All Over the Map (23 page)

The village is prospering; a new hair salon and restaurant have popped up, along with an Internet café sponsored by the coffee program. Some people have wooden bikes to haul their coffee the long distances to the washing stations, instead of carrying large baskets on their heads. It is, amazingly, a genuine good-news story from Rwanda.

I send a postcard to Maya in Nevada, who will be so eager to hear about these optimistic, grassroots projects with women in Africa, and I can’t wait to tell her about them the next time I see her.

The optimistic feeling of the project dims later in the day, when we arrive at the hotel where we are staying in Butare, which has an intensely creepy vibe. I go with Helen, the owner of a coffee company, to check out which rooms we want to stay in, but each one scares us. Without speaking, we agree that we are going to share a room, to stay together. The rooms are simple and tidy, with an innocuous bed, table, and chair, but something about each makes us too uncomfortable to stay. We finally settle on one, and, though there are two beds, we decide to sleep together, to feel safe.

“My one time in bed with a lesbian, and nothing happens,” I joke with Helen, trying to lighten the mood.

(I later read that there was a reason the hotel rooms felt so creepy. Butare had initially been a relative haven during the genocide, because the prefect was Tutsi and it had the largest Tutsi population in the country; but the government sent in militia
groups from Kigali to begin the massacre, starting with the eighty-year-old widow of the former Tutsi ruler, moving on to professors and students at the university, then to the hospital, and working systematically through the neighborhoods, convincing the locals to kill or be killed. The headquarters of the engineers of what became one of the worst massacres of the genocide was the hotel where we stayed. The arboretum where we’d taken an afternoon walk had been one of the biggest killing grounds.)

The atmosphere in Butare is so grim that Helen and I both want to leave as fast as possible; I take a bus back to Kigali for a flight the next day, and she is sorry to see me go without her. By then I have my story, including interviews Alice helped me get with some genocide survivors who are growing coffee and a long list of other sources. I tell the group over our last dinner together that it seems like it could be a good business story, maybe for the
New York Times
—an example of economic growth and reconciliation in a poverty-stricken, landlocked African country, still simmering with ethnic tensions but moving forward nonetheless—and though the women in the group make encouraging noises, the sociology professor gives me a skeptical look. I am a women’s magazine writer who wrote a memoir about sex and food in Italy, for God’s sake. Lightweight.

At home I procrastinate for a while and think about sending the article to the local paper. I hate the thought of proposing the story to the
Times
and having it ignore my e-mail, which is probably what will happen. I’d feel like a total loser. But I am hardly the point: the story deserves a wider audience, and it isn’t as if an omniscient editor at the
Times
knows I’ve been to Rwanda and
have a good piece and is going to call me up and
ask
me to send it in. I have to risk feeling like an idiot, the person the sociology professor mocked, and so, what the hell—I’m a grown-up, I’m forty-five—I pitch the story to the business editor of the Sunday
Times
. He e-mails back one line: “How fast can I say yes?”

I spend three more weeks reporting on the Rwandan coffee industry, get a quote from everyone including President Paul Kagame, and the piece sails through the
Times
editing process, handled by some of the most cordial professionals I’ve ever worked with. It ends up on the front page of the Sunday business section, with a beautiful photo of Rwandan women sorting coffee cherries, and shortly thereafter, the coffee group, whose funding had been endangered, receives a new grant, thanks in part, the director tells me, to the reporting. The check from the
Times
just covers my expenses for the trip; I use it to send Alice winter clothes and a computer for graduate school in Canada, to which she received a scholarship. (Helen and her partner, who are childless, have since supported Alice like parents, and I’ve done my best to be a big sister.)

The story lifts me out of my funk, wakes me up, and, just as my friend Trish guessed that day over coffee, gives me a wider perspective on the world and the work I could be doing. It’s not the kind of experience that’s easy to duplicate, but it raises the bar, expands the possibilities.

When I get home, I get the news that Maya has passed away. That seems impossible to me, because she was just here, maybe ninety but with such a strong spirit. I go to the ranch and can hardly stand to be there without her; I keep expecting to come
upon her soaking in the hot tub or reading a book in her big kitchen. At her memorial, hundreds of people arrive, telling tearful tales about her impact on their lives, through politics or friendship or as a grandmother. She lived a full life, and at the end, along with her family, had a huge circle of friends for companionship. I stay on a few days at the ranch, in her quiet house, but I miss her offering me a glass of wine and asking if I’ve written my thousand words yet today. The day I leave, I pick up the mail from down the dirt road, walk back to the house, and find my postcard from Rwanda.

M
idway through my forty-sixth year, with no more campaign to try to fix my life by a deadline, I feel less urgency to try to settle down with someone. It’s not that I want companionship and stability any less, but I have more of a sense of calm, like you have when you’ve run a race, lost, are exhausted, and know you’ve tried your best. The stakes change. There’s no rush to find a man in time to have children. That race is over.

There is a certain grief that comes with that realization, but also some relief. Perhaps if the right man came along I might still adopt, but I’m finished with the frantic search for the father of my children. I don’t regret not having kids, usually, because I never would have had other experiences that have made my life so richly textured. I also have nephews and a niece I adore and enjoy swooping in as the crazy aunt who has traveled the world, giving them a glimpse of a different kind of life. In any case, it’s the way things turned out.

È così
, as they say in Italian.

But other issues up in the air still make me uneasy, such as the
fact that I’m still living in the Hippie Apartment in the Haight and my retirement plan comes down to marrying a wealthy man or writing a bestseller (I’ve done both before, to little avail). For all my independence, I have never felt I had the wherewithal to try to buy a house of my own; financially and otherwise, it’s always seemed like a two-person proposition. There’s nothing wrong with renting—people in New York and Paris do it all their lives—but at my age there is a nagging sense that you ought to have a place on planet Earth to call your own. I have been in a holding pattern, waiting for a man to come along before I make a move to buy a house or change what, twenty-five years later, is essentially a postcollege lifestyle.

I’m also a little tired of San Francisco, which seems crazy, because on a sunny day—houses dressed up like Victorian ladies out for a stroll, Golden Gate Park blooming, the view from the top of Twin Peaks sweeping a circle around an urban paradise and out to sea, restaurants serving up the freshest, tastiest meals on the continent—there is no place better to be. But on one of the innumerable foggy, heavy-lidded summer days, I am itchy to move my life in a different direction, and it’s nothing that going to another country for a week is going to cure.

When one of my friends in the writers’ collective suggests we hire a personal coach for a couple of days, I agree to participate, just to get unstuck. The coach will work with us on organizing our time and deadlines and setting goals, which is a challenge for us freelance creative types, insecure procrastinators all.

Martha, the coach, shows up at the office, an imposing redhead in her sixties, full of energy and clear intention despite what
would, for most people, be a devastating disability: her hands and limbs are gnarled with rheumatoid arthritis. Clearly none of us is going to get away with easy excuses about our limitations. Naturally we have to go around and talk about what we want from the experience. I’m calmer about that process these days, partly because I actually do want some help getting unstuck but also because these are friends I’ve worked with, in some cases for ten years, and so it’s not as if I’ll be revealing how neurotic I am. They already know.

Martha starts by talking about the importance of setting goals and keeping commitments in our lives, to ourselves and to others. She asks us to write down our lifelong purpose and see whether what we’re doing day to day, and year to year, helps fulfill that purpose. It sounds self-aggrandizing to talk about purpose, and many in the group have never thought in those terms. I’m one of those lucky people, though, who was never tormented about which direction to go in in life. I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up back when I was in third grade and just set about doing it; it wasn’t a choice to become a writer but a necessity.

Purpose is a bit deeper than vocation, though. I’ve been too embarrassed, since my college application essay, to say out loud that I always hoped to use writing to raise consciousness, as a medium for social change; it sounds very seventies. Still, an astrologer recently took a look at my chart and articulated a similar purpose for me: I was handed gifts of language and communication, she said, and with them a responsibility to use them to benefit others, to bring darkness to light, to illuminate circumstances that otherwise might be left hidden, unnoticed, and unexplained.
(Whether or not I believe in the art, astrologers are frighteningly accurate when they read my chart; the last one took one look and whistled, “Wow, you have trouble staying in relationships, don’t you?”) Taking inventory, I accomplish my purpose occasionally, recently by writing about women in Naples, Nicaragua, and Rwanda and sometimes by describing the challenges of my personal life to benefit others working their way through similar circumstances—there’s no way I’d reveal myself otherwise; I’m too shy. But that purpose gets muddled with my personal issues and campaigns and often detoured when I need to take on work I don’t care about to pay my rent.

Purpose is important to keep in mind, especially at midlife, when it’s so easy to get mired in routine, when checking e-mail, day to day, seems to take precedence over the big projects and the big picture. My mother was struggling to find purpose when she was in her forties, breaking beyond the social expectation to raise children and moving toward making a broader social contribution. So was Maya after her divorce. Both succeeded brilliantly (though neither had to make her own living). Martha found her sense of purpose after she was diagnosed with her progressively debilitating disease, her husband left her, and she considered suicide; she decided she needed first to live for her daughter and then to help other people figure out how to turn seemingly insurmountable difficulties in their lives into opportunities.

After we’ve scribbled down our purpose, Martha asks us to write a few goals that will support that larger life purpose and make commitments to stick to them, i.e., spending more time writing and researching good stories. The results in our lives, she
says, reveal what we’re committed to. This makes uncomfortable sense to me: if I’d absolutely wanted children, I would have had them; when I really want to go to Italy, magically I find a way to get there. If being well off were important to me, I could’ve gone into business or law school or married one of the wealthy men who’ve crossed my path. I could have gotten married and settled down and had the companionship and stability I’ve been seeking, but I guess I didn’t really want it that badly, not if it interfered with my bigger interest in traveling and writing. Still, I’ve spent the past five years with an ongoing writer’s block, as if I’ve needed to settle some internal issues before I could turn my attention back out to the world.

If we want to change the results in our lives, Martha says, we have to change the beliefs that have led us to take specific actions and behaviors. Thinking it’s impossible to be both independent and settle down means I have no partner, saying I can’t afford a house means I have no permanent home; if I turned those assumptions around, things could turn out differently. Maybe.

I’m not sure how much I believe in this notion of manifesting your reality. At a certain point it can start sounding very New Age, like seminar leaders who convince you to spend your last thousand dollars learning about abundance. But Martha is more practical, and everything she says makes a certain amount of sense. Yet I can’t get beyond agreeing intellectually with what she’s writing on the flip charts to feeling and believing what she’s putting forth. Nor can I get past the thought that sometimes shit happens, through no fault of your own.