Trying to make sense of it all...
Another serialized installment of Boardinghouse Reach... and my continuing attempt to gather up all the bright-colored threads of the back-story
All Brazilians, All the Time
Do you remember that scene in “The Wizard of Oz,” after Dorothy comes to in her house that’s being carried away by the tornado, and everyone she’s ever known, loved and feared comes swirling by the window?
That’s how the next few months were for me in the boardinghouse. I was writing the second pop psychology book under contract to another local publisher, transcribing, organizing, and color-coding dozens of interviews I conducted. I was cooking and cleaning, mothering Kyle and loving Colby when he was in my bed—but the population of boarders kind of swirled by.
I remember a French post-doc, a very pretty young woman, who played bagpipes. There was a Catalonian chemist and a winsome Argentinean whose entire family came to visit while he was living with me (and whose mother corresponded with me for years afterwards). Another pushy North American parent—this time, a dad—talked me into housing his precious brat. She sat in her room one night while, just on the other side of the wall, in a swamp of spilled water and shattered glass, I was trying single-handedly to right our fallen Christmas tree before Kyle arrived home, full of childish expectation, from the boat.
During one interval, we had a Moslem, a Buddhist, a Catholic, a Protestant and a Jew (me) all eating at our table—a veritable League of Nations.
And then I finished writing the book—I had written two books in the space of eight months—and the all-Brazilian era began.
It can take us a lifetime to know what we know
The tornado now takes us further back into the past from the ongoing past of our story.
It’s 1975.
I’m at my mother’s house, briefly seeking refuge there while trying to figure out my next move.
Throughout my earliest years, I’d felt myself to be a sensitive, thoughtful person trapped inside the body of a helpless child, in a world that wasn’t at all of her own making. A frightening, dangerous world peopled by what the psychologists call unreliable attachment figures.
I was a full-term baby when I was born, but I launched myself into the world as a pre-term adult, on my own.
I’d gone away to college at seventeen, got pregnant at nineteen, and had an abortion followed by a self-imposed shot-gun wedding. Soon afterwards, I became infatuated with an artist and left my husband (who was a smart, kind and decent man who simply crossed my path much too early). I ran away with the artist, who turned out to be a nut-job—then (sensibly, for a change!) ran away from him.
I was cooling my heels at my mom’s in L.A. until I figured out a way to get myself to Europe.
And all of this before I’d reached the age of twenty-one.
When I was just a few months away from finishing my undergraduate degree, I saw my chance to make the sort of life for myself I imagined. To get off an academic pathway that I felt sure would lead me in the wrong direction. To steep myself in beauty and art (as I would have put it then). In short, to become a writer.
Affixed to a bulletin board, there was a three-by-five card that said, “Drive-thru car. Second driver wanted for cross-country delivery, L.A. to Long Island.”
I called the number, talked to some guy, made all the arrangements, and told my mother I was going to Europe via New York. She might have shaken her head, but she didn’t have much to say about it. She knew it wouldn’t do any good.
I didn’t know anything about this guy in the drive-thru car, but there I was in my maxi-dress that I’d sewn myself—it was a tartan plaid with ivory lace around the collar and a laced-up bodice. There I was with my long black hair and my guitar and my lace-up leather boots from a thrift shop, and two or three typed short stories and half a dozen poems. There I was with this nearly middle-aged stranger from New York, a drop-out from graduate school who thought he’d lucked out and found a chick he’d be able to screw in a Datsun 240Z—considered a very hot car at the time—all across the United States of America.
He seemed pretty disappointed when I made it clear that I wasn’t interested in him romantically or really in any other way—that I was just heading east. We slept the first night side by side in our bucket seats on a hill somewhere in Arizona. In the morning, as he wiped the crusts of sleep from his eyes, he told me that he planned to stop in New Mexico because he had some friends living out in the desert there, and he wanted to drop acid with them.
I told him I’d be damned if I was going to drive across country with him tripping out on acid, and he said, Look—I promise. If I seem at all fucked up, I’ll pay for your bus ticket the rest of the way to New York. I promise.
So I agreed to stop with him in Chimayo, a tiny little place outside of Santa Fe. There’s a sanctuary there and a well of supposedly magic dirt, and all around the sanctuary you can see the crutches and other things people have left behind following their cure. I scraped up some of the dirt and put it in a little plastic bag, figuring that I could do with a miracle. I was determined to go live in Europe. But I had no idea how I was going to earn enough money to get there, or how I was going to pay for my life there once I arrived.
The friends in the desert were the ex-wife of the car guy’s college roommate, and her new boyfriend, who was several years younger than she was. All of about thirty, Margaret seemed amazingly sophisticated and wise to me, living out there in the desert with her young, blue-eyed boyfriend in a two-room adobe shack. The car guy and I slept—or tried to sleep—in hammocks in one room that first night while Margaret and her boyfriend made noisy love on the other side of the wall.
The next morning, the three of them walked out into the desert together and I made my way into Taos to look up a friend of Damien’s adopted family, the widow of a Russian émigré painter who had made a name for himself in the southwest in the twenties, around the same time that D.H. Lawrence and his cronies were hanging out there.
Considering that I dropped in on her without warning, the painter’s widow was extremely kind to me. I can begin to imagine how I must have looked to her: a slip of a girl bristling with ambition, confident as only a twenty-year-old can be. After reading one of my stories, she expressed distaste at my use of “vulgar language” — I had a character write “Fuck you” in lipstick on a school bathroom mirror—and asked me if I considered it to be altogether necessary to express what I wanted to. (I did.)
She showed me around her house, which was famous in the area for being painted what she called “sunset pink” and was filled with huge, gilt-encrusted canvasses her husband had painted during his travels around the Far East living among nomadic Mongolian tribes. At one point, he’d been captured by a rival chieftain who was only talked out of killing him with the offer of a full-length, life-size portrait, painted at sword point. I stood before it as the widow told me about their daughter, a flamenco dancer; told me her secret formula for the homemade face cream she used every night (now I wish I remembered it, but at the time it seemed a useless piece of information), directed me to the gallery in town that had the largest holdings of her husband’s work, and suggested that perhaps I would soon find something else that would suit me better than writing. I had a richly detailed, instantaneous fantasy of how one day she would tell her friends about the Booker-prize-winning author who’d paid her a visit shortly before writing her first masterpiece, composed in various Parisian cafes. Smiling, I thanked her for spending time with me, and promised to go to the gallery.
Things went rather better there, as the gallery owner paid a good deal of attention to me, flattering my tender ego, even going so far as to suggest that I might want to stay on in Santa Fe to “work” for him—which even then I interpreted to mean becoming his mistress. I entertained the idea for about half an hour. He was rich and reasonably handsome, and Santa Fe held a good deal of charm for me with its three cultures living side by side and its clear air and beautiful light and the ubiquitous reverence there for people in the arts.
The gallery owner took me to a local painter’s studio, where one of the works was a dining room table with a delicious-looking meal painted directly onto its surface. The artist had neglected to mention that it was a work in progress. With expressions of connoisseurship, I touched the bright swirls of paint only to find that they were still wet. Afterwards, I was led from the studio in ignominy, thinking that, after all, it would probably be better to continue making my way east.
For the rest of that afternoon, I hung around the adobe waiting for Margaret and the others to return, played the guitar and worked on my poems. I played some songs for them when they got back—I’d actually been eating those past two months before I came down to L.A. by playing guitar (very badly) and singing English and Irish ballads (only slightly less badly) in exchange for supper and tips at a couple of the seedier cafes on Cannery Row in Monterey, before it became a shopping mall. I sang for Margaret and her boyfriend, and then read them some of my poems.
When the car guy and I were packed up and ready to leave, Margaret gave me a hug then held me at arm’s length by my shoulders, looking into my eyes. “I have a tower in Cork,” she told me, “and I’ve always wanted a young writer to live there. Write to me from New York, and I’ll tell you how to get the key.”
Every time I retell this story I feel sure I’m about to be plugged as a pathological liar—but I swear to God, the story’s completely true. A tower in Cork, she said.
The car guy filled me in a little once we’d hit the highway. Margaret was just playing at gypsies out there in the desert. When she and the ex-roommate got married, her father bought them a hill on the coast of Southern Ireland, complete with a ruined eighteenth-century watchtower. He arranged to have an authentic Irish country cottage built from the stones of the ruined tower, furnished with Irish country antiques that he had to send his agents to England to buy. Every detail had been thought of, from the Waterford crystal in the cabinets to the Connemara rugs on the bed.
That tower cottage became my imaginative refuge of choice, after I got to New York. I stayed with some cousins out in a suburb of Long Island when I first arrived. Two of the boy cousins still living at home took me to Jones Beach. I confided to them that it was my birthday and one of them did a handstand to mark the occasion. I ran into the ocean with all my clothes on, because I’d never been in the Atlantic before, and I thought, what better time than on the day I’ve turned twenty-one? Afterwards I moved in with some of my mother’s cousins in Flushing, Queens, where I’d have easier access to Manhattan and a better chance of finding a job.
Flushing was deeply depressing to me—my impressions were of block upon block of identical brick apartment buildings, with bored-looking people sitting out front on folding aluminum chairs. Nothing green or alive in sight for miles. Just these overweight, under-stimulated people holding reflectors beneath their faces, trying to get a jump on a summer tan.
Inside was worse. My cousin Marvin sat in a sleeveless undershirt sweating in front of the TV, holding a beer. I showed one of my stories (by request) to him and my Cousin Dotty. Marvin’s comment, punctuated by a muted but still audible belch, was that it’d be a lot better if I put some sex scenes in it. Dotty, a legal secretary, questioned my frequent use of hyphens, but told me in a voice meant to be encouraging that the manuscript was very neatly typed.
I had no idea then how generous they had been in inviting me to stay with them—or about what a pig I was being, really, in feeling so free to judge them.
Every day I took the bus into Manhattan and walked up and down the sidewalk with a section of the Times classifieds clutched in my hands. When I looked around me I saw that everyone else was also clutching a torn-out section of the classified ads. It was the beginning of summer, and the city was swarming with young people all competing for the same jobs.
I had few skills with marketable value in the big city. I’d worked one summer as a gardener in Santa Cruz. I’d read a good deal of nineteenth-century and medieval French literature. I’d had three quarters of college German. And I could type, albeit slowly and with a lot of mistakes.
One agency listed a job for a French and English bilingual secretary. At the interview, an exquisitely dressed Frenchman dictated a letter to me at full speed.
I wouldn’t have been able to take down the text with any accuracy even if he’d been speaking in English. With nauseating waves of embarrassment, I handed him the typed-up text of his letter. French epistolary conventions were never included in the courses I took, with the exception of The Letters of Abélard and Héloise, which held few clues about the arcane requirements of politesse among even the most casual business correspondents in modern-day France. I made broad and probably buffoonish transliterations of what I thought I’d heard the French businessman say in his rapid-fire dictation.
To his credit, he managed to peruse the letter without cracking a smile. Touching the knot of his stylish silk tie, he cleared his throat politely and said, “Votre français, mademoiselle, est très jeune.”
Another agency listed a receptionist position requiring fluency in English and German. The young woman at the agency—a living, breathing model of the successful job applicant, beautifully dressed and neatly coifed—asked me if I was sure I was fluent, because this was a very desirable job in a great building with good pay, and she didn’t want to send out anyone who was less than completely well qualified. I asked her if she spoke German, and she told me, “Not a word.”
“Oh, that’s too bad,” I told her, my voice ringing with confidence born of years and years of theatrical training, “because I’m completely fluent. Ich kann fliessend Deutsch sprechen.”
She smiled, duly impressed with my authentic-sounding accent. (I could just as well have said, “I am the man from Mars,” if I’d only known how.)
It was a ten-block walk uptown from the agency to the German company’s headquarters in suites overlooking Central Park. There wasn’t much I actually knew how to say off the top of my head besides “I can speak fluent German” — and I knew quite well that my comprehension was deplorable, especially if people spoke at full speed; and I could barely read German at all.
But my understanding of the grammar was good—my teacher was a strict task-mistress from Berlin—and I had ten long blocks in which to formulate a sentence from the small vocabulary at my disposal. I cobbled my sentence together and practiced it out loud as I walked, and noticed that one could say or do just about anything in New York without drawing the attention of passersby. I let the words roll out of my mouth until they felt as familiar as my own name, and thought about how sorry I felt for the spindly, light-starved trees that grew up out of their little squares of soil in the sidewalk. Entering the building, I promised myself that I wouldn’t stay in the city—or in the States, for that matter—for a long time. Just long enough to save the money I needed to make my way to Ireland, where I would write my first novel.
After I’d announced myself in the reception area on the twentieth floor, a tall, gangling, big-footed, smiling blond woman came out to greet me, extending her hand.
“Ich nehme an,” I said to her with rather good pronunciation and flashing my best smile, “dass Sie lieber auf Deutsch sprechen würden” (“I assume that you’d prefer to speak in German.”).
“Ach, no!” she told me in lightly accented English and with a big toothy grin that made me immediately like her. “It’s obvious that you speak German very well!” She then proceeded to interview me in English.
Well, there wasn’t much to it: it was a simple matter of sitting behind a desk in the reception area, answering the phone, directing visitors and calls to the various executives, and placing the occasional long-distance call to one of the company’s subsidiaries overseas. Fluent German wasn’t really required at all—everyone in the office spoke excellent English, even though I was the only native speaker among them. There were just a few pat German phrases I would have to learn, such as “I’ll connect you right away,” or “May I speak to Herr Von Pobloki, please? Dr. Mittag is calling.”
When Marika had finished talking with me and was satisfied that I was polite and pleasant enough, reasonably intelligent and well spoken, she introduced me to the head of the New York office, Herr Doktor Feder; and then left me alone with him in his austerely furnished, spacious office overlooking the park.
Herr Dr. Feder smiled at me and nodded before launching into a lengthy monologue in German, presumably about what the company did. I had no idea, beyond the general impression that they dealt with large sums of money and treated their employees to a working environment that could only be described as sumptuous, with well-furnished offices and a well-stocked kitchen where many of the women cooked a full lunch every day and there was ready access to a large array of staples, beverages and snacks.
Because my German vocabulary was so small, and none of it was technical, I hadn’t the slightest idea what Dr. Feder was talking about. He could easily have been telling me that they specialized in making bombs and were planning to blow up a different New York City landmark once a month for the next five years. I smiled and looked serious in turn, and nodded back at him, saying every once in a while—just to keep the conversation going— “Ach, ja, dass ist interessant!”
When the boss had wound down, apparently having explained everything to his satisfaction, he folded his hands and said in perfect English (he’d been educated at Harvard), “Well, Barbara—” My name seemed to give him pleasure. “What do you think?” His gaze took in the office, the view of the park, and the rest of his kingdom just outside the closed door. He looked at me kindly and indulgently, just as one would look at a precocious child. “Do you think this job will suit you?”
Who’s to say? Maybe he knew all along that I was faking it. It occurred to me that the fact that I was American, and Jewish-looking to boot, would probably be seen as a public relations advantage. I did a quick mental calculation to reassure myself that he couldn’t possibly have been a participant in anything that happened during World War II. I said, as I could only say under the circumstances, considering my need and the attractiveness of the offer, “I don’t see why not, Herr Dr. Feder, do you?”
***
Fast-forward to 1998.
The Brazilians arrived at the boardinghouse in rapid succession. There was Pedro, a sweet, relatively quiet thirty-something husband and father from São Paulo, here to get a certificate in business. Across the hall from him, I lodged Davi, the twenty-two-year-old cocky young lawyer from Recife. And so we were all on hand when Adriane arrived.
She’d called beforehand from Brazil, to ask me what I’d like her to bring for me. “Coffee?” she asked. (I didn’t know it at the time, but her family owns a huge coffee plantation in Minas Gerais—a place where I later went for the longest, fastest and scariest horseback ride of my entire life, the weekend before Adriane’s wedding.)
“Bring me music, please—samba music! I love to dance.”
We were all rather agog when Adriane stepped out from the shuttle bus. She’d been traveling some fourteen hours, but you’d never have known it. With her extravagant chestnut-colored tresses worthy of a mermaid, her impossibly long and evenly tanned legs and orthodontically perfect smile, she could have served as the cover model right then for a sports magazine.
She kissed everyone, glad, I think, to see other Brazilians, and to have arrived at such a pretty house, filled with sunlight. “Here,” she said, handing me a CD. “Dance!”
Adriane had learned English at the German school she attended in São Paulo. She spoke with authority, like someone who was used to being obeyed.
I stuck the CD in the boom box in the kitchen and started to samba. Adriane joined me, a little shyly. She did a very ladylike samba. Davi started dancing, too, with great sensuality, and even Pedro shuffled his feet and shook his butt a little.
This was one of the periods when Colby was working on a long-term project out of town, and probably a time when he was relieved to get away from me and Kyle and all my damned boarders—and suddenly it was fine with me. Living with these three Brasileros, I was quite certain, was going to be lots of fun.
All of us make the decisions we make for a reason—but few of us understand why we do what we do. Only now, on the cusp of 70, I can see—I’m beginning to see—that I’ve been running away, my whole life long. The shattered, glittering pieces of my life will make sense if I can only manage to piece them together: to float high enough above the Earth to see the patterns they make, far below.
Seeing what I see now, I wish I could embrace that child I was—and somehow help her feel safe.
Despair Despair. I know how it feels, always the same since my beginnings. A room inside me, waiting with its darkness and lack of air. Where sobbing is the only song I sing. Keening. No one I can trust to lift me out of there. I found a way to hope before when, as a girl of nine or so, I felt the prick of thorns and thought of death—such pain impressed on tender flesh. I felt, I felt, I felt. It all came in with such intensity. The red of roses made me cry. Banished, my brother and I stood on the patio, paralyzed, parsing the sounds that came from inside: Mom begging and sobbing, while Daddy raged. Had he pulled out a kitchen drawer, and dumped the forks and knives out on the floor? We waited, each of us alone, wondering if, this time, she’d live or die. Out he’d come then, kneeling down to blot my tears with the hanky I’d ironed in a perfect square, his eyes behind his glasses awash in sorrow and regret for her bruised lip and blackened eye. Copyright ©️ 2024 by Barbara Quick
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Such an interesting read! I especially liked the travel adventures and job interviews. Looking forward to the next installments.