Houston: The Best Place to Be

Fly in on Thursday afternoon, Trip-the-dog happy to get out of kennel, makes lake of pee on baggage claim floor.  David stays with Trip while I race to restroom seeking paper towels.  One of those dispensers—wave hand, single towel buzzes out, wave hand, towel buzzes.  Need at least twenty.  Wave, buzz, wave, buzz, wave buzz . . .

Arrive at hotel around two o’clock.  Staying at Hilton on Post Oak, which is hosting the Miss Texas Pageant.  Beautiful women everywhere.  Cluster in lobby, faces perfectly made up, hair in big curlers.  Discuss clothes they’re going to wear and why.  Worry over interview questions.  Compare body parts, disingenuous moaning—boobs too firm, butts too small, legs too long.  Walk on shoes with heels like needles.  Sashes cross from shoulder to hip, identify contestants by counties.  Good luck, Texas beauties. 

Friday morning at the rental car counter.  Jolly man, shaved head, returns David’s license saying, “Expired.  Can’t rent to you.”  The look on David’s face.  Spend our first afternoon back in Texas at the DPS.  David is number 293.  Chuckle all day, thinking about it.  Who doesn’t know when license expires?  David, apparently.

Saturday, car shopping.  Find perfect sedan for me—sleek, clean, loaded, a Mercedes C250.  But jet lagged and feeling fuzzy, unable to follow fast talk of sales guy—demonstration, incentives, promises.  “No,” I say.  “I can’t commit.  My head isn’t here.”  The car goes to someone else and we’re sad.  Opportunity missed, but timing wrong.  Rule:  don’t buy the first car you look at. 

Houston booming.  Torn up for years, I-10 now complete; twelve lanes across in places, all moving fast, zoom-zoom.  Also, Fifty-nine so smooth driving’s like flying.  In three years, population up by a hundred thousand.  Everybody with money to spend.  Restaurants packed, malls overflowing, houses and offices being built.  Two ac repair vans on every block.  So many customers at Toyota dealership, no salesmen available.  Commerce.  Prosperity. 

By Monday Texas beauties gone.  Hotel quiet.  Tuesday, morning after Labor Day, back to work.  Elevators up-and-down with men and women in suits.  Pull wheeled briefcases, keep heads down, somber in hallways.  After eight-thirty, hotel deserted.  I am Eloise, with the run of the whole place. 

Preparing to move back into townhouse, rented out for three years.  Updating and repair needed.  Will take a week.  My job—oversee painting, gardening; schedule vent cleaning, carpet-laying, air conditioner servicing.  Furniture in storage.  It comes in when workers go. 

Computer virus invades, takes over.  Blasted.  No access to internet.  Virus spreads, attacks Spider Solitaire, Scrabble.  Oh no!  Poor vulnerable Dell.  Lobotomize a fourth time?   Maybe just put it down.  At the mall, an Apple invites me to byte. 

Painting and patching.  It'll look better soon.

Eduardo, our contractor.  His company is called Fast Paint, but he does more than paint.  Works hard and does a good job.  Honest and polite crew.  The wine on the counter is mine.  

Sam, coming home from Beijing to fulfill your obligation?

My new car.  Worrisome that my phone and my car talk to each other.  

Hard-bodied

I fitness-march through the gates of the Botanic Gardens.  It’s early in the day, not crowded yet.  Usually David walks with me, but his back is giving him fits, so this morning I stride alone, which is fine with me because tomorrow the movers are coming to pack up our possessions, and the next day we’ll fly back to Houston, leaving this beautiful and vibrant city, Singapore, which I have loved; and with this change looming, I need time inside my head. 

I hear flapping footsteps behind me and feel a whoosh as a hard-bodied woman races past.  A cloud of Chanel wafts in her wake.   Mademoiselle.  I know this because it’s the scent I wear, though I tend not to waste a spritz before I go sweat-walking in the park. 

The woman has a small child at home, a three-year-old girl, who right now is having her breakfast mess cleared away by the helper, who plays with the child and talks to her and wheels her to and from play school.  The live-in nanny is from the Philippines, a jolly dutiful woman, though uneducated; and this morning, right before pounding toward the Gardens, the runner heard her daughter say words using the idiom and inflection of the Filipina, who learned to speak English in one of her country’s rural schools; and she misuses pronouns and doesn’t understand tenses. 

The hard-body has had a disturbing realization.  She is going to have to become more active in the raising of her child, who is picking up questionable habits and lackadaisical attitudes and dietary preferences and improper word-pairings from a foreigner with dark hair.  This knowledge makes the mother so sad and frustrated that she is near tears as she brushes between a picture-taking tourist and the sprawl of newly blossomed bunga (boon-gah) lilies.  She has so little time for herself, and now she will have even less. 

Her husband travels for his work.  KL, Jakarta, Beijing, Chengdu, Taipei.  He’s all over the damn place.  He’s even been sent by his company to advise people in Pakistan, a dangerous country where he might be killed!  And does he think about her and their daughter, how devastated they will be if he’s yanked violently from their lives?  No, he does not!  And she’s here, in this faraway city, taking care of absolutely everything without his encouragement or advice.  When he’s home she loses her temper over his absences.  She rages and accuses, shrieks even.  Why is she here if he is not?  She might as well have stayed in London. 

Three mornings a week she runs here in the Botanic Gardens; three mornings she plays tennis with the women at the club; and on Wednesdays she golfs, which takes up the major portion of the day.  At least twice weekly tennis extends into lunch, which means a glass of white wine, and then another.  The cost is sixty dollars and she’s exhausted when she gets home.  But these lunches are her pleasant time, when her friends listen as she bemoans the unsynchronized lights at the crosswalks and the dark-eyed construction workers who stare as they take their breaks on the curb across the street from her building.  If she doesn’t spend time with the other ex-pat wives, what will she do?  Who will she see?  What will be her outlet?  She will become a woman who speaks to strangers in the shops.  She will become a frump who cooks and makes quilts and is too apathetic to accessorize. 

Fifty yards ahead of me now, her firm butt barely jiggles as she bounds forth.  She takes the curve and is gone from my line of vision.  Good-bye thirty-something, hard-bodied, self-absorbed, and unreasonable. 

Look.  A huge monitor lizard crossing the path right in front of me.  Cool.  

The woman running in the park.

This man exercises and prays by the lake most mornings.

I almost stepped on this big guy.  Usually I only spot a monitor once a month or so, but on this walk I saw two.  

A view of the lake

Last Hurrah

An international move on the horizon.  Priorities compete and time is short.   Some would hunker down and get after it. 

David and I decide to take a little holiday.  We return to Patong Beach, on Phuket, a seedy area where beefy men drink too much, wear muscle shirts, and flirt with the massage girls.  Glamorous lady-boys parade up and down the humid streets in fancy clothes, enticing people to come to their show.  Lumpish vendors push flowers and crappy toys at passing faces, saying “Buy, buy, buy.”  A bar has a show where women shoot ping-pong balls out their vaginas.  Outside the ping-pong girl bar, a middle-easterner attempts to talk his four friends into entering.  Crudely, he mimes the act.  They all laugh and rush toward the door.  They can’t wait to see.  Now the question arises—why would David and I choose to vacation in this vulgar setting?  (A better question would be—and I don’t have an answer—why would parents bring their children here?  Families are all over the place.  Children swarm.)  We’re here because the food is good, the alcohol is cheap, exceptional spa treatments are priced reasonably, the people are considerate and helpful, the beach is lovely, and there’s something interesting going on everywhere you look. 

In the morning, a nine o’clock tee time for David.  He chases a ball around a course and curses while I drive the cart and play the role of supporting spouse.  I laugh as, again and again, his ball splashes into the water.  I wonder how anyone can take this game seriously.  But people do. 

Today we form a three-ball with Derrick, from Australia, and Mark, from South Africa, two congenial men whose play is similar to David’s—in other words, inconsistent and uncontrolled, but marked by the occasional brilliant shot.  After the round the four of us meet in the club bar for a beer.  I ask Mark what he does for a living and he tells me that he buys restaurants in financial difficulties, turns them around, and sells them.  I question the profitability of the enterprise, but he claims that it makes money and he enjoys the work.  Derrick sells energy drinks.  He says it’s a competitive and stressful business, which I find surprising. 

Another thing that takes me by surprise is the attitudes of both men toward the US.  I admit to suffering paranoia on the public relations front as far as being American goes.  Out in the world, a single American is often taken to represent all of America.  So I keep my head down in the hope that people won’t notice I’m American and start ranting at me about what we’re doing wrong.  This assumption is not unfounded.  I’ve had servers walk away from me when they hear my accent.  During my years as an American abroad, I’ve been accused of being insular and invasive, arrogant and inert.  I’ve been held accountable for international monetary crises, broken treaties, slow disaster relief, supporting corrupt governments, and toppling stable ones. 

But Derrick and Mark say they’re waiting for America to act.  They seem to think we’re a nation of super heroes.  They expect Americans to go into the Ukraine and find out who shot down that Malaysian flight.  They expect the US to blow ISIS off the planet.  They expect the American scientists to conquer Ebola, the American diplomats to solve the Israeli/Palestinian issues, the American dollar to bolster the European and African economies, and the American State Department to make China play nice.  In short, they expect us to lead.  There’s been so much negativity aimed at America over the last several years that I honestly didn’t think anybody expected anything of us anymore, much less leadership. 

When we get back to the room and the internet, we’re sad to discover that Robin Williams has died. 

RIP, Troubled Man. 

David and the Lady-boys

The caddies, covered to protect themselves from the hot, hot sun.  

I lost track of how many balls went into the water on this hole that circled around the lake.  

David, Derrick, and Mark

Thai Cooking School

I know Georgia will like the Thai cooking class.  She’s a gifted cook, intuitive about flavor combinations, enthusiastic about putting food before family and friends.  She’s also able to taste a dish and identify the separate ingredients, which is practically a superpower.  Personally, I’m an uninspired cook.  I’ve got a few recipes I pull out when something special is required, but for the most part, dinner’s fifteen minutes from stove to table; and in another fifteen minutes it’s gone. 

A young man meets Resi, Georgia, and me in front of our hotel on Khaosan Road.  His name is Tuk (rhymes with book).  He leads us across the street, around the corner, and into the cooking school, where he introduces us to our classmates, who are seated around a table, waiting to get started.  Much is made of where everyone is from:  Martin is Hungarian; Evie, his girlfriend, is German and, as it turns out, is suffering a foul reaction to something she’s eaten and must race to the restroom every five minutes.  Poor Girl.  Two from Switzerland; he’s named Fabio, and she’s named Fabien.  Georgia asks if they’re twins and they laugh and share a look.  Apparently not.  An Israeli couple and their daughter arrive last. Their names are given—foreign-sounding, difficult to pronounce, pointless to remember. 

Tuk, it turns out, is the chef who will be explaining the foods and guiding us through the recipes.  He pays special tribute to his assistants, two quiet women who smile and duck their heads.  I’m relieved that he’s considerate toward them.  In the last cooking demonstration I attended, the chef berated her assistant until she made him cry.  I’ve never seen anyone so brazenly, proudly sadistic.  So Tuk’s kindness is a relief. 

We’re assigned partners. Resi and I are together.  Georgia is paired with the Israeli woman who speaks no English, which makes her no use at all.  She can’t read the recipes, she doesn’t understand the instructions, she can’t communicate with her fellow chef-in-training.  Georgia’s happy to do it all.  She adds and stirs, asks Tuk questions, and hands the woman her share of the food at the completion of each dish.  Resi and I, both of us pragmatic cooks, hum happily along, taking turns adding ingredients and stirring.  The ingredients aren’t things that are found in either of our pantries—kaffir lime leaves, galangal, lemon grass, coconut milk, roasted rice powder. 

Here’s a list of what we make and eat:  pumpkin hummus, chili paste (this is a spicy staple used in many dishes), tom yam soup, pad Thai, fried vegetables with ginger and cashew nuts, green papaya salad, peanut sauce, spring rolls, Massaman curry, mango with sticky rice. 

In addition to doing all the work at her wok, Georgia runs around with her camera.  She gets pictures of Resi and me, our teacher and his assistants, the two couples, and the food.  She takes a picture of the Israeli daughter and offers to send it to the girl’s father if he wants to give her his email address, to which he replies, I’m assuming more loudly than he intended, that he prefers never to give out that information, an odd and almost belligerent reaction that draws notice from the whole group, making things weird for several minutes. 

This is a lot of food.  Too much.  We’ve consumed to the point of pain.  And there’s still the desert to get through.  Realizing that we’re all stuffed, Tuk’s solution is for us to get up and dance to make room for more.  Forming us into a circle around the room, he shows us the hand and arm motions to a Thai folk dance, then gets us moving around and clapping.  Surprisingly, five minutes of this renders us more comfortable, able to stuff in a few more bites.  I’m fond of neither rice nor mango.  While others proclaim it the best concoction ever, I take my polite two bites, and move it to the side. 

At the end of our cooking day Georgia’s still enthusiastic.  She’s got plans for the new recipes.  She buys the shredders and slicers that’re available for purchase at the front counter.  She’ll cook for her friends back in Utah.  When I ask Resi if she’s ever going to actually go to the trouble to follow the involved recipes and set a Thai meal in front of her family, she tells me that she’ll probably use some of the spices and implement some of the methods she’s learned—which I take to mean probably not.  Will David ever get to taste pad Thai in his own home prepared for him by his wife?  Wouldn’t hold my breath.  

Georgia made friends with Martin and Fabio.

Tuk with the Israeli family

Resi was good at stirring!

The whole class--our graduation picture!