Homing Instincts Read online

  Meanwhile, a half-dozen blocks to the south, I lie in bed and listen to the distant tinny blare of the brass bands, rubbing my uterus as if in greeting. I wonder if the baby is absorbing this via osmosis, if the motherland bestows a series of enzymes on its children, a longing for a particular type of air and light, an intuitive map of sensations that can be written over but never truly erased. I think of waking to the shock of snow, of that pale purple light at dusk and the smoke threading from chimneys, winter mostly, what sets Ohio apart from nearly all the other places I have lived. I think of Jorge and his diabolic grin over a plate of enfrijoladas con tasajo, the way he says “Mira!” like a child as we drive through the Sierra, its ridges running piney and blue as far as we can see. I think of the way he changes in Oaxaca, his musculature loosened, his bearing open, a new guilelessness and joy gentling him. He is already a kind, sweet soul in Ohio, but in Mexico he blends with the landscape, the people, loves them in a way that makes me jealous. I lose part of him as Mexico absorbs him. This has long been a source of tension in our relationship. When we have our big fights, the bad ones about the huge looming questions of where and how to live, Jorge comes back to the same insult: “You have no home,” he seethes. “You’re just jealous because you have no tierra of your own.” For a long time, he is right. I pride myself in a distinctly estadounidense way on not belonging anywhere. I am not so much a citizen of the world as I am unaccountable to any place and able to freely critique or embrace them all. I love Japan, I say, or The food in Mexico is unbeatable. But as I carry my baby through the Ohio seasons, from the luminescence and fade of fall to the first bite of winter and the freeze of the creek, as I carry her into the pale spring and then the riot of summer with its crush of humid leaf and smell of sassafras, I am reborn in Ohio. I remember what has always been present but what I have forgotten or neglected: this place is in my blood. Not only the stolid midwestern German refusal to spend $1.79 on a muffin and the predilection for practical rain gear, but the dirt, the rot, the flower, the rain, the wood. I lug bits of maple and white pine and clover on planes around the world to islands and tropics and Patagonian mountains. In Mexico my blood stirs with this awareness, my baby newly palpable in the fastness between belly button and pelvis, Ohio newly palpable in my veins and skin and eyes.

  Many of Jorge’s and my fights have stemmed from the way he defends Mexico like a rattler coiled before its lair. I grow exasperated and he lashes out, tells me to stop whining or to show some respect for the fact that here we can hang out all day drinking fresh-squeezed orange juice under the laurels, that here life is immediate and urgent and felt. Jorge embodies Mexico, its wounds are his, its beauties his triumph and heart. I have never conceived of Ohio in terms of wounds or beauty, and for a long time I have hardly seen it as a place. Instead it is a backdrop, of cheddar cheese and jungle gyms, Trivial Pursuit and loading the dishwasher. Jorge has the gift of a motherland: his smoky house, the comal atop the charred wood, the mountains spilling in every direction under their perfume of mist.

  In pregnancy, when the alchemy of making new life is constantly on my mind, I discover Ohio as my own motherland. It still sounds ridiculous to me, everyone still laughs when our friend Eleutario asks, “Sarita, cuando te vas a tu tierra, a tu ranchito?” with the ironic implication being that the United States is nobody’s tierra or ranchito but an antiseptic modern opportunityscape of work and money. This, too, is true; I realize it in the air-conditioned vastnesses of Target and the streets emptied of people. But place is made by perception as much as environment or exceptionality. Ohio is a place if I make it one in ritual, attention, and affection. I glimpse my childhood self in the woods, playing in the shroud of trees. I think of talking on the phone to my mom in the cabin’s small kitchen, eating Grape-Nuts.

  “Mmmm, Grape-Nuts,” Mom says. “Do you let them get a little soggy in the milk?”

  “Of course,” I say.

  When I return, I will make a scrapbook of Grandma Menkedick’s recipes, with entire pages devoted to cheese balls and coleslaws and desserts involving pretzels and cream cheese. This is the baby’s, too, along with the jacarandas in blossom in the fog.

  I recognize now that place lurks in us like a gene waiting to be expressed; we may repress it, or we may turn it on full blast, but regardless it is always there. I think of a man I saw once when Jorge and I went to watch the Semana Santa rituals in Tlalixtac, a village outside of Oaxaca. Easter in Oaxaca is not fields of giggling children collecting pastel eggs; rather, it is men in full Roman regalia whipping—literally whipping—a live representation of Jesus who drags a 120-pound cross. The Jesus wears a crown of thorns, is actually crucified (though he is tied to the cross, not nailed), and is barely able to limp back home after the re-created Passion. Young men wait years to play the role.

  Jorge and I followed the procession to different stations staging moments of Jesus’s trials, and at each one a man in a cheap purple polo and the pointy-tipped black boots worn by rural workers blasted mournful notes on his trumpet into the quietly rustling crowds. It was more than ninety degrees, with hundreds of people clumped in sweating masses on the sidewalks, their umbrellas in staggered layers over their heads, and this dark-faced man held forth with the self-possessed, innate composure of a believer. Like so many other people I have observed in Oaxaca, in ritual and fiesta, he embodied his role, blended and disappeared into it.

  I think of him when one day, walking the streets, I see a Virgin on a float during a parade. She is the best Virgin I have ever seen, the one I’ll always remember. She could be twelve, fifteen at max. Her eyes are the jade green of sea glass. They look over the revelers unmoving, unseeing, ethereal. She is neither fragile nor strong. She is in the way mountains are, or myths, or dreams, haunting, looming, more real than the real. Her features are plain, neither strongly indigenous nor Hispanic, without distinguishing marks. An angel offers her a torta: “Ten.” She shakes her head slightly without shifting her gaze. The angels sip small plastic cups of agua de jamaica. A band blares the standards; tourists duck dulces and grin from the sidelines with their cameras. Las chinas oaxaqueñas dance with their broad white grins, lifting their dresses into wings of silken candy pink. Five p.m., the traffic pants at corners, held back by the palm of a transit cop. The Virgin, green eyed, lips still, without expression, takes no note of me or anyone, aloft and shrouded in her blue satin. The parade stops for las chinas to dance and mezcal to be poured, and la Virgen stares on unseeing, forever and ever.

  I have seen many incarnations of the Virgin—this is Mexico, after all—but all have been aware of the tension and rift between themselves and their role; they could not, or did not, blur with it. We all carry the potential to disappear into such a role: maybe not the young Virgin Mary or the crucified Jesus, but a taciturn grandmother or an angry father or a tactless yokel or a folksy liberal in the New Mexico desert. Some people fearlessly embrace their roles, as legacy or destiny or comfort, and others reject theirs with distance and silence, but regardless, the role remains, like a snow angel in precisely our shape, just waiting for us to lie down and fill it.

  Before we leave, we spend another night and day in Mexico City, as we often do to bookend our trips, since flights from there are far cheaper than those leaving Oaxaca. I am now nearly sixteen weeks along, and the month I have spent here devouring tacos and tortas and tamales has culminated in sensational heartburn, which will dog me into the third trimester. I have taken to swallowing a half cup of apple cider vinegar, pure, to ease the flames. Still, heartburn is preferable to the perpetual unease of nausea, and supposedly means that the baby will be born with a full head of hair.

  On our last night we walk the pedestrian streets of central Mexico City, through the cacophony of the impending Christmas vacation. Musicians croon and strum guitars under the eaves, pedestrians idle in throngs, clouds of meaty smoke rise from ubiquitous taquerías and interwoven into it all is the insistent droning of ambulantes, selling everything from pralines t
o polyester vests to glow sticks. Diez pesitos llévale llévale diez pesitos llévale llévale diez pesitos goes the monkish chant, over and over. One guy, older, slightly frazzled, in a plaid shirt and jeans and white sneakers, is making a tiny skeleton dance in the midst of a growing circle of intrigued passersby. The skeleton isn’t more than an inch high, the cheapest flimsiest bauble of plastic. Still it dances like the most liberated reveler in one of José Guadalupe Posada’s postmortem fiestas. “Siéntate,” the man says, and the skeleton sits. “Párate,” he says, and it stands. Then, “Boom!” and the man shoots it with his finger, upon which it crumples, motionless. The crowd gasps. Soon it’s up again to join another skeleton, also maneuvered by the man, which it kisses. “Beso!” the man says, and the beso leads to the two skeletons collapsing in amorous fever and frolicking on the cobblestones. There are Christmas lights on the colonial buildings, a huge warm circle around the minuscule figures. Jorge caves and buys one for diez pesitos, and I laugh at him, chide him, Sucker, sucker. We lose it that very night in the jumble of our possessions packed and unpacked.

  The next morning we eat breakfast at El Popular, the diner we visit every time we’re in town, with transcendent café con leche and decent chilaquiles. Afterward Jorge returns to the hotel to finish packing, and I take a quick walk to the Zócalo. The next time we’re in Mexico, I think, I will be a mother.

  On a whim I enter the cathedral at the Zócalo’s north side, built on top of an ancient Aztec temple. I haven’t been in here since I first came to Mexico nearly ten years ago. It is cavernous, echoing, and solemn. I walk slowly, looking up, taking in the weighted silence. Just before the wooden fence that prevents tourists from entering the area of pews and the altar, there is a visitors’ book, where people leave comments and prayers. I pick up the pen. I write of my love for Mexico, of the years I have spent here, of my baby growing up between worlds, and then I pray for her on that thin frail paper in this great hall, this temple upon a temple. My hot breath catches in my throat, the tears obscure my writing. Then I breathe, set the pen down, make my way back toward the light.

  Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska wonders, “How much of me there is in these faces that don’t know me and that I don’t know, how much of me in the subway, in the steps that pile up, one on top of the other, until they finally come out into the great, white spout of light, how much of me in the last, weary steps coming out, how much of me in the rain that forms puddles on the pavement, how much of me in the smell of wet wool, how much of me in the rusted steel sheets, how much of me in the Colonia del Valle–Coyoacán buses that rush along until they crash and form part of the cosmos, in the graffiti on the walls, in the pavement, in the earth trod on a thousand times. How much of me in those worn-out benches, their paint flaking, how much in the hardware stores, in the little corner stores, how much in all those testosterone shots on those dusty pharmacy shelves, in those syringes that used to be boiled and that spread hepatitis, how much of me in the signs that used to hang all along San Juan de Letrán: ‘All types of venereal diseases treated,’ how much in the newspaper stands, in the Fountain of the Little Frogs, in the shoe-shine boxes, in the rickety trees—just like little sticks climbing up to the sky—in the man who sold electric shocks, in the old people’s wrinkles, in the young people’s legs.”

  If our baby is a girl, I will name her Elena.

  —

  When we arrive at the farm, the afternoon is clear blue-gold, and soon the woods are red with winter dusk. The evening light turns the creek to a ruffled gown. I sit on the bank and feel a bodily relief, an old feeling—long forgotten beneath all the complex layers of adult love and sex—which returns now in pregnancy. It is the relief of the infant picked up and soothed, of the child who collapses into her parent’s arms after she’s fallen. It is the comfort of the elemental space of mother-baby, before the baby pulls away to form an independent self. It is the belly, the soft hill of the shoulder, the nook between collarbone and neck, the nipple, the gently rising-falling pillow of the chest. It is attachment to a larger body that eclipses and absorbs one’s own, and this is how I feel now when I hug my mother and need her bodily as I haven’t in years, need the reassurance of her arms enclosing my helplessness, and it is how I feel at the farm on this carmine dusk, when my stretching body eases onto the leaves, when my eyes trace the insinuations of the stream, when the beeches and the oaks that form a canopy over the water take my scampering mind from me and sync my breath to the fading day.

  A WILDERNESS OF WAITING

  IN THE SEEMINGLY INTERMINABLE MIDDLE of my nine-month human pregnancy, I go on a Googling binge of animal gestation periods. Frilled sharks, I discover, gestate for forty-two months. Elephants take twenty-two. Sperm whales: sixteen. Walruses: fifteen. Rhinos: fourteen. Horses: eleven. I am seeking solidarity and comparative comfort in the realm of beasts, seeking to place my experience on a spectrum of waiting. I think of going on into month eleven, twelve, twenty, thirty-five: days into months into years of pregnancy. I find a kind of horror in it, and fascination, and reverence, and ultimately a question: What does it mean to wait so long that the line between life and waiting blurs?

  I’ve always hated waiting. I am that person craning her neck out the window in traffic to see as far ahead as she can; the one peeking over shoulders in the coffee-shop line, trying to determine why it’s taking so long to get to the counter. I come to bus rides and plane trips equipped with a dozen novels, magazines, sketchbooks, notebooks, podcasts, and playlists. I can recite in wearisome and alarming detail every moment of my day, arranged into a checklist of tasks judged successes or failures by their degree of necessity and productivity.

  Like most people, I also have systems both elaborate and simple for carving up days, weeks, and months into comprehensible and wieldy increments. In the quotidian, there is the morning coffee, for the initial writing spurt and gearing up for running, and then the whole afternoon tilts toward that early evening beer, after which the day begins its final descent into dinner and a nighttime of Indian takeout and Mad Men. To appease a larger restlessness, there is the anticipation of the end of academic semesters, the summer, trips home or abroad, the return to school, the granting or not granting of fellowships, the publication or rejection of stories: imagined futures like bobbers on a lake, watched with shivery expectation. I am perpetually casting, breaking up the monotony of the landscape of time with teetering red globes on the verge of abrupt submersion. And in the meantime, there are the daily markers and escapes of routine and substances.

  But pregnancy is characterized by a total physical and psychological immersion in the present and the body. In its months-long middle, in particular, the web of gestation is spun so tight that the past becomes inaccessible, so remote as to belong to another person’s life. The future is equally impossible to conjure: how can one imagine the brand-new human built from scratch, the meteoric impact of her arrival? The boundaries of the world shrink to the parentheses of the belly.

  At first, I felt all of this frustrating temporal impotence mostly in terms of beer. A cold brewski, it turns out, was one small but crucial element in my daily domination of time. I work from home, and not having that clear pivot point between work and leisure threw the whole day into interminable monotony. It was as though, without that reward and demarcation, it almost wasn’t worth working at all, or rather when and how I worked became irrelevant if the whole day was a soup with no beginning or end, no anticipation or release, sloshing into the soup of the next day and on and on.

  In the brutally slow final months of 2014, my dad lends me The Places That Scare You, by Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön. Chödrön counsels about the many ways we find escape in our days—sex, TV, booze, food, drugs, exercise—and warns how hard it is to let go of these crutches, which attempt to mask what for me became apparent in pregnancy: the fact that time is a crushing monotony, so much vaster than us and as unconcerned as the moon with the ways we attempt to dominate it. Our tricks, our counting down of
days and meting out of recompenses, our constant rigging of bobbers to watch, mask the fact that we are always changing and yet not changing at all, and all of our elaborate performances of success and failure, productivity and lethargy, are ultimately, to paraphrase Chödrön’s teacher Chögyam Trungpa, so much makeup on space.

  It is easy to be fooled by the trick of the pregnancy calendar. At first, it seems pregnancy is the most tantalizing bobber of all. There are so many ways to mark the passage of gestation—months for the laid-back, weeks for the anal, and days for the truly OCD. There are pregnancy books that inform expectant mothers of what is happening in the womb each and every day of pregnancy: At twenty-two weeks, five days, the baby is now covered in tiny fine hairs called lanugo. It seems therefore that gestation would provide the ultimate illusion of control, the ultimate beginning, middle, and end.