On my mind

I am on vacation. During the next few weeks, this space will feature vignettes (short scenes or incidents) written mostly in the early to mid-90’s, when I still entertained hopes of getting paid for writing. They are all true.

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IT ALL DEPENDS ON ONE’S POINT OF VIEW

Part 1

My son Leon and I usually get along pretty well. We’ve traveled together to the Cayman Islands, to Baja California, to Fiji, and most recently, to Bali and Ambon in Indonesia. We have no problem agreeing on a place to stay, on where to eat, on how to spend the days.

We have our shares of misadventures. We did remember—but only at the very last minute—to change some money at the airport for the trip to Baja, though we did not remember to bring even a simple glossary of most frequently-used words, or to check out the safety of the local tap water.

In Indonesia, I not only got sick, but the airline lost my suitcase for four days, and Leon nearly drowned when, in choppy water, the dive master gave him a panicked SCUBA diver’s weight belt to hold.

And we do have our differences. Over 40 and still single, he thinks only women with dark eyes and long straight black hair are pretty; I could as easily accept a curly-headed blond, or brown-haired, or even red-haired woman as daughter-in-law. He likes beer and rye; I prefer wine and scotch. He likes being constantly on the go. I enjoy a more relaxed pace. As a statesider, he has trouble understanding the vagaries of our island power system, the islander’s mañana outlook, the importance of saving face, the folly of driving aggressively on our roads. Still, we’ve learned to accommodate. Sometimes it takes long hours of discussion before one or the other of us will grudgingly concede that the other’s viewpoint has some merit. Now, I no longer hassle him about his taste in women. And when he comes to visit, he doesn’t hassle me, all that often, about alien island ways.

But we’ve reached an impasse when it comes to the plumbing in the house I live in. No amount of explanation, persuasion, discussion, argument, has changed his mind that my bathroom is more primitive than that in any of the Third World islands we’ve visited.

The house I live in is at least 17 years old. On this island, that’s pretty old. You know it wasn’t built to any architect’s spec, or according to any zoning, or housing, or any other kind of code, but by some unskilled workers, following the directions of an amateur contractor.

It has a septic tank and, presumably, a leach field, but there’s no telling what kind of pipes were used for the plumbing back then. It’s not at all clear, as a matter of fact, whether there’s a separate drainage pipe for the toilet, or whether it and the bathroom tub and the bathroom and kitchen sink all go down the same drain. Nor are there any visible outlets—pipe holes—one can open to find out. It isn’t even clear whether the septic tank for my house is separate from the septic tank for the house next door, both of which were built by the same family.

Over the years—and I’ve lived in this house for 12 years now—the drains have gotten a little sluggish, particularly the toilet drain. I did call in a plumber when the problem first began, but he didn’t hold out much hope of being able to fix anything without major work and expense—which I knew my landlord would not underwrite, and I could not afford. Fearful of destroying whatever piping is still in place, I’ve not dared apply anything but some of the more benign toilet de-cloggers, which haven’t been all that effective.

So I adopted the island adage: when it’s yellow, let it mellow; when it’s brown, flush it down. That worked pretty well for a number of years, but eventually the system couldn’t cope with all the toilet paper.

So I adopted a second island adage—a little less euphonious than the first, but rather ubiquitous nonetheless: don’t flush toilet paper down the drain. I found that embarrassing at first, but when I realized that not only government offices, but even top restaurants on island followed the same practice, I felt a little better. Though I do still try to hide the fact from my bi-weekly cleaning lady—I scrunch up the paper bag I use as receptacle, and put it into the bathroom trash basket before she arrives.

And that’s where my son and I part company. He considers the arrangement unacceptable, primitive, unhygienic. He doesn’t understand why I haven’t had the problem fixed. He couldn’t believe that I didn’t know more about the house’s plumbing system. He himself scoured the yard looking for the outlets with which, he claimed, all plumbing systems are equipped. He asked endless questions about the relative drainage speed and efficiency of the bathroom sink, the kitchen sink, the bathtub.

He concluded that the only solution was to roto-rooter the toilet, and as momentary man of the house, to do so himself. This time, hours of discussion didn’t work. I didn’t want to offend his masculinity. On the other hand, I didn’t want my pipes destroyed. Nor did I want to even think about the mess it would make in my bathroom. But he wouldn’t budge. He insisted on going to East-West Rental to check out their equipment.

Thank goodness, he neglected to take some apparently necessary measurements, so could not rent a roto-rooter on the spot. Thank goodness the next day was New Year’s Day—the store would not be open—and he was scheduled to leave that same evening. Leaving my toilet still intact, after all.

But to this day—and it is now months later—he still harasses me about getting my toilet fixed. Which brings forth yet another helpful island adage: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And since my toilet isn’t actually “broken,” I have no intention of getting it “fixed.”

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IT ALL DEPENDS ON ONE’S POINT OF VIEW

Part 2

My brother isn’t speaking to me. Since he came out to visit, he has stopped talking to me. Actually, that’s figurative, because we haven’t really talked much over the past 10 years, but we have been communicating—we’ve been writing letters.

You see, I live sort of far away. Some 6,000 miles away, in fact, and I don’t get back to where he lives, on the East Coast, all that often. He’s careful of where he spends his money, and I don’t have all that much in the first place, so we don’t call each other very much either. In fact, I can only remember talking to him on the phone once since I’ve been out here.

But we did write. His were funny kinds of letters. He would write that he’d just sewed some buttons on his shirt, and was now in the Laundromat, washing the shirt, among other things. Or he’d tell me about the supper he’d just cooked himself, or was in the process of preparing. Oh, once in a while, he’d write about the problems with his daughters—his divorce was very bitter, and the ex managed to alienate all three of his daughters against him—but usually it was casual chatter about domestic little details, about how he was teaching himself guitar, or his efforts to stay in shape.

And he did write about how he was feeling—angry, or pressured, or content, or somewhere in between—in the way that those who have spent some time working with a shrink are wont to do. I enjoyed his letters, even though they weren’t particularly stimulating, or captivatingly interesting, or all that newsworthy. He’d loosened up a lot in the process of breaking out of his marriage—no longer as intimidating with all that proper Bostonianism he’d worn before. I’d felt I finally had a brother I could talk to.

But then he came to visit. And the letters stopped.

Oh, he was very cool while he was here. In the best of enlightened style, he was “non-judgmental”—at least to my face. Didn’t get upset when I told him he’d better not drink the water from the faucet. Didn’t blink an eye as he watched my friends eat rice with their fingers. Didn’t flinch when the termites swarmed. Didn’t blush when I followed local custom, and casually—and generously—loaded up my plate with food to take home from the party we went to. Didn’t complain once about my rusty jeep’s stiff springs. Or comment on the rust-marked silverware, the corroded shower faucet, my mismatched furniture, my rugless floors, the ever-present ants around the sink and geckos on the walls.

I tried to explain that—on this hot, humid, “third-world” island, everything rusts, everyone has ants in their kitchens, termites are an annual given—that with the dust, with wind-driven typhoon rains prone to leak through window louvers and door frames, with water hours and frequent unannounced power outages, there just wasn’t any point to such niceties as curtains or shades on the windows, wall-to-wall carpet or “good” furniture—that the natives were just coming out of a subsistence economy.

And he said he understood it all. He made all the right empathetic noises.

But in the year since, he’s written only twice. Short little letters. Not once has he commented on his visit.

The irony of it is that I once did the same thing to my cousin. I visited her in Australia—at a time when I myself was still full of Bostonianisms. I was so aghast at her bare feet, her disorganized kitchen, her primitive furnishings, her casually tossing food scraps out the window to dogs and chickens in the yard, that I too found it difficult to write her afterwards.

And it wasn’t until I found myself leading the same kind of stripped down lifestyle that I understood, and could resume our former comfortable relationship. I’m not proud of that. But it’s the truth.

What worries me is whether I’m going to have to wait until my brother adopts a lifestyle closer to mine before we can resume our own former comfortable relationship. (Update: He’s re-married, and while our relationship is now different, it is more comfortable.)

(The writer is a librarian by profession, and a long-term resident of the CNMI. To contact her, send e-mail to ruth.tighe@saipan.com.)