Leaving Before the Rains Come

by Alexandra Fuller

  “What do you want from me?” I’d ask.

  “What do you want from me?” he would echo.

  Then sometimes on a summer day Charlie would announce time off from work and he would take Sarah and me down the scenic section of the Snake River, or we would hike up in the mountains, or kayak into a remote campground in Yellowstone. In those sunstruck hours, Charlie would recall how he had been riotously happy near here fifteen years or a decade ago, how he had thrown famously raucous parties in those days, how he had been soul-connected to this land back then. But he said it as if that experience was now an unreachable fantasy, as if the past were a foreign land and the present was a regrettable chore. I understood then that no matter what we did, we could never recapture those hallowed times. The best we could aim for were weeks or months of grinding slog, with these brief intervals of relief as compensation. Unbridled joy was not a realistic—or necessarily worthwhile and commendable—goal.

  I got pregnant again, and in early March 1997, Mum flew over for the delivery, arriving in the same spring blizzard that pressure-dropped the baby into my pelvis. Labor came like a train shunting back and forth over the same piece of railway track. Charlie sat by the television nursing a swollen foot brought on by an attack of gout, while I screamed and screamed. Nothing would budge. Mum pronounced herself impressed and shocked all in the same sentence. “It’s all very nice and shiny in this hospital,” she said. “Lovely views of the mountains, and they do seem to like their appliances and beeping things, but where are all the nurses and helpful people? There are no helpful people here.”

  Nine hours of screaming and still the baby was no closer to being born, and I was becoming overwrought with pain and with the terror of the next contraction. “For God’s sake,” Mum said at last. She hauled me out of the bed and marched me down the empty corridors. “A walk will do you good,” she said as I continued howling in protests of awful agony. “Oh, this is inhuman,” Mum muttered. “We’ll all go deaf.” She elbowed her way into an empty bathroom and filled the tub. “See if you can get in there,” she said. “Honestly, how hard can it be to have some Epsom salts on hand?”

  Much later, Mum found a nurse and insisted the doctor be summoned. “You can’t just leave us like this,” she pointed out. “It’s been going on all day. Knock her out at least.” Then she took the nurse outside and I don’t know what else she said, but there was suddenly a small cluster of nurses around my bed, and Charlie hobbled down to the nurses’ station to wait for the doctor, and then the baby started to come, although his head was far too large for the space allowed, and by the time he arrived he was all limp with exhaustion and needed to be taken from me into the bright gadgetry of an incubator in another room. “He’ll be all right,” Mum said. “Babies are as tough as cockroaches, really.” Then she peered unhopefully under the sheets. “Although you won’t be getting back in the saddle anytime soon.”

  I quit my menial office job to take care of the children. I cooked and cleaned and I still woke up at four in the morning to write. My third novel was rejected, as was a fourth and a fifth. But Charlie was selling more land and more houses. We commissioned an architect to design a mountain home for us, with hardwood floors and cherry cabinets. We bought nicer furniture, newer cars, a Labrador puppy. To pay for it all, Charlie went into the office earlier and returned home later; he brought back piles of paperwork and sat late into the night worrying numbers into columns.

  There didn’t seem to be any way for me to repay Charlie for all the work he was doing to make our material lives possible. I wrote, and raised the children, and kept house, and almost every evening I welcomed Charlie home with painstakingly prepared meals, wine, and overeager chatter that too often became a list of demands. I needed Charlie to bring back with him from the world beyond our children and the housework news and ideas and conversation. He didn’t have to slay dragons, but a few shiny scales from the fight would have been diverting. “Oh, just make something up if it was a boring day,” I implored. But Charlie complained of ever-increasing exhaustion. He grew more silent and withdrawn. Sometimes I got drunk and railed, “You seem so unhappy. What are we doing this all for?” Charlie would look embarrassed on my behalf and in the mornings I would wake up dry-mouthed and repentant.

  Growing up, I could measure my father’s stress by the length of the cigarette ash on the veranda in the morning where I found him at dawn after those uneasy nights, hands hovering over a game of solitaire, a cigarette shelved into a groove on his lower lip, a cup of tea at his elbow. “Top of the morning, Chookies,” he’d say. “Sleep okay?” And then I knew the yields weren’t matching up to expectations, or the price of fuel and fertilizer had just surged, or the government had suddenly decided to raise the minimum wage by fifty percent. “Well, I tried worrying about it all night,” he said, slapping cards down on the coffee table. “And it didn’t change a bloody thing. You’d think I’d have learned by now, wouldn’t you?”

  Years later, I stumbled in an accidental way on some of the works of the desert mothers and fathers, the ascetic, hermitic holy people who lived in the deserts of Egypt starting around the third century AD. I liked their names to begin with: Sarah of the Desert, Paul the Simple, John the Eunuch. And then I liked their teachings: know who you are; know where you are; know what is happening. Surrender anyway. One of the instructions of peace given by the desert father Moses seemed to me to trump all else: “The monk must die to everything before leaving the body, in order not to harm anyone.”8

  But I think really to live with even a small degree of that deliberately careless wisdom requires the precondition of fearlessness, trust in oneself, and belief in one’s own personal culture. My father had taught me one kind of fearlessness and trust. He had taught me how to get from one end of a bit of land to the other; he had taught me endurance; he had shown me what an unrestrained life looked like. But a more cautious life—one without geographical markers, a life of bills and bank statements—was foreign to me, and I could not catch up to it. Work, in some unexplained, inexplicable way, seemed to be the key to such a cautious life. Work, work, work, as if it were the modern equivalent of decades in the desert.

  I took another menial part-time office job, and continued to get up at four in the morning to write. My sixth, seventh, and eighth novels were rejected. I submitted a ninth novel. My agent didn’t even bother to shop it around; instead she wrote back to me saying that she felt it was a waste of my time to continue writing, and a waste of her time to represent me. “You may have some talent,” she offered cautiously. “But you don’t have a story.”

  So with nothing left to lose, I wrote the truth. I wrote about growing up in Rhodesia during the war, about the deaths of three of my siblings, about my crazy-wonderful parents. Into those pages went all my loneliness of my new life, all my love for the land that had raised me, all the pain of having left it. The pages seemed different from what I had written before—nonfiction instead of fiction, obviously—but also of me, eccentric, mordant, irreverent. I found a new agent and she sold it within a few days to publishers in New York and Europe. Suddenly I had a public voice and another full, distinct life from the one I had shared with Charlie. For the first time since falling in love with him, I could imagine myself as a separate being from him. And because of that, our arguments became more damaging; there would be tears, rages, threats, and afterward neither of us would sleep.

  In the next couple of years, I traveled back to southern Africa and wrote a troubling book about soldiers from the war I had grown up in. Charlie grew tired of the way I seemed to need to peel back the scabs on old wounds and explore the painful bloody parts of my vicious history. I told him I was compelled to dig into the world in this way. He said it was unnatural and unhealthy and made of me a terrifying wife. I said he would do well to explore his own demons and sadness and that I could stand for him to get a little more terrifying.

  “I’m perfectly fine,” he said.r />
  “Then why don’t you laugh at my jokes?” I asked, half joking even as I said it.

  “Because your jokes aren’t funny. They’re unkind.”

  I fell in love—or imagined myself to have fallen in love—with a backcountry explorer who lived two and a half thousand miles away. I felt unrestrainedly, disturbingly hungry for the sort of scant attention he could offer. I waited until we were driving, the car holding us in unambiguous confining coupledom, before I told Charlie, “I think our marriage is in trouble.” And then I said that I was at least tempted by the idea of falling in love with someone else. Charlie stared through the windshield, tight-lipped, silent. Miles clocked by. I said, “Please say something.”

  He said, “You’re married. You’re my wife.”

  I said, “I know.” I looked out the window and watched the way the farmland slumped and rose in ripped contours along here. Every spring when the farmers plowed these fields, topsoil picked up in the wind and blew west, sometimes in such a thick cloud that the road was closed for hours or days at a time. “This can’t go on,” I said.

  “No,” Charlie agreed.

  After that, he started to read my e-mails, check the phone records for unfamiliar numbers, and he started to see affairs where there were none. He would confront me. There would be more fights and tears. I said, “Don’t check up on me. Check in with me.” I thumped my chest and burst into tears. “I’m right here, for God’s sake.” But I wasn’t. Neither of us was there. We were between mother ships, struggling to stay buoyed. The signal flag Kilo is a rectangle of yellow next to a rectangle of blue. It means, “I wish to communicate with you.”

  We separated—a trial separation we said, as if to lessen the blow. We told the kids that nothing would change which, looking back, was not only a lie, but also a terrible threat. The whole point of the separation was that everything needed to change. We couldn’t carry on in the stagnant-feeling deadlock of our relationship without putting ourselves into a kind of living death. I rented a one-room cabin in a friend’s back garden, Charlie kept the house, and he continued to keep track of the finances and pay the bills. I felt as if I had left home as a sort of silly, unsustainable experiment, more like a teenager practicing living alone than a woman in charge of her destiny.

  After six months we crashed back toward one another, unable to tolerate the unaccustomed anxiety of ourselves alone and the children’s bewildered sorrow. And perhaps we remained desperate to heal not only the old wounds we carried from our own families and histories but also the fresher wounds we had made in one another. We decided to stay married. And once again I convinced myself that a deep, nurturing connection coupled with the vigorous defense of each other’s freedom was a false expectation, something that happened so rarely between two people that it was a completely unrealistic goal. It was better, I decided, to have the sort of marriage the bedrock of which was a complicit agreement to say nothing of real substance to one another.

  We shared a bed, a bathroom, a closet, our meals, and the gift of our children. We phoned one another through the day and had the sort of mundane exchanges overheard in public places everywhere. Sometimes, we reached reflexively for one another in the middle of the night. But in every real way, we steered assiduously away from one another.

  Charlie continued to sell real estate, manage our finances, and plan adventures abroad. To keep himself in adrenaline, he took up polo again, playing in the summers at the little club in Jackson with patrons, mostly from Texas. He bought four ponies and an old four-horse trailer and his Wednesdays and Saturdays were taken up with chukkas. It was a far cry from Prince Charles and Nacho Figueras, but it was a big step up from the dust-gusted pitches of Lusaka, and even though Charlie’s was a mismatched string—ranging from Big Boy, a towering thoroughbred of over sixteen hands, to a tough little Argentinean criollo—the whole idea of polo with its flashy, champagne-and-cigar and private-plane implications didn’t seem to fit with Charlie’s continuing concerns about our never-enough bank accounts.

  Polo seemed a grand, extravagant, incongruent gesture that was not of a piece with how Charlie did anything else. He had budgets and constraints and columns of numbers and a preoccupation about those columns of numbers that became the weather system of our home, building and swirling regardless of how much we worked or played or loved. Sometimes Charlie talked about retiring early—he would travel the world, fishing and skiing and running rivers, he said—but I didn’t see where I could ever fit in with that plan. For one thing, I always wanted to write, and I couldn’t imagine a time when I would want to stop. For another thing, I couldn’t see the point of living a piecemeal, disparate, unfulfilling life now with the expectation of something glorious to come. It was the biblical promise of a future reward for current slog writ in material, pointless, selfish miniature.

  The grand, extravagant, incongruent gesture was much more my territory: it was of a piece with the way my parents had raised us and done everything else. On the rare occasions we had money, my father slammed his fist on the bar. “Round’s on me!” And when money ran out, conspicuous, exaggerated destitution was part of our family vaudeville act. For example, during the long unhelpful stretch when the ancient Peugeot 403 took to stalling and we couldn’t afford the spare part to fix this problem, Vanessa and I had to jump out at traffic lights in Umtali and push the car through the intersections when the lights changed to green. “Come on girls, don’t just stand there!” Dad yelled while Mum wept with laughter in the passenger seat. “Put some vim into it.”

  For a while, in that same Peugeot, it was possible to watch the road whip by as we drove, dust billowing up into the backseat in a reddish film until Mum put bits of cardboard down where the floorboards had rusted through. She painted sunsets, giraffes, and flowers on the cardboard, and signed her name in the corners with a flourish. “Like the Sistine Chapel, only not the ceiling,” she said. “Although I wouldn’t stand on it if I were you, or you’ll plop right out.” Which served to prove to me from an early age that imminent danger and innovative beauty were often closely linked.

  When Mum and Dad finally did get their hands on a stack of money from the sale of the English farm on which I had been born—“Bloody stockbroker paid a fortune for a barn and a soggy field,” Dad said in incredulous delight—we lived like tycoons for a time. “Well, there’s no guarantee we’ll be around to enjoy it later,” Dad said. “And anyway, who wants to retire and die of bloody boredom?” Money was put aside for Vanessa and me to be educated overseas—Vanessa to finishing school and art college, me to university. Dad bought an old diesel Mercedes-Benz, spray-painted a remaindered peach. “The nipple-pink baby,” he called it. Then he invested in some horses off Zimbabwe’s racetracks—“Pukka things, these,” Dad promised. “Four legs, the lot”—so we could play polo and Mum could show jump. “Marvelous way to shake up the liver,” Dad said. And finally he took Mum on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday to New York, the West Indies, and England.

  After a while, Vanessa and I left home, the money dried up, and my parents were back to starvation rations. “We seem to have taken another inadvertent vow of poverty,” Dad said. But they kept the horses, and the Benz, and they held on to the memories of the large times. To this day, Dad recalls the name of the taxi driver who took them under his wing and showed them around Montserrat. “Winthrop,” he says. And then he sings in his botched West Indian accent, “Goat water, goat water, good for ya’ daughter.” And Mum still recounts how people in New York mistook Dad for Crocodile Dundee. “That wonderful film had just come out, and of course Americans are very impressed with anyone who can wrestle alligators or play with snakes.” But she never fails to act as if it is my personal fault that the difference between an Australian drawl and my father’s impeccable English enunciation was lost on an entire nation. “Dad’s sunburn must have confused them,” she says regretfully. “I suppose they expect all their Englishmen to be pink.”

 
Charlie and I had another baby. And for over a year, while I breast-fed her, a familiar tranquility washed over me. I was more or less permanently contented and mildly exhausted, my blood awash with the mellowing agents of oxytocin and prolactin. For those long blissed-out months, I spent my days moving through the rhythm of the baby’s needs: her baths, her feedings, walks by the river. I cooked, I cleaned, I wrote, and at night I fell asleep with Cecily pressed against my skin, her breath innocent with the charmed, milky scents of babyhood.

  “If they could bottle these hormones and make them into pills, my marriage would last forever,” I told a friend.

  “They do,” she said. “Valium, Prozac, Xanax.”

  I laughed. “If I ever have to be tranquilized to stay in my marriage, it’s really over.”

  At fourteen months, the baby grew out of breast-feeding and I took an assignment following pilgrim Mexican cowboys in Guanajuato, then I signed a contract to write a book about the effects of a natural-gas boom on a small cowboy town in southwestern Wyoming. There was talk, and increasing evidence, of air and water going bad where hydrofracturing was occurring. The safety practices of the drilling and oil companies were blatantly shoddy and the willful carelessness of Wyoming’s legislators seemed directly linked to their obeisance to the industry.

  Now I worked hard not out of fear but out of outrage. I wrote letters to editors of local newspapers and op-eds for national publications, I went to Cheyenne to testify in front of the Wyoming House Judiciary Committee, I attended meetings about declining air quality and unsatisfactory working conditions. I lodged complaints. I knew my noise was unlikely to change anything, but I didn’t feel it was responsible of me to shut up now, of all times.

  Then I helped organize a tiny protest right on the oil patch of the Upper Green River Valley: a few cowboys, ranchers, hunters, and residents from the area, a local rancher’s son driving a tractor, a few friends who didn’t particularly care about the issue but wanted to show their support of my cause, the way we all gave money to one another’s favorite local charity at Christmas. Charlie joined me and brought the horses and the children. Mum and Dad were visiting and came along too.