One of her granddaughters went to the great university nearby, a university that had gone from being a local secret to among the world’s most famous in the space of the old woman’s lifetime. This granddaughter came to see her, often as much as once a week. She was the only one of the old woman’s descendants who did this, and the old woman adored her, and also sometimes felt baffled by her: looking at her granddaughter she thought she saw what she would have looked like had she been born in China, for the granddaughter had features of the old woman, and yet looked to the old woman, overall, more or less, but mostly more, Chinese.
There was a rise that led up to the old woman’s street, and when she was a little girl the old woman used to push her bike up and then get on and zoom back down without pedaling, bikes being heavy in those days and hard to take uphill, especially when you were small, as she was then, and your bike too big, as hers had been. She had liked to see how far she could glide without stopping, flashing through the intersections, ready to brake, but not overly ready, because there had been a lot less traffic, at least as far as she could remember.
She had always had carp in a mossy pond in the back of her house, carp that her granddaughter called goldfish, and she had known the names of almost everyone on her street, and most had been there a long time, they were old California, from families that were California families, but over the years they had changed more and more rapidly, and now she knew none of them, and saw no reason to make the effort, for people bought and sold houses the way they bought and sold stocks, and every year someone was moving out and someone was moving in, and now all these doors from who knows where were opening, and all sorts of strange people were around, people who looked more at home than she was, even the homeless ones who spoke no English, more at home maybe because they were younger, and when she went out it seemed to her that she too had migrated, that everyone migrates, even if we stay in the same houses our whole lives, because we can’t help it.
We are all migrants through time.
ELEVEN
ALL OVER THE WORLD people were slipping away from where they had been, from once fertile plains cracking with dryness, from seaside villages gasping beneath tidal surges, from overcrowded cities and murderous battlefields, and slipping away from other people too, people they had in some cases loved, as Nadia was slipping away from Saeed, and Saeed from Nadia.
It was Nadia who first brought up the topic of her moving out of the shanty, said in passing as she sipped on a joint, taking the slenderest of puffs, held in her lungs even as the idea of what she had said scented the air. Saeed did not say anything in response, he merely took a hit himself, contained it tightly, exhaling later into her exhale. In the morning when she woke he was looking at her, and he stroked the hair from her face, as he had not done for months, and he said if anyone should leave the home they had built it was him. But as he said this he felt he was acting, or if not acting then so confused as to be incapable of gauging his own sincerity. He did think that he ought to be the one to go, that he had reparations to make for becoming close to the preacher’s daughter. So it was not his words that felt to him like an act, but rather his stroking of Nadia’s hair, which, it seemed to him in that moment, he might never have permission to stroke again. Nadia too felt both comforted and discomforted by this physical intimacy, and she said that no, she wanted to be the one to leave if one of them left, and she likewise detected an untruth in her words, for she knew the matter was one not of if, but of when, and that when would be soon.
A spoilage had begun to manifest itself in their relationship, and each recognized it would be better to part now, ere worse came, but days passed before they discussed it again, and as they discussed it Nadia was already packing her things into a backpack and a satchel, and so their discussion of her departure was not, as it pretended to be, a discussion of her departure, but a navigation, through words that said otherwise, of their fear of what would come next, and when Saeed insisted he would carry her bags for her, she insisted he not do so, and they did not embrace or kiss then, they stood facing each other at the threshold of the shanty that had been theirs, and they did not shake hands either, they looked each at the other, for a long, long time, any gesture seeming inadequate, and in silence Nadia turned and walked away into the misty drizzle, and her raw face was wet and alive.
? ? ?
AT THE FOOD COOPERATIVE where Nadia worked there were rooms available, storerooms upstairs, in the back. These rooms had cots, and workers in good standing at the cooperative could use them, stay there, seemingly indefinitely, provided one’s colleagues thought the need to stay was valid, and one put in enough extra hours to cover the occupancy, and while this practice was likely in violation of some code or other, regulations were not much in force anymore, even here near Sausalito.
Nadia knew people stayed at the cooperative, but she did not know how the policy worked, and no one had told her. For although she was a woman, and the cooperative was run and staffed predominantly by women, her black robe was thought by many to be off-putting, or self-segregating, or in any case vaguely menacing, and so few of her colleagues had really reached out to her until the day that a pale-skinned tattooed man had come in while she was working the till and had placed a pistol on the counter and said to her, “So what the fuck do you think of that?”
Nadia did not know what to say and so she said nothing, not challenging his gaze but not looking away either. Her eyes focused on a spot around his chin, and they stood like this, in silence, for a moment, and the man repeated himself, a bit less steadily the second time, and then, without robbing the cooperative, or shooting Nadia, he left, taking his gun and cursing and kicking over a bushel of lumpy apples as he went.
Whether it was because they were impressed by her mettle in the face of danger or because they recalibrated their sense of who was threat and who was threatened or because they now simply had something to talk about, several people on her shifts began chatting with her a lot more after that. She felt she was beginning to belong, and when one told her about the option of living at the cooperative, and that she could avail herself of it if her family was oppressing her, or, another added quickly, even if she just felt like a change, the possibility struck Nadia with a shock of recognition, as though a door was opening up, a door in this case shaped like a room.
It was into this room that Nadia moved when she separated from Saeed. The room smelled of potatoes and thyme and mint and the cot smelled a little of people, even though it was reasonably clean, and there was no record player, and no scope to decorate either, the room continuing to be used as a storeroom. But Nadia was nonetheless reminded of her apartment in the city of her birth, which she had loved, reminded of what it was like to live there alone, and while the first night she slept not at all, and the second only fitfully, as the days passed she slept better and better, and this room came to feel to her like home.