Margarita Wednesdays

  After a few more minutes I was circling the truck, gasping for air, tears streaming down my cheeks. Too scared to wander even twenty feet away, for fear I couldn’t find my way back again, I must have looked like an escapee from a mental hospital to the park ranger patrolling the area.

  “Is everything okay, ma’am?” he asked as he approached with caution.

  “It’s . . . I’m . . . my friends . . .” I sobbed, the snot dribbling down my lip.

  “Deb! What’s going on?” I turned to see Mike coming toward me, with a dripping chocolate ice-cream cone in each hand. “Are you all right?”

  And that’s when it began to hit home that I really wasn’t.

  BACK ON TOP OF BELL Mountain, my bizarro self continued to reign.

  On top of that, the passivity that had seeped into my veins somehow convinced me that allowing myself to become more than just friends with Mike would be okay.

  I was already sort of notorious for my questionable choices in men. Though they weren’t always to blame for the failures in our relationships, I had by now gone through a boatload of bad matches, including my polygamous wannabe Afghan warlord, to whom I was still married, who could now have me stoned to death for adultery, and who was the reason I couldn’t go back home to Kabul in the first place.

  But this one, at that time, seemed different. Mike and his mother, who lived next door, were like a big hug and a soothing Band-Aid rolled into one, particularly after what I had been through. It seemed to just be part of their way to take others under their wing—they liked to save and fix people. So I did my best to settle into my new role as the needy person in the group. Who knew? Maybe I just might find my happy ending after all.

  Despite my attempts at fitting in, things quickly started to go from bad to worse. I was still often too paralyzed to leave the house, and inside the house I wasn’t faring much better. The bare white walls seemed to be closing in on me. Of course, there was no way I was going to make new friends if I didn’t get my ass off that futon, so I had nobody to talk to. And for once in my life, I had nothing to say. The only thing I felt like talking about was Afghanistan, and the only people I really wanted to be with were people who had been through the same sort of things I had. I didn’t figure there were many of those in the Napa Valley.

  To complicate things even further, a mini media backlash to the success of Kabul Beauty School arrived at my door with an unexpected slap in the face. I felt I had been doing everything in my long-distance power to make sure my girls in Kabul would be okay. I was hardly prepared to deal with the accusations to the contrary that were being made, accusations that I now suspect might have been instigated by a certain someone over there who, how shall I say, did not have my best interest at heart. She went there only to make money, some said. She endangered those girls, claimed others. But regardless of how the stone throwing began, it hurt me deeply.

  I was an emotional basket case. Opening a can of beans, taking out the trash, or even getting dressed in the morning would suddenly make me burst into tears. I would be fine one minute, then depressed and lifeless the next.

  One morning, after a particularly rough night, I decided to swallow my pride and go for some advice. And for that, who better than a fellow hairdresser?

  Mike had introduced me to Deena shortly after I arrived in Napa. I figured she already knew a bit about my situation, so I summoned my courage and slowly made my way down Bell Mountain Road to her salon and plopped myself down for a shampoo, diving right into how depressed I had been. “It’s devastating, you know, not being able to go back. I miss my girls, and I worry about them.” She nodded as she wrapped my head in a towel and motioned toward the chair. I continued to blather on and on. In the mirror, I could see her eyes glazing over. “My whole life was there. Do you know how it feels to leave everything, and I mean everything, behind? My clothes, my photos . . . I feel like I even left my soul in Kabul.”

  Deena deftly twisted a hunk of my hair up into a clip. “I don’t get it, Debbie. Why can’t you go back to Cabo?”

  “Cabo? I said Kabul. As in Afghanistan?” So much for my hairdresser theory. Apparently this girl didn’t know Baja from Bagram. So, quickly and efficiently switching gears, I filled her in on my night in Yosemite. As I was paying, she wrote something down on the back of one of her cards and handed it to me. Steve Logan, Therapist.

  I called right away for an appointment, only to learn that Steve Logan, Therapist, was going to cost me $130 an hour.

  “An hour?” I was barely able to conceal my shock. “That’s over two dollars a minute!” I gasped, quickly doing the math in my head.

  “Uh-huh,” the uninterested receptionist replied. “That’s the fee with the discount for the uninsured. Cash only. You want it or not?” Clearly she was not trained to recognize a woman on the edge.

  “That’s a discount?” I must have been completely out of touch with prices in the States because to me, that sounded like a lot of money. Most families in Afghanistan don’t make that much in a month. For days I kept doing the math, calculating how many people I could have fed back in Kabul, how much rice I could have bought. The hefty price tag didn’t even come with a money-back guarantee if I didn’t manage to salvage my sanity.

  I called my friend Karen back in Michigan, who assured me that I wasn’t being self-indulgent and ordered me to stop being so stupid. “Debbie, you’re not in Afghanistan anymore.”

  To me that seemed to be my biggest problem: I wasn’t in Afghanistan anymore. I didn’t want to be in California. I just wanted to go home. And the only place that felt like home, the first place where I’d ever experienced the feeling that I was living where I was meant to live and doing exactly what I was meant to do, was lethally off-limits. Now I wasn’t sure where home was, and it was slowly killing me. I sat in the house for the next two days, counting the hours until my appointment.

  I EAGERLY PUSHED OPEN THE door to the office to a barrage of tinkling bells and twinkling lights. Dozens of wind chimes and tiny mirrors were suspended throughout the reception area. With no magazines in sight, I sat and concentrated on how I was going to tell my story without using up the entire hour. All I was looking for was a little direction and encouragement that, whatever this was, it was fixable. And I was determined to do it in one session. Who could afford to take more time than that?

  “You see,” I said once I was seated inside on a leather love seat, “my story is rather long, and a bit complicated. I spent the last five years in Afghanistan.”

  Steve Logan nodded his sandy-haired, balding head, clearly unimpressed, as if I’d just told him something he’d heard a million times before—like that I felt underappreciated by my spouse, or that I couldn’t sleep at night. That’s when I decided to amp it up and try to get my money’s worth. “I moved to Afghanistan after 9/11, started a beauty school, married an Afghan a few months after we’d met, learned he already had a wife and seven or eight kids living in Saudi Arabia. I wrote a book, opened up a coffee shop, went back to the States for a book tour, and somewhere in the middle of that my husband turned on me. I went back to Kabul, discovered there was a plot to kidnap my son, then fled the country in fear for my life. I’ve lost everything, miss my girls from Kabul, feel homeless in my new home, and am rapidly starting to lose my mind. Am I crazy? Is there a cure? You guys don’t use electric shock anymore, do you?”

  Dr. Steve was expressionless, not amused in the slightest by my attempt at levity. The guy should have been a poker player. He started to jot something down. I was sure there was total nut job scribbled somewhere in his notes.

  I waited for some sort of wisdom to come out of his mouth. Silence. Did he want me to say something else? Should I have added that my Afghan husband worked for a big warlord in Kabul? Perhaps the fifteen-minute abridged version hadn’t been the best approach. I wiped a rogue tear from my cheek. Then I remembered how much I was paying him. Why wasn’t he saying anything? Would I get credit for the nontalking time? Talk, damn it! The hou
r was going to be done before he stopped with his stupid notes. Stop writing and just fix me!!! I screamed in my head.

  Finally he looked up and said, without an ounce of inflection in his voice, “You have really gone through a lot.”

  I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. “I have, Doc, and frankly I’m not doing so well. Do you know what’s wrong with me? Can you fix it?”

  “Well”—he paused, drawing out his words—“it’s likely.”

  It was likely he knew what was wrong, or likely that he could fix me? I looked down at my watch. Ten minutes to go. He returned to his notes. Clearly he was not in a hurry. Then he looked up and asked, “Do you live in the area?”

  “Yes,” I replied. Really? Focus on me, man, not where I live. I need to know what to do. I’m on the edge of a cliff, buddy, and I need you to help me.

  He took out his calendar. “Let’s make an appointment for next week.”

  What, next week? You’re kidding me. He’s got to be kidding me. I barely made it through the past two days and you want me to wait until next week? Please, please, don’t do this to me!

  “In the meantime, I have some homework for you that should really help your healing.”

  I heaved a sigh of relief. Homework, thank God. Maybe some sort of writing or drawing exercises. I had heard about those. I rummaged in my purse for a pen and paper.

  “The area you live in has lots of glowworms,” he began, clasping his hands. “I want you to go into the fields at night and sit with the glowworms.”

  I opened my mouth, but no words came out. I waited for him to start laughing at his own joke. But his expression remained unchanged as he continued: “I also want you to mow the lawn in your bare feet and get in touch with Mother Nature.”

  And that’s when his little timer went off. Ding! My hour was up!

  I just sat there as he wrote up his bill and motioned me toward the door. I could barely utter a thank you. No meds, no workbook, no “things I need to be grateful for” list. Nothing. It would have felt better to burn my money than to give it to this quack.

  I left his office in stunned silence, and $130 lighter. At that point, I had lost all hope. There seemed to be no light at the end of the tunnel, unless, of course, it was just a bunch of glowworms.

  IN THE MEANTIME, I WAS becoming increasingly disturbed over my inability to appreciate the life I had. I may have been living a lot of people’s dreams out in sunny California, but it didn’t seem to be mine. I was that square peg hopelessly hoping to suddenly fit into that round hole. But it wasn’t happening, and I hated myself for that.

  It was doubly tough, because despite my reputation as the life of the party, there is a part of me, deep down inside, that’s really a homebody. There is nothing I love more than snuggling up in my own space, surrounded by my own stuff. But this wasn’t my own space, and this wasn’t my own stuff.

  I’m a treasure keeper, just like my mom. We both need to have familiar things around us. She kept everything—all my teeth, my drawings, my crummy report cards. She would have kept my fingernail clippings if my dad had let her. Me, I’m more of the souvenir type, filling home after home with memories of the places I’ve been and the people I’ve met. So when an electrical fire destroyed her house in Michigan during my stay in Afghanistan, my mother and I were both devastated. Thank goodness she and Noah, who was living with her at the time, got out unharmed. But she had everything in that house—my first rocking chair, my dad’s pipe, my old prom dresses, our family photos, my kids’ baby books—most of it gone. And my stuff ? My home was going to be in Kabul, so being who I was, I had found a way to have a bunch of my things thrown into a shipping container, and nine months later it arrived at my door. Every trip to Michigan involved lugging back at least one extra suitcase crammed with more of my little treasures. I can only guess where all that stuff is now. I’m sure Sam has given away or sold most of it. I did see a photo on Facebook of the wife of one of his friends, a woman in Kabul, wearing my pashmina scarf and the blue dress made from fabric I bought in Turkey. I remember that woman complimenting me on that outfit once. In the photo, I could see she was even wearing the gold filigree earrings Sam had once given me.

  Now, after having everything ripped out from under me in Kabul, an obsession with homelessness was beginning to gnaw at me. The nightmare of my mom’s fire, memories of not being able to get my hands on the last photos ever taken of my dad, it seemed to be all crashing down on me. But it was clear that it was about more than just losing my possessions; it was about losing control of my life. I was no longer in charge of my own fate. My home had become a symbol of that. And trying too hard to make somebody else’s home my own was turning into a disaster.

  On top of that, as strange as it sounds, even though I still longed for the craziness of Kabul, here in peaceful, safe Napa my fears just kept getting worse. A beautiful display of fireworks at a family graduation ceremony left me shaking uncontrollably. A trip across the Bay Bridge became a nightmare when I found myself driving the off-ramps in circles, unable to find my way out. So when I was invited to tag along with Mike on a trip to Oregon to pay a visit to a sick relative, I jumped at the chance for a diversion. Maybe a change of scenery after a couple of months on top of that hill would be just what I needed to yank me out of my dark place.

  The entire family was aware of my situation and treated me gingerly, doing their best to include me in conversations with the folks coming in and out to share what would probably be their final good-byes with Aunt Joan. But I found myself petrified that someone would talk to me, ask me what I did for a living or about what I had been doing in Afghanistan. And as much as Afghanistan was all I really wanted to talk about, inevitably it would always come around to the question of when I was going back, and having to say the words I can’t go back was like plunging a knife into my own heart. Every time I said them out loud, the pain would bring me precariously close to the edge. I didn’t want to believe it, but in reality I had to face the fact that I would probably never be going back. So I just sat in that living room, trying my best to disappear into the plaid sofa.

  At some point during the weekend Aunt Joan said she was expecting her nephew and his son to be stopping by on their way back from a fishing trip. As if on cue, two dark, lumbering men came through the door smelling like fish and lugging a large ice chest. The younger one headed to the kitchen as the older one greeted Joan with a hug and a kiss. As I sat there wondering who let the Native Americans into this totally white-bread family, he sat himself down at Joan’s side and took her hand gently into his own. His voice flowed softly and sweetly with news of life on the reservation, his fishing trip, his son in the other room. He finally stood to make way for more visitors who had arrived, and made his way to the chair next to me.

  “Hi,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m Larry.” He cocked his head and squinted at me, no doubt wondering right back at me who let the crazy redhead into this group.

  “I’m Debbie.” We shook hands. “I came with Mike. Really just along for the ride. I’ve never been to Oregon, so I thought I’d check it out.”

  “And?” he asked.

  “Nice. But wow, so remote!”

  “I love it up here, especially when the salmon are running. It’s a great excuse to see Aunt Joan.” His warm smile drew me in.

  “So you don’t live around here?” Small talk! I was actually carrying on a normal conversation, something I hadn’t managed to do in a long, long time. I listened as he spoke about fish and redwood trees with the same gentle tone he used with his Aunt Joan. An aura of quiet strength seemed to surround him, and in his peaceful presence I felt a welcome calm wash over me.

  “You really live on an Indian reservation? I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who lived on a reservation.” Suddenly I felt like an idiot.

  But Larry just smiled. “Yep, but in a house, not a tepee.”

  Larry made me laugh. He continued with some goofy Indian jokes and some silly stories about h
is childhood with Aunt Joan, and for the first time since I had arrived in the States I began to feel a little normal. I began to feel a glimmer of hope, all from a little small talk with Indian Larry.

  Through the kitchen door we could see Larry’s son trying to lift a huge fish out of the ice chest. He stood and tenderly grabbed my arm. “C’mon. Let’s go gut us some fish.” I stood and followed like a little girl, hanging on his every word.

  Obviously at home in this kitchen, he quickly pulled what he needed from the cupboards and drawers. I sat on a stool and watched as he nimbly slid the knife down the salmon’s shiny belly. Away from the prying eyes in the other room, I pulled a bottle of Merlot out of my oversized purse. Larry reached for a coffee cup.

  “Join me?” I asked, as I poured.

  Larry shook his head. “I don’t drink.”

  “Oh, sorry.”

  “No need to be sorry. I gave up the stuff ten years ago.”

  “Wow, good for you.”

  “Yeah, it took me almost losing everything . . .” Larry glanced over at his son. “Then I finally took control of my life.”

  “That’s impressive,” I said, quietly placing my cup on the counter. “So it has worked out for you?”

  Larry shrugged. “Pretty much. I felt like it was time to do something important, something that would make a difference in my community. And I couldn’t do that being a drunk.”

  I nodded silently. “And?”

  “So, I went back to school. Imagine, a fifty-year-old Indian, back in school. Got my B.A., then went for my master’s in psych.”

  “Really?” This guy was something.

  “Uh-huh, did my thesis on post-traumatic stress disorder among the First Nations people.”