Scarlet Letters: Getting There

Episode Five

June the first warmed itself up slowly from a cool, damp start. Before the sun had fully risen, Kala had already stowed Vivian's three bags in the trunk, added two of her own, then put her third on the back seat alongside the small cooler she'd insisted Vivian purchase on their pre-embarkation trip to K-Mart.

Vivian had refused to give any sign of whether she'd ever been in a K-Mart before, but Kala suspected she might well not have, though then again, her glazed, disoriented expression could simply have been the usual sort of daze that came over every K-Mart shopper eventually. The disco-ized version of the theme from M*A*S*H had made both of them glare irritably at the set-in speakers in the ceiling. A few minutes later, a glockenspiel- and harp-heavy bossa nova arrangement of "Love for Sale" had drawn simultaneous groans of outright agony that were followed by a shared glance and a gale of giggles. A shared, campy sense of their own outraged aesthetics got the two women through to the checkout with smiles on their faces despite the Muzak, and they emerged victorious with first-aid kit, tool kit, windshield washer fluid, six quarts of motor oil, 10-W-40, flares, Kleenex, a couple of cheap towels just in case, a little trash can to go behind the front seat, the cooler, and of course, three tubes of sunblock to insure that the milky-skinned Vivian did not fall prey to anything remotely resembling a trucker's tan.

All of it was now in the Jaguar's trunk, packed into plastic milk crates liberated from behind a Star Market, and Vivian was standing on the front steps giving final instructions to her housesitter. Agitatedly, Vivian asked whether Margaret had any questions. Approximately thirty seconds later, just as Margaret was finished reassuring her that she knew where everything was and had all the emergency phone numbers and no, she didn't have any questions, Vivian would ask again. She was in a loop. With a mild smile, Margaret began to gently steer Vivian toward the car, slipping an arm around her shoulders in a reassuring, motherly way.

It was hard to fathom why Vivian was so nervous about it all. Margaret, a sturdy Nordic-looking woman in her late thirties, was one of Vivian's dissertation students. During the dissertation-writing process she'd been paying the rent by teaching part-time in the school attached to the county facility for juvenile offenders. Kala figured that anyone who was capable of dealing with juvie hall kids on a daily basis was quite capable of coping with the day-to-day maintenance of just about anything, let alone a house that almost took care of itself.

For the fifth time, Vivian made Margaret recite the feeding schedule for Raskolnikov, the ancient Russian Blue tom whose primary activities were sleeping in the armchair in the corner of the kitchen and attempting to beat the stuffing out of the other cat, and Fanny, a skittish, slight mackerel tabby whose primary activity was hiding from Rask. Turning Vivian back toward the car as she answered, Margaret rolled her eyes heavenward. Kala tried not to smirk.

Finally Vivian was in the car, seatbelt fastened, walking-stick held defiantly, defensively between her knees. A few raindrops spattered the windshield as Kala backed slowly, carefully out of the narrow driveway, beginning to turn into a drizzle as Vivian waved farewell to Margaret and the house.

Vivian looked out the window as Kala backed out into the street and shifted gears, smoothly setting the car into forward motion. She gestured toward the houses along her street with her arm, not taking her hand off the knob of her walking-stick. "Did you know that that house there used to be T.S. Eliot's house? My father knew him."

"Really? I always think of him as having been British, for some reason." Kala looked briefly, but couldn't figure out which house Vivian meant.

"He probably would've preferred it that way. My father's mother was like that. My mother used to joke that she would've liked it better had she the been able to choose London when she died instead of Heaven." She paused for a moment, watching the trees go by. "Though I'm not so sure she managed Heaven anyway."

It had been many years since Vivian had thought of leaving home with relish. She'd owned a condo in the Back Bay for a decade and a half, but never really thought of it in the same light as she did the house on Ash Street. She'd grown up in that house, and had inherited it and all it held, tangibles and intangibles alike, when her father died and her mother decided she no longer wanted the responsibility. Her siblings, all well-established in their own homes, some in other cities, other time zones, hadn't disagreed, and so she'd moved back in -- albeit with quite a few more tangibles and intangibles to add to the collection.

Since then, she'd become one of those inveterate householders whose life seemed to grow roots that went directly to the bedrock beneath the cellar. One painstaking bit at a time, she oversaw the renovation of the house from roof (and good heavens, but those slate shingles had been dear!) to foundation, encompassing plenty of new plumbing along the way. Her sister had squawked when Vivian announced her intentions to knock out the wall between the kitchen and the old children's study where they'd all spent so many hours seated at the old, battered wooden trestle table, wrestling with their homework under the watchful eye of their maternal grandmother. But no one had complained when they saw the far vaster, modernized kitchen and, mirabile dictu, the first-floor powder room which the space had yielded up. And finally there were enough bathrooms in the house to nearly eliminate the dreaded, if historic, procedure of drawing straws for the next turn at the shower, even when all of them came back to visit the family homestead for the holidays.

To those who have a sense of home, travel is always a mixed blessing. For every wonder it unveils and every new mood or flavor it serves up, it demands payment in the form of a routine abandoned, a convenience forgone, a day-to-day familiarity dispensed with. Moreover, it means dependence: dependence on airplanes and busses and boats, streetcars and taxicabs, maps and guidebooks and hopefully helpful advice, restaurants and guides and friends and sometimes the kindness of strangers. There are few places to retreat from the continual assault of new information, new sights and sounds, new data that must be processed in order to accomplish even the most mundane things -- buying postage stamps, getting the screw in one's eyeglasses replaced when it falls out and down the drain in the hotel bathroom sink.

And of course that rush of novelty, even in its maddening moments, is the reason one travels at all. When one travels, one goes out prepared to appreciate to a state of affairs that few of us have the perspective to appreciate when it is thrust upon us. After all, in our normal lives, ignorance of one's surroundings is just an inconvenience. When, for instance, you've just moved house and don't yet know where the post office is and you've got to find it in time to get a bill payment in the mail and still get to work on time, it's nothing but a pain.

But the same ignorance combined with the indulgence of time and perhaps, with luck, a bit of money to burn, is delicious. The world becomes your curiosity shop, your box of chocolates, your magnificent old bookstore, and your fingertips itch to pick things up, turn them over, unwrap them, inspect their bindings, nibble at their corners to see what secret sweets they hide inside them. Of course, sometimes the sweets turn out to hide a rotten core, and the itch in your fingertips turns out to presage a dose of poison ivy, but at the same time, travel has a way of tumbling such rough stones, so that by the time you get home they have a lapidary shine that makes them that much more rewarding to show off.

But catastrophes come first, and stories come later. And catastrophes do feel more raw, somehow, when one is far from the comforting retreat and predictability of home. Feeling unfit or frail -- an undependable back, a trick knee, Vivian's inconstant hip -- can be enough to skew the focus of even the most enthusiastic traveler's eye. Even as arches of fresh beauty make the pupils dilate in an attempt to take it all in, even as veiled unknowns whisper soft promises from courtyards and alleys, the sunlight pouring itself over the scene from a different height, a different angle, when you know your body may betray you, every bit of it seems to carry a hint of rot, a whiff of treachery and maggots, oozing possibilities for everything to go terribly, horribly wrong. When you do your traveling in a potentially uncooperative body, every travel day that passes uneventfully is a quiet victory. But sometimes it is also a Pyrrhic one, bought at the price of keeping yourself on fear's leash, some part of you waiting, peevish, for it all to be over so that you can go back home. And you chafe all the more at the things you lose and the things you waste because it is just a bit too scary to let yourself off the leash, to let yourself truly romp.

It's not that home is uniformly safe and foreign turf isn't. There are pitfalls and accidents everywhere. It's just that they're easier to bear at home. Your doctor already has your charts, you know where to find everything in the kitchen, your nest is feathered to your liking, and friends are readily available on the other end of the phone. More importantly, you know where the likely risks are: the bad neighborhoods, the broken bits of pavement or places where the cobblestones are slippery in the rain, the odd local holidays whereupon some enormous parade (or that damned marathon, annual rant-provoking irritant of choice for Vivian and hundreds of other Boston-area non-runners) would toss bus schedules into chaos. With years of familiarity, even the annoyances become cozy, because you know how to deal with them, how to step around or over them without breaking your stride or needing to ask for help. You are, very simply, in your own domain, and your control, while not absolute, is still pervasive.

But this -- sitting in the passenger seat of her own car, a car she had never driven and probably never would -- was not Vivian's domain, not her realm, and was, despite her ownership, quite out of her control. She gripped the handle of her walking-stick with both hands, one on top of the other, willing herself to relax, to recover even a tiny bit of the excitement she'd felt the night before while she was packing.

Kala drove smoothly, competently, apparently quite at ease with the traffic as she piloted the Jaguar toward the highway, but Vivian still found herself biting back the urge to be a backseat driver… and the urge to tell Kala to stop, to turn around, to take her back home. You're being silly, Vivian. This too shall pass, she told herself, closing her eyes, suddenly tired. Besides, you like Newport.

Keeping half an eye on the older woman while she drove, Kala noticed the furrows in Vivian's brow but said nothing. There was nothing that she could say that would make it any easier, not just because Vivian was obviously tense about leaving her comfortable little world and strapping herself into a car for two months with someone who was still basically a stranger, but because Kala would only be able to offer sympathy, not empathy. She'd felt pangs at leaving the apartment, but that was mostly about leaving Theo and very much not about leaving town. It certainly wasn't about leaving home. As far as Kala was concerned, she didn't have one of those.

Places you stayed, places you lived for a while, didn't count when it came to having a home, she'd decided. She'd been thinking about it on the way back to the subway after a dinner at Vivian's, the warm evening air caressing her face, watching the lovers come and go, hand in hand as they swarmed across Harvard Square. Free on a Friday night for the first time in a long time -- Frank, the manager at the club, had offered to renegotiate with her about the lap-dance thing when she gave her notice, and had seemed puzzled when she waved him away and said she wasn't interested in renegotiating, just in quitting -- she felt at loose ends, unsure of what she should do with the evening, walking toward the subway through the warm, silkily humid night.

But she'd found herself walking past the subway station, strolling down Mass Ave, the freedom of walking far more appealing than the idea of subway-car passivity. And then she found herself turning left, leaving behind the busy business-lined reaches of the main drag for Cambridge's crammed, winding streets, tall windows opened to let the night in, letting out warm yellow light, drifts of different kinds of music, cooking smells from late suppers, the occasional waft of pot smoke or laughter, equally intoxicating and sweet. Was it clichéd of her to be walking through the neighborhood, envious of all the people who really felt that these buildings, these houses and apartments, were their homes? Certainly no more or less clichéd than it was for her to think of herself as some sort of automatic beatnik because she didn't feel like her apartment was home to her, and that she didn't, in fact, think she really had a place she could really, truly call "home."

Kala didn't like giving in to her romantic side; she didn't trust it much. But walking alone, certainly, it couldn't hurt -- and there was a soft, almost sepia-toned loveliness to the notion of all these little nests, these homes, their walls soaking up laughter and sex and tears and the smells of a thousand dinners, their floorboards echoing the footsteps of everyone who'd ever trod them barefoot late at night. She had to admit that.

There was beauty as well in the image of the wanderer, the lonesome independent, no fixed address, going where the wind blew -- though grad school wasn't quite so random, nor so rarefied, and it certainly wasn't as swashbuckling as all that. But it did mean moving, and coping with Boston's stratospheric rents, which in turn often meant moving again when the landlord jacked them up at the end of the year. A thirty-dollar rent increase could be dealt with, whereas a three hundred-dollar one could not so easily be absorbed…and that, in a nutshell, was the reason she'd ended up on Mission Hill. It might not have been a particularly posh address, and in fact it occasionally scared people, but at least she could afford it.

Affordability had always been the unifying theme in her life where housing was concerned. Not location, or style, or degree of convenience or comfort, or any of the other criteria by which people seemed to choose where they lived. The apartments she'd lived in with her mother and sisters, the little house behind the strip mall where they'd lived for a little while, and even the double-wide they'd gotten later on -- a step up in some ways --had never been anywhere she'd felt particularly comfortable, or particularly at home.

Certainly the dorms she'd lived in during her first year of college hadn't been a home, but that was only to be expected. But neither had the apartments she'd shared after that. They were tatty, usually grimy in spite of all her attempts to scrub them down, the Formica marred with the cigarette burns and knife scars of previous tenants, the no-wax flooring worn white in some places and dark with layers of imperturbable grime in others, precisely the kind of places that landlords would be willing to rent to college students on their own, kids whose mommies and daddies weren't co-signing the lease or footing the bill. No amount of hopeful rearrangement of thrift-store furniture or application of large, brilliant posters to the walls ever really helped make those kinds of places look much better, or feel like more than the temporary shelters that they were.

Those apartments -- hell, the one she had now was only slightly better -- tended to seem disposable. She could never bring herself to put much money or effort into trying to dress them up. The landlords always seemed to feel likewise, as if it wasn't really worth the energy to fix things, because the building wasn't going to be around that much longer anyway. Or perhaps it was just that they weren't planning to be. In any event, it could take weeks to get the toilet fixed, or a cracked windowpane looked after. Sometimes the landlords let the oil run out, and there'd be no heat or hot water for a weekend, no matter how many times you called and left messages. They were apartments where you had a cat not so much for companionship as for mouse control. Places that made you glad to move on, because if the next place wasn't any better, at least it was different, and hopefully not any worse.

When you live in places like that, moving out is synonymous with moving up. Or at least that's what you tell yourself. Sometimes the progress was pretty incremental, but Kala could trace her own ascent by odd signs and tokens: it had been several moves since she'd moved into a place whose fridge still contained the moldering remains of the previous inhabitant's groceries, for instance. They'd all been clean since then. And before she had moved into Theo's, the landlord had insisted on cleaning the carpets and repainting her bedroom while it was empty. For several weeks she had refrained from putting up any pictures or posters on the pristine, unspackled, unsullied expanses of eggshell-white wall that had been newly painted just for her.

But the apartment, cozy as it was, and as much as she associated it with good things, wasn't really home, either. No one challenged her right to be there, exactly. But she didn't fit in, either. In the rest of Boston she didn't fit in well a lot of the time because she wasn't white. On Mission Hill, it was that she wasn't black.

She was still surprised that the two experiences were often so different. In the Back Bay, or on campus, there was a certain degree to which she was a token: her background, her features that were usually classified as "exotic" by people who probably couldn't tell a Pinoy from a Mexican anyway. It wasn't just her skin or her features they thought were unusual. It was the fact that she didn't know her father, that she was the first person in her family to actually graduate from college, much less go to grad school. Some of her professors, and many of her fellow students, would look meaningfully at her every time the subject of racial diversity came up, as if her mixed heritage gave her some special authority on the topic. Most of them, ironically, were too bashful to even ask her what that heritage was, even as they asked her to make pronouncements about how "multi-ethnic people" felt about this or that. Maybe, she thought, they were afraid of what the answer might be?

Kala was a bit of a token on the Hill, too. But it was entirely different -- it often seemed as if she was either the bastard stepchild or some species of visiting royalty. The two spinster sisters who lived on the ground floor of her building doted on the fact that she was going to Harvard, praised her "good hair," asked when she was going to marry that handsome young man of hers. The middle-aged man who owned the liquor store on the corner where Kala sometimes picked up a bottle of beer or wine had always been distant -- Kala figured it was because she wasn't black and was therefore somehow suspicious in his eyes -- and yet he'd follow her to the front door of his shop when Kala left, his stern glare keeping the rowdy gaggle of teenaged boys who hung out on the street corner from doing more than staring at her and perhaps snickering amongst themselves as she walked home. Then again, sometimes she'd hear whispers behind her that hinted that she might not be white, but she sure wasn't black enough for some people.

At the same time, Mission Hill was also one of the few places where anyone would ever ask her what she was. And no one seemed at all troubled that the answer to that question is that she was one-quarter African-American Air Force staff sergeant, one-quarter indigenous Filipina who'd gone to work in the bars near Clark Air Force Base and ended up pregnant, plus fifty percent second-generation working-class Black Irish wannabe teenaged beatnik who managed to make it as far as the corner of Haight and Ashbury before herself ending up pregnant by the son of the other two. Kala's mother had subsequently high-tailed it back home to the Ohio steel town whence she'd come and promptly embarked on a life that was characterized by erratic caroming between fits of self-indulgent romanticism -- the most tangible aftereffects of which were her five tattoos and three daughters -- and periods of equally idealistic eforced conformity to the sort of life espoused by Kala's sternly upright, rosary-toting grandmother.

As for Kala's father, much of what she knew was that he'd taught her mother a handful of words in Tagalog by way of seducing her, one of which she'd liked well enough to remember. "Kalangitan," as Kala's mother reminded her in the soft, gentle little moments they shared when she was a child, meant "heaven." Kala's mother was soft like that sometimes, sentimental. She was also reactive, prone to childish bursts of anger and joy, and just as prone to rashly quitting a job, dumping a boyfriend, or chastising Kala or her sisters for no reason at all. Yet she had been as good a mother as she knew how, taking them to the library, singing while she made sandwiches, and ransacking her own mother's closet to play dress-up with her daughters. Kala loved her, sometimes more than she could say. But she had also been grateful to be able to leave her behind. It was nice to be able to move through the world without your past clinging to you like toilet paper stuck to your shoe.

All in all, moving on and moving out were never things that had seemed to Kala like things to be shunned. As for leaving town, it was something she'd cherished ever since she'd managed to scrape together enough money to buy her first decrepit used car and coaxed it over the Pennsylvania state line. She didn't like to think of it as escape, because she didn't like to think of herself as running away from anything. But the appeal was undeniable and the pleasure considerable.

The low, constant purr of the engine, the smooth way it coasted through traffic, the sleek sensation of knowing she was in a car that would inspire quiet respect, only added to her current enjoyment. The only thing better than getting to leave town for two months was getting paid for it, and getting to drive a fabulous car into the bargain. Traffic was light as they drove in and out of patches of drizzle, heading south. Vivian, eyes closed, took deep breaths and seemed to relax a little bit as they slipped into the groove of highway cruising speed.

Vivian opened her eyes and looked out the window, tilting her head, taking in the misty grays and greens of the space as they passed through it, then looking at Kala, her eyes following the curve of the young woman's arms from her shoulders to the wheel. She could see how much Kala enjoyed this, how effortlessly she expanded her awareness to encompass the car, how reassuring she found the motion. Her quiet was tactful, cautious, but it didn't hide her buzz of excitement -- or her nervousness at being so excited, and thus so out-of-step with Vivian's equally silent, but equally evident, discontent.

Kala was a good one to have on your side, Vivian thought. She was Vivian's conduit, the human thoroughfare by which Vivian could travel the asphalt ones; her love of driving, of travel, gave Vivian just enough anchor to feel secure on the unfamiliar sea of the American road. More than that she was an aide-memoire, reminding Vivian of other places, other times, when her eyes had been as eager to embrace newness, when the leash of health and home and bad hip had not seemed as short as it did now. Kala seemed pleased by the voyage, and she had every reason to. And so, Vivian had to remind herself, did she.

"I'm fine, dear," she replied, her voice warm. "Just fine. And I'm looking very much forward to showing you Newport. I think you'll find it very interesting."