What We Are Capable Of

Though part of Em desires solitude, she is glad that Sarah is home. Even unhappy, Sarah has energy enough to fill the rooms. She says little except that the past month has been the worst of her entire life. For the first few days, she goes to bed early and gets up late. She seems battered, slugged. This shows in her face, in the movement of her hands, in her walk, in her forced smile. Every morning after breakfast, she laces her boots, heads out the door, follows the path through the field, and stomps over the dunes. Each time she goes out, she leaves something of herself behind. Em, accustomed to being alone, is aware of the extra presence in every shadow of the house. Sometimes Sarah does not return by the time Em leaves for the Centre, at noon. Em works four afternoons a week and is grateful that she’s been able to switch from her former morning schedule. She has five new Vietnamese families in her care and at times she admits to feeling hopeless about the extremes of their neediness. But she has learned to set hopelessness aside. It is her job to provide the families with language.

I hav pasport. This issa potato. My babees namis Hang. Here is good country. This is what they tell her as they write lists to show off their English: boat, wood, matchis, soljer, rats. At one of the camps, during the six-year journey that brought them here, they slept in hammocks high off the ground so rats would not crawl over them in the night. They had been robbed by pirates. Two of the women were raped. They speak with buried expression. On the surface, the information appears matter-of-fact. They want their new country; they want everything about it. They want to know about Em, too. In his note-book one young man drew a picture of her in long dress and high-heeled shoes, though she wears neither. Beneath the picture he wrote: Teecher pritty. Mikel say she has round eyes.

Only once has Em bumped into Michael. The face-to-face encounter in the hall caught them both off guard. He could not, she remembers – though he would never admit this – he could not look her in the eye. What she saw in his face was discomfort, evasion. His classes were over and Em’s were about to begin. But before she could enter the room where the families waited – mothers, children, uncles, aunties, babies; they brought their babies, who else would look after them? – she went to her office and closed the door and stood by her desk, shaking. Later, at the end of the two-hour session, Trinh, the old auntie of two young women in the group, reached up to pat her shoulder and said, “Teacher sad.” Trinh tightened a cardigan about her shoulders and bent to pick up one of the babies who was playing on the floor. She tucked the baby to her hip and patted Em again, and made her way slowly out the door.

Taut, says Em, thinking of this. Kindness, parting, grief. Old Auntie Trinh had experienced countless partings before being forced to start a new life. “Hope,” says Em aloud. This is one abstraction she will not have to teach.

“We had a great time together,” says Sarah. “He was funny. He had a way of joking about himself that made me love him like crazy. I can’t figure out how things went wrong. What did I do? He didn’t have the guts to look me in the eye and say, This isn’t working. The worst part – are you ready for this? – is that I feel unworthy.” She sinks to the rug in the living room and digs her hand into the bowl of popcorn she’s carried in from the kitchen. “Why should I be the one to feel unworthy?”

Why, indeed? thinks Em, who’s so familiar with the feeling she might have invented it. But she’s supposed to know better. She’s supposed to know more.

“Get angry,” she says to Sarah. “Angry is better than unworthy.” As soon as she says this, her memory releases an image so gentle she doesn’t know what to do with it: Michael, standing in the middle of her classroom, wags a five-dollar bill and grins as he invites her for coffee. And then, without warning, he takes her hand in his and raises it to his lips as if her fingers are at the end of the most delicate limb on Earth. Her body stills as his lips brush her skin.

It’s hopeless, they say to each other. It’s complicated. Michael is married to a woman named Frieda whom Em has never met but whom she knows to be German. Michael tells her he has been with Frieda for thirteen years.

One Friday evening, Em is shopping in the pharmacy, in town. She looks out the window and sees the two of them across the street; they are speaking with a man she does not know. Frieda has beautifully shaped short blond hair and looks attractive and theatrical at Michael’s side. She is the same height as Michael and, at one point in the conversation, she stretches an arm towards him in an angular way and encircles his neck. Her elbow points out sharply. It’s easy to see that she doesn’t think about this; she’s accustomed to assuming the position. But he must be, too, because he moves neither away nor towards her. He keeps talking as if he hasn’t noticed the choking stance, the bony armour placed around him.

The next day, a Saturday morning, Michael phones her at home. Em answers and for a few minutes they discuss their work. Then his voice says, “Did you receive my message?” “Which one?” She hears a woman talking to someone in the background. She hardly dares to breathe.