Roberta Allen ~ We Don’t Know Why

We don’t know why the nurse who worked in a large urban hos­pi­tal only trav­eled to coun­tries with lousy san­i­ta­tion, pol­lut­ed water and too many peo­ple. She nev­er pro­tect­ed her­self against life-threat­en­ing dis­eases, so when she got sick no one was sur­prised. But she was lucky her sick­ness was mild.

~

Maybe the own­er of the guest house in a dirty lit­tle back­wa­ter with a tiny beach filled with plas­tic caught the sick­ness from the nurse who had recent­ly vis­it­ed the island. Like the nurse, he didn’t wor­ry about catch­ing con­ta­gious dis­eases. Like the nurse, his sick­ness was mild. We don’t know whether any of the vil­lagers had it. They were poor but laughed eas­i­ly. They seemed so much hap­pi­er than the guest house own­er and his wife, for­eign­ers there who spoke with heavy accents.

~

We don’t know why the nurse rec­om­mend­ed the guest house to the teacher she bare­ly knew. The teacher was not adven­tur­ous, but she did act on impulse from time to time. Why the nurse told her she had hurt her Achilles heel bicy­cling across the world’s sev­enth largest coun­try is a mys­tery. Or why she told her about the time she had fall­en off a woven bridge and hurt her back in a remote rain­for­est and had to be air­lift­ed to the near­est continent.

~

The arrival of the teacher annoyed the guest house own­er, inter­rupt­ing his game of chess. His chess part­ner didn’t even look up when the own­er showed her a doll-size room. The win­dow was held open by a stick. The next boat to the main­land wasn’t due for three days, so the teacher poked around the vil­lage. She thought about the own­er and his wife. Maybe he felt con­strained in his own coun­try. Maybe he thought he’d find his free­dom here. But his wife? The wife spent her days in a “civ­i­lized” town on an island, an hour away by boat. It had two hotels and three restau­rants. The wife wore lit­tle print dress­es and heels. We have no idea what she did there. She nev­er offered to dri­ve the teacher to the next vil­lage so she too could take the boat to the “civ­i­lized” town. But maybe the teacher was okay with that. Maybe she didn’t want to see anoth­er island. Maybe she just want­ed to go home.

~

The nurse got sick again, this time so sick she moved in with her moth­er. When she was well enough, she built a house in a vil­lage of expats on a moun­tain­top in a coun­try as far removed from the sick­ness as pos­si­ble though no place was safe. While trav­el­ing, the teacher who had recov­ered from a bout of her own hap­pened by chance to stop at the vil­lage where she lived. What an amaz­ing coin­ci­dence, she thought. The teacher had told her­self that if she ever saw her again which, of course, she nev­er expect­ed, she would ask about the guest house cou­ple. But by then, she had com­plete­ly for­got­ten about the cou­ple and the island where they lived. She had even for­got­ten about the nurse until she saw her again. Many things had hap­pened in her life since then, includ­ing a brief mar­riage and divorce.

~

Roberta Allen is the author of nine books, her lat­est col­lec­tion is The Princess of Herself. Over two hun­dred sto­ries appear in mag­a­zines, includ­ing Conjunctions, Epoch, and Bomb. Also a con­cep­tu­al artist, she has work in The Met and MoMA.