The Consulate Lawn
I’ve got that pre-solo trip nervousness, that top-of-the-waterslide gulp. The very notion of a writing residency – self-imposed exile for a month, away from my adopted city, back to my passport country – suddenly seems preposterous, like taking a naked walk at midnight around the neighborhood. What’s the point of shedding everything?
As I choose which books to take, various worries – what if the writing doesn’t come? What if the communal dinners are painfully awkward? – step forward like it’s Open Mike Anxiety Night, and suddenly everyone has something they want to share. Most of them are rude haikus, dismissive blurtings-out. Others are longings beginning to throb before I’ve even left: the murmuring documentary from the room next door affirming my husband’s invisible presence; the neighbor across the street, smoking again; the yellow circle of lamp from my desk: how will I stay whole without these familiar fragments assuming their solid shape inside of me?
The neighbor goes inside, and I will not see him for another month. I wish I were better at this. You’d think after so many moves I would be more cavalier about a month-long trip; you’d think I’d excel at leaving.
In Shanghai, in 1992, we were occasionally invited to play softball games on the American consulate’s lawn. Or perhaps the softball games were simply the casual byproduct of a picnic for US citizens. I remember entering the gates, the high walls around us, the astonishingly plush grass, the rise and fall of American accents and American laughter, as comforting and stunning as the sight of your white brick house after a long trip, waiting on you. We had sold our house in Atlanta, and wouldn’t be going back. But the consulate grass smelled like belonging, as opposed to the dusty bamboo outside.
Now, more than twenty years later, having chosen to live abroad in Germany, I wonder what Virginia will smell like. Will I feel like I’m inside the consulate’s gates? Or will it be more like walking through Shanghai’s streets in the near dark, watching the locals hurry home with an outsider’s shy regard?
