consolationland

Thanksgiving Day, 2004.

“There’s just the one bus for today,” frets the driver. “Goes around both the routes.”
“Both scenic routes for the same low fare?” I tell her. “What’s not to like!”
Her troubled look brightens right up. “You got it.”

So on the local bus she and I take a nice long quiet ride around the peninsula. Then, I mind the bus for her while she runs in to Sea Foam Cafe (lobster pots; wood shutters; climbing concrete kitten) and buys herself a bag of potato chips for Thanksgiving dinner.

The rain clouds are gone for now, leaving us a clear mild day.
In the center of town I hop out and walk.
Here’s the Street of Family-Owned Funeral Homes. On slack days, the guys provide car owners with auto painting & pinstripe services. Now here’s the Masonic Lodge / Odd Fellows Hall. Forsythia out of season blooms at Pleasant Park. The little fence around a maple tree is heaped with crushed iridescent-blue mussels. Spiked aloe vera is really antlers of driftwood coated with moss. A sapling bears yellow leaves, bright dots of lichen with tiny mouths, and new magenta buds peering right from the trunk. The town square’s war memorial, a statue of soldier with weapon, bears the unexpected slogan “Cuba!”: the war in mind here is the Spanish-American. The houses have real weather vanes, topped with gilt horses or gilt ships.

Near the white gazebo on the village green, masses of starlings tear up from the ground like one solid rending black veil. I settle by the swings for my dinner from home: baked brussels sprouts with mushrooms, baked yam, roasted chestnuts, apple, and Sunspire chocolate drops. At first bite, the bells ring noon. Everyone is indoors at their holiday dinner. On the streets there is not a car in sight. Everything is silent but a jubilant mockingbird, audible for half a mile around.

Down on the Point there are two views. One is dunes and sea. One is the Boston skyline and Logan airport, over sheltered bay with rocking rowboats champing at the bit. The water here is bright flat silver. Black clouds are massing for the next storm; I was soaked by one cloudburst early today leaving home, and might be soaked again soon. The sun is poised on the downswing, ebbing early. It picks out the sand grasses, bleached and salt-dried. It washes over them in tender translucent gold.

At the main beach I hop the seawall and hike out to the water.

Seeing its pale powder green tone, for once I understand what got into Mr. Crayola’s head, calling this Sea Green. The tide is far out. Orange seaweed lies like snake skin. The sand is tinged lavender with crushed mussels in indigoes and cobalts. I pick up a half shell to take home. Its shining curve is drilled through and through by some parasitic creature long gone. The damage at all the gnawed places brings out and burnishes the real nacre inside, white mother of pearl.

On Crystal Cove I step out over the water to hunker down on a concrete block over the storm sewer, completely hidden by tall reeds, wrapped in my khaki slicker. There are quiet sounds to learn here. One is wind, crisped in the waving rushes. One is the sound of duck-skimming: mallards choosing the muckiest puddles to run at, neck outstretched, beak low, nibbling at scum. One is low-flying Canada geese brushing their wings several feet over my head: each beat sounds like creaky leather, wrung fast and hard. A few feet away across the pond, the golf course is overrun with them, honking and flapping; seen through the grass they’re like a pilgrimage of Carmelites.

At last as a rain front settles in, it’s time to walk back to the Blue Line train. The little one-lane highway leaving the center of town is deserted. Under the Logan flight path it’s a long stretch of plain wetland with one little high-stepping white egret gleaming in the rain. The tall gold reeds look dingy today. But a close inspection of the plants shows that they are really just ridden with some sooty mold or scale. Some of the square plant cells are blackened by it, some are not. A checkered past! At close range, that overall dinginess forms a bright symmetrical mosaic.

Out in the open salt wind, all the wildflowers are dried and gone, and the landscape is plain fawn and gray. But the guard rail has caught and collected a layer of land flotsam, flung from cars. The styrofoam trays, hot-drink cups, and disposable plastic lobster bibs were good insulation for keeping out the wind and frost. With that weatherbreak, near the ground, there’s a whole separate habitat with its own palette of tints. Raking aside the debris I crouch down to duck under brambles for a better view. Under here there is still live goldenrod, gold briar leaves with scarlet rosehips, scarlet creeper vine, nightshade berries, bright barberries with reddening leaves, velvety crimson sumac, and yellow button flowers with feathery leaves smelling like bitter carrot.

So here’s Thanksgiving on the shoulder of the highway, squatting knee-deep in rubbish. But there’s such a lot to see and admire down here — somebody’s overlooked autumn, lost fall, recovered Indian summer. Who would have guessed? Under the frost line in phragmites and trash, tender and glowing all over again, a swatch of season that we thought was lost and gone.

The house was a plain white clapboard, built in 1930 give or take, insulated with a layer of horsehair embedded in the plaster. At $250 per month, my studiolette was a cozy work/sleep room lined up with a smaller kitchen and smaller bathroom, all with tall narrow windows facing north. For bathing, there was a claw-foot tub with a convenience called a Danish — a yard of rubber tubing to hold overhead, fitted to a small outlet for bathwater. The floor had a metal spade-shaped door that could open in winter to let a burst of warm air whoosh through the house every 15 minutes. In summer, air conditioning came from hand-sewed muslin dipped in water and hung over the curtain rods.

This was summer, and no question. My new vegetable garden baked out no matter how much dishwater and tub water I carried outside to pour on the cracked ground; nothing would grow but devil’s claw and very toxic pokeweed. The candles melted. The freezer filled up with ice every day, which I chipped off with a wooden spoon to place inside the warm refrigerator. At least the heat was useful for drying food; I tacked a lot of strings across the kitchen windows, and wove in a carload of fiber-rich daikon radish greens brought from Arkansas upon request by a good pal on an agriculture internship. And at least my quarters didn’t spring the surprises that one charming stone farmhouse did just outside town; a fellow student came downstairs one morning to a wriggling living room floor, where many bitty rattlesnake hatchlings were exploring the brave new world.

We relied on the county bank with its big thermometer outside, and its recorded telephone line with an elated male voice proclaiming time and temperature. The radio gave us the Comfort Index, like a wind chill factor in reverse, calculating just how miserable we felt. It also broadcast Livestock Emergency Alerts, letting farmers know when to get the cows in the barn, or out of it, or whatever cows need to cool off. Storm warning time was late afternoon, when NPR ran an especially popular show (probably “All Things Considered,” but I’ll check and make sure). I switched on public radio only to get bulletins when the sky turned green, so to this day its perky theme music makes me edgy.

Still, the town had real summer charm. To the south we had a fire watch tower with room for conversation and lunch on top, and a view of fields for miles around. On the north, the broad sand river levee was perfect for strolling and picking watercress. On the west, the hilltop had a tiny historic cemetery, a good place to admire sunsets and watch clouds of fireflies and eat mulberries off some nearby trees. The wonderful downtown history museum was a cultured refuge with a gazebo garden and winding path of vintage bricks. The central playground had a vintage locomotive for the kids to climb and scream on, and a popular library. The campus carillon tower played chimes on a hillside blooming with clouds of redbud trees every spring. There were evening band concerts in the park for picnicking families and friends.  Local artisans produced a tempting array of sprouts, fresh-baked sourdough breads, and tofu made the same day; one of them opened a popular micro-brewery in the fully restored historic opera house. The politically progressive food coop sold just-picked produce, some of it from their own garden. Their free giveaway box supplied many of my clothes and household goods; even their compost heap offered perfectly usable items for dinner.

The townspeople made the best of those arduous summers. The 4th of July parade included a tame llama, and food coop cashiers in an annual display of synchronized shopping-cart marching. A dear talented buddy had a fine time hanging half out his window to record severe thunder for his brilliant computerized music compositions. The ladies at the retirement home got in a friendly bet about whether it really was hot enough to “fry an egg on the sidewalk”; they made the front page of the city paper by cracking an egg on the pavement and then laughing at its behavior. The doughnut shop flashed a neon sign at 3:00 a.m., when the fresh batches were put on the racks, and students would throng in the door for a snack in the cool of the wee hours. The local Buddhist temple chose 3:00 a.m. too for their three-hour Sunday service; their little Zen Center house offered rides to anyone who called, and starting at 1:00 the monks in their feed caps would set out in a truck to pick up people for meditation. One afternoon some fellow students brought a truck inner tube to a pond and went swimming. To enjoy the breeze they sat on their towels just as they were for the drive back into town. Then at the drive-in burger stand they wished a little late that they’d put on a stitch or two before pulling up below the cute girl at the microphone.

One third of my income that year (the total annual gross was $6,700; I just checked the tax return) came from proofreading science journals. Each author submitted a typed manuscript, and the publishing house covered it with format markings, then reprinted it as a glossy galley proof. Proofreaders had to make sure that every marking was correctly carried out in the galleys, and complied with the detailed style sheet for that particular journal. For the sake of accuracy, we were not allowed to visually compare the two texts. Instead we had to read the author’s pages out loud into a tape recorder, describing every editing mark: “Capitalize this letter D in mid-word” or “end boldface Courier 10 point text here” or “add opening double curly braces.” Then we listened to our taped recital of editing instructions while reading and marking up the galley with soft red pencils. We were paid a base rate for the job, plus a 12 cent bonus every time we reported a mistake. (One astute proofreader realized that in an article of numeric tables, every last zero had been type-set as a capital letter O. That jackpot must have kept her in 3:00 a.m. doughnuts for a long time.)

The topics included mathematical calculations of crystal structures, prolific chemical equations with calculus symbols and Greek letters, and one about a type of bird which hatches chicks and then carries the chick droppings long distances in its beak, so that prowling predators would follow these little clues away from the nest. (Researchers followed the parents on many housecleaning trips, graphing the time of day, distance, and direction of all droppings dropped.) Another expedition team found that genetic distinctions within one species of spider could be ascertained easily by measuring the thickness of the individual hairs on the spider’s legs.

To save time and to stay awake through all those formulas and equations and literature citations, I devised representational sound effects as shorthand. High falsetto meant italic, growl was boldface, Donald Duck voice was underline. I worked out punctuation taps, yips, beeps, tongue clicks, glottal stops, whistles, and trills. I should have kept the tapes; they sounded like Science Hour with Spike Jones.

In the noonday sun, that horsehair plaster could do only so much insulating and no more. I’d have to take breaks to wet the muslin curtains, sip some roasted brown-rice tea, and take a nap on the wood floor wrapped in a wet towel with both feet in a bowl of water. When the heat was too much for working, I’d recreate the Russian sauna effect. I’d ride my bicycle hard up the main hill, come home, draw a hot hip bath of daikon radish greens (said to help expel toxins, but who knows?), then get out and wrap up in a sheet and blanket and pass out on the floor for a good sweat. Twenty minutes later I’d wake up refreshed, rinse off the sweat under The Danish, throw the water and greens on the garden, wash the blanket and sheet to hang at the window, and pour some more rice tea. (Note: I would never try a wacky extreme stunt like this in a heat wave now, and neither should you.)

Did we mention the neighbors?

They moved in as tenants of the stately Victorian house next door. That summer there were 6 or so students, strapping he-men with optional shirts and shoes. Regularly I gave a friendly nod or wave while passing the house, and tried saying hello a few times, just in the capacity of a neighbor using the same neighborhood. But it was like a squirrel trying to hail the Anheuser-Busch Clydesdales; they never responded or seemed to know I was there. Instead their gusto level ran to drinking wagers, stereo parties, auto revving, sports on TV, sunbathing on the roof with the radio, and visitors day and night who tended to drive or walk by, shouting long complex messages instead of knocking on the door and going inside.

All my windows faced their south windows 20 feet away, offering the full gamut of personal sound effects. At one 3:00 a.m. party, someone turned the stereo to the repeat setting for a couple of hours of a new Janet Jackson hit. The decibel level was actually enough to ricochet distortion against the houses across the street. I thought of calling the police, but couldn’t hear my own dial tone and figured the precinct dispatcher wouldn’t hear anything but “Nasty! Ugh. Nasty boys. Deet! Deet! Doodley-Doot & Dee Dee.”

To be fair, the fellas might have a blog today about their stress living next door to an arachnophile who talked, chirped, and beeped all day long in various voices all to herself about leg hair on spiders. Maybe it drove them to drink. Except, their windows faced four sides, and mine faced one. Besides, they were bigger and more loud.

You already see where this is going.

In following their bliss, the boys and their sports cheers, peppery language, and other visceral sound bites were drowning out my recorded hours of painstaking falsetto, tongue clicks, and whistle editing code. One especially hot night while testing a folk remedy for fever (= place green-leaf compresses on the sufferer’s brow), I found that a 60 minute recording of numerals was unusable because of ambient racket. Soon I was weeping hopelessly over my lost numeric tables, pacing the room with a lot of dripping cabbage on my head.

I prayed steadily over this all along, remembering to “Give thanks in all things.” After all, Corrie and Betsy ten Boom did just that in The Hiding Place. They offered praise even for the fleas in the concentration camp barrack, and later learned it was the fleas that had repelled the guards away from their Bible study. So, I began raising every candid noise as an offering, every time. That meant prayer while tape-recording with my head and upper body and tape deck under the futon for soundproofing; prayer during a rare quiet stroll one Sunday morning after a keg party, through hundreds of styrofoam cups rotating all over the street, bouncing pok-pok-pok in the breeze; and, prayer while chopping carrots at suppertime one day.

The carrot greens were washed and ready to strip from their stems and mince for the skillet. The carrots were lined up on the wood cutting board. During some TV match of the century next door, with goals scored and heated suggestions that the referee be given what-for and heave-ho, I was murmuring a prayer while dragging my tired dispirited mind through one even angled knife stroke, then the next even stroke, then the next.

And then, to the rhythm of the prayer, the strokes added up to some kind of rhythm and symmetry and rightness. The knife cuts took no effort at all. It felt as if there were no I, exerting my own force on the knife. Instead, the energy of the sunlight in the window flashed through the knife and then flowed through the carrot pieces. All the elements — light, metal, vegetable, wood — expressed their essences in freedom and balance. For an instant my mind let go of the havoc next door. And then a whole new prayer came to mind: “Thank you for letting me hear my neighbors. Because some day, one of those boys will say something that I need to know.”

Right then, two things happened.
One, the light from the window took on a striking soft gold glow on the maple cutting board, the beautiful saffron tones of the carrots, and the sparkling water drops in the feathery emerald greens.
Two, next door everything fell absolutely silent.

“HEY! Hey they interrupted the –” a voice protested, then instantly fell to a thoughtful mumble. “Whuzzat? ‘Tor-na-do warn-ing, seek shelter immediately.’ Huh.”

I gasped, flicking on the radio in my dash to the front porch. Outside, there was no breath of wind. The birds fell silent. That fond gold light took on a brass jaundice tint while the clouds sagged in darkening quilted patches. Sure enough: the local weather broadcast announced a tornado in air, heading toward town.

I turned off the gas stove and radio, yanked the plug from the tape recorder, and bolted to the dark storm cellar. There I perched with pounding heart on a broken wheelbarrow. We had a bit of hail, then a soft rain. Then the sun came out and the birds began to sing in a fresh breeze, so I tiptoed upstairs and looked around, wiping cobwebs off my face. The storm front was already racing away. My spike of fright melted in an endorphin rush of elation. I kicked off my sandals and drew in the energy of the melting hailstones through my feet, breathing deeply, marveling at the delicate clearing sunset.

My neighbors had taken the safety warning seriously by seeking shelter on their roof, with binoculars and a couple of six packs. The gold light flowing through my carrots was the same gold as the clearing sky, pouring itself over the boys and their flaxen rumpled hair, their tan skin, even the frosty beers in their hands.

Then, it all seemed so simple. Their candid noises, wakeful nights, raised glasses, pounding stereo, girls shrieking with hilarity — in this fallen post-Eden world, it was just one more human striving toward a paradise birthright of celebration, communion, and pleasure. We were all going to the Kingdom.

“Thank you,” I called up to them, putting down my sandals. “You could have saved my life.”
They stared down at me.
“What?” said one of them. “I’ve never even seen you before.”
“The special bulletin. ‘Tornado warning, seek shelter.'”
They blinked.
“What were you doing inside our house?” said one, curling his lip. (How drunk was I last night?)
I pointed to my room. “I’ve never been in your house. But those are my windows, there; I was fixing supper.”
“You heard me say that? Through the window?”
Their jaws dropped. So did the beer cans, nearly.
I just stood there, rapt in how beautiful they were. All that life force! How glorious!

Folding my hands I bowed to them and took my sandals inside.

Right after that, a letter came in the mail. My department on campus awarded me a summer scholarship for Polish Language. It paid more money than proofreading. But, there was one condition: to study full time, I had to give up all outside employment. So I finished the spider leg hair article, and the Press was very kind about giving me a two-month break. That meant leaving the studiolette behind each day for an air conditioned library and language lab, and edifying chats with kindly faculty in their pleasant shady offices.

And after that evening, noise from next door just made me think “Oh, they sound in good health, God love ’em.” Something shifted on their side too. It’s not like they started bringing me pie and Awake! Magazine. But the guys moved the TV room to the other side of the house. When the young ladies came over, they went up to the gable rooms and started closing the windows and even pulling down the shades. The parties ended. One of the guys came out one day and clipped the hedge. Even their outbursts were different: “Oh, sugar!” “What the Fritz are you trying to do?” “Well, ferrr — Christmas sakes!” or my favorite, a roar of “GAAAAAAAAAAAAA Jack, that keg fell right on my shoe, I wish you would be more careful!”

It was raining the last day of my summer term. I came home and saw that the stately Victorian was empty. It was purchased by two earnest women investing in a fixer-upper. For their fixing-upping they rose early each day, and we exchanged waves as I headed to my new additional campus job teaching English as a Second Language.

“But what about the carrots?” someone will ask. They turned out fine. Bit of sesame oil, garlic, shake of tamari & ginger. Not bad.

“We called you The Fish,” he told her, when the storm was over.

He was one of six bright young grad students with privileged credentials and gorgeous English who came a long long way to the U.S. for a winter internship. She was the co-ed in campus housing next door who saw them arrive. She knew about these distinguished awaited university guests. She imagined how homesick her new fellow students must be in a different culture. So she left the floor mopping to run out into the wind in her t-shirt and jeans, calling greetings in their language. She stayed to help them and the moving men unload their van. That evening she baked them an apple pie and delivered it to their Reception desk. A week later when the youngest one of them had flu, she brought her specially concocted hot golden chicken-vegetable broth in a big jar wrapped in plastic bags, and left that for their unimpressed building manager. When the grocery store showed Bicentennial spirit by selling tiny cherry-sapling sticks for Washington’s Birthday, she planted one at their curbside out front while the Security guards watched through the window. She did not not stop to think that in most countries planet-wide, a modest decent girl does not tote moving boxes for strange men, deliver home cooking to their door, or dig up their garden dirt while singing Shaker hymns. But the interns did. They showed a range of reactions whenever the group met her at seminars and shops. The youngest one in particular always hailed her with humorous pleasantries; the oldest would keep his distance, looking pensive and saying nothing at all.

Then the six interns were included as guests of honor at an awards ceremony in Alumni Hall. For the occasion her roommates staged a cosmetic intervention to dress up her image. They teased and moussed her hair and decked her out in their makeup, perfume, and a sleeveless slit-side clingy silver gown.

She felt off-center in all that array, so she spent the ceremony evening near the auditorium wall beside a potted palm with her usual khaki knapsack and best brown cardigan. But her roommates were right: she was in fact noticed. The American lads from her building got to bantering with the youngest intern and some guests from his country, all about the escalated eagerness of her new vamp costume. One quip led to another, in a chain of assumptions that complicated her life for the next several months. After the players left the country she pieced together the situation, and salvaged the one good memory: an ally that she didn’t expect.

But behind the potted palm, she heard just enough. She heard her hospitable overtures valued like the fortune cookie at a feast, a party favor to crack open and toss as a mistranslated joke. In 1976 she didn’t know that young men might like to compete in thinking up  off-handed remarks about girls when they don’t know who is listening. She didn’t know that once the guffaws died down, her own peers in post-Woodstock America really gave very little hoot about her welcome wagon hobby. But she did live by the tradition that a girl’s crowning gem is her irreplaceable Good Name, and that night she went home believing that hers was lost forever.

Her well-meaning roommates, who thought the Good Name idea was so much piffle, tried to cheer her melancholic gloom with teasing, pep talks, scolding, and hot brownie sundaes. But for the rest of the winter while the ripples rocked the rumor mill, she stayed quiet and subdued, mostly at home. Above all, she dropped any contact with the new neighbors. Coming and going, she even walked the long way round the block to avoid seeing their building or being seen by them.

On a spring night she got off the bus with her commuter reading and knapsack, and trudged uphill to the apartment. At the home stretch, along a brick wall running for several blocks, she broke into a run ahead of a thunderstorm rolling in from the south. A car swooped in beside her. She recognized the driver as the pensive laconic oldest intern. She darted behind his car to run across the street.

Other drivers honked at him to move along. Lightning cracked across the sky.
“Sister!” He shouted through the thunder, waving her toward the car, and threw open the passenger door.
She hesitated a moment while the first hail stones hit the ground.
He drew something from his jacket pocket, held it overhead out the window.
And that clinched it.

“This isn’t looking good,” he apologized as she jumped in and they took off. “Might as well drop you at the — hold on!” He braked (throwing the back of his hand out in front of her) as traffic stopped.  Fire trucks seesawed through the street behind them. The sky turned yellow-green. Hail hammered and bounced on the windshield. The wind rocked the trees and electrical wires.
“Hello,” he murmured, glancing over his shoulder. He took a sharp turn off the main street and up the driveway to the Cathedral. Tapping his brakes to test them, he parked in the downwind side of the building. “Shouldn’t drive in this,” he explained, both hands still on the wheel. “It’s a fast moving front; let’s give it five minutes.”
“Good idea, thank you.” She wondered what else to say that wouldn’t sound forward and wrong. “I appreciate it.”

The hail turned to solid rain, blocking out the view through the windshield.
“So. What’s the book?” he asked. “Bus reading?”
“Yes! Here: Wind, Sand, and Stars. Have you read it?”
“Why, St. Exupery.” He read the chapter titles. “Wait — this is Terre des hommes! I read this as a boy. Amazing — imagine finding it again here. What are you doing, reading this?”
“Well, it’s…” She thought it over. “A reminder. How even flying alone — midnight, desert, storm — there’s always some sign in the sky or land to guide us. Even in desolate places. Often something quite beautiful.”
“Navigational philosophy.” He smiled in recognition at some passage on a page, and glanced up at her. “How is it working?”
“I don’t work it very well. As half the school knows by now.”
He gave the book back. “No, that storm blew over. Too.”

The rain eased up just enough for them to see the Cathedral as it loomed on and off, traced by the lightning.
He leaned closer to the windshield, and pointed through the glass as a creature in wet-pointed fur hauled itself up on the pavement and stopped, gaping into the headlights.”Look who’s come to call.”
“Oh!” She swayed a little for a better look through the raindrops. “The biggest rat I’ve ever seen.”
“Rat? No, it’s…” He tapped his forehead. “Ah: Opossum. We’re intruders in his country now, and he’s dazzled by our commotion.” He switched off the headlights, then cranked down his window and leaned out into the rain. “There he goes. He’ll be fine.”

She cranked her window too a bit, listening. “Around the corner of the building, if there’s a wind high up we might hear the bells in the tower.”
“Well. Shall we then?” He turned off the engine and set the emergency brake. They closed the windows, and she groped for the door handle.
Instead of reaching across her he leaped out and opened the door from outside. They sprinted around the corner to stand under an arch, with the city lights sparkling off to one side and the dark gardens sloping down before.

The rain was a calm steady downpour three feet away, a solid falling veil hemming them in.
“Warm enough?” he asked her, preparing to shrug off the jacket.
“Oh, keep it, really — this is fine, it’s nice.”
They listened to the bells breathe long-drawn chimes, shifting tones with the wind. A startled pigeon tumbled from the tower and soared back up again.

Somehow, on their own in the storm, they felt their way into talking.
“You did have me puzzled,” he confided. “The week we arrived, what was that big jar? Were you behind that plan?”
“My special chicken health broth. I told the manager!”
“He just left it at our door. We had no idea. And you keep Washington’s Birthday, the president who never told a lie. Wouldn’t you celebrate by chopping down the cherry trees, instead of putting them in?”
“Had to start somewhere first. Chop it down next year if you like.”
“Can’t, leaving in two weeks. Besides, it’s got little leaves now. Or what’s…? Pre-leaves.”
“Buds. I forgot that tree. It’s alive?”
“It is. Someone might have watered it. A time or two.”

He reached in his jacket pocket again, and this time dropped the rosary in her hands.
“This is wonderful.” She looked it over. “I’ve had this rosary since I was a little girl. I thought it was gone for good.”
“I was going to leave it in an envelope with your name, at your department office. But, I thought you just might cross paths somewhere around.” He did not trouble to mention that he’d kept it to show a few of the regulars around the department (refugee cleaning crew, a reference librarian, night staff at the language lab, friendly priest from the chapel near the classrooms). He made a few discreet inquiries about her. He drew out his willing sources, then when he was satisfied reported his findings to the local elders from his country, people with all the right social clout to intervene with the rest of the interns. Stopping the domino wall of pointless slander cost him trouble and time and a falling-out with his people, and it gained him nothing. But he did it anyway. “And then there you were. Walking wrapped in your storm and your book.”

“Wherever did you find my beads?”
“Alumni Hall.”
“Ah, their evening bag — the clasp was loose. See, I was lost without all my usual pockets; the dress they picked out didn’t have any.”
“Picked out?” He gave her an instant’s lookover, and narrowed his eyes. “Who picked out what?”
“My roommates picked out the dress. They wanted to smarten me up. They tried so hard, I didn’t have the heart to hurt their feelings. But the makeup and clothes, and all? It was their stuff and their idea.”
“Theirs. Goodness.” He whistled in through his teeth and covered his eyes. “Oh dear. Oh I am sorry.”

He took three steps away for a long minute, jingling the car keys and looking out over the gardens. “Neither evil tongues,” he said, “Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all the dreary intercourse of daily life, shall e’er prevail against us.” He came back under the arch again. “Or disturb our cheerful faith, that all which we behold is full of blessings.”

She was pleased and heartened by his words and his lovely style of recitation. This was what people did in his country, she knew — recited great amounts of classical epics and chronicles and narratives, and then quoted them on all occasions. True, it seemed unusual that he’d learned this poem in particular; a young man at the top of his career, bright future ahead, winning awards — what could it mean to him? But she felt happy that he told it to her anyway.

“Star.” He pointed. The clouds were already blowing away. “Navigation for the journey home.”
The rain ended in a soft breeze. The elm trees showered their papery heart flowers over the grass and his windshield.
Hands in his pockets he circled looking at the ground, scuffing his heels in the elm flowers. “Can I go back to my unfortunate portion of the Third World, and remember you as being all right again?”
She thought that over, breathing the fresh storm air. True, a complex mindless practical joke had dis-illusioned her natural admiration of men as men. But instead she had this, a gift of time and an arch of shelter from a man who decided to believe in her. “Yes, thank you.” It was her first spark of understanding that in grace, it is never too late to begin amending a reputation.

Back at the car, he walked around checking around the tires. “Let’s make sure our little friend didn’t come back under the car…”
He opened her door. On the back seat floor he found an ice brush and wiped the elm flowers off the windshield. He handled the emergency brake and headlights and ignition. He drove her to her front entry and pulled in under the driveway canopy, waiting to make sure she got in the lobby door. Then he drove off and soon departed for his country, to a storm of man-made workings far more terrible than weather under any sky. For six young men with ties to America, survival was not likely at all.

Did he have a premonition of it, even then? On their way back he recited the rest of that poem for her.

…Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake.

“We called you The Fish,” he explained, shifting into Neutral. “That’s the name we settled on, to talk about you. It’s the only explanation we could find.”
“Fish as in cold heart?” Her own heart sank a bit.
“Fish as in no passport, no borderland. Foreign more or less, at home more or less; now this country, now that language. But try to pin her down, and she slips through your hands. Silver and gleam. Back to the sea.”

He got out and opened her door. “Farewell. God bless you.”
“And you.” She handed him the book. “I would like you to keep this, if you please. Thank you for talking to me.” She held out her hand, then realized, one instant too late: handshake across genders; her final cultural error.
“Welcome.” He ducked his head, smoothing back his hair. But, he made his decision and reached out, clasping three of her fingertips for a moment before getting back in the car.

“That poem is splendid,” she called. “Did you translate that? One of your classics?”
“One of yours. Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey,” he called back. “Everything I said, and everything I didn’t. Sister.”

The moral of this story is not that people born outside the U.S. are inclined toward bewilderment or learned helplessness. (Rest assured that in most life skills, the majority of people the world over could rocket figure eights all around my level of competence.) This vignette is only an example of a parallel conversation — times when you think and I think that we are describing the same picture, when in fact we are looking at two different views. Parallel conversations are a mainstay of comedy shows and cross-cultural mishaps of all kinds. Onward.

On a clear summer evening the bus rolled along through open fields, heading for our small town. Over wild blackberry and yellow Scots Broom and crying killdeer, the sun was setting in a clear apricot sky.

The town was a resettlement area for a wonderful array of refugee families. For this white Anglo lady, it was a great interest and pleasure to take in the scene among fellow commuters: thin bronzed wiry young men speaking Spanish, women with grocery bags speaking Ukrainian, teenage girls veiled in graceful hijab gesturing with henna-patterned hands speaking Arabic, senior citizens with splendid silver mustaches and Sikh turbans speaking… Punjabi?

The bus driver turned off the highway toward our little transit center on the green, at the heart of the historic downtown. Just then, a police car behind us switched on its siren and pulled us over, parking in front of our bus. A second car with siren came flying, and parked in back. One officer approached the driver’s window. From the first seat I heard him mention the Justice Center, a local landmark several blocks from downtown: “… So, pull in there, in the back parking lot. They’ll just have to walk the rest of the way.”

Later, the neighbors told me why. At our bus terminal, a high school student from out of town came for the first day of the annual Street Fair; he exchanged words with some local teens. One of them had a gun, and the gun went off. Fortunately, no one was hurt. In the alarm and confusion on the street, police took the teenagers in for questioning, diverted the traffic, and roped off the area to watch out for further incidents.

Meanwhile, the police officer boarded our bus. (One of the teenagers smoothed her veil closer, hiding the baby girl in her arms.) The officer tucked his thumbs in his belt and shouted an announcement. “This bus is coming out of service. We’ve cleared the downtown.  Station’s closed off.” He waved his arms at us in a herding gesture. “Last stop will be up here, on account-a the rioting, okay?” He looked around at his listeners, all sitting very silent and very still. “Riots, riots,” he repeated for their benefit, and left the bus.

Passengers whispered from seat to seat. “Riots? Ri-ots?” I crossed the aisle to the Ukrainian women and explained in Russian that the police were there only for our safety, to inform us of “some fighting” downtown. (To my chagrin, the only word for “riot” that came to mind was забастовка, and that applies to the Pugachev Rebellion of the late 1700s.) Then I explained to the Spanish speakers, again having no idea of the correct word, and hoping that peleando was close enough for describing argumentative trouble. The passengers had the same problem I did: “riot” is not a high frequency word in anybody’s language class, and for the other languages on this bus my  vocabulary would be no help at all.

At first, when the sirens first pulled up, the families and friends looked so tense that they might have been wondering whether one of them would be pulled off the bus by these pursuing police. But now it dawned on them all: the squad cars were escorting the lot of us straight up the driveway to the County Jail!

To this day, years later, it’s a heartache to think back on the fear and helplessness that crossed their faces. Most sat stolid and resolute. A few covered their eyes, or leaned their heads on one another’s shoulders, or shook their heads and whispered whatever words came to mind during that three minute trip up the driveway.

Then, we heard a child’s cry from the back of the bus. “Mira, Papi! Look, Dad!” he shouted in Spanish, bouncing in his seat. “He said RIDES! RIDES!” The passengers turned to stare at the little boy, then looked outside. Oh! Clever kid. Rides, sure enough! Once we pulled behind the building, there they were in plain sight — a Ferris wheel and carousel, and a little roller coaster. There was a stage too, with folk singing and dancing, all kinds of amusements and concession stands with ethnic foods, an ice cream truck playing “Bicycle Built for Two,” and all of it up in lights.

The driver braked and flung open the door. He pointed out the way, saying he was sorry for the inconvenience and wishing us all a hearty good night. The passengers burst out with clapping and laughter. “Rides!” they sang out. Imagine, the U.S. police showing up just to tell everybody about a Fair! They scrambled for their groceries and lunch pails and diaper bags and poured out of the bus like it was dry land on Ararat.

I struck out alone into the grass near the train tracks, with goldfinches skimming all around me. Once I turned back for a last look. The travelers, hand in hand with their skipping children, hurried toward the celebration across blackberries and Scotch Broom, under the apricot sky.