White Dog Fell from the Sky - By Eleanor Morse Page 0,32

lilac.

Lawrence was in a doctoral program in economics. Alice was in anthropology. Lawrence’s extended family sprawled like the lilacs. She loved them, perhaps more than she loved him. His sister, Wren, his brothers, Howard and Jeremy, his empty-headed young niece, Dahlia, his bulky aunts and rumbling uncles, and especially a caustic great uncle who lived alone not far from them and dressed impeccably, a silk cravat hiding his stringy old neck.

After Lawrence had successfully defended his thesis, his adviser told him of a job in newly independent Botswana in the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning. As soon as Lawrence told Alice it would be good for his career, she knew he’d be going. He left Providence in June and asked her to visit the following summer when she’d be working on her thesis.

After he left, his letters were full of his work, and when she thought back on them, not very interesting. But something in her wouldn’t let him go. It all felt promising. She went to Botswana that next summer to visit a man she thought she might marry. From Providence to London, from London to Johannesburg. From Johannesburg, she boarded a night train to Mafeking, and in the morning changed trains for Gaborone. When she woke somewhere between Mafeking and the border of Botswana, a bleached and pitiless landscape stretched forth, with no sign of human habitation. Only when the train stopped at small stations could she see that the land was peopled with children, dozens of them, selling beads and mopane worms and carved wooden statues stained with mahogany-colored shoe polish. Few people on the train bought anything, but the children’s voices were high and loud and their hands empty of food. From a young sculptor, she bought a soapstone carving of a boy’s face. The chin was long and eager, the lips full, with small vertical cracks carved into them.

When the train arrived in Gaborone, she caught sight of Lawrence before he saw her. He was wearing a safari suit and moved with an ease she hadn’t seen in him before. His face had filled out, and he looked large and healthy. His straight brown hair, which had once hung in his eyes, was combed back from his forehead.

He held her carefully by the shoulders, and they kissed each other on the lips. The veldt had slipped into his eyes. For some reason she thought she might have gotten the wrong person, that perhaps she was kissing Lawrence’s brother. She touched his cheek and mouth with two fingers, like a blind woman.

She was dazed by the strangeness around her: women carrying their babies on their backs, tightly bound to them like bandages, the sound of Setswana, the train station with its tea shop, the dust that hung in the air and caught in the throat, the smell of rotting vegetables. Sights and sounds and smells poured through her. A boy gnawed on a long piece of sugar cane. A donkey stood tethered to a cart loaded with wood, its eyes clotted with flies.

Lawrence took her elbow and led her to his pickup truck. His flat was undistinguished, part of a Type I government building that adjoined another flat and another after that, with an enclosed piece of ground in back where a clothesline hung. Underneath the clothesline was baked dirt, swept clean of vegetation and surrounded by a chain-link fence. Inside, the government-issue furniture was tinted the same shoe polish color as the wooden carvings the children had been hawking on the train platform.

While Lawrence went to the bathroom, she sat at the table and took the covers off the food that Dikeledi, his servant, had cooked. Strips of beef sat sullenly in a metal bowl beside another bowl that held white rice, scooped into a sticky ball; in another were little round squashes cut into halves. On the far end of the table was some kind of tinned fruit with a pitcher of custard sauce beside it. Lawrence sat down, and they served themselves. Dikeledi was in the kitchen, and then the door shut behind her, and Alice heard her shouting to friends in the backyard.

She felt suddenly forlorn.

The beef was tough and dowsed with black pepper. She told Lawrence it was good. In those days, she didn’t set out to tell lies, but the truth was often buried under politeness. In fact, the rice was without salt, the squashes watery like something that had been strangled and drowned. Lawrence held her hand after