The Bigness of the World (11 page)

The next day when Annabel arrives home from school, the phone is ringing again, but she knows what she needs to do, and she sits on the sofa listening to it, her hands tucked beneath her thighs. Eventually, she gets up and sets the table, two places instead of three, so that everything will seem right when her mother gets home. When the ringing finally stops nearly two hours later, she feels its absence like a sharp, sudden pain, but she understands now how it is: that this pain, this pain is how much she loves him.

Nobody Walks to the Mennonites

THE TWO AMERICAN WOMEN READ IN THEIR GUIDEBOOK
that there were Mennonites not far from town, so on the second morning they set out to find them. The women were staying perhaps a quarter of a mile outside of town in a bungalow, a round structure with cinder block walls, one of several grouped together along a footpath behind the main office. At some point, perhaps when bungalows were in greater demand, a flimsy wall had been erected down the middle of each, slicing it into two separate, though by no means soundproof, units. Now, however, the entire place stood empty, the grass along the footpath left uncut so that mosquitoes swarmed above it, attacking the women’s bare legs as they walked to and from their bungalow.

When they first entered the office from the road and inquired whether there were vacancies, the man behind the counter nodded his head, looking almost ashamed, and said, “Sure, we got rooms. Just go ahead and take your pick.” He was an older man, quite black with grizzled hair, and he wore only a pair of shorts and a necklace from which hung some sort of animal’s tooth. Because they did not want him to feel more defeated than he already seemed, they did not comment on the lack of other guests, though they were, in fact, elated.

The guidebook had warned that the town itself could get noisy at night—too many bars—and since neither of them had much tolerance for unabashed revelry, the sort that people tend to engage in while vacationing in someone else’s country, they had heeded the book’s suggestion to stay just outside the limits of the town proper. They had to walk into town to eat, of course, but it was nice, if not a bit disorienting, coming home in the dark like that. They simply
followed the lane that led out of town, sliding their feet along the gravel rather than lifting them up and taking actual steps, which would have required far more trust than the two women felt able to invest at that point, either in this country or in themselves. Still, they liked the walk, particularly the final stretch with the field on the left that contained a dozen cows whose silent, sturdy presence comforted them.

In all regards, the women (Sarah and Sara, who, because they were both visual people, did not think of themselves as having the same name) found this town vastly superior to Belize City, from which they had just escaped, but only after spending one night there in a hotel above a bar where their room had throbbed with a steady bass throughout most of the night. In the room next to them was a very young Japanese couple who had spent the last three years trying to see the world, “the whole world,” the young man had informed them, so that they could return to Japan and begin working and not feel as though they had missed something. They had gone through Asia first, and then into Africa and Europe, and now they were working their way up from South America. But Belize City, they told the two American women in careful English, was the very worst place they had ever been, “so dirty and” (this after pausing to weigh all of the English words at their disposal) “evil,” and Sara and Sarah, who had just spent the last four hours walking around Belize City, agreed though they kept their opinion to themselves, as was their tendency when talking to fellow tourists.

Their plan had been to take a taxi from the Belize City airport to a pleasant bed-and-breakfast that their guidebook highly recommended (it was run by an American), but instead the taxi driver had taken them straight into the dirty, crowded heart of the city and dumped them in front of the hotel. “Cheap,” he told them. “Cheap and very near.” He did not say very near what, but it appeared to be very near every trash heap and vice the city had to offer. Still, they
were tired of sitting, so they got out of the taxi, paid the driver, and checked into the hotel, where there was not actually a room ready for them. Instead, they had nervously entrusted their suitcases to the proprietor, who assured them that he would move the bags himself into the first available room.

Then, though the guidebook had recommended
not
doing so, they walked down along the empty pier, stopping eventually for drinks at a small café attached to the side of a house. The sign out front claimed that the café was open, but when they followed the arrow around the house to the side door marked “Café,” they found themselves in an empty, poorly lit room with several tables and a dartboard. They sat down anyway because neither woman was ready to face the street again, where they felt conspicuous and vulnerable to all of the dangers that the guidebook had warned of: drive-by shootings, gangs, drugs, purse snatchers, con artists, and ass grabbers, though they were not sure whether the book had actually mentioned the last of these or whether they were simply allowing their imaginations to get the better of them. The room was cloyingly hot and musty, and at one point Sara, who had grown up in Minnesota and was fond of explaining to people that the state actually contained almost one hundred thousand bodies of water, commented that the room reminded her of a lake cabin.

“It’s the smell,” Sarah replied, “the smell and the paneling.”

“No,” Sara said firmly. “That’s not it. There’s just something about it, something I can’t quite put my finger on, but it’s not that obvious.”

“That’s exactly what it is,” Sarah told her. “You just think that because I’m from Iowa, I don’t know anything about lake cabins.” She spoke almost sneeringly, and Sara looked startled, for the two of them rarely argued. They were quiet then, and after several more minutes, a door near the back of the room creaked open, and they sensed that they were being watched.

“Yes?” Sarah said sharply, turning toward the door. There was no
answer, but they heard a dog growl, and she called out again. “Yes? Are you open?”

Finally, a child’s voice—they could not tell whether it was a boy or a girl—announced: “My mother went to the store. Please wait.” Then, the door slammed shut, and they heard several locks fall into place.

Neither woman had an immediate reaction—to go or to stay—and so they stayed, but Sarah, who was the more impatient one, soon stood, walked to the window, and studied her watch. When she returned to the table, she said quietly, “We’ve been here nearly half an hour now,” and Sara understood that this was her way of suggesting that they leave. It occurred to them, however, that the room had become cooler, that, in fact, they were both shivering slightly, which meant that someone, presumably the child, had turned on the air conditioner. It was settled yet again: they could not leave. Instead, they spent the next fifteen minutes looking forward to the rest of their trip, to the moment when they would leave Belize City behind, and eventually they heard the locks being undone and the door to the house opening again.

A small woman carrying a tray approached the table, and as she got closer, they saw that she was Chinese. “High tea?” she asked softly, and because they could see that she had already prepared something, they did not have the heart to say that they just wanted sodas.

“Yes,” they both said and then nodded overly vigorously. The woman set a small plate in front of each of them, placed a pot of tea in the middle of the table, and set about arranging cups and saucers, cloth napkins, and various pieces of cutlery. When she was done, she gestured gracefully toward the table, an invitation to begin eating, and hurried away. Each plate contained a slice of white bread spread thickly with rancid butter and topped with chocolate sprinkles. To the side were cucumber slices, spilled out like coins.

They ate everything, of course, because they couldn’t bear the thought of the woman staring sadly at their scraps, and Sara, who always carried the money, wedged a dollar bill under her saucer after settling the bill. They both nodded politely at the woman, who was hovering near the dartboard, and left, their eyelids fluttering rapidly against the sudden brightness outside. They had thought they would find a taxi, but there were none, and so they walked quickly back in the direction of the hotel, their fanny packs slung low across their buttocks like shields.

They returned to the hotel to find that their bags had indeed been taken up to their room as promised, though they realized, as the proprietor led them up a rickety, winding set of stairs and down a narrow hallway, that the hotel was, in fact, nothing more than three rooms wedged between the first-floor bar and the third floor, where the proprietor and his family lived. They stopped in front of a particleboard door, and the proprietor handed them a key attached to a plastic coffee mug. “Your room, ladies,” he mumbled and hurried off without showing them the interior.

There were no windows in the room or fans; the only suggestion of circulation came from an open transom above the door, which did nothing to alleviate the heat or the smell of raw sewage that hung in the air, an odor that wafted up from the toilet in the middle of the room. They tried flushing it again and again, but the toilet had no lid that could be closed to block the smell, which rose up from the pipes and filled the room. The final insult, for that’s how it seemed to the women at this point, was that the toilet stood shamelessly out in the open, within touching distance of the bed and without even a curtain that could be drawn around it when it was in use; in fact, it was almost as though the person who had designed the room was trying to showcase the toilet, for it sat atop a platform, which one had to ascend like royalty. Still, and this was always a consolation, the room had been quite cheap.

Sara and Sarah knew how to
pass time
, an expression that they used often and without self-consciousness, considering it an important skill whether one liked to travel or not. At home, where portability was not a concern, Sarah was teaching herself the art of papermaking, and both women enjoyed gardening; also, while they understood that recycling was technically not a hobby, they liked to devote time to that as well. When they traveled, the two passed time by reading, though they also carried a deck of cards with which to play cribbage. Thus, they spent the early evening hours in Belize City in their hotel room playing round after round of cribbage, keeping score on a pad of paper because they both agreed that a cribbage board was unnecessary. Then, turning their books alternately toward the light from the transom and the weak glow offered by the bedside lamp, they read, Sara from a Belizean novel entitled
Beka Lamb
and Sarah from the guidebook. At one point, the Japanese couple knocked furtively at their door and asked whether they could possibly change some American currency into Belizean dollars. They didn’t have enough for a bus, the young man explained, and they couldn’t bear the thought of waiting around in the morning until the banks opened. As he said this, the young woman began to sob, and so they had given the couple half of their money, changing it at the bank rate even though they had just purchased it at the higher airport rate that afternoon. After the couple left, bowing slightly and thanking them repeatedly, they returned to their books.

At ten o’clock, they turned off the lamp, though there was nothing they could do about the light coming through the transom or the throbbing music from the bar downstairs. Sarah engaged in a relaxation method which involved focusing on each part of her body and encouraging it to ignore the noise while Sara simply covered her head with the pillow. Eventually, they fell asleep. At some point during the night, however, the music stopped abruptly, and they both awakened to a soft lapping sound inside their room, though neither
could be sure afterwards which had woken them—the sudden cessation of one sound or the quiet proximity of another. They turned the light on quickly, without even speaking, to discover a mangy, sore-infested street cat crouched on the toilet seat drinking from the bowl. It fixed them with a slow, dazed look, and then it leapt from the toilet seat, clawed its way frantically up the wooden door of their room, and hoisted itself out through the open transom.

So, of course, after Belize City, they slept inordinately well that first night in the bungalow. The second night, however, as they lay in bed reading, they heard a group of people, Americans also, coming down the path that led to their bungalow. The group paused for a moment, looking for a key, and the women realized that these people were going to be inhabiting the other half of the bungalow, sleeping on the other side of the flimsy dividing wall. It became difficult to read then, for the newcomers—a family they suspected—were celebrating, their voices loud and merry with everyone talking at once, interrupting one other without giving offense and laughing in unison like people who had shared years of finding the same things funny. There were the sounds of bottles being opened, and periodically someone said, “I’m ready for another, Shel,” an announcement that was followed by the clink of glass hitting glass as another drink was poured. They were discussing something that they all seemed to find extremely amusing, something that had happened on the Cayes just a day or two earlier, so the incident was still fresh in their minds. In the middle of the story came the very loud, unmistakable sound of someone passing gas, and two or three voices said at once, with practiced indignation, “Dad!” which confirmed what they had initially suspected, that it was a family on the other side. Neither woman could understand this, a family still taking vacations together as adults, actually finding it restful to be in one another’s company.

The sounds of drinking continued as the story from the Cayes was
related again and again so that eventually they were able to piece together the gist of it, which involved this man—Dad—and his inability to climb back into the boat after a morning of snorkeling along the coral reef off of the Cayes. The boat had been ladderless, and he had been unable to summon the strength to pull himself up and over the side, so finally the captain and several of their fellow snorkelers had lowered themselves back into the water and hoisted him over the rail and onto the deck. Each time they retold the story, Dad chuckled along good naturedly, as though it did not bother him to be the butt of the new family joke.