How to Read the Air

by Dinaw Mengestu

  “What were you like in high school?” she had asked me. “Cool. Smart, stupid. Friends, no friends.”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Which means what?”

  “Which means I can hardly remember. That whole time seems like one big gray fog in the back of my mind so I never think about it.”

  To the extent that was true, Angela assented, prying only occasionally for extra details while at the same time happy to hold on to whatever I revealed. There were plenty of memories from that time, but I found it difficult to trust if they were real or not. I know that I read encyclopedia-sized anthologies of poems and stories that I borrowed from the library, and that on many nights I fell asleep in front of the thirteen-inch television that was perched in front of my bed, but these images, like so many others, fell into a vast, indistinguishable corner in which I hardly existed. Where was I on my sixteenth birthday, or what had I done during my long, boring summer vacations while my classmates were drinking their parents’ beer on porches or groping each other in empty parking lots at night? To be honest, I couldn’t have said much more beyond the general—that I was either alone in my bedroom or sitting out by myself near the river’s edge, close to where the cargo boats docked. Violence had made, and to an equal degree when I was older and separated from it, unmade, my world.

  My students were windows, if not into the life I actually lived, then into the one I might have had had a different set of odds been cast in my favor. I told Angela things such as “I think I would have been on the soccer team. I was very fast when I was young.”

  “Did you have a soccer team?”

  “I’m not sure. I think so.”

  “Okay, then let’s say you were on it.”

  “Was I any good?”

  “Were you any good? Jonas, you were the best. You once scored three goals in a single game.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I remember.”

  “Were you there?”

  “Of course I was. I was sitting at the top of the bleachers watching you. I always thought you were beautiful in your shorts.”

  Our inventions, you see, worked both ways, and in whatever false histories I created, there was always room enough for Angela to join me when and if she cared to—

  “What happened after graduation?”

  “You picked me up in your father’s car.”

  “What kind of car was it?”

  “A 1972 black BMW.”

  “Really?

  “Yes. It was your graduation gift, remember?”

  “That’s right. He bought it used from a friend.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And where did we go?”

  “We drove all the way to Chicago.”

  “Just the two of us.”

  “Yes. It was just you and me. We had dinner at a restaurant right on the lake.”

  “Was it good?”

  “It was one of the best meals we’ve ever had.”

  Because the truth, of course, was that she needed these fantasies as much as and perhaps more than I did. What few stories Angela shared with me about her own childhood consisted almost solely of private adventures that she had taken while left alone, which was nearly always. Angela was never a teenager so much as a premature adult assigned to watch over herself. Her mother, she told me once, “had a bad habit of disappearing sometimes. She always came back after a day or two, and after the third or fourth time I got used to it. She always left a little money.”

  Inevitably some of the false memories we indulged in had nothing to do with me, even if I was supposedly the one at the center of the story. These narratives were reflections of her own past, the parts she was reluctant but needed to tell me about and most likely had tried to forget, like the time she asked me if I remembered my first “sexual encounter,” which was how she phrased it, in cold, clinical terms that were lifted right out of a textbook. I lied and said no so I could listen to what she came up with.

  “Well, it wasn’t with me,” she said, which was when I understood that this was her story. “We didn’t know each other yet. You were only twelve, or thirteen. There was this person who lived near your house who was a fair amount older whom you’d known for years. She waited for you after school one day and you both started walking home, but when you got near your houses you turned in a different direction and just kept walking. Eventually you came to an open field where there was no one around. Since she was older she led the way. She told you where to put your bag down, and when you did she told you to lie on your back and close your eyes. You couldn’t see her face but you knew it was there because suddenly you couldn’t see anything at all anymore, not even a little light from the sun. She gave you just a little peck first, and then when you didn’t run away, she kissed you harder.”

  “Did I enjoy it?”

  “Let’s just say that at the time you thought you did.”

  When it came to these stories we never sorted out which details were false and which ones may have been true. To have done so even once would have destroyed the whole enterprise we had created from the foundation up, and so we always diligently avoided any prodding that could be construed as a search for verisimilitude. The imagined memories had to have as much weight as the real, or we had to at least pretend they did to such a degree that they just very well might have. And so I never questioned Angela about that particular story, or about all the troubling things that it pointed to, content to believe that at least in this version things worked out for her better than they did in the one I never heard.

  If Angela were driving with me, she would say that this is exactly where I belong, somewhere here in the middle of the country, a man unsuitable or ill-made for coastlines, more at home in flat terrain that bears no hint of ending and that strives at all times to be as evenhanded and uncomplicated as possible. I’ve never lost my affection for this place; many times over the intervening years I’ve thought that it would be wonderful to stand alone in the middle of any of the fields on the other side of the car windows. Shortly after my mother left my father, I thought of coming back here to commemorate the event. This was the only context in which I knew her, and I understood even then that once she was gone from here we would grow increasingly distant from each other, until eventually someday we were completely estranged. It was a fair price to pay for her tarried freedom.

  Her departure in the end wasn’t the dramatic event that it had promised to be during the nineteen years my mother and father lived together. There was no furious packing or preceding arguments. They were, if anything, at a relatively tranquil moment in their lives—their fights and arguments having all but ceased, to the point where they hardly spoke at all to each other. It was peace through a policy of détente, with occasional violent skirmishes that flared up from time to time on the side. Two weeks after I had left home for college she left too, packing her clothes in the middle of the afternoon while he was at work, calling a cab to take her to the bus station, and then taking a bus to Chicago, and from Chicago a flight out east to Washington, D.C., where a few old friends from the private school she had attended in Ethiopia had recently resettled. She called me shortly after I arrived at my dorm room in New York.

  “I’m in D.C.,” she said.

  “What are you doing there?”

  “I’m staying here for a while with my friend Aster. You don’t know her.” Nor would I ever.

  I understood even with those few words that she would never return to my father again. Washington, D.C., at just over seven hundred miles away, was the farthest she had ever been from home since she came to America, and if there was any one rule to her departures, it was that once you get far enough away, you never go back. What I hadn’t known at the time was just how little of her I would see afterward. She lived four hours away from me by car, and yet over the course of the next three years we only saw each other twice, both times at cold, impersonal cafés outside the city, in one of the suburban mini-malls that had taken the place
of the northern Virginia farmland. When we did see each other, we talked around whatever we were supposed to have said. She asked me on every occasion if I was happy.

  “Are you happy, Jonas?” she asked, much in the same way she had asked me as a child if I was hungry or tired, both states of being that she could easily remedy by either giving me a plate of food or offering me a place to sleep on the couch next to her. What could I say to her except “Yes. I’m happy,” which put her mind at ease and allowed us to continue sitting at our table, picking apart whatever pastries she had chosen to buy that day.

  My mother chose a diner similar to the ones we used to meet at to make her first stop of the trip, less than an hour from Fort Laconte and still more than five hours from Nashville. She had kept a cheap little souvenir from it on top of her chest of drawers for years afterward—a palm-sized aluminum pig with a wide-brimming smile and a napkin wrapped around its neck that read “Eat at Frank’s.” Her excuse for stopping was a simple one: “I have to use the bathroom,” she said, and my father, sensing that this time she was indeed telling the truth, and that regardless it was easier to oblige her than to argue, pulled off at the next exit, at least two hours sooner than he would have preferred to stop again.

  Inside the diner cold blasts of refrigerated air seemed to hold the people sitting at the counters and at the booths in place, frozen and lifeless, as if they had been sculpted out of the same dough that had been used to make the pies sitting on display in the glass counter next to the entrance. My mother walked in and wrapped her hands around her arms, trying to quell the little bumps that had sprung up as soon as she entered. No one looked at her when she came in—not the girl sitting behind the cash register and not any of the dozen or so patrons who were eating at this odd hour of the day, and yet she still felt as if all eyes were secretly trained on her, and that if she could only turn her head fast enough to the right she would catch them measuring her every step and taking size of the neat little bulge below her waist that could have just as easily been a few extra pounds put on since her conversion to a nearly all-American diet.

  She didn’t ask where the bathrooms were. The signs were obvious enough and plus she had learned that only the guilty and the frightened asked for things that were otherwise evident.

  “The first step to being an American,” a friend of her father’s had told her shortly before she left Ethiopia, “is to act as if you know everything. The two most important words in the English language are ‘of course.’”

  Gashe Berhane Getachew was one of the few Ethiopians she knew who had actually lived in the United States, a scholarship child of the former emperor, sent abroad to study agriculture in Kansas; his words, as far as she and everyone in the family were concerned, were nearly sacrosanct when it came to America.

  “They didn’t know what to do with me,” he told her. “When I got there I asked them where their peasants were. All that land and no peasants. My teacher told me, ‘I don’t know how it is where you come from, but we don’t have peasants here.’ Liar. They had plenty of them, everywhere. They just kept them far away from the university so I couldn’t see them. Please, when you get to America, find the peasants for me.”

  That became his running joke with her until the day she left. “The peasants, Mariam. Remember me to them.” If someone new was present, he would exclaim, “Soon our young lady here will be leaving to find the United Peasants of America.”

  If Gashe Berhane were here with her now, he would say, “At last, Mariam, you’ve found them.”

  The bathrooms were located at the back of the restaurant, just off the kitchen. The only two stalls were empty and the room smelled of a mixture of ammonia and fried chicken that made her both nauseous and hungry. For the past few weeks she hadn’t been eating nearly half as much as she wanted. She was afraid that if she gained weight too quickly the barely noticeable bulge would swell and become all but impossible to deny, and so she had kept herself hungry to the point where she often had to sleep once if not twice in the middle of the day to quell the hunger pains in her stomach and the slight dizzy spells that were becoming more frequent.

  She stood in front of the mirror and noticed that her eyes were developing dark purple sacks underneath them, and that the knot on the side of her head had now taken a distinctly egg-shaped form. She clucked once, like a chicken, at her reflection. The noise sounded hollow, echoing back to her off the cold white-tiled walls. She heard what she thought were footsteps shuffling behind one of the closed stall doors, and for a few seconds she stood there frozen, afraid someone had heard her and her barnyard imitation. She looked at the floor and saw nothing. She turned back to the door, hoping to find a lock that would ensure her privacy, but there was nothing there as well. She entered the stall farthest from the door and locked it, checking once to make sure that the bolt was secure so no one could walk in on her by purpose or accident. As she sat down on the rim of the toilet, she wondered if this was what giving birth would feel like—the hard-rimmed edge of the toilet seat serving as the delivery table, and the general noise of strangers on the other side of the bathroom door serving as both the hospital waiting room and cafeteria. The delivery room would have to be white, just like this one, and at some point, Mariam thought, she would close her eyes and search for a darkness so complete that not even a hint of light could be seen.

  She peed with her eyes closed, and as she did so she thought to herself, I wish you were this easy to get rid of. It wasn’t the pain that she particularly feared. Even as a young girl she was nearly indifferent when it came to the scrapes, bruises, scratches, and occasional punches and kicks of childhood. If you were injured you suffered but eventually recovered. Time took care of the scars and slow, deliberate movements eased the rest, but it was the exact opposite with having a child. Once you opened up and delivered you would never fully heal again. The wound was permanent, and for all the days of your life there would be another part of you that could break or die over which you could do little but console. She had been told that babies in America were sung lullabies at night to help them fall asleep. Mariam didn’t know the words to any lullabies yet, but she had a sense of the tone and rhythm in which they were sung. She tried out one now, humming a tune that was soft and gentle but came from nowhere. It masked the sound of her urine splashing in the toilet, and when she was finished she stopped humming and left the stall.

  In the nine and a half minutes that she had spent in the bathroom, the crowd inside the diner nearly seemed to double in size. When she came out, she searched for her husband’s face in one of the booths and then at the counter, but there was no one who looked even remotely like him, or her for that matter. The faces here were decidedly uniform in color, shape, and by and large, size as well. They all seemed to be related, distant cousins, aunts, uncles, brothers, all gathered together for a sullen family reunion at Frank’s Diner, located just a half-mile off the interstate highway. She walked toward the door, but this time she stopped just short of the exit, as if told to pause by command. This time all eyes in the diner really did turn on her, and for once she turned hers back on them.

  That meeting of strangers’ eyes is something I’ve thought about often since—the confused, bewildered stares heading in both directions, passing one another along the way like two cars driving past each other on a highway, headed for similar but opposite destinations. The people on the other end of my mother’s glare must have wondered what she was staring at so intently, if perhaps she was mad or in some sort of desperate trouble and searching for a friendly face to rescue her. I have a hard time picturing any cruelty on their part. At that age my mother was too slight and pretty to have inspired any real hostility, but there was no doubt in anyone’s eyes that she didn’t belong here, and that, at least, is one point on which everyone in the diner could agree. If they shared anything, it was the common sense of relief that came when she opened the door and finally left.