Planting Dandelions (25 page)

“You do? I got these online somewhere.”

Oh, for heaven's sake.
The two women are comparing shoe sizes, so I reach down and remove one shoe on the pretense of having forgotten what mine is. The label is clearly printed on the inside. “Manolos!” one of the women gasps.

Finally.

But the real moment of reckoning comes one evening when I have to run out last-minute to the grocery store. It's been a typical, nonstop day, and I'm wiped out. My hair is dirty. I'm in old jeans and a T-shirt. I can't believe I have to go out in public. Then I remember the black Burberry trench coat.

I throw it on. The Louis Vuitton bag slips easily over my shoulder. I slide the Gucci sunglasses over my head. It's magic. Instantly I look, and feel, like someone who has it together. Isn't that worth a few thousand bucks?

Heck, yeah—if you've got a few thousand to burn. Of course, if it all turned to discount at the stroke of midnight, I would feel a mighty pang, but nothing more serious than that. As they say, it's just fashion, darling.

The keeper, the real must-have, is that woman I kept running into all over New York City: the one standing a hundred feet tall and fabulous in the mirror every time I turned around. The woman who's allowed as much time as she needs to discover what she wants. The one who walks confidently through doors that are opened for her and is free to enjoy beautiful unnecessary things without the fear that she's losing her soul. The one who can dream up things that are wildly impossible from the bathtub and watch them come true.

If it takes wearing something special on the outside to remind me I am always her on the inside, I think that's okay. You can call it an investment. But it isn't in the clothes.

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

—Excerpt from “The New Colossus” by EMMA LAZARUS, inscribed on a plaque inside the Statue of Liberty

 

I
was tired, wretched, and yearning to breathe free the first time I knocked timidly on America's golden door, but America did not lift her lamp to me. Instead, I was escorted to a waiting room beyond the U.S. Customs inspection area of Toronto's international airport, and told to take a seat. An enormous wall plaque dominated the room, depicting a stern bald eagle that looked like it might swoop down and eat me. I sank into my chair and watched the clock as minutes passed and the hour changed. My flight departure time came and went without me, and with it went the last frayed wisps of my courage. By the time I was ushered into an interview room by a customs officer, I was ready to click my heels together however many times it took to get back home.

My Canadian passport and visitor information form lay on the desk between us. He picked them up and reviewed the facts that had flagged me in the preclearance line as undesirable and unwelcome. One, I was traveling on a one-way ticket, purchased that morning by an American friend. Two, I had no idea how long I intended to stay with said friend. Three, I had no cash with me, and I had been unemployed for several months, as had my friend. Four, I was clearly a nervous wreck. The only thing separating me from the usual suspects was that I hadn't made any attempt at all to conceal or minimize the damning evidence against me. But it hadn't occurred to me that I should. I was twenty-five years old, and the only time I had traveled outside Canada as an adult was for my Jamaican honeymoon, two years before. I had no idea that my circumstances would flag me as a would-be illegal immigrant. When my hands and voice shook as I handed over my passport for inspection, it wasn't because I was scared of getting caught, but because I was in the middle of coming completely unglued. I was going to America just long enough to figure out my next move. I didn't want to
live
there. Why would anyone? The news made it sound like a stupid, scary place to be.

That's a Canadian passport, pal,
I felt like saying to the officious clerk, who was looking smug, as if he'd foiled my schemes.
I'm not some refugee.

Except I
was
a refugee, fleeing a comfortable life that had recently become intolerable, thanks to the catastrophe of falling in love with an American. Patrick would be waiting for my plane to arrive in Little Rock, watching the last passenger come through the gate, telling himself I was coming on the next flight. Champagne and a vase of flowers in a hotel room. The long night.

The interviewing officer turned to his computer keyboard, poised to enter my name in a database of the huddled masses. There wasn't going to be another flight for me. Not headed in that direction. Maybe it was the clear sign I'd been seeking all these anguished months. Maybe I wouldn't feel so defeated if I just surrendered.

“I left my husband this morning,” I said, quietly. “But I think I made a mistake.”

He stared at me a long moment across his desk. Then, without saying a word, he slowly handed me back my passport, took me by the arm, and walked me back to the Canadian side of the airport. I made two phone calls from a bank of pay phones, then flew back to a life I desperately wanted to belong to, but didn't anymore. Homeless, and tempest-tost.

That miserable November day turned out to be the backward step it sometimes takes to make a giant leap. Three months later, legally separated, I joined Patrick in Mexico, and the following spring, accompanied him back to the United States, though I still had no intention of staying longer than was absolutely necessary. It was still a stupid, scary country as far as I was concerned. But bumming around with the other ex-pats in San Miguel de Allende wasn't paying the rent. If we saved carefully, we figured, Patrick could quickly earn enough USD to buy us a year or more of
la vida mexicana.
We promised all our friends we'd see them soon, gassed up the car, and drove north.

“Welcome to Texas,” a road sign announced. It might as well have read “Here Be Dragons.” Driving through the streets of Laredo, I felt like I'd left civilization behind. Hand-painted gas station signs advertised “GUNS BEER AMMO” as if it were the lunch special, beverage included. We pulled into a fast-food joint for supper, and I marveled at the grotesque portions, my first exposure to supersizing. I could barely grasp the soda cup with one hand, tucking it inside the crook of my elbow instead, like I was playing a bagpipe, not drinking a cola. We found a cheap motel and checked in. When Patrick said he was going out to buy cigarettes, I freaked out.

“It looks like a dangerous neighborhood,” I said, fretfully.

“I'm just going around the corner,” he reassured me.

But I meant the neighborhood that extended from the Mexican border all the way to Canada. As far as I knew from watching television, the entire citizenry of the United States was armed to the teeth, running around shooting each other over imported vehicles or a bad day at the post office. International media coverage of America tends to draw from extremes. I'd grown up with nightly news portrayals of a dystopian anarchy so violent it made Mad Max look like an Outward Bound adventure. I was frantic the entire fifteen minutes Patrick was gone, convinced he would be shot.

He came back unharmed, and the next day we set out across Texas, arriving in Little Rock two days later, without being shot at once. After several consecutive weeks passed without either of us getting mowed down in a hail of bullets, I began to relax and take in my new surroundings. In Mexico, I'd acquired an idle expatriate's taste for people-watching, and the dives we frequented in Little Rock offered a steady parade. It was a pageant of misfits and miscreants: drunks and drug addicts, rednecks and hippies, young strippers and old groupies, musicians who were on their way up and those who were all the way down, trust-fund kids who were slumming, and ghetto kids on the hustle. Everyone was a character. Fear gave away to detached bemusement, then exhilaration. I loved the freedom of being a stranger, an observer of the show. And what a show.

“This country is a train wreck,” I wrote gleefully in a letter to my father during my first year in the United States. Maybe so, but I met it in a head-on collision. I became a connoisseur of trash culture, venturing out from the neighborhood bars in search of something even grittier. I found it in highway joints where you had to be ready to duck under the table when a brawl erupted, where everybody and their gun was always half cocked and fully loaded, and the possibility of getting shot was no paranoid delusion. I was playing a part. I drank bourbon, smoked Marlboros, got fake nails, and knotted my shirts below my breasts. I thought I was on TV. I thought I was Daisy Duke. I thought I was badass. Dumbass, more like. One night, after all the bars and even the strip clubs were closed, we wound up in somebody's house down a country road, where I picked up an antique pistol off a table and swung around brandishing it in a two-handed grip, posing like a Charlie's Angel. Everyone in the room ducked and shouted at me, and I was shocked by the response. It hadn't crossed my mind that the gun might be loaded, or that anyone on the business end of the barrel would think it was loaded. I had never held a pistol that wasn't a toy. As far as I was concerned, it was just a prop. Like so much about America, it seemed too far out to be real.

In those early days, it was a thrill just to sit in a diner booth at four in the morning, ordering a breakfast of biscuits and gravy from a gum-cracking waitress who called me “hon.” The Waffle House was no less exotic to me than a sidewalk café on the Left Bank or a tearoom in Japan. The giant American flags that flew over car dealerships and truck stops were as colloquial and curious to me as dharma banners fluttering on a mountainside in Nepal—expressions of a local faith, not mine.

Gradually, the novelty wore off. Our lifestyle changed. We never did make it back to San Miguel. Patrick got a desk job, we got an apartment, got married, bought a house, and had a bunch of children. No regrets. It was good to settle down. But every year I spend in this land of the free has cost me more of my freedom. I'm not an onlooker anymore. I don't relish it when things go off the rails. I have children on the train now, and many other people I care about. My heart heaves and shakes with every rumble of the track. I'm tied to it.

I might as well just get on board, but I've held off making that last leap. My passport is still Canadian. Most people assume I'm a U.S. citizen. But to a careful observer, there are a few signs that should give me away. The Pledge of Allegiance is one. At the request to “please stand,” I rise to my feet along with everyone else, out of respect. I put my hand over my heart like everyone else does, out of affection. And then I just stand there, mutely smiling and trying not to appear seditious while the rest of the assembly pledges fealty to the flag and the republic for which it stands. No one has ever once turned to me afterward and called me a traitor, or asked me what I'm protesting, but the self-consciousness and anxiety I endure for those two minutes is acute.
I'm Canadian,
I telegraph silently through my smile.
Don't shoot.

“I'm Canadian,” I explain, in an apologetic aside to whoever happens to be standing next to me, as soon as they get through “justice for all.” They are always amazed, as if just learning that there is such a place. “Oh! Canada!” they exclaim, whenever I out myself. Nine out of ten people will then say something nice about Vancouver, a city four thousand miles away from my East Coast hometown. I've never been anywhere near there, but when I go, I will have a lot of kind words to pass on, and numerous distant relatives of Americans to look up.

“I had no idea you were Canadian,” they say next, if we've been coming to Scouts together for a while, or passing each other coming and going in the school hallways.
Living and breeding in your very midst,
I think, as they scan me for any visible marker of foreignness that hitherto escaped them.

In Mexico, the other ex-pats used to joke that the only way to tell a Canadian apart from an American is to mistake them for each other. The one who's offended is Canadian. There's more than apocryphal truth to this. People think hockey is Canada's national pastime, but what really brings the Great White North together is disapproval of the country next door. If the community of nations were middle school, Canada would be on safety patrol, courteous, eager, prissy. America would be the rich girl with big breasts and loose ways.

I flung off my orange safety vest one day, and went running after her.

I don't know exactly when my feelings deepened past infatuation, but I'll never forget noticing that they had. I was home for my father's funeral at the end of the summer of 2001. Patrick had returned stateside, ahead of me and the children, to get back to work. He called me one morning from his office. It was Tuesday.

“Are you watching TV?” he said. I wondered what juicy political or celebrity news had broken.

“The boys are watching something on CBC,” I told him.

“Turn on an American channel. Two planes have crashed into the World Trade Center.”

It was like the confounding of tongues in Babylon. I couldn't understand what he was saying. I grabbed onto the words that were the most familiar.
Plane crash,
I thought.
An accident.
But as I set the phone down and lunged for the living room, my mind was parsing the rest of the sentence.
Two planes. Two. Two is not an accident.

I picked up the remote control and pressed an arrow. Not an accident. An attack. On my friends, on my neighbors, on my husband and my children.
This is what it means to be hated.
The TV screen a mirror held up to my heart, blown out and crumbling. I gathered my sons in my arms, realizing for the first time that they have mortal enemies because they are Americans.