Leaving Before the Rains Come by Alexandra Fuller Page B

that discipline,” he confesses on the tapes. “Bit awkward with someone of my temperament.” So, in Dad’s telling, he fled England (“An aunt and half a dozen cousins in every county”) for a farm-laborer job in Canada, found it cold and alcoholically dry; tried a stint in the West Indies, where he stayed until his bar bill exceeded his salary; went to Kenya to see a giraffe and met my mother. And she, fresh from the confines of dreary finishing school in London (“Tweedy lesbians and boiled cabbage,” she says), was ready for the sort of adventure he promised. “Tim Fuller of No Fixed Abode,” he introduced himself. Which would have rung out as a warning to anyone else, but manifested as a mating cry to Mum.
    Ten years into my own marriage, when it was becoming clear that Charlie had receded from me, or that I had flowed out beyond his reach, maybe irrevocably, I asked Mum if she had any advice about being married, or (more to the point) staying married. I was home on the farm from the States, it was early morning and we were a little hungover, inspecting the fishponds before the heat of the day could really pick up. The dogs, as usual, were spilling all around us, scaring up pigeons and grasshoppers.
    Mum frowned at me and, thinking she hadn’t heard, I repeated the question. “No, no, no, I heard you perfectly well the first time,” she said. She dusted flies away from her ears. “Oh Bobo, I don’t know. Marry the right chap to begin with, I suppose.” And then she whistled for the dogs and marched on ahead. It occurred to me then that Mum had probably never thought of herself as
married.
She just sailed on with life as she saw fit, and Dad, smitten with her, more or less steered from the stern, occasionally shouting (usually unheeded) words of warning.
    By all logic and by any standards, my parents should have spun away from one another years ago. Together they had lost three children, a war, a few farms, and for a while my mother had seriously lost her mind. And yet they incorporated these losses into their marriage along with what they had gained, assigning very little in the way of either blame or praise almost anywhere. They put no more weight on despair than they did on joy. The way they did love was also the way they did tragedy, as if it was all an inevitable part of the gift of being alive. It was rare for my parents to make a production out of their tragedies unless sometimes, drunk, the past eddied out in Mum’s mind and she was caught in the circulation of her old grief for a day or a week or a season until the sorrow passed.
    “I was just bloody lucky to find your mother,” my father told me after breakfast when I asked him the same question. “No one else would have put up with me.” He thumbed some tobacco into his pipe and tapped it down. “Anyway, we’ve always given each other heaps of room.” Then he added, as if this mattered more than anything, “Whole bloody acres of room.” He clamped his pipe between his teeth and lit it. “Yep, that’s it. Acres and acres of room.” Dad set his cards out for a game of solitaire. “Now,” he said. “Let’s see what sort of day we’re going to have.” By Dad’s questionable reckoning, if his game came out, the day would be good. If it didn’t come out, Dad cheated and the day would still be good. “Win-win,” he said.
    I watched Dad’s hands hovering over his old cards, sticky with spilled tea and dog hair. I remained confused: Charlie and I seemed to have nothing but acres of room between us, and my parents, who had the kind of marriage to which I thought it worth aspiring, had none. They had lived, worked, and played together for the better part of forty years. Their tastes have cleaved and overlapped; they share bathwater, silently conceding that the grubbiest person goes last; they sleep under the claustrophobic confines of a single mosquito net. I said, “That’s absolute rubbish, Dad. You give each other no room