Optional Ending

The Promised Land

We sailed through customs and our flight took off on time. We connected first through Dubai and then through JFK to reach Houston on schedule, where my mom and step-dad picked us up from the airport. I was an only child and my mom had me when she had just turned twenty, so now in my early adulthood she was still young and vigorous, working out four or five days a week in addition to her full time job in a doctor’s office. My step-dad, Byron, had never had children. At 6’4” with red hair and freckled skin he looked like a Viking.
“I know you guys are exhausted, “ my mom said when we had everything loaded into her Volvo wagon, but do you mind if we stop at Whole Foods on the way home?”
“That would be great,” I replied as I settled in against the immaculate beige leather backseat. As Byron drove back from George Bush International Airport through the intricately knotted elevated freeways of Houston I gazed out the window. “This is my birthright,” I thought with deep satisfaction, “These elevated roads with no potholes where travelers move quickly and safely. This is a great accomplishment of my people.”
“Sara, put your seatbelt on,” my mom reminded me from the front. “Ah, what is this seatbelt of which you speak?” I joked while pulling the shoulder harness down and clicking myself in. I immediately felt like the shoulder-strap was choking me so I put it behind me and kept the lap-belt around my waist. “I guess some things are going to take a little getting used to again,” I mused.

Once in the Whole Foods my mom just wanted to pick up a few things and Dan was tired, but I began to wander through the mountains of fruit and started touching all of the neatly displayed oils, lip-balms, and lotions. I was still caressing a bar of soap when my mom finished checking out. “Come on Sara!” she called out from the nearby express lane. “Dan’s about to fall asleep on the bench next to the store managers office.” Reluctantly I replaced the soap and followed my mom out of the store and back into the car, purposely not fastening my seatbelt. As we pulled out of the parking lot I noticed a mosquito buzzing near my arm. “Go ahead and try it,” I thought to myself. When the mosquito landed I killed it easily.

While my mom fixed dinner I offered to take, Emma, her yellow lab out. I planned on staying in and around her yard, so I didn’t bother to wear any shoes. Walking through the grass in the late afternoon reminded me of my childhood summers roaming the fields of Wisconsin until I noticed a few black ants biting my foot. I brushed them off and the area continued to sting for a few minutes and then went away without even leaving a red mark. “These bugs are pathetic,” I thought to myself with disdain while watching the dog sniff the base of a tree. I remembered when an ant bit my little toe when I had my shoes off at a rural temple back in Sri Lanka. The pain had been excruciating and the toe turned red, swelling up like a little smoky sausage overnight. The skin at the nucleus of the bite split and oozed for days while I hobbled around. “Now that was a bug-bite,” I recalled to myself as I headed in with the dog.

My mom served slices of baguette on the table with prime rib and the rosemary roasted potatoes she had prepared for dinner, leaving the other half of the baguette out on the countertop. Throughout the meal I found myself anxiously watching the bread, expecting it to be colonized by ants at any moment. “Man,” I remarked to Dan, Byron, and my mom, “These American bugs are sleepy and slow. If I left bread out like that back in Sri Lanka it would already be covered in ants. I just got bit by some ants when I took the dog out and my foot is totally fine.”
“Really?” my mom asked. “The bugs were that bad?”
“Yes,” Dan chimed in, “They’d invade anything, even your computer, and you had to zip-lock bag any open food like bread or cereal.”
“What happened when they invaded your computer?” Byron asked.
“Well,” I began, “we went away for a few days and I turned my computer off. When we got back home I turned it on again and ants fled through the ventilation holes. After that it started to run hotter and hotter and slower and slower. It started to get glitchy and started crashing, so I backed everything up and took everything off of it I could. I would only have one application open at a time, but finally it wouldn’t boot anymore when you turned it on. It just went to the blue screen of death,” I finished sadly.
“So what’d you do then?” Byron asked.
“I took out the hard-drive and physically destroyed it and then gave it to a friend, I mean, maybe someone could get some use out of it somehow” Dan replied.
“Sure, sure,” Byron replied.

“So what do you think you’ll miss?” my mom asked. Dan and I were both quiet for a moment, chewing our steaks thoughtfully. “There must be something,” she prompted.
“I’ll miss the Galle Face, that great colonial hotel I sent you the link for,” I answered.
“I remember, that place looked really pretty,” my mom replied approvingly. “What about you Dan?”
“I’ll miss,” he started and paused, “Can’t say the Galle Face, that one’s already taken,” he paused again. “I guess there is some food I’ll miss that you can’t get here,” he replied unconvincingly.
“Like what?” my mom asked.
“Jackfruit,” Dan replied.
“What’s that?” she asked, perplexed.
“It’s a big fruit,” Dan explained. “When it’s young it can be prepared like meat. When it’s older it gets sweet.”
“Hmmm…” my mom replied.
“When they get older they are big too,” I added. “Up to 40 kilos, about 80 pounds.”
“Did you guys ever make it to the beach?” Byron asked.
“No,” we replied in unison.
“Why not?” my mom asked, “I bet the beach was really nice.”
“It’s not like here,” I explained. “You can’t just throw the dog in the Volvo and drive to Galveston. Either you take the local train, which is a total nightmare, take the bus, or hire a car for forty-bucks a day. Then when you get to the beach you have to spend some money to stay someplace nice, so it’s not like a cheap little vacation if you want to do it in any degree of comfort,” I finished.
“I thought you had a car there Dan?” Byron asked.
“I sold it to my research assistant,” Dan replied. “Plus, it’s really stressful for me to drive.”
“But the place is an island, how far away can the beach be?” Byron prodded.
“As the crow flies, not to far,” I replied. “But you’re looking at a full day of transit from Kandy no matter how you do it.”
“Wow,” Byron replied, mocking us slightly. “Sounds like it was better to stay home.”
“That’s basically what we did,” I confirmed.
“OK! Who wants pecan pie?” my mom asked from the kitchen.
“So Sara, when are going back to work?” Byron asked as my mom was dishing up the pecan pie.
“The important first step is finding my scrubs in the basement,” I replied sarcastically. “Really though, I don’t know,” I admitted. “We need to get my car home and unpack. There’s plenty to do around Dan’s house since he’s basically been renting it out for the past four years.”
“I think that’s good,” Byron answered as the pie arrived. “I think you are going to need to take some time,” he warned me.

During our car trip back to Virginia we took a detour through Chicago to see my best friend from high school and attend her baby shower. My friend from high school, Kim, was six months pregnant with her first child. She and her husband both had jobs at law firms and lived in a beautiful apartment in Andersonville, a stylish neighborhood on Chicago’s north side near the lake. Kim and I had been best friends in high school, lived together in college, and visited each other frequently after college. We even got married around the same time. Sitting in her tastefully updated, well-appointed apartment listening to her describe the baby’s kicks I realized I was divorced, broke, unemployed, and homeless. “So, when are you guys going to get married?” Kim asked when the baby stopped kicking.
“Well, we weren’t going to do it in Sri Lanka now were we?” I replied as Dan squirmed next to me on the couch. “You should have a baby too,” she teasingly commanded and started to stroke her belly.

The baby shower was thrown by one of Kim’s friends from graduate school who also lived in a spectacular apartment and was radiantly pregnant herself. It occurred to me that these people were real adults living proper adult lives for people our age. “So Sara, what did you do in Sri Lanka?” Kim’s sister asked me next to the punch bowl.
“Well, I kept up with the house, lot’s of laundry, that sort of thing,” I began. “I mean, a house gets dirtier much faster in Sri Lanka because you have to have the windows open all the time,” I explained weakly.
“You didn’t do anything with nursing?” she asked, surprised.
“No, medicine is all, really different over there,” I explained.
“So then when are you going back to work?” she asked.
“I need to get home first,” I joked, got my punch, and moved into the living room where I spotted Kim’s mother-in-law, Nancy. “So Sara, how was Sri Lanka?” she asked.
“It was really something,” I remarked lightly, raising my eyebrows and quickly trying to divert the conversation to Kim’s sister-in-law’s pervious year of college. “So when are you and Dan getting married?” Nancy asked, “I really like him,” she confided.
“I really like him too,” I replied. “But even though we lived together well in Sri Lanka, that’s not real life in America and everything that comes along with it. I just have to see what that’s like first,” I explained. Nancy nodded her head. “That’s probably wise,” she confirmed as we moved back to the dining room to get some hors d’oeuvres. While I was munching on a little slice of gourmet pizza with goat cheese, basil, and fresh fig I met up with one of my friends from college. “It’s amazing that Kim’s pregnant,” she remarked.
“Yeah, it’s pretty crazy adult stuff,” I replied.
“Do you think you and Dan will have kids?” she asked.
“Well, Malaria can be dormant for six to twelve months,” I began, “So it’s probably better to wait that out,” I joked. I remembered the one time I called my mom and told her I had some interesting news. She thought I was pregnant but really I was calling to tell her that I had tested positive for exposure to Tuberculosis and was starting treatment.
“I don’t want to wait too long,” she answered. “Hey, where were you this past year again?” she asked.
“Sri Lanka,” I answered.
“So how was that?” she asked.
“Well, it was pretty much the way you’d expect a Third-World country with a quarter-century civil war to be,” I answered wryly.
“But aren’t they Buddhist?” she asked. “Shouldn’t they be, you know, non-violent?”
“No, the people relate to Buddhism just like people relate to any other religion, ” I explained. “They relate to the Buddhism they know culturally, the rituals, the festivals, and giving to the monks for merit. They don’t relate to the philosophy the way most Westerners do. That’s what I learned. Going in I thought because I was all into yoga and some Buddhist philosophical ideas I would feel some sort of resonance with the culture,” I added.
“Did you?” she asked.
“No” I answered simply. “Instead of learning more about the tradition I have come back feeling less interested in Buddhism, yoga, curry, and anything else that reminds me of the region,” I commented as the hostess called us into the living room for Kim and her husband Pete to open presents.

When we had cleared the loops and construction of Chicago and Dan was able to lock in the cruise control on the highway I blurted out, “If one more person asks me when I’m going back to work or when we are getting married, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m running out of pithy answers.”
“That’s just the normal stuff for people to ask,” Dan consoled me. “It’s really hard for people to really understand what we’ve been through because it’s so far outside of the range of their experience.”
“I feel old,” I replied.
“Living overseas does that to you,” Dan explained. “You come back and think ‘what’re all these crazy kids listening too?’ and you feel out of touch with technology and everything.”
“For me it’s that,” I agreed, “And the sense that everyone else’s life has gone on and developed. Lots of my friends traveled in college and their early twenties, and now they’ve settled down and I’m just wilder. Now they’re talking about layettes and I’m just glad I don’t have any new mosquito bites.”
“What’s a layette?” Dan asked.
“I didn’t know either,” I answered, “I had to look it up. It’s a set of clothing and bedding for a newborn.”
“Hmmm.” Dan replied.
“Before we left people would say ‘oh what a wonderful experience that will be,’” I continued. “But right now I just feel disoriented, overwhelmed, and my GI system is in ruins.”
“Look, I know you could go back to work this week if you wanted to,” Dan replied, “But I don’t want you to feel pressured. I want you to take some time. I am going to get reimbursed for all of my airfare from Fulbright and then the dissertation-writing grant will kick in soon. We’ll have plenty of money.”
“That’s good, I think that will be good,” I replied sincerely and started to scroll through the podcasts on the iPod to find some listening material.

For the weeks we spent in Houston and Chicago I felt on some level that we were just on vacation from Sri Lanka and we would be going back soon. It wasn’t until we got back to Dan’s and started to unpack that I started to feel that we were back for good. It was strange for me at first to see my flatware in the kitchen drawer and the dresser my grandfather made for me when I was a baby in the bedroom. It took us three weeks of steady work to combine households. I hung up my sarees next to my collection of vintage dresses in my closet and put away my scrubs and work clogs, wondering what sort of job I would find next. I brought up boxes of my own books and started putting them on the shelves, some for reference, some favorite reads, and some on the to-do list. Looking at my books I suddenly thought “This is who I am! I have books on tea, yoga, climbing, and travel.” I felt as though my own interests were a name I had been trying to remember for days that suddenly popped into my head as I pulled a coffee table book on Turkey out of a box. Sitting on the floor amongst empty boxes, still-packed boxes, and piles of my belongings I started to flip through the book on Turkey, savoring the pictures of my favorite mosques and focusing with interest on pictures of places I hadn’t visited. Dan was unpacking his own boxes of books in his office across the hallway. “I’ve got some reading material for you,” he remarked as he entered my office with two books in his hand. “They both detail the introduction and propagation of Buddhism in America,” he explained, handing them to me.
“Great!” I replied, putting down the picture-book of Turkey and starting to thumb through the chapters of the new books.

Once the house was unpacked we decided to go out to our favorite restaurant in Charlottesville, a Spanish tapas place called Mas to celebrate. “So what’s next?” I remarked to Dan as I looked through my sarees, trying to decided which one to wear.
“I guess we will schedule a curbside rubbish pick-up to get rid of that filing cabinet and some of the other stuff Salvation Army wouldn’t take,” he replied, pulling on his new cowboy boots from Houston.
“No, I mean travel-wise,” I clarified. “Are we going to go to India this winter for you to finish up some of the research you started on the Jains? I was thinking I can work full-time, pull in some overtime, then I could just quit again and we could go for a month and a half or something.”
“Are you crazy?” he asked, “How can you even think about that?” stopping in the middle of pulling on his second boot.
“But, don’t you want to go back to India?” I asked, surprised.
“I have to stay home and write, and go to the annual conference and try to get a job,” Dan replied, slightly stunned. “Then there’s my first year of teaching. That’s going to be really stressful,” he continued. “After that, maybe.”
“I guess I didn’t think about all that,” I admitted. “You think you’ll have to write all the time?” I asked tentatively.
“A dissertation is a pretty big project,” Dan assured me.
“Well, it sounds like I just have to take a trip to Turkey on my own then,” I replied, grinning. “I’ve always wanted to do a solo trip. For me that’s the final frontier,” I added thoughtfully.
“Will you send me a postcard?” Dan joked as I started to drape the saree and mentally outline the trip. The best time would be the early spring I decided. I knew could fly out to Van in the east and work my way back. That could probably be a two-week trip including a few days in Istanbul. “But if I had more time,” I ruminated to myself while pinning my saree, “I could go out through Ankara and go back along the Black Sea Coast in the north.”