1 There is no release from life's turmoil, so put your back into it. In a gulch somewhere between the San Jacinto and Santa Anas, my mother, Yevgenia, slows the car at the sign welcoming us to the dubiously named Oasis Mobile Estates. She cuts the engine behind the property manager's battered truck and goes about the task of cleaning herself up. She pulls a rubber band out of her stiff, dyed-black hair. She scrunches it back to life. Tweezers in hand, she yanks the rearview mirror down to brutalize her already emaciated eyebrows. When she smell-checks her armpits, I know there is a man inside. "Don't I get a vote?" I ask, watching Yevgenia resuscitate her breasts by scooping them up in her bra. Our drive from Nevada to California has been nonstop. For miles, nothing but hot dust, windswept trash, and nameless mountains closing in on our resentments. My mother ignores me. Instead, she looks through the bug-splattered windshield, her eyes turned to the heaven she doesn't believe in. She blows hard through her mouth. Traces of old beer and tobacco stir in the narrow space between us. "People who cast votes decide nothing. People who count votes decide everything." Pushing the car door open with her shoulder, she says, "Stalin. Look it up." "Hey," I call out as she heads to the manager's trailer, her red tank top plastered to her back with sweat. "Use a condom." There's a brief pause in her step. Her body tenses. Then I hear it. The source of what I yearned for most in childhood, her husky laugh, etched by decades of chain-smoking. Waiting for her to score whatever it is she thinks she'll get from a place like this, I crane my neck to survey the Oasis Mobile Estates. Nestled in shriveled patches of yellow desert grass wedged between boulders heavily scarred by acid rain, this "oasis" is a decrepit collection of rusted metal boxes lined up along small tributaries of roughly hewed roads. The only sign that I'm in the year 2000 is a flat-roofed Circle Ksquatting a half mile outside the trailer park. Fiery air blasts through the open car window from the direction of the Mojave. I shove my hand down the back of my jeans to pull my sweat-drenched underwear out of my crack. Eventually, the door of the property manager's tin hut opens. My mother emerges with a man in tow. Her skirt is straight, her tank top tucked in. They hadn't done it. This is a bad sign. It means she's serious about the place. They approach the car and I overhear Yevgenia casually lying about where we have just been, saying Denver and not Las Vegas. That she's leaving a job rather than leaving yet another guy who turned out to be broke. The property manager, with his tangled waist-length black hair and weathered brown skin, is smitten. He follows my mother, eyeing her swaying hips. "Don't just sit there like a dum-dum," my mother says to me through a fake smile. Her voice comes from the earthy place deep between her legs. It drips with allure, turned up by the presence of a man who has something she wants. "Get out of the car. Say hello to Carlos." Out of habit, I do as she says. But inside I smolder. I raise my hand in a half-hearted greeting. Yevgenia glares. "This is my daughter, Lara," she says. And I wait for it. Maybe secretly, Yevgenia does too. The scrutiny of a white woman with a Black child. There. Carlos's eyes flick between me and my mother. The appraisal of biological proximity. Her straight hair to my curly, lopsided Afro. Her rounded, fleshy curves to my limp, flat lines. Her light, white skin, the known story, to my dark, open question. "Call me Papa Bear," he says, straightening his face, giving us a pass. "Everyone does." He's got a bum knee, so we follow Papa Bear's slow, limping figure down the cracked asphalt road. He heads with purpose toward the main artery of the Oasis. Dead Man Walking isn't a film I've seen but the title comes to mind. I try not to notice Papa Bear's disability, but his lurching movement ignites an involuntary jumpiness within my own body. I hate myself for it and glance at my mother. Her attention is on two women standing next to the trailer we're approaching. "Don't Minnie look silly?" says an older white woman. She's standing in the carport on a step stool, attaching a rainbow umbrella hat over a yellow baseball cap worn by a second, taller old woman. They wave at Papa Bear. Papa Bear smiles at them, polite and exaggerated. To me he says, "She's Mickey and the other is Minnie. Get it?" "Yeah." I don't get it, but I know it's easier to just go along. "Their names. Their actual names." He's shaking his head, as if he's looking at the eighth wonder. I grunt a false half laugh, not confused by their names but by the winter clothes they're wearing. Shapeless jeans and baggy sweatshirts, and neither of them is sweating. Several trailers down we stop next to a cramped frontporch with steep carpeted steps. It looks the same as all the others except in the covered carport there are black plastic garbage bags flung one on top of the other like bodies in an open grave. "Don't mind that crap," Papa Bear says, his eyes on the swell of my mother's breasts. "They'll come 'round to collect in a day or two." My mother considers the place, shaking her head. Fishing her cigarettes out of her fake Chanel, she lights up carefully. Yevgenia always takes her time before haggling over the rent. It's her game. Acting as though she's deliberating from along list of nonexistent options. She sighs, annoyed, glancing at the mess in the carport, pretending those bags interrupt some big plan of hers. Amid the dilapidations and failures, my mother, Yevgenia, a woman who accidentally defected from the Soviet Union in the 1980s, is at her most Russian. She will make anything work. A broken washing machine, a flat tire, a foreign country. This. I don't want to be here but it's not like I'm at risk of running away. Though my mother wouldn't care. The truth is, she's tethered to me by weak strings of obligation. Nathaniel "Nate" Basmadjian taught me this, and how to scrunch my body into a tiny ball on the floor of the car, while he and my mother drove around town. One night, Nate hinted that if my mother "lost the Black kid," he'd marry her and within a few days, they were off. I was five at the time so the rec- ollection is vague. What I do remember of my life without Yevgenia is time spent with the strange people my mother pawned me off on. The Polish Seventh-day Adventist couple who liked to show me pictures from their missionary trip to Botswana, saying, "This is your culture, dear," until I nodded my head like I understood. The pretty Canadian coke addict who made me lie on the floor at the foot of her bed while she talked to me about her married boyfriend until I fell asleep. Then there was the large family from Guam who worked me like a slave and called me nekglo ñamu, black mosquito, in their Chamorro language, which was "amazing that they even knew those words," the eleven-year-old cousin told me, since the U.S. burned all the dictionaries in his country. So not exactly foster care, but something like it. Acquaintances from Yevgenia's various jobs. People who owed her a favor. She exhausted everyone with promises she would send more money, be back soon. She was gone for nearly two years. Supposedly embarking on a new life in Scottsdale as a blonde named "Evie" who played mixed doubles every Saturday. When my mother returned to me in California with brown roots and an allergy to shrimp cocktail, she didn't speak too much about tennis or Nate or Arizona, so I didn't ask. Those years without her created a savage hunger in me that's hard to shake. When I was eight, nine, and ten, Yevgenia had to cleave me from her body whenever she left for work or to go to the store. At twelve, thirteen, and fourteen,I yoked my mother, leaving little space between us as she sat to read, on the sofa or in a chair. If she closed a door, my back would be pressed against it. I was the inextricable daughter, physically and mentally. But now, as we arrive at the Oasis during this Indian summer, as I enter what will be the merciless year of sixteen, I am ready for the grip of longing to finally loosen. And there's relief, like letting go of a sweaty hand. Excerpted from A Country You Can Leave: A Novel by Asale Angel-Ajani All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
