middle-class couple, and I suppose this is how we meant to present ourselves for posterity: smiling and poised. After our kiss at the end of the ceremony, Katie hugged me tight, and when she pulled away there was a pale stain across the front of my suit jacket.
3.
By a coincidence of missed buses and late flights Katie and I spent the evening of September 11, 2001, watching television in Dhaka. A friend called from another room in the hostel to say the Pentagon and World Trade Centers were on fire. For the next twenty hours we only watched television. We could not leave the capital until we received the all-clear from the Peace Corps office, which was busy leaving phone messages for volunteers in all of the other cities, then calling our families back home to say we were safe. We waited to hear that we were all accounted for, the embassy was secure, and we might soon return to the place where we had worked and lived for two years. We spoke to each other in reassuring tones. We waited for direction.
Everything , the commentators on the television keep explaining, will now be very different.
In our small room no one seemed exactly certain how to measure either the quality or the scope of the impending change. When we could not keep watching television, we watched movies. The cable movie channels did not interrupt their programming, so we caught the end of a comedy, then a war epic, then a musical. We did not want to sleep. How could we? Our country was in immediate peril. HBO was showing a Robert De Niro marathon. When we could not stay inside our room any longer, we tried to decide together whether it was safe to leave the hostel. Were terrorists waiting in the lobby to kill us? If not, could we buy chicken schwarma at this hour? Dhaka seemed suddenly hostile to our presence. As we walked through the neighborhood, life was distinctly unaware of us: the price of rice unchanged, televisions turned to cricket matches.
A few weeks later, the night before we were evacuated from Bangladesh, Katie and I packed what we could fit into our backpacks and left our sites on the last night buses. Whoever came to find us that next morning arrived at half-abandoned rooms strewn with papers and stacked with clothes, photographs, cassette tapes, and books. We hoped it seemed, for a while at least, only that we had forgotten to take out our trash and clean our kitchens.
We left Bangladesh for Bangkok. We flew from South Asia to Korea, took a discount tour of China, and finally landed at my parents’ home for the holiday. After Thanksgiving we flew one last time, to Chicago, where we both found work. I was a middle school social studies teacher. Katie managed the office of a green-development nonprofit. I slept most nights at Katie’s studio sublet in Lincoln Park, until after a while I had my own key, laundry pile, and grocery list. Evenings, we ran along the lakefront to one of the beaches and back. We came home, showered, made dinner, and played chess, cribbage, and rummy.
Wasn’t this our new, ordinary, and immodest life? Everything in America seemed luxuriously indulgent. We took buses and trains that ran on time and arrived a few blocks from heated offices. My Chicago public school classroom had its own telephone line and internet connection, a mobile computer lab in the back of the room, and several five-pound bags of candy in a locked storage cabinet. Sometimes, in the middle of the day, I sent Katie an instant message on the computer, and she wrote instantly back.
I like my job!
I like my job, too!
For the first time in either of our lives, we saved money. We opened checking accounts and savings accounts. We subscribed to magazines and theater seasons, took dance lessons, and traveledweekends to visit our families. Tuesdays and Saturdays the diner across the street served four pancakes, a fried egg, and three sausage links, with pie and coffee, for six dollars. Movie rentals were two-for-one four nights a week.
Those
3.
By a coincidence of missed buses and late flights Katie and I spent the evening of September 11, 2001, watching television in Dhaka. A friend called from another room in the hostel to say the Pentagon and World Trade Centers were on fire. For the next twenty hours we only watched television. We could not leave the capital until we received the all-clear from the Peace Corps office, which was busy leaving phone messages for volunteers in all of the other cities, then calling our families back home to say we were safe. We waited to hear that we were all accounted for, the embassy was secure, and we might soon return to the place where we had worked and lived for two years. We spoke to each other in reassuring tones. We waited for direction.
Everything , the commentators on the television keep explaining, will now be very different.
In our small room no one seemed exactly certain how to measure either the quality or the scope of the impending change. When we could not keep watching television, we watched movies. The cable movie channels did not interrupt their programming, so we caught the end of a comedy, then a war epic, then a musical. We did not want to sleep. How could we? Our country was in immediate peril. HBO was showing a Robert De Niro marathon. When we could not stay inside our room any longer, we tried to decide together whether it was safe to leave the hostel. Were terrorists waiting in the lobby to kill us? If not, could we buy chicken schwarma at this hour? Dhaka seemed suddenly hostile to our presence. As we walked through the neighborhood, life was distinctly unaware of us: the price of rice unchanged, televisions turned to cricket matches.
A few weeks later, the night before we were evacuated from Bangladesh, Katie and I packed what we could fit into our backpacks and left our sites on the last night buses. Whoever came to find us that next morning arrived at half-abandoned rooms strewn with papers and stacked with clothes, photographs, cassette tapes, and books. We hoped it seemed, for a while at least, only that we had forgotten to take out our trash and clean our kitchens.
We left Bangladesh for Bangkok. We flew from South Asia to Korea, took a discount tour of China, and finally landed at my parents’ home for the holiday. After Thanksgiving we flew one last time, to Chicago, where we both found work. I was a middle school social studies teacher. Katie managed the office of a green-development nonprofit. I slept most nights at Katie’s studio sublet in Lincoln Park, until after a while I had my own key, laundry pile, and grocery list. Evenings, we ran along the lakefront to one of the beaches and back. We came home, showered, made dinner, and played chess, cribbage, and rummy.
Wasn’t this our new, ordinary, and immodest life? Everything in America seemed luxuriously indulgent. We took buses and trains that ran on time and arrived a few blocks from heated offices. My Chicago public school classroom had its own telephone line and internet connection, a mobile computer lab in the back of the room, and several five-pound bags of candy in a locked storage cabinet. Sometimes, in the middle of the day, I sent Katie an instant message on the computer, and she wrote instantly back.
I like my job!
I like my job, too!
For the first time in either of our lives, we saved money. We opened checking accounts and savings accounts. We subscribed to magazines and theater seasons, took dance lessons, and traveledweekends to visit our families. Tuesdays and Saturdays the diner across the street served four pancakes, a fried egg, and three sausage links, with pie and coffee, for six dollars. Movie rentals were two-for-one four nights a week.
Those
Similar Books
