There Is No Long Distance Now Read online

  She didn’t know what to say. The driver accelerated slowly again, pulling back into traffic. She said, “Haven’t you ever known any nice Arabs?”

  He said, “You are really mad, aren’t you? I’m sorry. I talk too much.”

  Callie said, “Haven’t you?” She was thinking about prejudice, how it might begin so simply—they come from elsewhere, they don’t look the way I do. Why did people want to match? And here they were in the great multicultural city of the first African-American but also half-white U.S. president in history.

  Callie slumped in the seat.

  The driver said, “My girls are in Eye-rack.”

  “What?”

  “They’re nurses. They don’t see much action. Frankly, they’re in it for the money. And they met some nice Arabs, they said.”

  Callie said, “Wow. Were they wounded?”

  “My daughters?”

  “No, the Arabs. You said your daughters are nurses?”

  “Yes. Wounded. Your dad is really an Arab?”

  She sighed. “Yes. From Syria and Lebanon both. He hates war. He grew up in too many wars. He’d feed you even if you didn’t like him.”

  The driver said, “He’d feed me?”

  “He likes to feed people.”

  The driver was silent again. They passed a Jamaican coffee shop, a Korean Bar-B-Q, a Vietnamese diner. They passed grandmas of indeterminate origin wrapped in fluffy black coats. They passed shoe shops, a burned-out factory, and an apartment building with faded graffiti streaking the sides.

  Then he said, “Oprah Winfrey is not as good-looking as she appears on TV.”

  Callie started laughing. “Oprah is gorgeous! My mom gets O magazine—she looks fantastic on every cover. Do you know her?”

  “I’ve driven her. They really make her up. Airbrush. And she’s too rich! No one should be that rich.”

  “Yeah, well, she gives a lot of it away. Isn’t that good?”

  “And Julia Roberts is not really blond. She has dark roots.”

  Callie laughed out loud. What a complainer.

  Then she said, “I’ll bet I know one person we could agree on.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Elizabeth Smart—she’s brave. She was so great to speak up for herself and all victims in court. And the guy who kidnapped her is horrible and the same goes for that disgusting man in California who kidnapped the other girl and kept her in his yard.” Then Callie realized she should probably stop talking about kidnapping to a prejudiced individual with his hands on the wheel.

  “I’m with you,” he said. “Okay, we now agree.”

  Again they drove in silence. Past more old buildings, ponds, ducks, trees wearing golden autumn sweaters. Every city, a mosaic of blocks and hopes and ash cans and bright signs. Callie thought of the Langston Hughes poem she’d wished she could include in the contest, but it wasn’t long enough. It began, “I can see your house, babe, but I can’t see you.” Inside her head she said, Yo Langston, man, you really told the truth.

  “Are we friends now?” the driver asked. He was driving better.

  “We were never not friends,” Callie said. “I’m just keeping my fingers crossed you meet some really great Arabs soon.”

  He said, “See, you’re still mad.”

  When they arrived at her hotel, he jumped out to retrieve her suitcase from the back. She paid him and tried to give him a tip, but he pushed it away.

  “No tip, since I insulted you,” he said. “I couldn’t.”

  “Yes, you could,” Callie said. “But I only want you to do one thing with it. Buy some really good coffee from a nice Arab. And I hope your daughters get home safely and soon.”

  He took the money. Stood there awkwardly, as if he wanted to say something else. Which he did. “My wife . . . is from Mexico.”

  Great Wall

  “Today my mom told me she’s fine now and can stop taking her bipolar drug. And I went bipolar. No, Mom, you can’t! You need to take it forever.”

  She said, “Do you really think my well-being depends on a little pill?”

  “Yes, I do,” I said. “I really really do. And, having known you all my life, so does mine.” Sarah covered her face with her hands.

  A truck backed up outside, making its back-up beep. How appropriate.

  Margaret, the therapist, smiled, said nothing.

  Sarah just kept talking. “She told me I was being dramatic. She said I should give her another chance to do it herself. She makes it seem as if I’m responsible for her being on drugs. Helpful drugs. As if she’s only doing it for me, not for herself. I really hate that. Because I have only one more year at home, and Dad’s already left, so who’s she going to take her drugs for after I leave? Will I just be worrying about her forever?”

  “Yes,” said Margaret. “You will always be worrying. It’s human nature and especially your nature. But do you really think she plans to quit her medication? We need to get her to her own doctor immediately if that’s the case.”

  “I don’t know,” said Sarah. “She might already have stopped taking it. She might be lying.”

  “I thought she never lies.”

  “She never used to. But she started, once she was feeling better.”

  “What else did she lie about?”

  “Her boyfriends. I thought they were just piano students. But now I think they’re all her boyfriends.”

  “How old are they again?”

  “Oh, in their late teens and twenties. About twenty years younger than my mom. I thought they were all gay. But I came home the other evening unexpectedly and there were yellow roses on the kitchen table and one of them was in the bathroom and he doesn’t even have his lesson that day.”

  “Did you ask her?”

  “Of course I asked her. She said they were celebrating his new job at some restaurant or something. They were eating shrimp.”

  “Sarah, what do you want from your mother?”

  “Me? I want her to be stable!”

  “But what do you want her to give you? Why are you so angry at her?”

  “Angry? I’m not angry!”

  “Are you sure? Angry because your dad left? What do you blame that on?”

  “Her, definitely her.”

  “Does he speak to you about it?”

  “Whenever I can catch him in the U.S. of A.”

  Sarah cringed. That was definitely another thing she had gotten from her mother.

  Stupid phrases.

  “She blames everything on him. I’ve always been their captive audience. It’s so exhausting.”

  “And would you like her to release you from that position at this point?”

  “Of course I would.”

  “Do you realize you may have to release yourself?”

  “You mean just walk out the door when I go to college in Vermont or Washington state, whichever farther corner of the country will have me?”

  “No. I mean, emotionally. Once and for all, inside yourself. Saying, I am not your audience. I am not your sounding board. I am Sarah and you are Angie and Dad is Max and we are each responsible for the well-being of our own minds and spirits.”

  “Sounds great. Has never been true even for a minute.”

  “So let’s find a way to work with that.”

  Sarah glanced at her watch. Sure, in the last four seconds, let’s find a way. Let’s come back another day. Let’s be bound together now, you and I, as if I were a little donkey and you are the cart I am pulling as you tug on the reins and direct me, right or left, stop or go.

  Max was in China hiking on the Great Wall. He’d finished a consulting job in Beijing and had a few days off. He wished Sarah were with him. No one else was at the Great Wall because Chinese people, apparently, did not like to freeze their butts off in winter by taking stupid outdoor hikes. Even the sky ride operator, who ferried people up to the top of the wall from the parking lot, had gone home while Max was walking, so he had to climb all the way down by himself, finding
the big stone steps among frozen bushes, keeping himself oriented. The sun was sinking, cold deepening, eerie silence cropping up. You could imagine armies plotting against you in a silence like that. No, you could imagine all the mistakes you’d ever made, laughing at you. What if he got lost and couldn’t make it back to his taxi waiting in the lot? What would happen then?

  I thought about you, Sarah, he wrote later in his e-mail. Your dad afraid, doing something dumb, going to the Wall too late in the day. Who imagines being alone up there? Quite surreal.

  Her father wrote better than he talked, sometimes. So sometimes it wasn’t bad that he was far away.

  But I made it! Here I am, your dad on earth, for another day!

  To her mom he wrote perfunctory notes—Work went well, must stay two extra days for flight changes.

  Maybe that was part of the problem.

  If you didn’t tell your story in the most interesting way you might, how was someone else expected to care?

  So Sarah used to tell her mom how cool Max was and that didn’t work, either.

  “You like your father better than you like me.”

  “Someday, I will not be a bridge,” Sarah thought, walking to her car from Margaret’s office. “Someday I too will be the Great Wall. I will stand quietly in the sunset, turning different colors. I will separate the tangled past from the future. I will be nice to children.”

  Allied with Green

  For her paper on What I Believe In, Lucy writes first “the color green.”

  That’s how everything starts. A tiny shoot of phrase prickling the mind . . .

  Then she runs around for a few days doing other things but noticing the green poking up between buildings, on sides of roads, in front of even the poorest homes, how pots of green lined on rickety front porches, hanging baskets of green on light posts downtown, the new meticulous xeriscape beds of puffy green grasses and plants alongside the river, are what seem to keep everything else going. If people could not see green from the windows of the hospital, the hospital might fall down. She believes this.

  Once she starts making a list, it will not stop.

  Green has had a terrible summer. Threatened by the longest drought and highest heat in recorded history, green has had many second thoughts.

  Lucy’s family could only water with a sprinkler on Wednesday evenings between eight and ten. When she and her mom wash lettuce, blueberries, peaches, they carry the plastic tubs of fruit water outside to pour onto a plant. It’s ritual now. It’s holy water. The city had a water waster hotline. It made the national news. You could turn people in for excessive watering.

  Last semester, when asked to write a paper on addictions, Lucy wrote about trimming and got a C. Her teacher scrawled across the top of the paper, “What is this?” But Lucy often feels happiest with pruning shears in her hand, heading toward an overgrown jasmine vine.

  It’s a clear task, trimming. The longer you’ve done it, the more you know how it encourages green, in the long run. Also, you can have fine ideas while trimming. Queen’s crown, germander, plumbago. Snip, snip, snip.

  She knew it had been mentioned before, but thought she ought to include how cities assault their green for two reasons: money and greed. Later, feeling remorseful, or sickened by the new view, they name everything for green—Oak Meadows, Lone Pine. You could find it almost anywhere now.

  Lucy’s father demonstrated against developments when he was in college. She had a faded black and white picture of him holding a NO! sign, his hair bushy and wild. Highways slashing through green space—he now drives one of those highways almost every day, feeling guilty. He plants free trees in scrappy medians, as an apology. Sometimes people steal them. When he planted four little palms in pots as a gift to Freddy’s Mexican Restaurant, they got plucked from the soil overnight. Obviously some people were desperate for green. And surely, with all the population issues now, some developments were necessary, but look at what happened before you knew it—hills sheared, meadows plucked, fields erased, the world turns into an endless series of strip centers—yo, Joni Mitchell! Joni sang about parking lots when the world had probably half the number it has now. Her dad told her that. She likes Joni Mitchell.

  The boulevard wakes up when a strip of green is planted down its center.

  The sad room smiles again when a pot of green is placed on a white tablecloth.

  No one goes to Seattle to see the concrete.

  An exhausted kid says, I’m going outside—sick of her mother’s voice, she knows she will feel better with bamboo.

  In Dallas people run around the lake or refresh themselves at the arboretum.

  San Antonians send their kids to summer digging classes at the botanical gardens. The kids come home with broccoli. After a while.

  Patience is deeply involved with green.

  It’s required.

  So, why don’t people respect green as much as they should?

  This was the serious question growing small fronds and tendrils at the heart of Lucy’s paper. She knew her teacher might turn a snide nose up at it. Oh, blah blah, isn’t this rather a repeat of what you wrote last semester?

  People took green for granted. They assumed it would always be skirting their ugly office buildings and residences and so they didn’t give it the attention it deserved. Somewhat like air. Air and green, close cousins.

  Lucy truly loved the words pocket park.

  She loved community gardeners with purple bandannas tied around their heads. She loved their wild projects—rosemary grown so big you could hide in it.

  She loved roofs paved with grass.

  She loved the man in New York City—Robert Isabell—who planted pink impatiens on the metal overhang of his building. He had started out as a florist, at seventeen, in Minnesota—green state in the summer, not so green in December. Then he moved to New York City and became a major party planner, incorporating flowers, lighting, tents, fabrics, to create magical worlds of festivity. He didn’t attend his own parties. He disappeared once he got everything set up. Sometimes he hid behind a giant potted plant to see what people liked. Lucy found his obituary in the newspaper, clipped it out, and placed it on her desk. She wished she could have worked for him just to learn how he put flowers together on tables, how he clipped giant green stalks and placed them effectively around a tent to make Morocco, Italy, the French Riviera. Transporting. Green could take you away.

  Save you. But you had to care for it, stroke it, devote yourself to it, pray to it, organize crews for it, bow down to it. You had to say the simple holy prayer, rearranging the words any way you liked best—“Dig, Grow, Deep, Roots, Light, Air, Water, Tend.”

  Tend was a more important verb than most people realized.

  You had to carry a bucket.

  His Own Voice

  It was exactly one year to the day since her father died. Every twenty-second of every month had a sting to it, but this was the one-year sting and it was bigger. She’d ridden her bike to San Fernando Cathedral that morning to light a candle, though her father was not Catholic, and she wasn’t, either. Had he ever even entered the place? A candle cost one dollar now. She stuffed her quarters into the metal tube. Old Mexican women sat scattered in pews, praying with their heads bent. She would ride all over town today. Back streets, see what houses were for sale. Pick up some avocado-cucumber sushi with brown rice and have a quiet meal in his memory in the park. Watch the fat orange fish swirl around in murky water for a while. Some had large polka dots on them. Her mom was out of town. She might do a few errands or watch the little kids swing at the Mulberry playground.

  A man stepped up to her at Broadway Daily Bread. “Your father is still alive in my phone.”

  Jolt.

  Tall, lean man, combed-back dark hair. She’d never seen him before. He flipped his phone open. Reeled through the names to her father’s and held the small screen in front of her face. Her dad’s old familiar phone number still standing calmly like a small city of sevens and threes.<
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  The man said, “You don’t know me, but I recognize you. I saw you two together at the accordion festival . . . your dad and I were such good friends. We went to lunch all the time, talked regularly. I miss him so much. I still can’t believe it.”

  Oh. Oh.

  Rainey whispered, “And your name is?”

  He said, “Selim. I kept his messages as long as I could, then they disappeared. I wish they were still in here.”

  She thought, My father had his own life.

  She wanted to hold the man’s phone up and proclaim to everyone in the bakery, “My father is alive!”

  Selim hugged her and said, “Take care of yourself.” She left the bakery smiling.

  My dad is in the sack of wheat, this birdseed bread that he loved, the street he knew, the towering pecan trees, the stop sign. . . .

  Pedaling toward the park, she couldn’t believe she’d forgotten to tell the man what day it was. One year exactly. Did it matter? Did he need to know?

  She wondered, Would some people call him an angel? She didn’t. She called him a really nice man with perfect timing. That was enough.

  At home later, feeling well exercised, soaked in sun and happier than she thought she could feel on such a gloomy anniversary (Leo had offered to meet her somewhere, but she wanted to be alone all day), Rainey was surprised to find a message on her home machine from someone she hadn’t talked to in two years. Annie, from Comfort Arts Camp. Annie said, “Hey! Call me back. Soon! You probably have a cell, but I don’t know the number. I need to tell you something you might want to hear.”

  Annie’s first question was, “How is your dad?”

  Rainey gulped. “Did you know my dad?”

  “Don’t you remember, when he picked you up at camp, he was so nice to me and gave me that George Strait CD he had, because it was one I wanted?”

  Rainey didn’t remember. Maybe she’d run back inside the cabin for something she’d forgotten. Her dad was always being nice to everybody. Then she gulped. “He is dead, I’m sorry to tell you. Really really sorry.”