Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing Part 22

All the while I'm sitting at the dining table expecting Pa to defend his sayings either with another of his parables (as he had a habit of doing) or by telling Ma shut up, woman, what you know. But instead he stared at the tablecloth as if there was something there that only he could see.

Finally a long sigh whooshed out of him and his shoulders slumped even more. "What they expect we to do, uh?" he said.

A beetle pinging against the lampshade gave the silence in the house the heaviness of mola.s.ses. Crickets chirped in the bushes outside. Frogs croaked.

Pa gazed at the letter in his hand. "First they tell we the boy got a scholarship. Now look at this. Eh? Look at this. What they expect we to do?"

And that night for the first time I saw what defeat looks like on the face of an adult.

Ma gazed at Pa for a long time then sighed. "G.o.d will find a way," she said.

To which my father replied, "Well he better hurry up. The school term soon begin."

"Hush," Ma said right away. "Don't talk like that." And she's glancing over her shoulder like she expects G.o.d to strike Pa dead.

But the slump of her shoulders says she doesn't really have much more faith than Pa does.

I never found out where Pa got the money to pay my school fees and buy textbooks, nor where he got the money to take me into town and buy a cricket bat for me after I came second in cla.s.s that school year.

Even now the smell of linseed oil always triggers the memory of Pa and me walking out of the store with the midday hot sun beating down, me holding the cricket bat, and Pa looking down at me and saying, You got to cure it with linseed oil.

If my life can be told in chapters, that day marked the beginning of the end of one chapter, the one that ended with Pa shaking my hand man-to-man in the airport building and walking toward a plane that took him to Away, a place I couldn't even imagine and only later got an idea about through reading books I borrowed from the public library.

For weeks after Pa left I would find myself listening for him to come home from work, and several times I heard his bicycle bang against the side of the house. But those are the kinds of illusions that loneliness can create.

Many nights I would lie in bed listening for him to come singing and stumbling home, waking up Ma when he came in the back door saying, "Esther! I home! The Boss has arrived!" and then coming over to where I was sleeping on the floor and saying, "Sleeping, Brute?" and Ma stirring in bed and mumbling, "How many times I tell you don't call the boy no Brute. And keep quiet, for G.o.d's sake. People trying to sleep."

And sometimes Pa would take his food from the larder and warm it up (Rum drinking made him ravenous. I know. The same thing happens to me), and we would eat at the table with the kerosene lamp flickering before us.

Once when our cricket team was playing down in Australia Pa and I sat every single night next to the radio up to three, four o'clock in the dead of night listening to cricket commentary and eating salt herring and biscuits.

But all of that stopped the day Mr. Gaskins's old Morris Minor came b.u.mping down the road to take the three of us to the airport.

When we reached the airport, Pa and Mr. Gaskins each carried a suitcase into the terminal building, with the weight of each suitcase behding their bodies sideways.

Ma and I watched from afar as Pa showed the woman at the counter his papers. It was as if Ma was already putting distance between herself and Pa so that when he really left the shock wouldn't be so great.

After Pa checked in we stood in the middle of the terminal-Ma in her good beige dress with white lace trim around the neck, broad-brim straw hat and shining black pocketbook, Pa in his only dark-gray suit with the two-b.u.t.ton jacket and dark-brown felt hat c.o.c.ked at an angle. It looked to me like he was outgrowing his suit, which didn't make sense because grown-ups don't grow. Mr. Gaskins wore a long-sleeved white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbow.

With all the talking that was going on and the aroma of food, the only difference between the airport and the market was the voice coming over a loudspeaker every now and then.

". . . flight number 461 now boarding . . ."

That is my plane, Pa said.

And the noise in the airport almost drowned out Ma's voice reminding Pa of the two dozen flying fish she fried that morning and wrapped in plastic and newspaper and packed in the suitcase. "Those will hold you for a little while," she said. "What you don't want right away you can freeze."

Pa said, "All right, all right." He didn't say it, but you could tell he was thinking he was a big man who didn't need n.o.body telling him how to take care of two dozen fish.

Then Ma said, Write as soon as you get there.

"Soon's I get pay I going send something," Pa said.

"Get yourself settle first," Ma said. Don't worry about we.

Pa pulled on his cigarette and at that moment he looked like a movie star with his hat c.o.c.ked at an angle and his shirt opened at the neck under his jacket.

He stamped the cigarette b.u.t.t under his foot and hugged Ma. She stared over his shoulder with water br.i.m.m.i.n.g in her eyes.

Then he stuck out his hand and looked me full in my eyes. "You in charge now, Brute," he said.

We shook hands, man to man, with me looking him full in his face and with my lips pressed together knowing that if I opened my mouth to speak I would cry, which I couldn't do because men don't cry.

We watched Pa walk toward the door with his travel agency bag over one shoulder and a carton of rum like a valise in one hand.

"Come," Ma said.

So I didn't learn until years later that he stopped at the top of the airplane steps and searched for us among the crowd behind the guard rail on the roof of the airport building, and even though he didn't see us he waved, not knowing that we were already in Mr. Gaskins's car headed back home with Mr. Gaskins making conversation to lighten up Ma's spirits.

"He soon come back," Mr. Gaskins said. "Soon as he make enough money he going come right back to you and Gabby here. Look at me," he said. "I work like a slave in the London Transport. But you think I was going stay over there? No sir. That en no place for human beings to live, far more die. But if I didn't do that, if I didn't go away, you think I woulda had this little motorcar to help me make a few little extra cents? Things going work out," he said.

That night I lay on the floor and heard Ma crying softly. And it brought to mind another night when Ma and I were sleeping and Pa came in, drunk as usual. For some reason he and Ma started shouting and next thing I know, PAKS! He delivered a slap to Ma's face. Ma held her face. The house was silent. Then she uncoiled and began windmilling her hands, hitting him every which way and yelling, "You come in here with your drunk self and hit me? Eh? In front your son? That the kind of example you setting?" And Pa hitting her back, but not with any force. After a while he walked back out of the house and Ma lay in bed sniffling into her pillow the same way she was crying that night after we came back from the airport.

It was the first of many such nights.

FROM Water Marked.

BY HELEN ELAINE LEE.

Delta moved aside as Sunday came through the doorway, and in an instant, they felt their manifold heritage of silence and remorse, and the pull of common history and blood.

Sunday called her sister's name, and Delta's hands began to reach for her, before pausing and returning to her sides. She offered a determined smile, and then, seeing Sunday seeing her, she smoothed down her hair, oiled and halved by a careful part.

As Sunday looked at her, Delta nodded, reminded of her sister's apt.i.tude for sight, and wondered if she could sense the toll of misbegotten love. She felt a sudden kinship with a tree she had once known, lightning-struck and fired from the inside out, a few singed spots the only clues, but changed, unmistakably changed. Her roomy, flowered shirtwaist offered no cover at all as she seemed to thicken, further, under Sunday's gaze, and she crossed her arms over the fullness of her waist and b.r.e.a.s.t.s and fumbled toward speech.

"Well . . ." she said, d.a.m.ning herself as she spoke for her inept.i.tude in launching their reunion with that word that was all-purpose and meant nothing, asking herself why she could never find the right way to begin, the right thing to say, even to her own sister, and there she was groping, idiotically groping as she heard her own voice trail off, her alarm at the impending silence and her own impotence spreading, and again, "Well," this time as if it were a statement, the completion of what she had started.

Each one took a step forward, and then Sunday reached for Delta, smelling Ivory soap and Kool Milds, and Delta felt herself enfolded in the soft, loose weave of her baby sister's clothes. She tightened her balled-up hands and inhaled the woody musk, the train, the oil paint in her neck, identifying them all in a tumbled rush of memory as the thin, gold music of Sunday's earrings quieted against her face and hair. She hadn't been held for so long, and here were Sunday's wiry arms around her and her fingers spread wide across her back.

"Wing stumps," Sunday whispered as she touched her sister's shoulder blades, giving her own childhood explanation for the protrusions of bone. Delta laughed as she remembered how Sunday had once drawn herself holding a set of folded wings, prepared for flight.

Delta freed her hands from her pockets and patted her sister stiffly as she eased herself away, noticing as Sunday moved to the center of the living room how tall she seemed beneath the layers of overlapping aubergine cloth. Her hair was unstraightened and unconfined, and she was so tall, so purple, so much, she seemed to fill the room.

"I know I was supposed to call, but I forgot, and it seemed easier just to come. That way I got to walk through the neighborhood."

Delta stepped back from her and focused on the different textures of cloth, some nubby and fibrous and some watery smooth, and what was that she had on, anyhow, she wondered silently, unable to tell if it was pants or a skirt, and where the top ended and the bottom began, and standing out from those waves of purple, from the corkscrews of bark-red hennaed hair and strings of beads that rang together as she moved, were her eyes, unquiet and night-black, taking in the details of sister and house.

Sunday saw the green and rust that had appeared again and again on her own canvases, and the familiar symmetry of the room, where crystal candlesticks stood like sentries on the ends of the mantel and lamps of bulbous, tarnished bra.s.s sat beside the easy chairs that flanked the window. Little was changed, aside from the new afghan of alternating brown and white crocheted squares that Delta had recently made, folded neatly at the end of the couch.

Following Sunday's gaze, Delta looked around and saw threads escaping the bound edges of the sculptured pea green carpet, the dark, beetle-shaped cigarette burns climbing up the threadbare arms of her chair, the fingermarks around the switchplates on the walls. She saw that the brown oak leaf pattern on the drapes had faded, the curtain rod sagged in the center, and she would have to get the side cords unknotted. Everything was in its place at least, but she hadn't realized how shabby some aspects of the house had grown. She need not feel embarra.s.sed, she told herself as she looked at the room crowded with furniture and knickknacks, for they had both grown up there.

Sunday's beads sounded against each other as she turned in a circle and then stopped, caught by the ribboned light coming through the half-opened venetian blinds. Feeling for the edge of something she couldn't place, just a feeling, maybe, a color or a shape that might be, for her, like a first word, like the start of speech, she stepped into the banded light.

Delta watched her. Nate had walked right into that light, too, she thought, recalling that his arms, bare and muscular, had been briefly tattooed with stripes as he extended them, offering plenty. She found that he visited her in sudden alarming flashes: She would see a customer at the post office who waited tensely, flexing his jaw as Nate had done, and it would freeze her fast until she could recover and return to the present moment. Why, she asked herself, did mistakes have to stalk you, no matter how hard you tried to right them and forget? She didn't seem to be able to lose Nate Hunter, and here he was now, walking, uninvited, into her living room light. She shook the memory off and went to the kitchen to restart the kettle, watching the blue fire of the burner leap into a mesmerizing ring.

Absorbed in her study of the room, Sunday didn't realize Delta had left. She felt a pang of guilt at her scrutiny, hearing the voices of those who had told her it wasn't gracious to look so hard at things. Countless times she had tried to defend herself, to say that looking was her job. She approached each object hungrily, seeking something without even knowing what: some clue that would bring understanding, some key thing that she might find in the landscape if she read it closely enough.

She recalled the cloudy rings on the coffee table and its veneer rising up along the edges, exposing warped and naked wood. The mosaic tabletops and trays that Dolora had made were still displayed around the room, overlapping spirals of color and glyphs of private and ancient languages. She could see the few survivor plates and ceramic figurines behind the gla.s.s doors of the china closet, and tiny pieces of glazed tile and stones were scattered on the shelves like bits of excavated treasure.

The missing leg of the phone caddy had been replaced with three of the secondhand encyclopedias Dolora had purchased over a five-year indenture: Q through S. Sunday stared at it and thought about the bound, compiled world of facts in the hall bookcase, the gold letters on the spines harder and harder to make out, missing an entire chunk of information two-thirds of the way through, missing quartz . . . rhinoceros . . . scarab . . . She reached out to straighten one of her first paintings, hanging where it had been placed fifteen years ago, recalling that as Nana was putting it up, Delta had said that she liked the texture, but wanted to know what, exactly, it was supposed to be. The plaster had crumbled above in places, leaving a fine grainy film on the picture gla.s.s.

The walls and furniture were still marked with horizontal lines from years of flooding, when rain burst the river and filled their home. She remembered sitting on the stair landing, watching wastebaskets, colored pencils, and even chairs float, and recalled the dank smell that remained when the water receded and left its dark, wavy line across their lives.

She could still detect it, she thought, sniffing, just a trace. Either that wetness or a recollection, surfacing.

Their lives had always seemed open to water. Loose, rattling windows and their ill-fitting frames accepted heavy rain into the house, into the ceiling that every now and then grew distended like a swollen belly. There was always a saucepan or that blue bread bowl of Nana's sitting in the middle of a floor upstairs to catch some drip from the roof that failed them again and again. The border of the oak floor was scarred with dark blots around the arching ribs of radiators that hissed and knocked and leaked.

She looked around the cramped, moist house she had been desperate to leave. Although she had never managed to lose it in her work, she had returned annually after leaving for school, and not once in the past five years. After Dolora and then Nana died, she had wondered if the present could exist for her in that house.

There was Nana's photo across the room. That last time, when they were supposed to be comforting each other, she thought, they had given in to a kind of smallness that had made Sunday feel disgraced before Nana's memory. It all came back to her as she pa.s.sed through the hallway: the airborne tumbler of bourbon, the a.r.s.enals of words and tears, the resentments, grown thick and malignant, fed by absence and discontent. But the thing she had never been able to forget or forgive, the thing that came to her at night, just before sleep, was how she had heard Delta come softly to her bedroom door.

Sunday had heard her in the hallway, and had chosen to stand on the other side, separated from her sister by a piece of hinged and hollow wood, so close that she could almost hear her inhale and exhale. Not knocking, Delta had stood there for a full minute and then left, and Sunday had neither spoken, nor opened the door.

Blinking away the image of that door, she saw the piano resting in the corner, its closed keyboard piled high with library detective novels, magazines or horoscopes, mail order catalogs. So many things in the house made her want to either flee or weep. The try at cheerful domesticity of Delta's ruffle-edged ap.r.o.n brought tears to her eyes, and the crowded dining room with its crocheted doilies and centerpiece of plastic lilies reawakened the cornered sense of longing she had felt as a girl.

But there had been touches of beauty, she thought, while her mother was alive. Her mosaics had always given the house a distinctive quality, as had jelly gla.s.ses and coffee cans filled with fresh flowers. Mason jars of vibrant canned fruit and preserves had stood on open shelves in the kitchen. And in the daytime, the venetian blinds Sunday had always hated were raised; there had been light.

Overwhelmed with remembering, she went into the bathroom and sat on the chenille-covered toilet seat, collecting herself. I have never left this house behind, she thought, touching the dusty crocheted doll, no doubt bought from one of Delta's post office coworkers, whose skirt concealed an extra roll of toilet paper. Standing, she looked at her face between the abstract shapes where the mirror's silver backing of paint had cracked and flaked off, and pulled the ma.s.s of unruly ringlets from her face to force it into one of the elastics she had around her wrist.

She followed the ridged path of the yellowed plastic runner across the carpet, listening for the rrrrrrrh her shoes made. When she entered the kitchen she remembered the women who had regularly inhabited that room, Nana's voice leading the others, and she could almost hear their wooden spoons and smell the flour and sharp yeast. Standing in the doorway behind her, Sunday watched Delta straighten the quilted rooster-shaped toaster cover and raise her fingers to the half-moon stainless steel handles of the white metal cabinets and drawers. With her st.u.r.dy, flat-heeled shoes and her broadened hips rising under the pastel cabbage roses of her dress, she looked upholstered from the back.

Glancing away, Sunday could see the dent above the baseboard and a dark trace of splashed whiskey. How would she meet this woman who was her sister across the chasm, not only of their past but of their adult lives? She sat at the round oak table and took out the gift she had brought as Delta turned around, retied the bow on her ap.r.o.n, and flattened her palms along its fading green and yellow fruit. She took her cigarettes and plastic lighter from the counter and placed them on the table as she sat down.

"A peace offering," Sunday said as she pushed the foil-wrapped box a few inches toward Delta with her fingertips. She hoped the gift wasn't too extravagant, recalling how Nana had told her you had to be careful what you gave middle-cla.s.s black folks, for if you brought jams or wine to dinner, they might be insulted, construing the gesture as a declaration that they couldn't afford, or didn't know enough, to get such things for themselves.

Delta opened the box slowly, anxious that she wouldn't know how to respond or might not understand its importance or its use. It might be some artsy thing she had never heard of, or some cosmopolitan gadget that was all the rage. And she was embarra.s.sed that she had not thought to get Sunday a gift.

When she saw the dangling, pewter fish earrings, crafted into hinged and moving pieces, she smiled carefully. Sunday knew immediately that again she had chosen something discordant with her sister's quiet taste; she had chosen the gift she herself would like to receive. And she also knew that Delta would try to like them, and would wear them, at least once, before she left.

"They're . . . dramatic," Delta said, pulling one out of the box. She went to the hall mirror to put them on, and returning to the kitchen, unable to think of what to say, she began to apologize for not having a gift.

Sunday interrupted the repentance with a wave of her hand, and they both focused on the tabletop.

"It was definitely him, then?" Sunday asked, raising her head. "You're sure it was him?"

Delta nodded as she reached into her ap.r.o.n pocket to pull out an engraved gold locket the size of a half dollar. She placed it on the table between them.

"What I'd like to know," said Sunday, staring at the dented face of the locket, the letters of their mother's monogram looped together in a continuous line, "is how. How, I ask you, did he manage to die twice?"

The locket lay between them on the table as they looked at each other. "It came in the mail, along with what you might call a note," Delta explained. "He had kept it all these years."

Sunday's mouth went dry. She wanted to ask for every detail and then devour Delta's answers, but she couldn't seem to pose even the first questions: Where was the locket mailed from and what did the note say? She didn't understand why Delta was silent, why she didn't say everything then, right then. She looked up and saw herself in her sister's face. She had her skin, her oval face, her hairline. And unlike their mother's mouth, lean and carefully governed, theirs were liable to transform suddenly into reckless smiles.

Although Delta's hair was pressed straight and divided into the two dark curtains that Sunday remembered, its smooth surface had been invaded by recalcitrant white hairs that stood up at the temples and along the part. They had both sat on the edges of their beds while growing up and rolled the ends of their hair with pink foam-rubber curlers, but she had long ago abandoned that ritual. Delta's was turned under, as it had been for twenty years, in an even pageboy. Her deep-set eyes were sheltered by heavy brows, which she had plucked back to narrow pointed arches as a teenager, until Nana had convinced her to let them be. She still had the habit of smoothing them down with her fingertips, first the right one and then the left.

She seemed different to Sunday, but it wasn't her roundness, or her graying hair. As Delta raised her gaze from the table, Sunday sensed a change within the restive eyes. She searched the striated browns of her sister's irises, seeing behind the folded shutter of russet and seal brown and weathered gra.s.s something scorched and too quiet. The aftermath of fire.

She watched as Delta moved from taming her eyebrows, to turning her spoon over and over and over, to circling the gilt edge of the saucer with her fingertips. Delta took out a cigarette and tapped the filtered end against the table, and Sunday remembered how her fidgeting had unsettled Dolora, who had impatiently told her, "Be still . . . be still." Only Nana had been able to quiet her. "Be here," Nana had urged in her hoa.r.s.e and gentle voice.

Delta jumped up to escape the discomfort of her sister's eye and emptied the coffee grounds from the pleated filter. As she rinsed the pot she also searched for a way to start the talking, glancing sideways at the locket in Sunday's rough, discolored hands, the nails cut close and straight across, the cuticles bearing traces of brown and yellow paint. Sunday examined the gold wafer intently, as if her touch and concentration could make it surrender its story, and Delta noticed the lines, like Nana's, that appeared in her forehead as she focused.

Reaching into the bag she had dropped next to her chair, Sunday rummaged through pens and sketchbook, lipsticks and barrettes, and the collection of found stones she carried with her. She unearthed her eyegla.s.ses and put them on to inspect the details of the gold engraving that she had been taking in with her hands, and pried open the gold disk with her blunt fingernail.

Inside she found a faded picture of Dolora at fifteen or sixteen, her hair free of the French roll they had always seen her wear, her face plump and unworried, lovely in its innocent excitement at the just-opening world. Although Delta had looked at it when it arrived, she wiped her hands on her ap.r.o.n and came closer, bending over Sunday's shoulder to peer at the photograph that was cracked and water-warped. Together, they thought how different the young girl was from the mother they had known.

They had opened the locket, but they would have to work their way toward what it meant. They sat at the table chatting about local news. Then Sunday pulled the beaded bra.s.s chain that hung between them, flooding the room with soft, warm light.

"Remember Mama's jewelry box?" Sunday said as she eased her gla.s.ses up onto her forehead, where they stayed, like a second pair of eyes. "How when you slid the little bra.s.s b.u.t.ton on the front the flat catch popped up, and each of us wanted to be the one to open it. Remember the embossed pink leather . . ."

"I think it was brown . . ."

"Pink. And it was darker, with the gold embossing fainter along the middle edge from all of our fingers touching it and pulling it open. And we would beg to go through it, getting her to tell us the lineage of each little thing in its velvet-lined division, always asking for more information. Unsatisfied, no matter what she told."

"You would want to try it all on and we'd pretend it was rediscovered treasure and make up our own tales about those things. Then we'd sneak into her closet when she was gone and play make-believe with her purses and shoes. I remember the little necklace with the dangling purple stones. 'Those are tourmalines,' Mama used to say whenever I touched it, as if it were important to her that the stones were authentic, and she could call their name."

"She never said where it came from," Sunday remembered. "She had costume stuff, too, the bracelet of shiny birthstones that must have been fake, and matching pin. But it was all super-real . . . magical, to us. And when you held it or put it on, you were transformed. It was the way into a fantasy."

"And there were the colored plastic bangles that probably came from the five-and-ten, and the one that boy had made her in his ninth-grade shop cla.s.s from twisted metal." A symbol of love that had never had a chance to fail.

Delta also remembered the everyday, unremarkable things that were in there with the jewelry, and had thereby acquired a magic of their own: tiny safety pins and keys to forgotten or changed locks; b.u.t.tons, lone ones Dolora must have been meaning to sew back on, and special, cherished ones made of rhinestones or cast bra.s.s that she had cut from clothes before giving them away, threaded into cl.u.s.ters with tangled wire.

"Grandpa's watch was in there, too," Delta added. "It's upstairs now. And a ring that was missing its stones. I used to imagine it complete, faceted sapphires intact. And there was a silver belt buckle, I vaguely recall."

Sunday stirred and cleared her throat, but decided to say nothing yet about the buckle she had brought in her coat pocket.

Delta lifted the chain and let the locket swing back and forth before she put it down. "Well, it seems like I've seen this locket, but clearly, it was never there after he left. Maybe she showed it to me beforehand, but maybe not. Probably she created it for us in the telling, 'cause when it came, I knew immediately what it was. What I hadn't known was that he took it with him when he left."

They had heard about the locket again and again, as Dolora made and remade her tale. Always it began in the same way, with her pointing to the empty velvet depression where it had been housed. She recounted her sitting for the photograph, and its presentation as a gift from her father, when she turned "sweet sixteen." As she described its intricate monogram and delicate chain, she looked into the distance and they could tell she was seeing it, repeating chosen pieces of the chronicle with embellishments, until it was a myth with a life of its own. As explanation of its absence, she had said only that it was "lost."

"Tell me . . . tell me the whole story," Sunday said, reaching across the table to take Delta's wrist and to feel the pulse beneath her fingertips, helpless at how little she understood, wondering what it would mean to have the whole story about anything, anything at all.

"Tell me," she said, "about the suicide that wasn't death."