by Carol Beddo

Mid-July in Los Angeles, my newborn grandchild needs no more than her diaper. Less than a mile from the Pacific coastline, offshore breezes from Venice Beach wring out warm and dry as they flow up the slight incline and cross Lincoln Avenue. These hot winds embrace us; Nora cradles in the crook of my left arm, a pink flannel receiving blanket between her skin and mine.

Unlike the creaky old Craftsman rocker I used when Nora’s mother was my first baby, this silent glider won’t even whisper as Nora and I drift silently forward and back, forward and back. Will her eyes stay blue? Will her skin stay this parchment white, so like her namesake, my mother?

Gently rocking newborn Nora, daughter of my daughter. Rocking, rocking, back and forth. Will Nora have a daughter? A granddaughter? She is born at the beginning of this new century; I lived nearly sixty years in the last. Who will she be in her future, when I am gone?

I hear baby moans. Baby sighs. Deep, slow breathing. Sudden startle!

I rest my palm on her chest. “Shhh, Nora. Shhh.” She calms with a loud exhale. I feel her warmth against my palm; my body heat warms her unnecessarily, but I will not put her down. I learned with my own girls, rocking a sleeping baby completes my world. Nothing satisfies me more, there’s nothing easier to do, and there’s nothing better for babies. I rock, slowly forward and back, and my life and world comes into my mind, anyway it likes.

“Gramma loves you. Just rocking, rocking. Um hum, um hum. Now you hush, hush. Shhhhh.”

Rocking, swaying, dreaming memories. Choices accepted. Choices rejected. Drift, daydream, imagine a future, remember a past.

Mysteries open to me. Faded memories back bright and strong. End of August, 1966 rainy season. My little two-room house in Addis Ababa, near Arat Kilo. I’m completing two years of Peace Corps teaching in Ethiopia.

“Everyone says you won’t be happy if you go back. And they’re right,” Guy says as we sit together on the couch having our morning coffee and an Arab roll.

Our friends also want me to stay. They say I’m more Ethiopian than they are because I’ve lived for two years among the common people in the provinces while they’ve lived only in cosmopolitan Addis Ababa - in addition, that is, to their time abroad for higher education, at the behest of Emperor Haile Selassie. They are good, dear friends to me, the first in my life to give me a nickname. I arrived named Carol and now I am Kay.

“But I have to go home and finish school.” I explain once again, holding my cold fingers between my knees for warmth, my shoulders hunched up close to my ears. Will anyone at home believe that Africa is actually chilly at times? Without a fireplace, there is no way to heat this house, and it’s downright cold on a cement floor at 8,000 feet during the rainy season. I’m wearing my blue mohair cardigan against the damp chill. Morning’s first rain has yet to begin, but thick, dark clouds already have blacked out the sun and blocked its welcome warmth.

“My dear Kay, you have become Ethiopian. You will not be happy back home.”

“Perhaps.”

“I’m sorry, I should let you go,” he says. “But I don’t want you to.” He looks away.

“You don’t need to be sorry. I’m sorry to leave.” We have known each other for two years, and now only days remain for us; I deeply regret leaving.

“Will you come back? I know you can’t say right now. But do you think about coming back? Will you try?” He looks at me, waiting for my answer.

“Of course I think about it. All the time.”

“I’m sorry for so many things. That I can’t ask you to stay. That I can’t offer you a future. Not until my family problems are settled. Soon, I hope. Soon.”

“I know that. It’s okay.”

“But there’s something else.” He pauses, waiting. “There’s something I don’t understand.” His left forearm rests comfortably across his thigh, and I’m admiring the beauty of the back of his left hand, the way his smooth brown skin contrasts with the stark white cuff of his fresh business shirt. He raises his right hand, cups my chin and gently lifts my face to his. It’s only when we’re this close that I smell the spicy, evocative fragrance of his aftershave.

“Yes?” I ask. I’m still in love with the sight of his brown eyes, especially those alluring quarter moons above the lower lids, yet today they make me almost sick with loss. His fingers are cold on my chin, just as cold as mine.

“I’ve always hoped that you would leave me with our baby.”

“What?” I pull away.

“I don’t understand why we haven’t started a baby. I always think it will happen, but it never does.”

“Of course not. I don’t want a baby.”

“You don’t want a baby?”

“Well, someday. But not now.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You don’t? Oh wait a minute.” Of course. He returned from college in the U.S. before birth control pills were in common use. Our times together were intermittent - school holidays, Easter week, the rainy season - but each time he thought I possibly might have become pregnant? “Do you mean you don’t understand why I haven’t gotten pregnant?”

He nods. How odd, we never discussed this. No, not so odd - it was my business, not his. How could he possibly have thought - oh well, some things that happen here are unknowable. And here’s another one.

“Guy, I’m on the pill.”

“The what?”

My usual frank tone is replaced with a new gentleness. “I take the pill, the birth control pill. I’m not ready to have children, and -”

“I didn’t know,” he says, interrupting me, his kind, calm voice that is richer, deeper. He takes off his glasses and wipes at his eyes with a neatly ironed and folded white handkerchief and again I see the beautiful contrast, his reddish-brown color against crisp white.

“Guy, I’m so sorry. I just assumed you knew — knew I did not want to be pregnant.”

“No. You should have told me. I would have asked you to stop.”

“What? Why?”

“For a baby. We could do that now, yes? Would it hurt you to stay that much longer? You could leave me with a baby. Please, my darling Kay. It’s all I ask of you.”

I don’t know what to say.

“We would have a beautiful child,” he continues, speaking slowly in a logical, even tone of voice. “And then I would always have something of you. It’s all I want. Please.”

“But what about me?”

“You may do as you wish.”

“But I wouldn’t be able to leave a baby here.”

“Good. Fine. Then stay.”

“But I have to finish my degree.”

“Then do that. And come back. Or not. It would be up to you.”

“This is impossible, Guy.”

“Why is it impossible? I have two aunties who would love and care for our child.”

Ah yes, I know of these women, and they know of me, but for some reason, Guy’s mysterious “family problems” prevent our acquaintance. Yet the only problem I know about is his family’s agreement, made when he was a child, that he someday ought to marry one of Emperor Haile Selassie’s daughters. That’s unlikely to happen, however, since neither of them want to do this. So what would everyone say if he suddenly produced our offspring into the mysterious “family problems?” I can’t imagine, though I know such a thing would not be forbidden here, not the way it would be in my culture.

“I guess it’s impossible for me to do that,” I say. “Just impossible for me.”

For all the talk of my friends in Addis Ababa — Guy’s friends, actually - that I have become an Ethiopian, I know in this moment I’ve hit my limit. Yes, this culture would embrace our beautiful biracial child, but for the first time my culture succeeds in pulling me back to itself.

“Guy, please listen. I don’t want to have a child until I want one, and I won’t want one until I’m married. And I can’t even think about being married until I go home and finish college.”

“Then you’ll come back in a year or two? I’ll fix all my family problems in the meantime. Yes, then we’ll be married, and we’ll have our baby.”

“You’re being very persuasive, you know. Why now? Why didn’t we talk about this before now?”

“Because I kept waiting for us to start making our baby.”

We fall silent. I’m trembling; is it the chill? I imagine a letter: Dear family, Sorry, but I won’t be coming home right away because I decided to marry that nice Ethiopian man I told you about. Oh, and I’m pregnant. So I guess you were right, Mother. I never will complete college.

No! Unthinkable.

I’m aware of Guy again, and he’s sitting up straight and tall. His brown, thin-soled Italian leather shoes, highly polished, are placed firmly on the floor. With long, elegant fingers folded together, his clasped hands rest between his knees. Eyes closed, as if asleep, his glasses folded on the arm of the couch, I watch him for a long time, trying to figure out what he’s doing, why he seems so intent and still, wondering how he can be so still when I’m shivering.

The electric bulb overhead blinks off and back on once, just as lightning cracks below the black clouds. A thunderous roar comes with the rain’s sudden deluge, and it’s the usual deafening sound of falling nails banging onto the tin roof. But nothing disturbs his reverie.

“What are you doing?” I finally ask, in a voice louder than I’d like, trying to speak over the din.

He startles, as if I’ve awakened him.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” I say, leaning toward him to lay my hand gently atop the middle of his chest, under his tie. I feel his warmth against my frigid palm. Even the small white buttons are warmed up. “I didn’t mean to give you such a fright. I just wondered - I didn’t know what you were doing.”

“I was praying.” He looks to me, and I feel sorry. So sorry. For both of us. “That’s all,” he says. “Just praying.”

This is too hard. We want to cry. And I want to imagine a future, one that somehow includes this loving, gentle man whom I love and respect with all my heart.

But these would be our last times together. Now only Guy’s letters remain as testament, mere words scribbled in blue pen. I still ache as I read again his fast loopy scrawl, sometimes on a folded blue aerogramme, other times on onion skin stationary mailed in envelopes with the return address of the Ethiopian Tourist Organization printed in both English and the lovely, exotic Amharic script.

My darling Kay — I have many times asked you in a not serious way to marry me, with the purpose of you to start asking whether I am serious or not, in order to help me explain all the problems. You never did, and you never took it seriously. I decided that your interests were more across the ocean. My dearest of all human beings, now at this stage I have to solve so many problems that you do not know. God knows whether I can solve it within a year. Love love love and a million kisses, Guy

Faded memories back too bright. Old mysteries open with something to reveal. How could I have known he wanted to tell me the family problems? That he wanted me to ask? Sensing his reticence and respecting his privacy, I never did. I never took the hint. I’m still no good at hints. So I went home to California. I completed my college degree. Guy and I continued corresponding for two years, until I married the beloved man who is the father of our two daughters. We are married to this day. We are Nora’s grandparents. And all these years later, I remember a past as I imagine a future.

Sweetest Kay — You are gone, you have left me, it is only your memory that is haunting me. I sometimes wonder whether you have ever been in Ethiopia. I know two years were long, but when I try to remember those two long years they are just like thin air. I miss you my love, I long to see you. I do not know, perhaps we will or will not meet again, but on my part, as I have repeatedly told you, I will try my best to see you even if you get married and have ten thousand children. I miss you and will always miss you. Guy

Now drifting, daydreaming in today’s dry, hot summer, I regret that Guy has not found me. But I will always wait. His goodbye letter, written two months after my marriage, was brutal - for me, for him.

I am left all alone. No one can either see me or find me. I’m kind of a monk. No more Carol. All of us missed you very much. You know how much we loved and respected you. You were our exception among the ferengis. You were the noblest of all women. We loved you, adored you and admired you. Now we are separated, yet we will never stop remembering you. Arivaderci. Buona fortuna to you and your husband. Please write me again. With very great love and respect. Guy.

I never wrote him again. And I’ve never stopped feeling we still deserve more than that goodbye. So I honor what’s past by remembering, even while today I also imagine a future. I gently sway, rocking and knowing; newborn Nora is a future. Baby purring. Gramma knowing. Choices rejected, choices accepted. Knowing Nora, knowing love.

---

Carol Beddo served in the Peace Corps, Ethiopia, 1964-66, and traveled throughout Ethiopia and East Africa. A lifelong adventurer, she retired from a challenging career in politics and public policy and at last is writing about her years in Africa, playing her violin, and learning to speak Spanish. She and her husband of forty years are parents of two adult daughters and grandparents of two youngsters.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 9:06 pm and is filed under Great Stories, Love Story, Third Annual Solas Awards Winners. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.