The Family Tabor

After she unwrapped the present, her mother said, “A little explanation. The book is a vivid account of Samoan adolescent life and was incredibly popular, although eventually Margaret Mead and her research methods came under harsh attack. She was smack in the middle of a scholarly-scientific wrangling that began in the mid-1920s and has yet to be conclusively determined, the nature-versus-nurture debate. To what extent are human personality and behavior the products of biological factors, like the genetics you’ve inherited from Daddy and his ancestors and from me and mine, or are products of cultural factors, like where you live, how you’re being raised, the school you attend, the music you listen to, the television shows you watch, the friends you have. You are now a teenager and it’s important you learn to distinguish between the two so you can make thoughtful decisions from your head, rather than automatic ones, perhaps from your heart, whose underpinnings are harder to understand.”

Her mother was a prominent child psychologist and often said to her children, “You can do anything you want if you have thought it through and are capable of articulating your reasoning. In other words, so long as you can show your work.”

What Camille had already determined was that she wanted a life that was anything but quotidian, ordinary, middling, mediocre, words she knew and never wanted used to describe the life she would have, the person she would become. At home, she wasn’t at all surrounded by the quotidian, but the fear was so deep, she was sure she’d been born with it. Who she would actually be and what she would actually do was all hazy in her head, until she devoured Coming of Age in Samoa by the redoubtable Margaret Mead.

She read that birthday book many times, but it was the first reading that set her on her path, when Camille knew she would become a social anthropologist, studying exotic tribes in exotic places, researching their rules of behavior, their interpersonal relations, their views on kinship and marriage, their motivations and ambitions, their language, customs, forms of currency, music, stories, and material creations, their taboos, ethos, moral codes, the nature of their self-governance, their notions and beliefs about the communal world in which they existed, the gods they prayed to, the visions that manifested in their dreams.

By the time she delivered her valedictory speech to her graduating class at Palm Springs High, she had stormed through all the ethnographies, memoirs, autobiographies, collected correspondence, and biographies by and about every female social anthropologist she could find. They became Camille’s personal heroines.

She entered the University of Washington, thrilled to be facing a lengthy and arduous education. She thought fortitude should be required to become an expert in the rarest field, so temporally and spatially expansive it touched on everything in the world.

At nineteen, light-years ahead of her fellow collegians who hadn’t any idea what interested them, she knew she intended to spend her life in unruly, woolly places beyond the pale, engaged in on-the-ground research, discovering, analyzing, reflecting, and publishing her own important ethnographies, adding to the understanding of humanity.

She was a natural, cruising through the intro and second-level anthropology courses, through biology, statistics, research methods, data analysis, and chose Polynesian as her first foreign language, because of Margaret Mead. She declared her major early, was admitted to the university’s highly competitive and selective Anthropology Honors Program, took the 300- and 400-level courses, accomplished her yearlong honors project in ten months, graduated first in her class with a BA.

Then on to her master’s, with its first-year core curriculum and evaluation, its second-year sequence of courses in ethnographic methods and research design, and the completion of a research competency paper.

Then on to her PhD, demonstrating her fluency in Polynesian and, by then, also in Abo, a Bantu language spoken in the Moungo department in southwestern Cameroon, and in Kilivila, spoken on the Trobriand Islands. She passed the general exam, acquired training and experience in teaching at the university level, and finally, nearing the summit of the mountain she’d been climbing all those years, the creation of her own research project, which, like her heroines’, would birth new ways of understanding one tiny world, and, through extrapolation, the great big one.

It did not affect her that her friends, colleagues, and siblings, scholarship completed, had begun making serious salaries, were renting large and lovely apartments, acquiring the trappings of burgeoning achievement, because no matter what they accomplished, their lives were known, while hers would always be of breathtaking mystery, and that was the barometer by which she measured her personal success. The university gave her a stipend for teaching. Her tiny apartment, where she’d been since her junior undergraduate year, had an aura of impermanent student lodging warmed up with walls she frequently repainted in cheery colors, and, doing her part to reduce the rampant waste of fickle people, she filled with discarded furniture that was perfectly usable, stenciling on quaint polka dots and stripes when her brain required a break. It was home with a very small h and all that she needed.

And new in her life then was Valentine Osin, her Russian-Jewish lover, the two of them burning for each other from the first moment they met at the university’s omni-anthropology cocktail party for doctoral candidates. She had never before been so spontaneously attracted to a man, and never to a man who was all heavy beard and worn denim. But there was an intensity between them she had never experienced, and never thought of denying. She’d had bad luck dating nonanthropologists, and that Valentine Osin was a physical anthropologist of the Leakey variety only further increased his mammoth appeal.

That he was Jewish was irrelevant—she didn’t believe in any of it—she was sold, instead, by his accent, trimmed away and smoothed over, but retaining the hint of otherness she preferred, and by his upbringing in a town on the outskirts of a forest, and by their deep conversations, and by their impassioned sex, his swiftness, his directness, the way he could shake her up with the slightest touch, the way he stared at her as if she were a greater achievement than his eventually winning the Charles R. Darwin Lifetime Award. They were equally matched, in restless and driven natures, the desire to live unparalleled lives.

Their insistent love was only six months old when she began thinking about where she would go for her doctoral research. Her heart had pounded and her fingers had trembled when she pulled from the pages of Coming of Age in Samoa, the list she had maintained since the age of thirteen, of tribes who dwelled in untamed places. A precious list she had amended and revised, that grew smudged and torn, that reflected changes in her handwriting, the list from which she would find a people she could call her own for a while, in a place where she would put down temporary roots.

She quickly crossed out the isolated Amazon tribes. Interaction with them, the study of them, was prohibited by non-engagement policies at last put into place, to preserve their isolation and their lands; a safeguarding with the dual purpose of resisting further exploitative encroachments into the rainforest and protecting it for the environmental health of the entire planet.

But there was serious anxiety when she began crossing out contactable tribes already claimed by others.

Then near panic, until she found the name of one virginal tribe she had scribbled in pencil: the Sentineli, a Stone Age tribe on the Andaman Islands, in an archipelago in the Bay of Bengal, between India and Myanmar.

In the anthro library, she found scant research on them, which impelled her hope. All she could learn was that they were an uncontacted people who spoke an unclassified language, who used arrows for hunting, harpoons for fishing, and untipped javelins for shooting at those who dared to encroach. They had been fending off researchers since 1880, and although they weren’t necessarily cannibals, they did often display heads on warning stakes. She imagined herself the first social anthropologist to befriend that protective hunter-gatherer tribe, the first to learn their unclassified language, to capture that language in what would become the seminal Sentineli dictionary.

She wrote up her findings, her intentions, the ethical and methodologically sound research she would perform in the Andaman Islands, but when her adviser, Dr. Jin, saw Sentineli on the cover he said, “I was hoping you wouldn’t alight on them. I don’t need to read anything else. The answer is absolutely not. The tribe has been classified not merely as uncontacted, but as uncontactable and too dangerous. The Indian government would likely refuse you a permit for those reasons. Choose another tribe, in another place.”

She had called Valentine, and he was sympathetic, but the frequent futility of his work, of physical anthropology itself, eliminated his ability to understand that this was the first time she was experiencing such futility. She’d hung up, heartbroken to find herself in the wrong era. In the 1800s and early 1900s, when her heroines were out in the field, dozens of untouched tribes in unexplored locales were up for grabs. But in the hypermodern twenty-first century, with travel to remote places standard and Google mapping uncovering the most distant rock, there was no accessible tribe left whose existence had not already been the subject of cogent boots-on-the-ground participant observation, and somehow she, who missed nothing, had missed this cardinal piece of intelligence.

When she’d worn herself out crying bitterly, she searched her shelves for one of the books written by the lambent creator of modern social anthropology. Published in 1929, the title had a patronizing hegemonic tone that nonetheless encouraged one’s prurient curiosity to see what was inside. Of course, she knew what was inside, but she sat upright on her frayed old couch and read Bronislaw Malinowski’s The Sexual Life of Savages again, first page to last, as the hot pot of coffee by her side cooled to mud.

When she finished, she thought: So she would not be the first explorer on the Trobriand Islands. So she would not be following in any of the footsteps of those women responsible for directing her life path, but rather in the man’s, in Malinowski’s, who had established the imperative of researching a tribe, not from comfortable university library chairs, but out in the field with the people one was studying, engaging in their community, eating their food, taking part in their everyday lives, and she decided that wouldn’t be so bad, not at all. (She wouldn’t have admitted to her staunchly feminist friends that there was something appealing about following a pseudo father figure.) Plus, she already spoke Kilivila.

Malinowski had done all the heavy lifting there, but she would go anyway to those seemingly very happy islands in Melanesia, where sex reigned, and if luck was with her she would add to the knowledge about them her own penetrating and revelatory findings, hopefully as groundbreaking as his.

Which is what she did: two years in the Trobriand Islands, researching every aspect of the Trobrianders’ lives and how those lives had been altered and impacted by the researchers who had come before her. Then fourteen months writing her dissertation, working at the anthro library, eating dinners and having sex with Valentine. Physically, she was in Seattle, but mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and psychically, she remained in Melanesia, carrying with her the Trobrianders’ vibrancy, their lust for life, who she was there, doing the work she relished. And then she had gone topsy-turvy, crashing hard the very afternoon she successfully defended her work. After the kudos, and the back pats, and the champagne toasts with Dr. Jin and the oral-defense examiners, she walked home through campus, seeing the late-summer colors bleeding away, the greens and golds turning pale, then transparent, and by the time she reached her apartment, her life force was gone. She was no longer the Camille she had always been.

Months passed in which her bed became her safe place, her bedroom a cave, the blinds shuttered to hide the cheeriness of the walls, the phone ringing and ringing, the messages piling up and never returned, Valentine bringing her soup, singing to her, leaving reluctantly when she did not respond to his words, to his overtures, and his patience was worn. Then in late December a knock on her door, and Dr. Jin was standing there. “So you’re here, Camille. I’ve sent you dozens of emails, left you numerous phone messages. I thought maybe you were away on a long holiday and hadn’t let me know. Then I ran into Dr. Osin and he told me what’s been going on. Dress and come to my office.”

She managed to shower, to wash her matted hair, then stared at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were cloudy and red-rimmed, and how weird that she’d forgotten their light hazel hue. She was the only one in the family without dark, darker, or darkest brown eyes, and her father used to tease her, calling her “Witch Hazel.” She’d hated that nickname as a kid, like glass shattering inside, but looking into her eyes, she finally understood what he’d been trying to teach her: that humor could coexist with seriousness, that she had needed to find the humor in herself even at that young age. She could hear him saying, “Come on, Witch Hazel, smile,” and she tried smiling at her reflection, but it was impossible. Still, with her father closer to her heart, it was a little easier to pull on dusty jeans and a wrinkled shirt and, under cover of a large orange umbrella, make her way in teeming rain to Dr. Jin’s office on campus.

“Sit,” Dr. Jin had said, handing her a fragile cup of green tea. “This happens to the most committed social anthropologists. Your world in the Trobriand Islands, kept alive through all the work on your dissertation, it’s still more real to you than this one, isn’t it?”

She had nodded.

“I know how difficult it can be to reenter one’s former life. I wish I had an instant fix for you. Sadly, there aren’t any assistant professorships available right now. I could make a few calls, to American Anthropologist, Anthropological Quarterly, Cultural Anthropology, Ethnology, Oceania, see whether they have a rare vacancy. I haven’t heard of any, but I’m happy to double-check.”

She had shaken her head slowly because it hurt to make abrupt moves in the brightness of his clean office. “Dr. Jin, I think I just need another expedition, to be back out there. Is there a new one I could join? I don’t have to lead it, just be a team member.”

It had been Dr. Jin’s turn to shake his head. “No university-funded expeditions here or anywhere for the next two years. But even if there was, based on what Val Osin tells me, months barely functioning, you wouldn’t pass the psych eval right now.

“Here’s a way you could retrench. Return to the Trobriands by diving back into your dissertation. Take yourself to the library and try turning it into a book. Not a study that, alas, few will read these days, but something for a broad audience. There are publishers who would be interested in exciting nonfiction based on the real-life adventures of a young and interesting scientist. I know a few. When you’re ready, I could reach out to them on your behalf.

“It has real potential, Camille, a young woman who investigated the sexual practices of other young women living in a very different society. It’s been a long time since Malinowski’s Savages, and other than refuted Mead, with the adolescent Samoans, never investigated by a woman.”

“I was more intrigued by other aspects I researched,” she’d said, the words falling from her mouth one by one, and Dr. Jin nodded repeatedly. “Yes, of course. And I understand. But times are different now, not much call for ethnographies. And it’s very disappointing, but sex sells. From what I’ve been told, it also greatly helps if the young and interesting scientist is actually in the book.”

A nod was the most she could muster. She placed the fragile cup of untouched green tea on his uncluttered desk and left. The rain was still teeming, but the umbrella remained rolled up tight by her side. She had no energy for any project, but an exploitive tale about the Trobrianders and sex, with herself as a character? It was exactly what she couldn’t do: replace the wildness of the Trobriand Islands with an airless library, reduce her vibrant experiences into a trite narrative, massage that extraordinary time—the raucous freedom, the exploration of others, the bonding with people so unlike herself—into something so frivolous.

When she reached home, she was soaked through, more hopeless than before.

Since that meeting with Jin, she hasn’t so much as glanced at her dissertation, seven hundred pages of text, another two hundred of graphs, statistics, citations, and sources, thick as a tombstone gathering dust on her kitchen table. In fact, she doesn’t even notice it anymore, when she drops her keys next to it, or sits down to eat a quick meal.

Although never one to ask for help, when her depression did not lift, she took herself to the university counseling office. The counselor-in-training was useless, said only, “Wow, so you lived among natives, wild. Must be great to be back in the real world,” then adjusted her necklace. Camille didn’t bother seeking out a different counselor. She had no confidence anyone else would understand her nature more clearly and felt only exhaustion thinking about repeating her story again, explaining all the reasons why that other world remained realer to her than this one—the Trobrianders’ love for one another, their ties to the earth and the sky, their belief in rituals and magic. She decided to nurture herself with long walks every day, and applauded herself when she managed to do so sometimes.

On the last day of last year, on one of those walks, she stopped at a row of free-paper kiosks and took one she’d not read before. At home on the old couch, she flipped through it and came to a picture and article about the House of Lilac Love. She recognized the pretty lilac-painted building, not far from her apartment, but would never have guessed it was a hospice. As she read about the people cared for there, she imagined them as a tribe of the dying, and a minute amount of her vanished strength made itself known, enough to pick up the phone and inquire whether any jobs were available.

It had felt odd interviewing for a job that didn’t include discussions about prior tribe contact, what the research hoped to reveal, the term of the expedition, housing accommodations, shots required for travel, but there was Patty Donaldson, the head of Lilac Love, who looked to Camille like a highly experienced team leader. She had army hair, a crew cut strictly maintained, gigantic hoops in her ears, an easy laugh. Her bulk was crammed into a well-tailored Day-Glo lime-green pantsuit, and when she shook Camille’s hand, she said, “I like to be a splash of color for everyone. Now let’s talk about you,” and then exclaimed over Camille’s background, her experience in fieldwork, expressing veneration for her accomplishments, and her certainty that someone highly trained in dedicated listening would be a great addition. With Patty’s unceasing, honest smile aimed directly at her, Camille had felt the slightest renewing of what once had been her natural optimism.

Since January, for the last seven and a half months, she has been working as an end-of-life caregiver at Lilac Love. It is a job for which she needed no formal training: she does not insert needles into veins, or clear phlegm from throats, or dispense morphine, or arrange and empty bedpans. There are compassionate nurses for all of those tasks, selfless women who sail through the place like loving spirits. Now, five or six days a week, Camille wakes early, showers, dresses in clean and pressed clothes, fills up her thermos with her special coffee blend, makes a sack lunch, and walks to the hospice, to sit by bedsides, to ask questions that encourage exhausted tongues to recount their owners’ stories, to write dictated letters to family and friends, sometimes loving letters, sometimes letters filled with angst, sometimes letters filled with vituperative hatred aimed like poison-tipped darts at their intended recipients—as sharp, surely, as those arrows the Stone Age Sentineli carried and Dr. Jin prevented her from viewing up close. She can honestly say she feels most at home in that small, vertical palace where futures are preordained.

When she has tried to explain this inexplicable shift in her focus to Valentine, his inquisition leaves her shrugging her shoulders, and he, increasingly frustrated by her curious new inability to express herself in terms he can understand, says, “Yes, yes, I know, the Trobrianders sucked all the life right out of you, but you’ve got to pull it together. And what I don’t understand is your new fascination with death.”

To Valentine, death has no immediacy; it has been reduced to the examination of skeletons, the unlocking of genes, the analyzing of migratory patterns, and dust. His pursuit of the dead shares nothing with her experiences, the way the process of death has parameters, permutations, crosses enigmatic boundaries. That they view death differently did not bother her, but his admonishment hurt, because the funny thing was, she thought she was starting to pull it together. That the desolate period of her life, ragged and ugly, the very definition of quotidian before she started at Lilac Love, was tapering off. She’s no longer in the trough of the black depression into which she sank; the blackness is fading into a pallid gray, the depression softening into a lassitude, although when she’s home by herself it reverts to inertia. It is too soon, she knows, to figure out how to resume her prior life; she still can’t imagine how she once possessed such gargantuan dreams, such energy.

But she’s awake every morning, sometimes before the alarm, interested in where she is going, and there is something so restful about being among the dying. Not those who are still denying, or angry, or bargaining, or depressed—the first four stages of Kübler-Ross’s American model for death and dying, which she has now learned all about—but those who have reached the fifth and last stage, acceptance. Those people, who have accepted their outcome, are extraordinary. They aren’t at all what she expected. She thought she’d find them huddled up to their gods, worn or new Bibles close by, and she, a disbeliever, would have nothing to say to them, would be unable to find common ground. A few do hang onto old remnants, but most have no atavistic reliance on religion, have cast away what they might have been taught in childhood, despite the crosses or Jewish stars hanging around old necks, lost beneath heavy drifts of wrinkles. Few prayers are uttered; they have left behind the realm of hope, seek no last-minute godly redemptions, no heightened revelations, are instead most interested in assessing all those years in which they put on their faces and their suits and braved the act of living. Had they lived? Truly lived? Lived enough? “No,” they say, it is never enough, but no god is going to set things right at this late date. “Don’t waste time on any of that nonsense,” they tell her repeatedly. “I won’t,” she says.

But it’s more complex than that. Her unbelieving is giving way to a belief in all the variants of the holy, those she learned from her anthropological studies, those she observed in the Trobriand Islands, those she’s apprehending in these rooms listening to the multitude of ways in which these men and women found their own higher meaning in the physical and emotional world.

Those closest to death and still sensate pay scrupulous attention to schedules being precisely maintained. Breakfast at seven, lunch at twelve, dinner at five. No matter their lack of appetites, no matter if they slumber through mealtimes, they want those trays in their rooms, visible confirmation upon awakening of their continuing existence. Sometimes that small proof of life is all it takes to bring a slight smile to their faces, though often the slight smile is rictus in nature. Those lucky to have more time ahead of them are resisting the natural inclination to retreat into insularity, are instead expanding their horizons, insisting on being bundled up and wheeled down to the kitchen to watch the cook bake a delicacy that might taste in their mouths like their own Proustian madeleine, regardless that they can barely manage a second bite. One man has hired a college student to teach him to play chess, a game he once refused to learn because his father had been a competitive player. A woman has taken up knitting, despite fingers petrified by age and rheumatoid arthritis, the most minor of her afflictions. Wherever they fall on the incline toward death, they share a surprising stoicism. The nature of the stoicism ranges, but has a common denominator: an undistinguished day is welcomed, even if in their prior lives they would have bucked against such dullness. Religion for them is now art and music, gazing through dimming eyes at reproductions in heavy books, listening with fading hearing to love songs, operas, symphonies, Neil Young, Barbra Streisand, the Rolling Stones, even Metallica; one old gentleman requires fifteen minutes a day of what he calls his “nerve-settling polka music,” which unsettles everyone else.