White Teeth

In my month away from Liberia, I read a book that made me want to write books. Lines from that book made me want to write this post.

Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.

So I’m flying back to Liberia last Sunday and I’m staring at this kid in the row in front of me. I don’t know why I’m staring at him yet -- he’s adorable and he speaks French, though, so I assume that’s it. (I’m easily entertained.) The kid is perfectly dressed, looking like a GAP ad for multi-ethnic babies. He’s sitting quietly with his hands in his lap. He’s not watching the movie. He’s staring at the back of the seat in front of him, struggling to hide a facial contortion.

Then, just as silently, he throws up all over himself.

Now I realize I’ve been staring at him because I knew this was going to happen to him. It was my most Fight Club-ian of moments. (“I know this because Tyler knows this.”) How could I have known? Because 23 years ago I, too, was crisply attired in a middle seat between my half-brother and my mom, on my way to my dad, inching towards Africa, stoically battling a willful tummy. I know the look of someone forestalling the inevitable.

This was my reintroduction to Liberia. It presaged the grey skies and barren marketplaces to come. (For the record, it is really foul to get someone hooked on tropical produce and then syke! It’s the rainy season. Withdrawal and scurvy are just around the corner.)

While away, I realized two things. (Clearly, I realized more than two things but we’ll address the first two.)

1. Post-grad Avril is moving to Asia. (Sorry guys.)

2. I don’t know anything about family – mine or anyone else’s.

The first, though arguably self-explanatory, is based largely on the fact that I did more in two weeks in Indonesia than I had done in nine months in Liberia. I dove 18 meters under the sea. I climbed a volcano at dawn. I drank the world’s most expensive coffee (which, hi, comes out of an animal’s butt). I met orangutans in the jungle and monkeys in the forest. I located the best imaginable spring roll. I saw a play. I rode a funicular. I bought a ring I never want to take off. I got a massage alfresco. I saw workmanship worth flying around the world for. I went off anti-malarials. I saw a city and people you’d never believe had faced a tsunami.

I know, of course, that visiting a place isn’t the same as living there. Still, I like the idea of starting anew. I’ve always wanted a clean slate; you’d think I had a prison record.

But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to speed the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.

So I ask myself, “What am I dodging?” No student loans, no estranged husband, no draft. I’ve got no issue with the western world, where I never have to ration entertainment. (Aquarium and gallery followed by bowling? Yes please, Berlin.)

The truth is that I think I'm dodging my family.

Once upon a time, I went to the islands with a girl and her family. At dinner, her aunt asked how big my family was and, in a moment of uncharacteristic stupidity, I said to this woman (in one breath), “Well everyone remarries and starts new families / or stays married and starts secret families / and each of my parents / has ten siblings or half-siblings / that they know of / (many of whom drank or ate themselves out of this life) / so I figure I've got a few hundred cousins. / Carrots?”

None of this was a lie.

I never saw the color drain so quickly from someone’s face.

What is the matter with me!? I couldn’t just say, “Oh, you know, pretty big..."?

In a vision, Irie has seen a time, a time not far from now, when roots won’t matter anymore because they can’t because they mustn’t because they’re too long and they’re too torturous and they’re just buried too damn deep. She looks forward to it.

This is where the moving far, far away comes in: not only will I be somewhere where other families are just as unconventional and complex, but none of those families will be mine. In Jakarta, I watched a girl my age drop her family at the airport. Swiftly and soundlessly, she kissed her mother on the cheek, pressed the back of her father's hand to her forehead, and pressed the back of her hand to her little brother's forehead before getting in her car and driving away. Amazing. My family would never part (or do anything, really) that beautifully.

"Isn’t that something? Did you know this is how other families are? They’re quiet. Ask one of these people sitting here. They’ll tell you. They’ve got families. This is how some families are all of the time. This is what it's like in other families. They’re not self-indulgent. They don't run around relishing the fact that they are utterly dysfunctional."

I came to Liberia, in part, to find a family -- one of those jolly ones on the cereal boxes and Club Med posters. And now I fret about how this knotty mass of people fits in with my nice, tidy FutureLife™.

In London, I met nearly all of Will’s living relatives. That’s four generations of self-sufficient people, all of whom you could fit in a sitting room, living totally regular lives within 3 hours of one another. Imperfect, but functional.

And then there’s my family.

“Hi Uncle Newman.”
“We were expecting you on Decoration Day.”
“Deco—what?”
“Decoration Day. Everyone went to your pa’s grave.”
“Oh. Yeah. I don’t like to go there.”
“Why not?”
“I went once. It’s in a bush. I got bitten by ants and the stone has the wrong birth date.”
“Everything was hurried; it was war time.”
“That war’s been over for ten years now.”

It appears I have different priorities from the rest of the clan. I really don't know how my semi-straightforward twig of the family tree could possibly have come to be.

The differences between the Chalfens and the Jones/Bowdens were immediately plain. For starters, in the Chalfen family everybody seemed to have a normal number of children. More to the point, everybody knew whose children were whose. The men lived longer than the women. The marriages were singular and long-lasting. Dates of birth and death were concrete.

Behold the Jones/Bowden family tree:

This is more or less what I’m dealing with.

The thing about family, though, is that I don’t really know what to do with them. In New York, I had little family and, so, made family out of my friends. (They came in handy when I lived in San Francisco and had neither friends nor family.) Now, in Liberia, I have few friends and entirely too much family.

“Hi Aunty Priscilla.”
“Avril!? Are you calling me?? My lord! Hold on, I’d better sit down for this. Death must be near.”
“Har.”
“Where are you?”
“Leaving London.”
“And you didn’t come see me?”
“I thought you were away.”
“Mmmhmm. How’s Liberia?”
“It’s fine.”
“Don’t lie to me. It’s a difficult country.”
“Okay.”
“Did you meet Eric?”
“Eric who?”
“ERIC.”
“Umm…”
“Avril, he’s your cousin.”
“Does he go by some other, less conventional name?”
“How have you not even heard of him??”
“Uhh. You underestimate just how strange this family is.”

Now that I’m writing this down, of course, there’s a certain charm in being part of something huge and difficult to wrap your head around. Maybe my family’s like Indonesia: 20,000 effing islands you can’t possibly know, all different, all doing their own weird thing. And then there’s me, the province of Aceh, striving for independence though clearly, clearly bound to Sumatra. Even if Aceh became its own state, it wouldn’t detach and push off from the archipelago with a “Peace out, brothers!” No. It can’t. It will always be where it has been, whether it forks its future or not.

So perhaps I'll just concede this one to fate, to willful tummies, to genealogy and geography. There is no starting from scratch: there is only accepting or fighting a past that will follow you regardless. So let the family tree follow me to Asia – I will regale the people with my tragicomic tales.

And I guess I’ll call this Eric person. I hear we’re related.