Super America Read online

  “I don’t like this one bit,” my mother said. “But you’re a grown woman. You have to know.”

  I looked down at myself in blue jean cutoffs and a red T-shirt. For an instant, I felt like I was twelve again and we were having the menstruation talk; I was that antsy and uncomfortable. It seemed my mother had me wrong, though: I was not yet a grown woman.

  “Just trust me,” I said.

  “Oh, okay,” she said, closing up tight. My father had always complained she was no risk taker. She’d always needed the safety net of compliance.

  * * *

  We ate strawberries with every meal: in sandwiches, on pancakes, sprinkled in salads, studded in ice cream, chopped in stir-fry. “Oh, look! Strawberries!” we joked, as if they were the greatest treat. My fingers were stained red but felt softened by all the juice. Later, every time I smelled strawberries, I would be catapulted instantly back to that summer in Alton, New York. Our little khaki tent, our sex inside it, our pink skin, and the very taste of berries on our tongues at all times.

  If Matthew had failed miserably at college, he quickly rose in rank in the strawberry business. Our boss, Leo Benning, made Matthew crew captain after the first week. Matthew had a way of making people feel at ease but of getting them to do what he wanted, as well. Half of the workers were poor college and high school students like us; the other half were Mexican migrant workers with little English and even less money. Luckily, some of my Spanish became very useful. I was the only one who could understand what they were saying, which made Matthew paranoid. He was convinced they were talking about his leadership as captain. I laughed. “They’re talking about what they need to get at the grocery store later, you fool.” But Matthew wasn’t sure he believed me.

  After our first week there, we were all run ragged. The novelty of working with my hands quickly wore off. My back ached deeply. The hot sun had burned my fair skin and then reburned it before it had time to heal. My joints creaked and popped from the constant crouching. After the first big rainstorm, life in the tent was no longer such an adventure. When it began to thunder and lightning one night, Matthew suggested we try to “wrestle” and “pin” each other in synch with each boom in the sky. I remember I went along, but my heart wasn’t in it, and it never really worked.

  Leo Benning turned out to be a tyrant. Though he did not actually wield a whip, he may as well have. We were paid by the bushel, not the hour, as we’d been told, so everyone began speeding along to make a decent wage. Matthew decided the working conditions were inhumane. After dark one night, we sat around the fire and drank beer. Matthew had prearranged a secret meeting with both the migrants and the students. I remember sitting there exhausted, worrying about whether or not my student loans had come through for medical school and how I was probably missing some very important pieces of mail. After all, we had no television, no radio, and no mail service, save for when we could get into town, which was seldom. I remember worrying that so much sun was doing damage to my brain and that I’d never be able to compete with the other students, who were likely lazing around their rich parents’ air-conditioned homes, brushing up on their biology and anatomy. I remember also daydreaming about hot showers, movie rentals, and a much-needed professional haircut.

  Matthew stalked circles around the fire, hands clasped behind his back. I could tell he liked the power. Of course he needed me to translate for the migrants, which slowed the whole process down, but the long and short of it was that he was spearheading a labor movement, initiating a strike, and was trying to get everyone to go along with him. The migrants sat on one side of the fire; the students sat on the other. Neither group ever mixed. The all-white students nodded eagerly in agreement, their herd mentality and susceptibility to peer pressure much apparent. I tried to soften Matthew’s rhetoric in my translation to the migrants, but even then they immediately shook their heads and stubbed out their cigarettes; they had heard it all before.

  “What’s wrong with you people?” Matthew shouted. “Unless we rise up and do something, we’re nothing but slave labor. Come on! Fuckin’ spiks.” His voice echoed across the dark fields. I remember the air was gauzy with leggy, moist mosquitoes. Clouds of gnats floated in waves above our heads. The migrants, of course, understood some English and knew they were being insulted. Beer flowed, and consequently, if not inevitably, one of the migrants made a dash for Matthew, swung at him, and floored him. A quasi fight ensued, and I remember feeling two blurred parts of myself split and divide: the desire to walk away for good, and the need to go for blood myself. I had never hit anyone and could almost taste how good it would feel.

  But I didn’t. I didn’t know whom to hit.

  The next day Matthew was licking his wounds, wanting me all over him as if I were a sort of bandage. “Sex,” he said through clenched teeth, “is the great healer.” I remember my inability to speak after he said that. I had sacrificed a great deal to be with him, and my body now seemed too much to ask.

  I remember sitting inside the tent sipping instant coffee. We had no days off and had to rush each meal before getting to work. I missed my mother; during one of our rare phone calls, she told me she’d sent fresh muffins from Rolling in Dough by overnight express, but of course, having no mail service, I never saw them.

  “You don’t love me enough,” Matthew said.

  “What’s enough?” I asked. Among other things, my mother had accused Matthew and me of overanalyzing everything.

  “I’ll tell you what’s not enough.” Matthew chugged more coffee straight from the thermos. “What’s not enough is that you’re just here slumming this summer before you go off to med school and play with the rich kids. You think you can just slip in and out of this tent on a whim.”

  I remember the sun rose higher and higher and hit the top of the tent hard. It was very hot inside, and we were both sweating heavily. Across the camp, the migrants’ cassette player blasted Mexican polka. The same tape played day after day. The scent of their breakfast—beans, rice, eggs, and salsa—blew towards our tent and made my stomach hurt from hunger. We were having nothing but the coffee. I’d dropped several pounds already and could feel myself disappearing.

  “What do you want from me?” I asked. I remember my pajamas—Matthew’s T-shirt and briefs—stuck to me, and stunk.

  “Marry me,” Matthew said. It was now the second time he’d proposed.

  “Marry you?”

  “We’ll move to Kenya,” he said. He wore only briefs, and his chest, slightly pigeon breasted, protruded and swelled. You could count his chest hairs on one hand. “My parents said they’d fly us over. They love you! You know that.”

  I had never met his parents.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something important?” I said. “When I agreed to come here with you this summer, what did I say?” I sounded like a parent or teacher, I knew, but couldn’t help it.

  “Depends,” he said. He reached out and stroked my cheek with a pink finger. I had had it with the strawberries and couldn’t eat a single berry more. “Depends on how much you love me.”

  I knew somehow I had to end it right there or I’d look up years, maybe decades later, and find myself still without a medical diploma. I told him all of this, and more.

  We were going to be late and have our pay docked, but neither of us cared. Matthew lit a joint and pinched it between his fingers as he smoked. “Med school will always be there,” he said. “But will Kenya?”

  The pot smoke made me dizzy. I got up, ducking low under the canvas. “I don’t know,” I said. “Don’t you have it reversed?”

  I stayed three more days, just long enough to collect my pay, say good-bye to the migrants, and ship a bushel of fresh strawberries to my mother’s bakery. On the third night, I saw Matthew ducking into a student’s tent. I had seen him talking to her earlier, helping her carry the baskets heavy with fruit, leaning in close. He didn’t come out until morning.

  My mother would be so proud of me, I remember thinking as I wal
ked down the long gravel road to the highway; I could almost hear her cheering me on.

  * * *

  I remember Nebraska as grassy plains, gigantic truck stops, and competitive, blue-blooded medical students who skied and played tennis, cutthroat to the core. Much of my time was actually spent in study carrel 16 on the third floor of the library. Occasionally I peeked out the window at the tar-topped parking lot and muddy puddles, but only occasionally. The flat gray sky depressed me; the absence of trees served to expose me for the sham I really was. I remember I had to press my fingers to my temples in order to fully grasp the words and images in front of me. I was most fascinated by the vascular system and spent hours tracing tiny blue blood vessels with my fingers.

  One professor, short and mustachioed, who wore bow ties, told me the money was in oncology. “Sounds morbid, but it’s true.” Another, a woman with long gray braids and braces, tried to lure me into obstetrics. “Think of the joy you’ll see every shift,” she said. “You’ll see life pouring out right in front of you.” My classmates, when they did manage polite conversation, seemed destined for the newly popular ophthalmology (laser eye surgery) or cosmetic medicine (plastic surgery). I didn’t know where I belonged, only that I preferred the human body inside out, so beautifully red and blue and brown, instead of the pale sad colors of the flesh. I did run into Walt occasionally, though I tried to avoid such run-ins. He still seemed bitter about my summer betrayal, but some attraction gave itself away in his trembling voice, his jittery hands, the glint behind his nearly invisible eyeglasses. I rarely dated, save for a few courtesy setups arranged by fledgling friends. I simply studied with the intensity of a true beginner. Maybe the sun on the strawberry fields had burned up some of my brain cells; maybe I wasn’t as smart as I’d thought I was; maybe my heart was stronger than my will; maybe I missed Matthew but didn’t even realize it.

  Matthew. I remember the day I saw him sitting on a bench outside Carney Hall. It was early spring; a pair of squirrels chased each other up a tree behind him. His leather book bag was flopped open like a yawning saddle sack. Books and papers tufted out the top like a strange bouquet. A loose lock of hair swung in front of his eyes, and he pushed it back casually, with two fingers. We create ourselves by our choices, I remember thinking. But who’d said it originally? Nietzsche? Kierkegaard? Nietzsche, I thought, but wasn’t certain. I saw him before he saw me and stopped, stunned, my heart nearly throwing itself up my throat. I remember he was eating pistachios and throwing every other one to the squirrels. The empty shells accumulated in his black beret, which he held on his lap. When he saw me, he stood, the blue of his eyes brightly visible even from a distance. Up close, I could see how red they were, as if from tears or too much sun. The pistachio shells tumbled to the grass.

  “It’s my mother,” he said. “I’ve got to go back. To Kenya.” He said something in Swahili, and I nodded. I didn’t quite understand. I wanted to know—illness? accident? death?—but I kept the questions quiet. He reached a hand out to me, and his flesh looked so pale, so clearly veined in violet blue, he would have made an excellent cadaver sample. I could imagine myself separating the vessels with a tweezer clean and cool in my hand. We were especially taught to look for vascular bundles, like small gray embroidery knots my mother stitched into dish towels. I could’ve sworn when he hugged me, I smelled strawberries. I pulled away.

  “You’ll come?” he said. My next lab was in five minutes and was clear across campus. I could miss it but would instantly lose points as others rose in rank. As if on cue, a balmy, almost tropical breeze came out of nowhere to tempt me.

  “I don’t know.” I didn’t want to give him false hope, but compassion prevented me from declining him outright. The books weighed heavily in my bag and cut a deep pain through my shoulder. I could almost hear my watch ticking and knew lab would be starting any second. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t?” Matthew’s innocence often surprised me. At times, I thought it was an affect of his he used wisely, even manipulatively, but as he stood in front of me, under the big beech tree, I saw his honest wonder. He really wanted to understand my elusive response.

  There were so many ways things could have gone after that. I could have walked away, as a smart woman would’ve. I could have slapped him; I could have kissed him; I could have told him to kiss my ass. A thunderstorm might have blown in and sent us scurrying for cover; a tornado might have swept us away. I could have sat down next to him and explained all the reasons why he was wrong for me, and I, for him. Instead I stood mutely, the weight of inevitability pinning me to the spot where, for the third time, Matthew asked me to marry him.

  As leaves spun above our heads and the sky rumbled impatiently like an empty stomach, I remember thinking how small we must have looked underneath the big tree. I looked up to gain perspective. Dark branches arched and curled, reaching for a sky bigger than either of us.

  For the first time, I did not say no.

  WHAT HAPPENED

  This morning at 10:30, Angela Mayer’s husband died on his bicycle; he was wearing a helmet, in case any of you are wondering, though it hardly mattered. And Angela is doing all right, too, despite so many things beyond the obvious, despite the fact she lives so far away from both sets of relatives it will take them a day and a half just to get there. What comes next is how it went, what came before and what came after an event so circumstantial yet conclusive. What comes next is an account of how people steer themselves through tragedy and freak accidents, and of who Angela and Michael are, or were, together. What comes next is something similar to—though far more detailed than—an article you might read in the newspaper and find yourself unable to stop thinking about. It is exactly the kind of thing you hope will never happen to you or anyone you love, yet it intrigues you, propels you forward into a strange pursuit to know more. Why, then, do we seek blood, tragedy, horror?

  Earlier today, a Monday morning in June: Angela and Michael putter around the apartment, and Michael finishes off the last of a second pot of coffee, despite the heat. In Honolulu, the only apartment they can afford is a small cinderblock walk-up on Date Street that gets very humid and cloistered and dark by afternoon. Angela is off to teach an English as a second language course at the Vietnamese Community Center, and Michael, a marine biologist, must run to the university and do research in the library. They Velcro into sandals, Angela swoops her long blond hair up into a tight knot, Michael fills his water bottle, and they kiss in front of the stove. Angela runs her hands up and down his back, over his stiff, line-dried T-shirt.

  “Maybe we can go to the beach later,” Michael says, and straps on his bike helmet, which looks, to Angela, like a peculiar, blue, shiny beetle perched atop his head.

  “Yeah, maybe,” Angela says, “unless I’m too exhausted.” She slowly maneuvers her backpack onto her shoulders, trying to keep perspiration to a minimum. She must do everything slowly on days like this—walk slowly, eat slowly, get dressed slowly, think slowly. Outside, on the busy street, the sun pounds down like an assault, and Angela lingers by the door, imagining its rays pounding into her scalp, fermenting her brain, sunburning the side part in her hair. “I hate to go. It’s too hot. God, why does it always have to be so damn hot here?”

  The question is of course rhetorical, but Michael bristles and jeers. This bone of contention is old: Michael, an East Coaster, spent most of a year begging and pleading and campaigning for Hawaii Pacific as the school where he’d do his postdoc. With so many foreigners there, Angela could teach English as a second language, but as a Montanan, she had shirked. She had coiled up like a snake and spit, “Hawaii? Me going to Hawaii is like putting a polar bear in the desert! It’s like putting a herd of cattle in the jungle!” And it’s true—her parents were cattle ranchers, and it did get fantastically cold in Montana so much of the time. But still Michael hoped and held on to dreams of the clear ocean blue and all that heady sea life: bright yellow angelfish practically jumping into your hand! Parrotfis
h, dolphins, whales! About all of this, and more, he had read. For the rest of winter, Angela sat poised on top of a decision which would alter everything, and she knew it, and she roosted there long-term.

  But they were married. Within three tiny chaotic years, they had already learned, like soldiers, to advance and retreat, listen and fight, give and take, and finally, to think things over in the kind selflessness of private time, which, when one is much in love, is the giving-in time. At last, Angela gave in, or agreed to try it, because she loved Michael: it was that simple. Yet, although Angela agreed that he should at least apply, she had no intention of going there; at her insistence, he had also applied to Oregon, California, and North Carolina. But as everyone knows, life more often than not throws you where it wants to. So when the Hawaii forms came and the funding was so good, even Angela couldn’t say no. She, too, had job prospects waiting for her there, too good to refuse.

  At the time of their decision, they were both working loathsome temporary jobs in a city they did not so much hate as endure. Angela was a clerk at a life insurance agency, and near the end of her assignment, an older female coworker with deep, smoky breath and tinted glasses took her aside and gave her a quick little lesson on how to hold a pen better so as to fill out forms more efficiently. Angela, a college graduate, had nearly fainted in exasperation and horror. Michael had fared no better on the temporary job scene; he had ended up in the county’s social-services phone pool, with twenty-eight telephone lines ringing in his ears in a basement office, sans windows.

  But this morning in June, in Hawaii, it is hot, both are distracted and busy, and from the window, Angela watches Michael unlock his bike. He weaves through traffic and stops, poised, at the light before heading up the hill and out of sight into Manoa. She, too, mounts her bicycle and is off. As she rides, heading toward Diamond Head, something in the air feels entirely too heavy, as if it might rain, though there is not a single cloud in the sky. Still, the air is thick and hard to get through. She plans in her head: she will teach, come home, make a cold fresh-vegetable sandwich, then, yes, go to the beach with Michael. They simply do not go to the beach as often as you might think, living in Hawaii.