Amor and Psycho: Stories (16 page)

My son, Sam, spent a year on a fellowship doing advanced work on the culture and civilization of the Mezima-Wa. When he came home for the summer, he brought a Mezima-Wa woman with him. Natalie was not a traditional Mezima-Wa; in fact, she’d grown up in St. Louis, where she attended the Burroughs School on a merit scholarship before matriculating at Villanova and taking the Mezima-Wa option for her junior year abroad. A year among the Mezima-Wa had irrevocably changed both my son and Natalie, they agreed. They were blown away by the culture, the colonial legacy, the horror, the architecture, the tribal music and the tribal language (Mezima-Wa). They came back earnest and politicized, decrying the effects of U.S.-backed “economic development” projects that supposedly raised the standard of living of the Mezima-Wa but commodified the forests and shorefront, on which the entire
culture depended. I roasted a chicken and made a pilaf, and as we sipped
vin ordinaire
, I asked about their experiences among the Mezima-Wa; I asked for pictures. But they couldn’t tell me anything, because I had not been there; it was as if the year among the Mezima-Wa had cleaved them away from common life and made us (parent, offspring, girlfriend of offspring) strangers to one another. Of course, Natalie
was
a stranger. I know nothing of the customs of the Mezima-Wa, nor even those of young American women from back east.

In those first weeks in July, during which they kept erratic hours—not to impugn Mezima-Wa hours—Natalie and Sam tried to be patient. In short: When I woke, they slept, curled together in Sam’s childhood twin bed; if I brushed my teeth and put on pajamas, they spontaneously decided to make a feast of Mezima-Wa foods from the hill country. This required a ritual bathing of their feet in the bathtub, followed by a cleansing of the tub with my good balsamic vinegar and hideous bathroom sponge. They then filled the floor of the tub with the tough leafy vegetables, dampened grains and fish, which, along with a tuber called
chloc
, form the basis of Mezima-Wa cuisine. (Sam and Natalie substituted frozen hake for the usual stockfish and jicama for the
chloc
.) They pounded and stomped the mixture with their clean feet, forming the solids into neat balls by manipulating their toes and rubbing their soles together.

Seeing the two of them sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on
the edge of the tub in their bright-colored tunics and cutoff jeans reminded me of what Roland Barthes called “the fabulous comforts” of domestic life. Since my ex-husband Bob’s defection from marriage and from America, prompted by certain impetuous but unoriginal actions on my part, life had devolved into tidiness and convenience. Natalie and Sam, ankle-deep in their bathtub stew, reminded me of my own erotic history and, by extension, the whole human history of messy pleasures.

Sometime after midnight, they poached the fish balls in my wok (the Mezima-Wa drop them into clay vats of oily broth, where they rise like matzo balls) and used the liquids (traditionally scraped from the mashing tub with a freshwater shell) as the base for fiery sauces. Natalie produced endless spice packs, which she kept not in the kitchen with the other spices, but in her own purse.

This was not to be ungenerous, she assured me—generosity was the highest value among the Mezima-Wa—only for safety: Mezima-Wa spices were mildly psychotropic and could cause seizures in any but the smallest doses. Each was absolutely essential to the authenticity of the dishes.

They fed the fish balls—
boibois
—to each other in the Mezima-Wa way, reclining on my off-white sofa near dawn, their fingers in each other’s mouths. My pleasure in their company was diminished somewhat by perimenopausal symptoms—sporadic irritability, trouble sleeping, numbness, a new rigidity in my shoulders and spine. (Dr.
Berman had suggested homeopathic doses of bioidentical estrogen and a pinch of testosterone—good for the libido, she said.)

Sometimes I rose to the demands of maternal generosity and offered to make a Western breakfast when Sam and Natalie awoke at one or two o’clock in the afternoon. Natalie would whisper into Sam’s ear at such length and with such urgency that I thought she must be revealing some secret. My first thoughts ran to pregnancy, a thrill and a panic—what beautiful, brilliant children they could make!—until finally Sam nodded and said, “Natalie would like two eggs over easy with some ham and, if you have them, a few sardines. Canned are fine. I’ll just have Grape-Nuts, thanks.”

While among the Mezima-Wa, Sam had sent regular texts from his cell phone—a form suited to his terse, epigrammatic style. From these communiqués, I’d gathered that Natalie’s year abroad had not pleased her parents, who actually stopped speaking to her for several months. Part of the trouble seemed to be cultural; having so recently left the region themselves for the economic opportunities they hoped a life in America would make possible for their daughter, they objected to her return to the nation-peninsula (engaged in a civil war when they left, which Natalie barely remembered) and to her study of the Mezima-Wa culture as a living, dynamic possibility. It seemed to them that they had the best of both worlds in St. Louis—Mezima-Wa values within an American economy and a capitalist structure that protected their investments, including and especially Natalie.
After Villanova, they expected Natalie to attend Harvard Medical School and become, like her aunt, a pediatrician.

Maybe, too, Natalie’s return to the Mezima-Wa struck them as romantic or frivolous. “Bet they grieve loss of their homeland,” I’d texted Sam.

“Grief counselor examines world through lens of sorrow,” he’d texted back.

What other lens could I use? Four mornings and two afternoons a week, grief knocked at my office door, presented evidence (lost children, failed marriages, demented parents, financial ruin, existential dread). This is not to say that I don’t love my job; grief counseling is the most satisfying work I have ever done—it brings me pleasure, and I believe in the process. Twenty years of compelling narratives have convinced me that as an organizing principle for life, grief works.

DURING THE COURSE
of their daughter’s year abroad, Natalie’s parents came to understand and accept that Sam was not a traditional Mezima-Wa man. (The initial confusion stemmed from Sam’s name, which is actually the Mezima-Wa word for “calabash” or “capacious urn”—an auspicious symbol.) They realized that in returning to Mezima-Wa, Natalie wasn’t unraveling all their work in coming to the United States, but, rather, reclaiming her identity and cultural heritage as a Mezima-Wa while maintaining a friendly, nonsexual relationship with a promising and affluent(!)
American-born boy. On the other hand, when they learned that Sam wasn’t Mezima-Wa-American, but just a random person Natalie had met during her year abroad, and with whom she lived in unseemly proximity, they naturally began to worry that Sam might not fully appreciate the urgent, paramount importance of Natalie’s remaining a virgin until her wedding day. Their concern eventually reached a hysterical pitch.

Then came the bombshell, a text from Sam: “Natalie and I plan to marry on return to States. Yes we’re sure.” Sam assured me that Natalie’s parents were relieved and had expressed willingness to accept Sam as a husband (according to Mezima-Wa tradition, he would be called “Husband” not only by Natalie but also by her parents). They had also accepted me as the husbandmother.

Natalie’s parents arrived at the beginning of July at my house in Santa Cruz for the monthlong visit that precedes any Mezima-Wa wedding. During this time, although we all lived under one roof, Sam and Natalie could have no physical contact at all. They couldn’t even sit at the same table to eat, though no one objected to them Skyping from their laptops between the rooms. At first, I felt glad to have Sam back to myself, whatever that means. But delicate marital matters demanded his—our—full attention: determining the agreed-upon number of children the couple would produce, for example, and the penalties should either side (not just the husband and wife but also their extended families) default. Natalie kindly pointed out that her family would naturally
assume that as the husbandmother-to-be, I’d demand a number of children higher than Natalie could comfortably or safely bear—and only then would we negotiate.

Sometimes, passing by Sam’s room, I’d see his face glowing into his computer screen. He’d smile and give a little wave. Then I realized that he was Skyping with Natalie—he didn’t see me at all.

But he responded immediately to my messages.

“Two children is a nice number,” I texted.

“Two is nothing. We can get more,” he replied.

If I weren’t divorced, it turned out, we could have commanded five or six children from poor Natalie. But Sam and Natalie agreed on three, and each of us signed the document that outlined specific ameliorations should Natalie prove infertile or unwilling to bear the planned number of offspring. I couldn’t read the document, as it was written in Mezima-Wa. Sam read it aloud to me, translating as he went, his face adorably close to the page. Although I felt the document exerted a fair amount of pressure upon a young couple with student loans to repay, I signed my name on the line above the word
Husbandmother—Husbandmother
, the most beautiful concept in the Mezima-Wa language, Sam told me.

ENDING MY MARRIAGE
had been like jumping from a beautiful tall building filled with people working and loving and laughing, a building illuminated against the darkness. I
jumped and fell slowly, Alice-like, past each floor. I saw the various scenes of human contact and togetherness and knew that I could no longer live inside.

Marriage—the end, the loss of faith—is not something I’ll recover from, financially or in messier ways. Recessions and housing crises are always good for my business, but I have a mortgage built for two and a son in college. To complicate matters, Bob isn’t Sam’s biological father, who was never in the picture, really. (That early encounter was brief and strangely productive, and it all took place during my junior year in Rome.) During the marital negotiation, Sam had asked me not to mention my impulsive youth. It was enough to say that Sam’s father lived abroad.

When Sam announced that he and Natalie would be getting married in a traditional Mezima-Wa ceremony, I had three hundred dollars in my checking account and a Discover card I’d prophylactically cut in half. Circumstances compelled me to expand my practice—to bring more grief into my life.

Natalie’s parents were better-off. Her mother had attended a Catholic high school among the Mezima-Wa, then, after the civil war and her move to the United States, put herself through community college and then through a master’s program at Ohio State. She now directed an international nonprofit organization that did incredibly bold and dangerous work with child soldiers in war-torn countries. Natalie’s father, Mondal-Wa, was an orthodontist. They spoke with pride about their Roth IRAs and 401(k)s (all of which were
disclosed and enumerated on the marital document). Natalie was their only child.

Before we met, I felt confident that Natalie would warm to me. I’ve always been a favorite of girls, who see me as tough and independent and androgynously, fabulously feminist—probably because I am tall, single, and forty-five. But Natalie remained cool.

“Come, we live in America now,” Natalie’s mother, Fenn, told her daughter. Fenn explained to me that among the Mezima-Wa, divorced women lost all status. “It’s a fate worse than death,” she said, “though a small percentage of Mezima-Wa women still choose to leave husbands for the most serious reasons.” These women lived together on the margins of the Mezima-Wa territory in a desperately poor but beautifully organized gift economy.

“All will be well,” Fenn assured me, patting my arm. She picked up my hand and put my thumb into her mouth and held it there, looking sternly at the olive tree outside. This gesture of consolation is among the more endearing intimacies practiced among the Mezima-Wa. Before Natalie’s parents arrived, I had seen Natalie do the same to Sam, and Sam reciprocate. The inside of Fenn’s mouth was like another world—warm and dark and safe. We sat there for a long time—maybe fifteen minutes, my thumb in Fenn’s mouth, and all was well.

Mondal-Wa was an attractive man, taller than I, with gorgeous, sleepy eyes. He admired my CD collection and shared my enthusiasm for Bill Evans, Miles Davis, Grace
Jones and the early Sting. He slept in Sam’s bedroom; in fact, he slept in the same spot where Natalie had lately slept, next to my son, in the twin bed Sam had used since he was three. This was inviolate custom among the Mezima-Wa; the bride’s father symbolically guarded the future husband, or guarded his daughter from the possible predations of the future husband. But Mondal-Wa’s presence in my son’s bed was not hostile or purely preventive, Sam assured me; it was also a chance for the father and husband to bond. Similarly, Natalie moved from my son’s room into mine. She brought her pink ditty bag, her tampons, her incense, her secret birth control pills, her collection of bras from Victoria’s Secret, her G-strings, her flannel pajama bottoms, her tank tops, her Haruki Murakami novel and her plastic basket of dirty laundry. She slept on the bed beside me.

Fenn slept on the floor. She claimed the red rag rug I’d stepped on first thing every morning and last thing every evening for the past fifteen years. At first, before Fenn explained its deeper cultural significance, this abasement horrified me. With one thing and another, raising my son, keeping up my practice and so on, the rug had probably gathered dust. But Fenn just shook it out the window that first night and smiled warmly through the sparkling motes. “Your dreams will reach me here,” she said.

Fenn added that sleeping on the floor immediately beside the bed of the husbandmother was a privilege and even a pleasure. “It’s a nice change for me,” she confided. “I’ve slept next to Mondal-Wa nearly every night since our wedding—and
he snores like a buffalo.” I asked if she would like, at least, a yoga mat to lie on. She pursed her lips and then said, “Yes.” When I found my old yoga mat—in the garden shed, of all places—she asked for a pillow (with feathers, if I had one). I felt we were making progress.