True Places(26)

After her parents left, Suzanne confronted the pile of unfolded clothes in the laundry. The kids were supposed to do their own laundry but usually only got as far as starting the washing machine. If they needed something, they just picked through the pile that Suzanne had run through the dryer. Suzanne didn’t care about a pile of clean clothes behind a closed door, but Whit couldn’t tolerate disorder. Fairness would dictate that he should therefore enforce the laundry rules, but he wasn’t around to do it and not inclined to be the heavy. Suzanne had fifteen minutes, and there were worse jobs.

Partway through the pile, she came upon a T-shirt Reid had given Whit several years ago, picturing a pair of hiking boots and the words NOT ALL WHO WANDER ARE LOST. Whit had a fatal sense of direction; without GPS, he could get lost on the way home from the grocery store. When the children chided him for it, he would reply with the line from Tolkien. Suzanne smiled wistfully, remembering the laughter her son and husband had shared over the gift of the shirt. Reid was eleven at the time, gently testing out his hypotheses about what was good and bad about his expanding world, still trusting the frame of reference created by his parents. His world was theirs, so he and his father could laugh over each other’s foibles. Nothing was threatened. Now any topic at all, however mundane, had the power to push them further apart.

She folded the shirt and added it to the growing stack. Her thoughts turned to Iris, alone in the forest for so long, neither wandering nor lost. Such freedom was foreign to Suzanne, and she wondered if her attachment to the girl was born of fascination with Iris’s independence. Growing up, Suzanne had been at the mercy of the tangled misery of her parents’ marriage; she’d had no agency and little love or attention as compensation. College was an escape route, and like a perennially captive animal, Suzanne had needed those years to begin to understand the mechanics of psychological freedom. Finally, believing in love at last, she’d allowed her heart to wander, and it was then that Suzanne had become truly lost.





CHAPTER 12

June 1995

The night noises of Dar es Salaam were versions of those of other cities—the car horns higher by a fifth, voices rising and falling in odd cadences, the air spiced with the smell of salt and fish, mixing with the acrid scent of fuel. Sheets thin as gauze. His lips, his skin, his breath, his muscles were versions of those of other men. Here is another man who wants my body, Suzanne thought, as she chose to give it to him. After, he dropped off to sleep while she listened to the city settling down, but not stilled, like a sick child succumbing to exhaustion and yet remaining awake.

The man was Dmitri Gregory, a postdoctoral student under Professor Reiner, who had been Suzanne’s senior thesis adviser in botany. Suzanne had harbored a crush on Dmitri since starting work in the lab two years earlier. He was friendly enough but showed no indication of returning her interest until they found themselves traveling together here in Tanzania. Sitting next to him on the plane for fourteen hours, his elbow grazing hers on the armrest, had been exquisite torture. Dmitri had claimed the hotel looked too shady for her to stay in her own room. She didn’t think he felt anything for her, but she wasn’t about to turn down an invitation to share a room and a bed, as there was only one.

Suzanne had never been in love. She first understood what love was, and become aware of its tenuous relationship to sex, through the teachings of Tinsley, who shared the infidelities of her husband (“your father”) with Suzanne as if Suzanne were not a child of thirteen, or fifteen or seventeen, but a close adult friend or marital therapist. Suzanne’s father, Anson, did little to balance his growing daughter’s views of men. Disappointed that Suzanne was born female, he neglected to spend time with her, and it never would have occurred to him to curtail his affairs because they might give his daughter the wrong impression of men. That chain of reasoning was too long for Anson, who believed people were born as they were and acted within their natures. If he was a man who enjoyed variety in women, that was that, and what Suzanne would be attracted to or tolerate in men had nothing to do with him. He asserted she had turned out just fine and felt thereby vindicated.

Suzanne’s take, unchanged since her adolescence, was somewhat different. Men were unreliable, self-serving shits. That didn’t mean she hadn’t had lovers, or even a boyfriend or two, starting in her late teens, but her heart wasn’t on the line—it wasn’t anywhere anyone could damage it. Once she left home, she kept men away from her apartment and insisted on leaving theirs before morning. If a man wanted to get close, she’d make excuses to slow things down, or just break it off. Her friends shook their heads and said she acted just like all the douchebags they’d been jilted by. She shrugged and replied that she hadn’t found the right guy yet and wasn’t going to waste her time pretending. Only her very best friend, Mia, knew the real story.

A police siren wailed, becoming louder as it neared. Suzanne glanced at Dmitri. He did not stir. She couldn’t put her finger on what was different about him. Maybe nothing. Maybe at twenty-one she had finally stopped seeing every man as a version of her father. Maybe it was being so far from home, in a land so strange the rules and ideologies she had come to accept as truth were no longer applicable. He was a wonderful lover, especially considering her body was foreign territory. In retrospect, Suzanne would speculate that might have been the influence of Africa, too. It was a naked, sensual place.

In the morning, they searched out two herbalists recommended by an ethnobotanist Suzanne had contacted. Suzanne was looking for the pink root of Hydnora abyssinica, the focus of her research. Professor Reiner had brought her to Tanzania to assist with his work—the study of the effect of cattle grazing on plant diversity in the Ngorongoro Crater—but she had secured a small grant to explore the medicinal uses of the oddball plant Hydnora, whose roots were supposedly used to treat intestinal disorders and skin infections. If Suzanne could find it in the market, she might learn more about it from the herbalist. In the bush, she planned to search for the plant itself, a parasite with rhizomes belowground and no green parts at all. After a strong rain, a bizarre—some would say hideous—flower might erupt from the soil, thick walled and scaled on the outside. As it ripened, fleshy, muscled sections peeled back, revealing a pale pink interior like the mouth of a hippo. The flower was male to start with, giving off a putrid stench that attracted dung beetles. After a beetle crawled inside and became encased in a special chamber, the flower changed its sex to female and released the pollen-laden beetle to fertilize the plant on its way out. Suzanne readily admitted she was fascinated by Hydnora’s unique biology, but that didn’t erase the argument for examining its potential medicinal uses.