Kept: An American Househusband In India

Prologue

I gape at the man in tears on the roof of our two-story home. From my vantage point I have the unspeakable misfortune of being able to see directly up his skirt-like lungi as he teeters on the edge, apparently ready to jump. A small army of security guards, domestic servants, turbaned laborers, and unknown passersby stand next to me, all come to witness this bizarre spectacle, many clearly hoping for action.

“Somebody, do something!” I demand, looking hopefully at our contract security guard.

He grins.

Biting my tongue and feeling a little guilty for thinking “either get it over with or get off my roof,” I mount the ladder. If this guy jumps, it’s going to mean some serious paperwork. As I climb, I can’t help but wonder how this happened, how I got here, and what I did to deserve this. Whose idea was this anyway?

Chapter 1: Love Bites

My wife, Dana, works for the US Department of State as a Foreign Service officer. Foreign Service officers are our nation’s career diplomats. After passing a grueling exam, these gifted people are indoctrinated in Washington, DC, before being sent to one of the hundreds of US embassies and consulates around the world to issue visas to foreign nationals, attend cocktail parties, carry communiqués to foreign governments, host cocktail parties, assist Americans abroad, go to cocktail parties, and represent the American government outside the US. Did I mention the cocktail parties?

There are many civil service employees at the State Department in Washington who are not Foreign Service officers, and they don’t typically get assigned abroad. And a relatively small number of Americans posted to American embassies and consulates around the world work for the military or other agencies, such as the US Agency for International Development, the CIA, the Department of Alien Invasion, and even the IRS.

For the most part, however, Americans working in US embassies and consulates abroad are Foreign Service officers working for the Department of State. Dana did not really want to be a diplomat. She was perfectly happy remaining in Texas, but that was not to be. And, as she is fond of pointing out, that was my fault. I, on the other hand, had wanted to be a diplomat for years, but that career was not to be, and that, too, was my fault.

Of course, I blame my parents. My mother grew up in a tiny town in East Texas and went to Stephen F. Austin State University. Since the university wouldn’t allow young women to study accounting at that time, she got a bachelor’s degree in music and a master’s in education. Then, wanting to get as far from East Texas as possible, she took a job with the Department of the Navy and wound up as an elementary school teacher on US Naval Base Subic Bay in the Philippines. She traveled in Asia, and her fond memories of that time became the soundtrack of my childhood—always there in the background. My father, for his part, encouraged me to participate in the local Lion’s Club Youth Exchange Program, which sent me to Belgium for a summer at the age of seventeen. I spent that summer with my host family’s eighteen-year-old tooling around Europe in an ancient Peugeot, trying to figure out which country had the best-looking girls. (Results were inconclusive, but we had a great deal of fun.)

So it’s no surprise to my parents when, one semester before my own graduation from Texas A&M University, I open a book left on a table in the library that suggests amazing things to do my first year out of college. The first page offers work on a kibbutz in Israel.

I throw a wad of paper at my roommate, Javier. “Dude, what’s a kibbutz?”

“Dude, I have no idea. I think it’s a sandwich.” We said "dude" a lot in those days.

I turn the page: Teach English in Japan. I only need to be a native speaker of English—check—and have a college degree—almost check. I sign up. I go to the interview in Houston, where I get the name of the Japanese prime minister wrong.

“Dude,” I tell Javier when I get back to the dorm, “If I get this job, I’m going to Japan.”

“Man, you’ll meet some girl and back out.”

“No! Even if I meet the girl I’m going to marry, I’m going.”

“OK, dude, whatever.”

I shake Javier by the shoulders. “Seriously, dude. Don’t let me let some stupid girl screw this up. Seriously!”

“Whatever, dude. Whatever you say.”

Then I meet the girl I’m going to marry: Dana. And then I get my letter of acceptance from the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program.

I meet Dana under a tree on campus. “Uh, you remember that Japan thing I talked to you about.”

“Yeah…”

“Well, uh, like…I sort of got, like, accepted.”

“You sort of got accepted?”

“Yeah. And I, like, really want to go. In fact, I, uh, kind of promised myself that I’m going. That even if, uh, I met the girl I was going to marry…well, I’ve kind of always wanted to do something like this, and, uh, if I don’t go, I feel like I’ll kind of regret it for the rest of my life.”

“Well,” Dana says casually, “then I guess I’m going with you.”

So, just like that, the deal is sealed. Well, not exactly “just like that,” but that’s the gist. We spend the first three years of our marriage teaching English and traveling all over Japan and the rest of Asia on a shoestring. We ski the Japan Alps, travel by ferry to South Korea, take a slow boat to China on Christmas Eve, island-hop in Thailand, and visit Hong Kong, my mom’s favorite city in the world. In Japan I meet a young German who has just been accepted into his country’s diplomatic corps, and he tells me all about it.

“Wow. I want to be a diplomat someday,” I tell Dana, fascinated, but I have other things to do first.

Chapter 2: Baby Gaga

In 1995 we move back to the US, where Dana supports me financially and otherwise while I attend graduate school in a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona. The whole time we are there I can’t help but wonder how Phoenix even happened. I can just imagine pioneers traveling across the land in their covered wagons.

Amaziah: “Honey, why don’t we just stop here and call this home?”

Imogene: “Duh. It’s desert.”

Amaziah: “Right.”

Imogene: “Seriously? There’s nothing but cactus and sand.”

Amaziah: “Exactly.”

Imogene: “OK. Sounds like a plan.”

And thus, Phoenix was born.

I promise Dana we’ll move back to Texas after I graduate so she can attend graduate school at the University of Texas. As my life is committed to Arizona and then Texas for the next several years, I give up my dream of traveling the world as a US diplomat and get to work studying, finding a job, and having a baby. Technically, Dana does the having-a-baby part, but I am present (at both beginning and end). And it’s a good thing too, because the doctor is conspicuously absent until the last twenty seconds or so, when she shows up to take credit. What a job!

Cole is born shortly before final exams of my last semester in graduate school. We had read all the fashionable books, attended the childbirth classes, and bought all the latest equipment—not all that lime-green lead-covered death-trap stuff our parents had so ignorantly used. We knew what to expect when we were expecting, by God, and thirty seconds after his birth I have him wrapped in one of my shirts—the books said he’d learn my smell—arguing with the nurses over whether or not he ought to be taken to the sterile, impersonal nursery or remain there in my loving arms.

Cole is beautiful despite the fact that, like all newborns, he bears no small resemblance to a frog, and I’m not about to let the nurses have their way with him. Convinced they’ll carelessly switch him with the baby “Bradford” in the next room, I’m not taking any chances.

We—OK, mostly me—are traumatized when Cole doesn’t jump right on the ol’ nippy and begin nursing right away. Will he survive the night? I swear he’s already losing weight, and Dana swears that if I tweak her nipples again to help him latch on, she’s going to brain me. After I go to the nurses’ station and apologize, I find myself banished from the room while they help Dana nurse Cole back from the brink of starvation.

“First-time dad,” the nurses whisper as they exchange knowing glances. I bite my tongue and get a candy bar for supper.

We go home. My parents arrive from Texas and simply smile as we—again, mostly me—obsess over every tiny detail of baby care and do everything wrong the first time. They never offer advice but are quick to give it when asked. They don’t even complain when I wake up the whole house, calling the doctor because Cole hasn’t dirtied a diaper in two days. (Note to new parents: If you are trying cloth diapers, do yourself a favor and give them up now! We gave it a shot until we figured out our son would sleep twice as long at night in disposables. So go plant some offset trees and get some much-needed sleep.)

Contrary to popular opinion, graduate school is a great time to have a kid. After Cole’s arrival, Dana works in the afternoons at the school’s financial aid office, and I attend classes in the mornings. In this way, we both can take care of Cole half a day; she nurses him in the mornings, and I feed him from a bottle in the afternoons. We both get our Cole fix, and everything is peachy. Yet parenthood and graduation introduce me to an as-yet unfamiliar notion: I must provide. My life soon becomes consumed with the search for a job, and I am getting nowhere. Dana wants to go to graduate school in Austin, but I can’t even get an interview there. Finally, we load everything in a U-Haul and head back to Texas, where at least we can bum off of family.

After a brief but painful stint living with Dana’s parents, we lease a dumpy apartment a few blocks away from, statistically, the most dangerous intersection in Austin while I continue to look for a job. At last, I land a lousy sales job that almost pays the bills. The day I start working there I begin my search for something better. For a year I stalk a manager at Austin-headquartered PC giant Dell. Finally, he gives up and hires me. On my first day, he introduces me as the most persistent person he has ever met.

Life improves. We get the car fixed; it reeks of gasoline so badly that we have to drive with the windows down. We are ready to move; obviously drunk men wander our apartment complex asking for handouts. We can stop paying for Dana’s schooling with student loans. We no longer buy the mystery meat labeled “reduced for quick sale.” Immediately, we move into a rental in a more wholesome neighborhood, and within several months we buy a little yellow house with “potential.”

Cole turns two and is obviously brilliant. We shower upon him the attention it is the good fortune of all first children to get, and he repays us with good behavior. He really is an easy, well-behaved child, and I smugly tell myself this is the obvious result of superior parenting. A lot of one-child parents harbor the same ridiculous delusion.

When we move to Austin, Dana starts school and I start working. Cole has to go to day care. This devastates me. I fume over the injustice of it all, fretting aloud to Dana about the long-term effects of his not being with us all day, all the time. Every day, I flee work as early as politically possible and race across town to pick him up, cursing at every slow driver and racked with guilt. I won’t even consider leaving Cole with my in-laws for a night so we can go out on the town. Essentially, I drive Dana nuts with my bellyaching. There has to be a way out of the rat race we are in, but if there is, I don’t know it. In this day and age, this is just what we have to do: two incomes, kids in preschool from day one, work forever, and die. It never occurs to me there are any options.

As Dana nears graduation, the idea of the Foreign Service surfaces again. I’m making good money at Dell, but I am not content. I long for our carefree days teaching English in Japan, traveling and eating weird stuff like fish eyes and natto. (If the smell doesn’t make you puke, you’re sure to love it.) It isn’t just me; we both have itchy feet, but Dana can live with normal. I need something more exciting. Yet we have a toddler and hope to have another bun in the oven soon. It looks like the days of youth hostels and backpacks are over.

“Is that all there is?” I croon, channeling my inner Peggy Lee. (I get this gene from my mother.) “Should we just buy a minivan and give up?”

One night, after a day spent listening to me gripe about my job, Dana makes me a deal. She tells me to take the Foreign Service exam. If I pass, fine; I can tell my boss to shove his Q4 target, and she’ll go with me overseas. If I don’t pass, no harm done; I can tell my boss how excited I am about his Q4 target. Great! Even though we have just bought the little yellow house, I happily sign up for the test and eventually convince Dana that she might as well take it herself.

“Why not?” she says. Dana doesn’t want to find herself overseas without a job.

We both consider it unlikely that Dana will pass the Foreign Service exam. Although Dana likes to travel, she is not particularly knowledgeable of or interested in foreign affairs. We agree, however, that I have a decent chance since I totally geek out on international anything and was a teaching assistant for International Political Economy class in grad school—seriously nerdy stuff. To our happy surprise, a few months later we both pass the written phase of the exam and immediately began preparing ourselves for the grueling day-long oral phase.

We drive to New Orleans to take the oral examination in an office space the State Department has leased for the occasion. The day before the big event, I have my first Bloody Mary at Commander’s Palace—and realize they make me want to vomit—and we stuff ourselves with beignets at Café du Monde while trying not to think about our reason for being in town. We have spent months preparing for what, by all accounts, will be a harrowing experience: an entire day of mental punishment for the privilege of possibly being selected to be a US diplomat.

On the appointed day, we start at Mother’s with the breakfast special for me—eggs, baked ham, grits, toast, juice—and a crawfish étouffée omelet for Dana before waddling down the street to the exam site. We are told to wait in a hallway with a half-dozen visibly nervous, clean-cut hopefuls in their brand-new suits and heavily gelled hair. One guy shows up half an hour late in jeans and a T-shirt. We wait until our names are called, one by one.

A man who looks like my father ushers me into an undecorated room, where I wait alone with three metal chairs. I search for hidden cameras, wondering if I am being watched and whether my behavior alone in this room, with just my chair friends, is part of the test. I decide to sit and not move. After an eternity, two men arrive looking highly unamused, and the oral exam takes place almost exactly like this:

“We’re going to ask you some questions. We will stop you when your answer has reached the time limit.”

“Shoot.”

“You’re a Foreign Service officer in a small, underdeveloped Latin American nation. You’re the only officer on duty on a Sunday when you receive a call stating a tour bus full of American senior citizens operating in a remote area has plunged off a road into a ravine one hundred feet below. What do you do?”

“Call the local police!”

“They are uncooperative.”

“I call the tour bus company to get a list of passengers.”

“You’ve got the list. Now what?”

“I contact the families of the injured.”

“Injured? I didn’t say there were any injured. Maybe you should contact the local hospitals.”

“Yeah, I do that. Contact the hospitals.”

“Good idea, but the phones are down due to flooding in the area.”

“Then I drive to the area personally and check the hospitals.”

“Roads are impassable. Remember the flood?”

“I take the next flight.”

“Airport is closed.”

“I rent an ultralight, and, taking my satellite phone with me, I land on the roof—”

“Mr. Buford, you are out of time. Thank you.”

And things basically go downhill from there.

The examiners don't ask me about foreign affairs; they don’t care about my overseas experience; they don’t want me to demonstrate my language skills; they aren’t interested in my master’s degree; they don’t consider my work experience; they don’t even ask me the name of the speaker of the Iranian parliament. Somebody, please ask me the name of the speaker of the Iranian parliament! (It was Hashemi Rafsanjani, for what it’s worth.) I fail the exam miserably. Meanwhile, proving God has an excellent sense of humor, my wife is in the next room, passing with flying colors.