The Foreign Service Journal, January 2007

50 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 7 he hadn’t expected to feel the shock to her system. She hadn’t expected the panic, the visceral instinct she felt; her body, her cells, veins and tissues, all leaning away from here, cringing away from here, pulling her thoughts back toward the familiar, like the way a plant in a dim room curves and stretches toward a distant band of light. She hadn’t expected to yearn and stretch for her old life so much. Moving here was supposed to be an adventure, a partnership, a way for Jane and her husband to try something new together. She hadn’t expected to feel so uprooted. Their assigned house had come with a man who cleaned and cooked. “It is imperative,” another embassy wife had told Jane. “With the lack of supermarkets, and all the bugs and dust, cleaning and shopping just takes too long.” It was funny to think of that now. She had nothing but time on her hands. The other embassy wives she’d met were so different. They had kids, or jobs to go to. They seemed breezy and confident, and comfortable here. They spoke of Lusaka as they spoke of their children — pesky and frustrating, but beloved. Jane had tried to socialize, but she found words stuck in her throat. Her roots had been dug up, her branch- es cut back; she had nothing here —no job, no friends, noth- ing that was hers alone; even her speech had been clipped. At first she’d forced herself to hope that she’d fit in, that somehow she’d become one of the people she admired, who shopped in the market and walked through town and didn’t blanch at the smells of freshly slaughtered meat hanging in the open-air butcher shop; who didn’t flinch when the little children selling candy and single cigarettes flocked around her trying to make a sale. She’d gone to the market once to search for gardening supplies. It was her husband’s idea. She wanted to bring order to something, and her husband had suggested the garden. “It could be beautiful with your green thumb,” he’d said, gesturing one evening at the over- grown space behind the house. “Anything will grow here, in this soil, this climate. Make it your own.” But at the market she’d gotten lost among the stalls of produce and piles of clothes. She was stretched too tautly toward home to make the effort to understand this place. Her attempts at bravery winked out, like the tiny pop of fila- ment in a burnt-out light bulb. Most days now she just stayed at the house, digging up weeds in what could be flowerbeds, fantasizing about the hyacinths and peonies in the garden she’d left at home. Her husband was wrong. Neither of her favorite flowers would grow here. The houseman’s name was Moffat. Moffat sounded like old, soft slippers shuffling along through the rooms of their house. She tried to avoid him, but the house was small and he seemed determined to dust and mop in every nook. She was always relieved when he left on his daily shopping trip. She’d listen for the rusty creak of the gate, and then she’d leap up from where she usually sat at the back of the garden and watch him wheel his bicycle to the street and hop on. It wobbled under him as he made his way up the road. She tried to make herself invisible when Moffat was in the house, tried to make him believe that she was busy as she sat at the outside table or poked at the dirt with her trowel, struggling to imagine gathering the energy to commit to a garden. One day, Moffat didn’t come. She wondered what had happened and how she could get in touch with him. Jane FS F I CT I ON P HOTOTROPISM A YOUNG A MERICAN WIFE ABSORBS THE SHOCK OF BEING TRANSPLANTED TO L USAKA AND FINDS THAT SHE CAN FLOURISH . S B Y A DRIENNE B ENSON S CHERGER Adrienne Benson Scherger grew up traversing Africa with a USAID father. As the spouse of a former Peace Corps staff member, she has lived in both Ukraine and Albania, where she was the CLO. Currently, she and her husband and two sons reside in Syracuse, N.Y. She is a freelance writer, and is work- ing on her first book, I Never Had a Birdcage Hairdo.