying Zodiac that was taking off and landing every twelve minutes. As a mere swimmer, you could start to feel a little vulnerable.
Now, a flying Zodiac—that was something Skyler would really like. “It’s everybody’s dream to fly, Mom,” he’d said a few days earlier. He’d recently become obsessed with YouTube videos of flying people in wing suits. “Do you think people will be able to fly in my lifetime?”
I swam back to my more deserted section of the beach, wary of hooks and harpoons. As I waded into shore, the tune from a CD-sales cart jumped out, Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” I felt the water getting warmer as I reached the shallows and thought, What I really want is to watch my kids have fun.
I walked over to buy a chilled coconut from a girl lounging in a beach chair. She picked one up, held it in one hand, and nonchalantly hacked off the top with a large machete. Puncturing the woody skin of the now-flat top, she inserted a straw. I retreated to my umbrella to savor its cold, sweet water. A bit later, I spied a teenage boy swinging a round charcoal brazier by its long looping handle. Raising a finger, I got an answering chin lift, and he ambled over and pulled what looked like a white popsicle out of his cooler. This porous white cheese was slightly sour, rubbery, and oily—perfect for grilling. After buying the cheese and a bag of roasted cashews and a plastic cup of mussel soup from other roving vendors, I was quite content.
Just as I put my book away and was sitting back to enjoy my last minutes on the beach, the coconut girl shuffled her way toward me through the powdery white sand, another coconut in hand. She jerked her head toward another set of chairs. Oh!
A mystery man was treating me to a coconut? Was this like buying a girl a drink? I had to laugh. I was so long out of this game, I had no idea what to do. I glanced furtively in the direction she’d come from, but not long enough to really see anyone. What if my look were taken as an invitation? I put the coconut on my beach table, not sure whether to drink. Was taking a sip like saying yes to something?
I suddenly felt exposed in my skimpy swimsuit. I hadn’t worn anything so revealing since the red gingham two-piece I’d used when I was eight. I’d become a competitive swimmer and had been a steadfast one-piece wearer ever since. The suit I had on now was one piece, but barely. It was more like a bikini on end, running vertically rather than horizontally.
I sat a while longer, gingerly sipping my secret-admirer coconut and tapping my foot to the Brazilian pop song being played at the cart that had just pulled up in front of me. The song had the word Americana in it. Had he sent that over, too?
I decided to try to catch the van leav
ing the roundabout at 3:20. I picked up my things and left, carefully keeping my eyes on the sand, wondering if I were being watched. Squeezing into the small restaurant bathroom, I changed clothes, retrieved my purse, and began the hot trek back out to the highway.
I was glad I’d left early. The van arrived thirty minutes ahead of time. I flagged it down and climbed in, happy to head home, rearmed with gratitude for my intrepid family.
Pousada Colonial
Skyler “playing” Capoeira
Bentinho “playing” Capoeira
Giovanni
Karol
Aniete
Zeca
Lu, Peter, and Junior
The Coelho—Skyler, Molly and Valdir
At the beach in Peba
View out the back window
Amy and Peter score a date in Salvador
21
Bands of Ants and Silent Horsemen
ONCE, WHILE LISTENING to a session of British Parliament on the radio in a rented car in England, I suddenly understood the cockeyed humor of Monty Python. Listening to that raucous parliamentary session, I realized context is everything, and when you don’t have one, things can seem surreal. I began to understand where the magical realism that Latin American authors are famous for comes from. I had several experiences in Brazil that I’m sure actually happened but that in retrospect seem fantastic.
Like the time Molly got home at 11:00 PM from watching a futsal game with friends. I was half asleep but rousing myself to greet her.
“Mom, are there always this maweee ansheeez?”
“What? I didn’t catch that.”
She spit toothpaste into the little sink in the hallway outside the bathroom and jerked her chin up. “Look at the ants!”
Above us, on three walls, wrapping around two corners, were thousands of ants, big reddish-black ones. They were up near the ceiling, covering four rows of tiles—a solid band of squiggling black, one foot wide.
“Ohhh.”
We’d been seeing more and more formigas, the almost-imperceptible little ants that I’d swipe up by the dozens with a wet rag, during the day. And I’d killed a few of these big ones at night, the only time I’d noticed them. My tolerance for insects is very low in tropical places, where mosquitoes carry dengue fever, flies have been who knows where, and I don’t know whether the spiders bite and if they do what that might bring. I was taking no prisoners, practicing the brutality that comes with ignorance.
But this was beyond me. I tried to see where all the ants were coming from or going to but found nothing. They didn’t appear to be moving down, where they could start invading all our food stores in open baskets below. It seemed there was nothing to do but go to bed. I suspected they’d be gone in the morning, and they were. Completely.
One day, I was following Skyler and Victor down an alley when Skyler urgently beckoned to me from across the street ahead, shouting, “Mom, hurry up!” I emerged out of the narrow side street and skittered across the intersection, just ahead of the first of a hundred or more horsemen. They were clicking noisily up the cobblestones, accompanied, of course, by the requisite speaker-mounted car, blaring music at high volume. The surreal part was that until I’d popped out of the side street, I’d heard nothing at all. It was as though they were part of a movie set and had just been given the go-ahead to start moving and turn on the speakers. I happened to be carrying my camera in preparation for photographing Skyler’s upcoming game of street soccer, so I stopped to take pictures. Instead of the usual smiling, thumbs-up pose that I got when I pulled out a camera, the riders seemed oblivious, as though I were as invisible to them as they had been to me.
Then there were all the little piles in our house, fine little piles of black. From what? There was no visible trail of falling dust. Was it alive? Aniete swept them up daily, and then they reappeared. The pile by the dish drainer was a little different—a little more in the horror-movie vein. I wiped up a wet brown “accumulation” from behind the dish drainer. While I continued to wash dishes, I saw a drip in the same spot and the brown began to re-accumulate. I could see the drip land, but looking up, I could never see the drip leave. What was dripping?
Once I started to see things this way, there was no going back. The fantastical quality was increased by the fact that, as foreigners, we were so in the dark; we couldn’t predict things coming, we didn’t recognize what they were, we didn’t understand what created them. They seemed to magically appear and then disappear, still a mystery.
22
A Viking Queen Floats Above a Chiffon Sea
FROM THE TIME they were in bassinets, both Molly and Skyler had been residents at the university, tucked into dance studio corners, immersed for years in music and diving, twirling bodies. It was not surprising then that by age three, Molly was looking for a tutu and Skyler was finding ways to spin and flip. While, as a modern dancer, tutus have never been a part of my life, by age sixteen, Molly had developed into an elegant and adept ballet dancer, and to our delight, we’d been able to find a wonderful teacher in Penedo, Fernando Ribeiro. He immediately invited Molly to perform in his Ballet das Alagoas recital. This meant finding new pointe shoes. The pair we’d ordered from the States three months before had never arrived. I’d begun to realize that global American business is global as long as you’re in the United States.
Catching the van in Penedo, Molly and I made the three-hour trip to Maceió in a last-ditch effort to find the shoes. We took a cab from the van stop to Maceió’s downtown shopping district, where streets were closed to traffic. Entering the flood of people on foot, streaming around sidewalk racks, squeezing into dark doorways, we found the fabric and notions store where we hoped to find shoes that would fit.
In Maceió, there was one brand of pointe shoe, and you chose a size. In the United States, there are many brands, as well as four toe widths, three shank lengths, and narrow heels versus wide. In the United States, when one is fitted, the sales person will pinch the heel, stick his or her finger inside the curve of the toe, and peel back the outer layer of shoe as you stand flat, then on demi-pointe, then on full pointe. It was a scientific operation with many variables. In Brazil, they asked, “Do you want to try it on?”
It seemed that in Brazil, shoes were something to cover your feet, not a high-performance device meant to help you better feel the floor, or touch the ball, or cushion your joints. Peter had bought Dalan a new pair of white soccer shoes.
“Did he just ask you to buy him a new pair of shoes?” I’d asked.
“No, not exactly. He told me that his shoes were broken.”
“Did he choose the store?”
“Yeah. We went to Sportgol. I think he may have chosen the shoes because he liked the color. He didn’t even try them on.”
Nevertheless, we found pointe shoes for Molly that looked as though they would work.
Molly had been taking ballet twice a week with Fernando, who traveled every week from Maceió to teach dance in Penedo. With the lifted chest and rodlike back of a ballet dancer, he’d stride into the tiny studio at Imaculada, where the students were chatting in clusters, wearing board shorts, muscle shirt, and baseball cap, bare legs and feet in leg warmers and jazz shoes. “Molly, we going to dance,” he’d say, forearms circling from the elbows as he talked, like a flower girl tossing petals.
He was warm and interested in us from the start and clearly enjoyed trying out his spattering of English. Neither Molly nor I told him that I, too, was a dance teacher, but he sniffed it out. Maybe it’s in the way we stand, a little taller when we’re around each other. One day he bent my ear about how pulling work out of these students here at Imaculada was like “squeezing blood out of a cockroach.”
“E as baratas não têm sangue”—And cockroaches don’t have blood, he whispered out of the corner of his mouth.
December 10. The Ballet das Alagoas performance was to start at 6:30 PM. Molly had already left to walk down the ridge to the theater, carrying her green tulle tutu ho
oked over her forearm like a wreath. Peter and Skyler had watched the dress rehearsal the night before because they’d had to leave that morning to meet friends from Missoula who were arriving that night in Salvador, eight hours away.
I decided to dress up for opening night. Sweating despite my cold shower, I ran down to the washroom, blouse and skirt in hand, to iron them. I never iron at home, but in Penedo, I felt compelled to, knowing I’d inevitably be on show.
I stepped out of the house in my new platform shoes—my concession, along with red toenail polish, to Brazilian womanhood—and struggled not to twist my ankles on the cobblestones.
At the theater, the doors were still closed. I stood outside in warm, heavy air, watching the sky slide from light blue to slate to black. I thought about buying a beer from a vendor with a Styrofoam cooler, despite the fact that I don’t drink beer. A half hour later, Skyler’s teacher Vanessa sauntered up with one of her daughters and her mother.
Vanessa was Skyler’s English teacher at Imaculada, though she was so shy about speaking, you wouldn’t have known. We’d recently hired her to tutor him privately as well. We had rapidly abandoned our homeschooling experiment, finding ourselves unable to engage Skyler in any constructive way. He was back at Imaculada full time, and we were now trying option three: the keep-up-with-homework-because-maybe-you’ll-find-it-more-interesting-if-you-know-what’s-going-on option.
That evening, Vanessa’s habitually slow movement was overlaid by agitated conversation.
“Os ladrões—robbers—broke into my brother’s house. They had a gun,” she told me when I asked if she was all right. No one had been hurt. Like so many, while Vanessa was distressed, she seemed to shrug it off—nothing to be done.
