Yam Story Excerpt 2

Arthur

Noah hoped his roommate would be out long enough to leave a few hours of peace in the cabin. But no such luck. Arthur was only a few minutes behind him getting back. He had hoped he would have time to read, or write or just fall asleep alone. Time alone was something Noah cherished, he was finding out on this experience of very little time alone. The idea of a roommate was somewhat stifling to him after years of having enjoyed his own room back home. Strangely enough this very concern was on Arthur’s frantic mind. As he paced he vented his thoughts to Noah.

“They really mean it when they say you get no privacy, you know. Not a moment to yourself. Always in the fishbowl. You never know when you’ll have a moment to yourself.”

“Was that the article by the girl who was a volunteer in Kiribati, because I—“

Arthur didn’t notice the interruption. “My brother was a volunteer in Mali a few years back, the seventies. He taught in a secondary school. Not two minutes after a shower, he’d be in his room dressing and there’d be a pair of eyes. A student peeking in the window to see how the white man lives.”

“I guess the curiosity just—“

“Well, this went on for weeks on end, a different kid or group of kids each day, peeking in the window. Finally he—“ Noah thought he could see Arthur’s pessimistic world view rising, dough in a pan, as he related his tale. What had pushed him to such fear and excitement?

“Finally he couldn’t take it any more and he chased the kid away with a stick, and then the trouble really started” The guy in Arthur’s story must not have read the literature that said “you live in a fishbowl” when you live as a Peace Corps volunteer.

It was spelled out for them during the application process, during the interview process, but other volunteers returning home, and in a hundred little hints given in any travel book about any country where “westerners” were not a majority. People simply looked at strangers quite a bit, especially children who had never seen the strangers. A white man entering the Solomon Islands that year was much the same level of fascinating as a black man visiting a small city in Japan. Everyone has a look. Some people have a stare. It’s not pleasant but it’s natural.

“It’s only natural for people to stare, Arthur.”

“I know that’s true. It’s just that I’m ready for that part of the experience to be over.” Ready for it to be over? Hell, it hadn’t even begun. What the heck, thought Noah, I’ll share some psychology stuff too, as long as we’re at it.

“I really think I’m going to like the people-staring-at-me part. You wanna know why? I was pretty lonely as a kid. Big house, lots of sibs, I didn’t get a lot of attention. You had to be loud or injured to get much attention at our house.” He thought as he spoke, this is letting your guard down. From now on this nutty guy’s going to consider you his buddy, and follow you around the way he was following Edgar around at the visit to Lars’s research center.

“That’s opposite of me. I had a ton of attention. Only two of us and my brother gone a lot.”

“Two parents?”

“Yep. Divorce?”

“Not only that”, said Noah dramatically, “but a second divorce. Mom got remarried right away to an even weirder guy than Dad.”

“Whoa. And did he have more kids that he added to the mix?”

Noah felt strange about the conversation. As if Arthur were going to keep track of all he said to use it as gossip or blackmail later. Paranoia, infectious? It was Arthur who had all the concerns about privacy, so would he be protective of others’ privacy? For a second, it seemed like a funny idea to talk to Arthur about drugs or group sex, just to see if word would get around. A crazy notion.

“Do you think they have much in the way of divorce here?”

“I bet they don’t. But I also know there’s quite a lot of missionary work here. Traditionally, probably divorces weren’t too common. But you see foreign influence and you see alcohol and gambling and people moving to town, then you sure see divorce, I guess.” Arthur continued for a while in the same vein, for a little too long.

Noah cocked his head sideways as if to let a word or two fall from his ear to his brain. Weren’t he and Arthur the “foreign influence”? Was divorce really something that “Europeans” brought with them? What about the theory that the locals might have freely divorced one another until the missionaries came along and told them God meant for women and men to stay married for life. Noah saw a momentary picture of his mother and father, having to stay together despite their dislike for one another.

After holding forth for quite some time, Arthur shocked his roommate by suggesting they ought to turn in rather than wear themselves out with the cultural talk. “We have plenty of culture to live, I reckon”, he declared. It would be a relief to de-focus from the aura of weird that was Arthur. As Noah dozed off he toyed with naming the phases he’d seen Arthur seamlessly cycle through: scared watcher on the plane; eager boss-follower at Lars’s house; fretting paranoid at the dinner; jabbering academic after supper. What fueled all this? Not just the stress of the trip, or the whole resort would feel like a getaway for wigged out Americans.

Originally Written 2003-2005