How to Read the Air by Dinaw Mengestu

Author:Dinaw Mengestu [Mengestu, Dinaw]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: United States, Children of Immigrants, Family Life, General, Literary, Ethiopia, Ethiopians - United States, Ethiopians, Fiction, Cultural Heritage
ISBN: 9781449832858
Google: KBFcMJ82jXIC
Amazon: 1449832857
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2010-10-14T07:00:00+00:00

When I came back home that night, I found Angela already in bed, sitting propped up with all the pillows on her side and a dense legal text in front of her. She didn’t say anything when I walked through the door and neither did I. When did we become like this? Looking back now, I would have to say it was sometime shortly after we had gotten married and had supposedly settled onto the smooth track of our lives and careers. Of course, it’s not our jobs that I blame. We had each wanted to varying degrees settled, stable lives that would serve as a counterweight to our own panicked childhoods and the wanderings of our parents. That was one of the first things that had brought us together—a shared vow, as sacred as if not more so than our wedding vows, that we would never be like the people who brought us into this world. We had promised each other as much as soon as we moved in together. There on that bed on which she now sat pretending to read, oblivious and indifferent to me, we had said things like “I never want to raise my voice in anger at you,” and “We’ll make this into the happiest smallest apartment in the city,” and “I fight every day at work. I don’t want to with you.”

Which one of us said what hardly mattered anymore since we had failed on all accounts, and perhaps that was the greatest source of our disappointment with each other—that despite what we may have said we were finding that we were still perhaps only a few degrees away from what came before.

In hindsight it makes perfect sense that that should have been the night we finally began to talk about bringing our relationship to an end. The evening was already full of attempted closure, and so why not add one more.

Shortly after I got into bed, Angela, without ever looking up from her book or taking off her reading glasses, said, “You know, we don’t have to stay like this.” And at first I thought by “this” she meant the cold, silent treatment we were giving each other, but then I noticed that she hadn’t looked at me and clearly wasn’t planning to, at which point I understood the true intent of her words.

“No,” I said. “We don’t have to do anything.”

“What does that even mean. ‘We don’t have to do anything.’ That’s what you come up with. I say we can end this marriage and you say, ‘We don’t have to do anything.’”

It was one of Angela’s specialties to repeat my words back to me twice—the first time to prove how little they meant, the second time to show how obvious they were compared to hers. Years ago, in a moment of good humor, she told me that she would someday compile the Jonas Woldemariam Book of Clichés.

“I have them all here in my head,” she said, “beginning with the very first one you told me on our first date.

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