by Kristen Rainey
Hawthorne Fellow Fall 2012
When not working at her corporate job in sustainability, Kristen Rainey enjoys drinking hoppy I.P.A. and biking to food carts in her home of the hour, Portland, OR.
When I got back from Morocco, doctors and hairdressers told me different things. My hair loss might be caused by stress, they said. Or birth control pills. Or a change in diet. Check. Check. Check. I was a science experiment with too many variables. So I did what I could. I started shampooing more gently, patting my head gingerly with shampoo foam. I avoided brushing my hair. What would happen, I wondered, if it all fell out?
In Morocco, certainly there had been the stress of moving to a new country and starting a new job, especially with the rush of my arrival. The Al-Akhawayn School of Ifrane had a last minute vacancy for a Social Studies teacher who would teach World History to the 9th and 10th graders, North African History to the 11th graders, and Sociology to the 12th graders. Had I taught any of those subjects before? No. But I’d been wanting to live in Morocco since college, when I saw all kinds of parallels between desert architecture of the American Southwest and desert architecture of North Africa. I wanted to spend time over there exploring how climate shapes our dwellings. I also needed something to do for a year while I wrote grad school applications for the following year. I accepted the job on a Monday and touched down in Ifrane 48 hours later, with enough time to sleep a few hours before the first day of classes.
So there was that stress, for sure. The paperwork. The jet lag. The flights. The Arabic that I didn’t understand. The rules of what to do and what to avoid in this Muslim community.
But all these changes were manageable. I’d done this before. Not the moving to Morocco part, but the moving to new places part. Culture shock was familiar. Despite the frustrations and questions and confusion that occurred on a daily basis when I moved to a new country, I had found a strange sort of comfort in being outside my element.
The stress making my hair fall out wasn’t about Morocco. It was about loss, I suppose. And a guy named Mark. Yes, he’d been a boyfriend once. We hung out for nine months of the three years I lived in Tahoe. Not a long relationship, you note. In my book, it was a world record, but that’s not really the point. We had met while waiting to get adjustments at the chiropractor’s office. He wasn’t the first, nor would he be the last, to feign interest in my web design company as a way to get my phone number. Conveniently, he lived in the same neighborhood, and I would cut through trails to get to and from his house, which made my heart race when it was pitch black. We’d already broken up by the time he fell to his death while climbing the Eichorn Pinnacle in Yosemite, but the news took the wind out of my sails. I didn’t digest it right away; my good friend Rosie called to tell me. I hung up the phone and went about my day. It wasn’t until several hours later that the finality of it sunk in, and I found myself on the floor a lot over the new few weeks, as if my body knew instinctively that the certainty of the ground was the only thing I could count on.
Arriving in Morocco only a few months later, I couldn’t introduce myself at my first faculty meeting by saying, “Hi, I’m the new Social Studies teacher. And I’m grieving, by the way.” They wouldn’t know what I was experiencing, nor had they ever known Mark. I needed to deal with it on my own.
At his funeral, I’d learned he’d been seeing someone else after me. How much overlap there was between the other woman and me is something I’ll never know, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Are you allowed to be pissed off at someone who’s dead? Especially at his funeral? Or is it like a tree falling in a forest with nobody around to hear it? Sound needs a recipient eardrum to fulfill its definition. Maybe anger needs a living recipient. No, that’s dumb and not even logical. I was pissed off, whether he was above the ground or below it.
There were things that gnawed at me while we were together. The little things, like Playboy magazines lying around his living room coffee table when we first started seeing each other. There was the obliviousness with which he sped around curves on his motorcycle with me on the back, my white knuckles gripped around the chrome seat stay. During my first foray into ice climbing, he climbed down to me while I was ascending and criticized my technique. While en route to a wedding, he yelled at me for letting a wedding invitation (with directions) fly out of the window on the highway. (Between you and me, they’d fallen out during the hour that he’d been in the passenger seat and I’d taken the wheel). Despite hastily throwing on some fancy clothes (i.e; dress-tie-Tevas) in the parking lot to save time once we’d finally arrived, we still missed the ceremony. Then, by way of introduction, a friend of his asked if I was twelve.
And there were the bigger things, like rudeness to waitresses. I said no tomatoes! What part of that didn’t you understand? Or his inability to commit beyond the right now. If we’re still talking in February, he’d say in December, there’s a wedding we can go to. Or the racial slurs that slipped out during one weekend away, which triggered lots of questions from me followed by my hyperventilating tears. It’s easy to underestimate the power of new birth control pills, which made me a hormonal eruption that summer. After years of eyebrow raising at my mom’s sniffling during sentimental movies, suddenly I was a total fire hose. But it wasn’t just the pills. It was also the realization that this was never going to work long-term. Having lived all over the globe, embracing differences was part of my DNA; for Mark, he confessed that part of his comfort in Tahoe was its total lack of diversity.
Mark was 47 when we met, but you never would have known it. Like clockwork, he’d be the one calling friends 20 years younger at 5 am to get their asses out of bed. They’d throw skins on their skis to hike up mountains and then ski down before most people had finished breakfast. He thrived on that friendly competition, the testosterone fest that often accompanied group excursions.
And it was hard to say no to him. Whether he was convincing you to try a new sport or going head to head with you drinking shots at his kitchen counter, his energy was over the moon. That was the part of him I loved; the ugly part I managed to tuck under the carpet.
“Creature?” he called out late one night from outside my bedroom door. I bolted upright. He was the only one who called me that. And nobody ever used the door of my bedroom loft, which connected to the outside of the house and descended to the woods via a staircase. I used that door often in the middle of the night to avoid descending three flights to the indoor bathroom. I never knew if my neighbors watched me squat and pee into a large empty Stonyfield Farm yogurt container and then hurl the contents into the woods. I didn’t really care. I did care that Mark’s warm, living body was outside my door, and that he was clearly back, and safe, after three weeks of zero news whatsoever during his climbing trip in Switzerland.
About eight months after we’d broken up, I returned a book to him the day before I moved away from Tahoe. I was finally feeling claustrophobic in that town for the very reasons Mark remained there. I was also tired of the limited career options a ski town provided; the monthly stress to pay my rent had started to outweigh the bliss of my outdoor activities there. Standing in his living room, bantering back and forth about nothing, I realized with surprise Mark and I had finally reached a point where I saw a friendship in sight.