Crazy Good Fortune Out of the Blue - 18*
My parents were classic Midwestern-American urban sophisticates. Partly because of the fact that my father was in a wheelchair (and had been for twenty-five years after a freak accident in which his spinal cord was severed), partly because of the fact that they enjoyed a comfortable, upper-middle-class, suburban lifestyle, I don’t believe that either one of them had ventured off pavement for years and years. I found the fact that they were willing to brave a trip to a developing country in order to make sure I was safe rather touching—once I got over feeling incensed, that is, having entirely forgotten my own misgivings about moving here. “Don’t be ridiculous!” I huffed to my father, who could always rile my temper, even on the most benign and neutral topics; “Of course Costa Rica is safe! It’s so safe they don’t even have an army! They have more teachers than police!”
It was true, Costa Rica possessed no army ever since their coup d’etat back in the forties. When they held elections in 1948, the guy who occupied the presidency and lost declared the results of the election a fraud and refused to step down. Don Pepe, as the leader of the insurgency is affectionately known, then rallied a bunch of farmers and intellectuals to challenge the government, and amazingly, in five weeks, they won. The way we heard the story, the deciding battle was slated to take place on the portentously named Death Mountain, or Montaña del Muerte. The night before, however, the government forces became chilled from the unaccustomed altitude. To keep themselves warm, they (clearly not the intelligentsia) downed large quantities of guaro, the local spirits made from sugar cane, which I imagine must register about 500 proof on the Richter scale. We once ordered a pitcher of sangría at a restaurant, not realizing that wine was much too expensive to use and that the alcoholic content was provided by guaro. After half a glass, I was so woozy I almost passed out into the pizza.
It had a similar effect on the soldiers, evidently. When the sun came up the next morning, Don Pepe’s men tramped into battle only to find their opponents passed out from their guaro fest the night before. They rounded up all the weapons and when their adversaries finally awakened, they marched them to the capital in defeat and installed Don Pepe as president. During his tenure, he abolished the army and put in place a few other reforms, such as the vote for women and civil rights for blacks, then stepped down eighteen months later and handed the reins of power over to the man who had won the previous election.
Since then, Costa Ricans reveled in their status as a peaceful country. “Costa Rica es el país de paz,” I heard dozens of people assert proudly during my stay here: “Costa Rica is the country of peace.” We even happened to be around for a demonstration of social unrest: the utility companies jacked rates up an absurd amount practically overnight one time, and outraged citizens took to the streets, assembling barricades on every road that led into the city. They camped out at the barricades—made from anything and everything they could get their hands on, chairs, tires, plants, children’s toys—and made it into a party, as usual. But they were very clear about the fact that no one would be traveling into or out of the city. After three days, the government declared that the rate increase would not take place, and everyone quickly and responsibly dismantled the barricades, even swept up after themselves. No violence occurred whatsoever.
At any rate, once Richard reminded me that I had also felt a little nervous about Costa Rica before I settled in here, and I got over being mad at him for taking my parents’ side, I was able to summon a more generous view of their visit. Among other things, however, I felt a little apprehensive about how Jane and my dad were going to get along.
My dad, a man of almost anachronistic integrity and moral rectitude, had to be the most straight-laced person I have ever known. For instance, once when I was visiting my parents during my stint as a graduate student, they kindly offered to buy me a new dress, since they knew Richard and I didn’t have a lot of money. That year, prairie dresses were popular—old-fashioned gowns composed of several different patterns of fabric sewn together in horizontal panels and trimmed with satin ribbon. I happily picked out a few from the rack at the store that they took me to and tried on my favorite first, one whose colors were primarily purple. I didn’t realize it, but purple was considered by certain members of my parents’ generation to be some sort of offensive, subversive statement; so when I pranced out of the dressing room to show my mom and dad how nice the dress looked and how much I loved it, my father’s face immediately darkened.
“Absolutely not!” he barked furiously. “It’s too funky!”
I was so startled by his use of the word “funky” that I didn’t even explode, the way I might have normally. Not only couldn’t I imagine he even knew the word “funky,” I certainly didn’t expect him to use it properly. In fact, listening to it come out of his mouth with his clipped, patrician pronunciation, I nearly died laughing. He was so surprised by my reaction, that he, in turn, didn’t get angry, either. So it turned out okay. I picked out a lovely gown whose primary colors were gold and black, and everyone was happy. But there are many, many occasions when Richard and I like to turn to one another and shout, pounding our fists into our hands, “Absolutely not! It’s too funky!”
To be fair, my parents were good people, even colorful people, despite my father’s austerity. My mom loved to dance and clown around; my dad liked to bring home sheets of corny jokes from the office and read them aloud at the dinner table. Both of them dressed with exquisite flair (an interesting contrast to my dad’s more Puritanical traits), and they were two of the most competent, organized, dependable people who ever lived. My father determinedly cultivated an optimistic attitude and didn’t let his disability prevent him from doing most of the things he wanted to, including building a successful wholesale drapery business with my mother’s help, traveling, and sending all his kids to college. My mom’s life was not easy, raising three kids, taking care of my dad, and working full-time at their business, but she did it, and not only that, she did it with style. In fact, she was really the superwoman in the family. I’ve often wished I had one-tenth of her energy.
I knew my mother wouldn’t find fault with whatever Jane did or said, despite the fact that my mom was incredibly proper and prim, since … well, to be honest, she was a snob. She loved high society and status and wealth. Behavior that she would condemn in someone who occupied what she considered to be an inferior social rung—for example, the use of profanity—could be dismissed lightheartedly as eccentricity or high spirits in someone of “superior” social status.
But I was concerned about my dad’s interaction with Jane. Jane and my father had met before, at Richard’s and my wedding in Kansas City. She had magnanimously thrown the rehearsal dinner at the country club where my family had once been members and provided an inexhaustible supply of good champagne. But there had been hundreds of people to deal with that weekend, and his interaction with her had been buffered by the wedding. My father didn’t drink alcohol or caffeinated beverages, take any sort of drugs whatsoever, including aspirin, never smoked, thought that sex in marriage should be for procreation only (needless to say, when my father sat Richard down for their father-in-law/son-in-law chat, this pronouncement was met with stunned disbelief), never swore or used any kind of language that he described as “common” or “low-toned,” nearly had a stroke when I started wearing miniskirts in high school like all the other girls my age, had another apoplectic event when I bought a halter top in college, and generally lived a monk-like existence.
Jane swore constantly at the top of her lungs, smoked like a fiend, took pain pills for her knees, could drink like a sailor, loved telling risqué stories and jokes, including some about her own sex life, and was generally a complete and total wild woman—in short, what my dad very much feared I might become (if I hadn’t already).
There was another reason I felt nervous about my parents’ impending visit. Costa Rica was so far from wheelchair accessible, it could prove daunting for my dad. They also didn’t speak a word of Spanish and I had already learned how difficult that could be. When my dad wasn’t happy, he never said anything, but the vibes he put out could stun or even kill small mammals and large insects. And when my dad wasn’t happy, my mom wasn’t happy, either. I really wanted them to be happy.
Jane, of course, behaved in her thoroughly charming and gracious Southern manner when they arrived, and to my relief, I could tell that both of my parents warmed to this. My father was capable of excusing some infractions of his stringent moral code if he felt that the person had redeeming qualities. Horace, needless to say, was his usual refined, elegant self, which went over big with both my mom and dad. They reacted more coolly to Paul, since they knew he had been in some trouble, and they believed that negative social pressure properly applied could help straying youth find their way back to the righteous path.
Their interaction with the servants, however, proved problematic. The fact that neither one of them spoke Spanish wouldn’t necessarily have been a huge, insurmountable problem, but the way they dealt with it caused some bruised feelings. For instance, Lijia would approach them as they sat reading out on the porch and ask them what they would like for breakfast or lunch. They could have tried explaining, in English, that they didn’t understand. Or they could have asked me how to say “I don’t understand” in Spanish. Or they could have tried to puzzle things out with the help of hand signals. Or they could have enlisted my aid. But instead, they decided to pretend as if Lijia wasn’t talking to them, as if she wasn’t even there. She came to me, asking me what she should do, and I could tell that it utterly mystified her. It seemed odd to me, but then, people can be odd, and I felt my parents were odder than most.
Still, we managed to get past that, sort of (basically by pretending they weren’t doing this while I served as their go-between with the staff), and one morning Jane thought it would be fun to take my parents to the language school where Richard and I studied Spanish. We piled into Jane’s black Mercedes, Luís driving and my father up front, Jane, my mom and me sitting in back. On our way to the school, we passed a group of campesinos working on digging a ditch across the road.
“Must be putting in a water line,” observed Jane.
Well, the ride was pretty bumpy, which I could tell was a little hard on my dad and made my mother a trifle nervous, but we reached the school, where some of the maintenance workers there helped Luís with getting my dad up and down the stairs so that he could see the main offices. Stairs represented tremendous physical as well as psychological obstacles for my family. When I was growing up and my family arrived at a place in pre-wheelchair-accessible America only to encounter a long flight of stairs and no ramp and no elevator, it was like something terrible and Hitchcockian. The stairs practically seemed to bulge out at us in taunting mockery and I could almost hear a sour blat of discouraging, dissonant trumpets in the background as we took in this barrier and contemplated our options: 1) not go; 2) everyone go except Dad, who was the most excited of all about whatever it was; or 3) try to round up one or two kindly souls with strong backs who could help heft my dad up the steps while he sat frustrated and helpless in his chair. Whichever option we chose, it was stressful.
He managed to handle his trek to and from the language school offices with a fair amount of aplomb, however, and all the teachers my parents encountered told them what a wonderful daughter they had, which every parent likes to hear, of course, especially about their black sheep. The kitchen staff pressed a nice little snack upon them of fruit and tortillas, which they seemed to enjoy, and then we headed back down the mountain.
This time when we encountered the campesinos working on their ditch, we found that they had dug across the entire road. There wasn’t really much of an alternative route that could serve as a detour, so Luis decided to see if he could just rev up the engine and hurtle across the ditch. This resulted in both front wheels firmly wedged into the ditch. We were stuck. Again, I could see that both of my parents felt anxious about this new development. It must be a very uncomfortable feeling to find yourself in a wheelchair in a land without pavement.
All the campesinos stood watching us, leaning on their shovels and picks. Jane threw open the door and charged out, while Luís did the same, and they asked the men if they could help us out of the ditch. When they agreed, Jane joined the campesinos in positioning herself behind the car and pushing (in her nice navy-blue dress, nylons, and pumps) while Luís manned the vehicle and everyone else except my dad got out of the car.
At first it seemed that we weren’t going anywhere, but then all of a sudden, the Mercedes lunged forward with a roaring lurch, causing Jane to sprawl onto her face. The campesinos howled with laughter, but they also hastened to her aid, picking her up and dusting her off. She was laughing, too, and tried to give them some money for helping us, but they refused, wearing great big grins.
We piled back into the car, while Luís started off again, Jane waving to the men behind us and exclaiming, “Well, they sure got a big kick out of the big fat gringa falling on her face, didn’t they!” Then she inspected her nylons and observed that she had run her hose, damn it, and she wanted to take us all to a nice restaurant for lunch. “Oh, those campesinos are the sweetest people, aren’t they?” she rattled on. “They wouldn’t take a penny for helping us out of that ditch.”
I could tell that my mother and father were both thinking, if it hadn’t been for those nincompoops digging a ditch across the entire road, we never would have gotten stuck in the first place! But they murmured their agreement that yes, indeed, the campesinos were delightful.
Unfortunately, when presented with the option of going to Garth and David’s resort in Quepos (I made a point of telling them it had a lot of stairs) or another resort no one had been to before but that we understood occupied only one floor, my dad insisted he didn’t care. So Jane thought it would be nicer to go to Quepos where we knew everyone. She surmised, correctly, that the young men who worked there would bend over backwards to help my dad negotiate the stairs. But the ride over in the jeep turned out to be no fun for him (using restrooms was a problem, for one thing), and once we got there, it turned out that he didn’t like having to be carried up so many stairs so often. Then he got sunburned, even sitting in the shade. Another time, when he was approached by a man in downtown San José who wanted his help in smuggling wheelchairs into Costa Rica, I could see that he was gravely affronted.
So by the time they left, I’m not sure how glad they were they came. I think they at least knew that I wasn’t going to get picked off by a sniper or blown up with a mortar shell and that was probably enough to ease their minds. And actually, I was glad they had made the trip. We were somewhat estranged emotionally because we were so different, and it made me feel good that they cared enough to come.
*Intro:
At the end of 1982, both Richard and I had been out of work for a year, despite constant looking, and the best we had been able to come up with was scrounging for odd jobs. It was an economic climate much like the one we’re in now, and we were feeling both dejected and panicked about what the future might hold for us. We certainly could never have imagined what happened next: a dream job in a dream country for a dream boss.
This is Chapter 18 of the memoir I wrote about the year-and-a-half that Richard and I spent living in Costa Rica. It was quite the adventure, living with a an eccentric and flamboyant heiress** from Dallas, her elegant and erudite husband who wrote Westerns, and their handsome, bad boy son, whom Richard used to babysit. Oh, yeah, and next door resided the safe house for Eden Pastora, aka “Commander Zero,” leader of the Contras who were waging a civil war with the Sandanistas in Nicaragua at that time.
This was a particularly golden era in Costa Rica’s history, before it became “discovered,” even before the introduction of television there, really (it started coming in during the time we lived there). It was wild and exotic and magical and amazing.
So once a week, I’ll be excerpting a chapter from Crazy Good Fortune Out of the Blue until I’ve told the whole tale. I hope you enjoy these stories!
**Jane, sadly, passed away not long ago, but she left a legacy as colorful as she was. In 1984, she commissioned one of the largest environmental sculptures in the Western Hemisphere, a set of standing stones in Arlington, Texas that were designed and built by sculptor Norm Hines. Caelum Moor has been a source of enormous controversy over the years, which I’ll write about one of these days. In the meantime, feel free to Google “Caelum Moor” and see what turns up. It’s fascinating.
Thursday, July 9, 2009