The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart (9 page)

She had not killed for her sister. (And one would have had to kill the mindless drunken brutalizing husband, a blow to the head might only have made him more angry.) Her guilt soon clouded over the love, and around Barbara she retreated into a silence that she realized was very like her grandfather’s. The sign of disappointment hinged to powerlessness. A thoughtful black man in the racist early-twentieth-century South, he probably could have told her a thing or two about the squeaking of the hinge. But had he? No. He’d only complained about his wife,
and so convincingly that for a time Rosa, like everyone else in the family, lost respect for her. It seemed her problem was that she was not mentally quick, and because she stayed with him even as he said this Rosa and her relatives were moved to agree. Yet there was nowhere else she could have gone. Perhaps her grandfather had found the house in which they lived, but she, her grandmother, had made it a home. Once the grandmother died, the house seemed empty, though he remained behind.

Aunt Lily was handing out the remaining odds and ends of her grandfather’s things. Barbara got the trunk, that magic repository of tobacco and candy when they were children. Rosa received a small shaving mirror with a gilt lion on its back. There were several of the large, white “twenty-five-cent hanskers” her grandfather had used. The granddaughters received half a dozen each. That left only her grandfather’s hats. One brown and one gray, old, worn, none too clean fedoras. She knew Barbara was far too fastidious to want them. Rosa placed one on her head. She loved how she looked—she looked like him—in it.

It was killing her, how much she loved him. And he’d been so mean to her grandmother, and so stingy too. Once he had locked her out of the house because she had bought herself a penny stick of candy from the grocery money.

But then when Rosa knew him he had been beautiful. Peaceful, mystical almost in his silences and calm, and she realized he was imprinted on her heart just that way. It really did not seem fair.

To check her tears she turned to Aunt Lily.

“Tell me what my father was like as a boy,” she said.

Her aunt looked at her, she felt, with hatred.

“You should have asked him when he was alive.”

Rosa looked about for Barbara, who had disappeared into the bathroom. By now she was weeping openly. Her aunt looking at her impassively.

“I don’t want to find myself in anything you write. And you can just leave your daddy alone too.”

She could not remember whether she’d ever asked her father about his life. But surely she had, since she knew quite a lot. She turned and walked into the bathroom, forgetful that she was thirty-five, her sister forty-one, and that you can only walk in on your sister in the toilet if you are both children. But it didn’t matter. Barbara had always been accessible, always protective. Rosa remembered one afternoon when she was five or six, she and Barbara and a cousin of theirs about Barbara’s age set out on an errand. They were walking silently down the dusty road when a large car driven by a white man nearly ran them down. His car sent up billows of dust from the dirt road that stung their eyes and stained their clothes. Instinctively Rosa had picked up a fistful of sand from the road and thrown it after him. He stopped the car, backed it up furiously and slammed on the brakes, getting out next to them, three black, barefoot girls who looked at him as only they could. Was he a human being? Or a devil? At any rate he had seen Rosa throw the sand, he said, and he wanted the older girls to warn her against doing such things “for the little nigger’s own good.”

Rosa would have admitted throwing the sand. After all, the man had seen her.

But—“She didn’t throw no sand,” said Barbara, quietly, striking a heavy womanish pose with both hands on her hips.

“She did so,” said the man, his face red from heat and anger.

“She didn’t,” said Barbara.

The cousin simply stared at the man. After all, what was a small handful of sand compared to the billows of sand with which he’d covered them?

Cursing, the man stomped into his car, and drove off.

For a long time it had seemed to Rosa that only black people were always in danger. But there was also the sense that her big sister would know how to help them out of it.

But now, as her sister sat on the commode, Rosa saw a look on her face that she had never seen before, and she realized her sister had heard what Aunt Lily said. It was a look that said she’d got the reply she deserved. For wasn’t she always snooping about the family’s business and turning things about in her writing in ways that made the family shudder? There was no talking to her as you talked to regular people. The minute you opened your mouth a meter went on. Rosa could read all this on her sister’s face. She didn’t need to speak. And it was a lonely feeling that she had. For Barbara was right. Aunt Lily too. And she could no more stop the meter running than she could stop her breath. An odd look across the room fifteen years ago still held the power to make her wonder about it, try to “decipher” or at least understand it. This was her curse: never to be able to forget, truly, but only to appear to forget. And then to record what she could not forget.

Suddenly, in her loneliness, she laughed.

“He was a recorder with his eyes,” she said, under her breath. For it seemed to her she’d penetrated her grandfather’s serenity, his frequent silences. The meter had ticked in him too; he too was all attentiveness. But for him that had had to be enough;
she’d rarely seen him with a pencil in his hand; she thought he’d only had one or two years of school. She imagined him “writing” stories during his long silences merely by thinking them, not embarrassing other people with them, as she did.

She had been obsessed by this old man whom she so definitely resembled. And now, perhaps, she knew why.

We were kindred spirits, she thought, as she sat, one old dusty fedora on her head, the other in her lap, on the plane home. But in a lot of ways, before I knew him, he was a jerk.

She thought of Ivan. For it was something both of them had said often about their relationship: that though he was white and she was black they were in fact kindred spirits. And she had thought so, until the divorce, after which his spirit became as unfathomable to her as her grandfather’s would have been before she knew him. But perhaps Ivan, too, was simply acting like a jerk?

She felt, as she munched dry crackers and cheese the pert stewardess brought, in the very wreckage of her life. She had not really looked at Barbara since that moment in the toilet, when it became clear to her how her sister really perceived her. She knew she would not see Aunt Lily again and that if Aunt Lily died before she herself did she would not go to her funeral. Nor would she ever, ever write about her. She took a huge swallow of ginger ale and tried to drown out the incessant ticking.…

She stroked the soft felt of her grandfather’s hat, thought of how peculiarly the human brain grows from an almost invisible seed, and how, in this respect, it was rather similar to understanding, a process it engendered. She looked into the shaving mirror and her eyes told her she could bear very little more. She
felt herself begin to slide into the long silence in which such thoughts would be her sole companions. Maybe she would even find happiness in it.

But then, just when she was almost gone, Barbara put on their grandfather’s other hat, and reached for her hand.

She was busy cooking dinner, a nice ratatouille, chopping and slicing eggplant, zucchini and garlic. George Winston was on the box and the fire crackled in the stove. As she dripped olive oil into a pan a bit of it stuck to her thumb and she absentmindedly used her rather rough forefinger to rub it into the cuticle, which she noticed was also cracked. In fact, she had worked a lot over the last month putting in a winter garden; the weather most days had been mild, but it was also dry and occasionally there had been wind. Hence the extreme dryness of the skin on her hands.

Thinking of this, puttering about, putting a log on the fire and a pot of water for noodles on the stove, she touched her face, which, along her cheekbones, seemed to rustle it was so dry. Massaging the painfully dry cuticle, she swooped up the bottle of olive oil, sniffed it for freshness, and poured a tablespoonful into her hand. Rubbing her hands together she rubbed the oil all
over her neck and face. Then she rubbed it into wrists, arms and legs as well.

When John came in from splitting wood he sniffed the air hopefully, wanting to enjoy the smell of the ratatouille, one of his favorite dishes. Putting the wood down and kissing Orelia on the cheek he noticed how bright, almost burnished her skin looked. He was sorry he had a cold and could not smell her, since her sweet fresh smell always delighted him.

“Still can’t smell anything, eh?” she asked.

“Nope.”

To which she replied, emphatically, “Good.”

One of the sad things about their relationship was that even though she loved John she was unable to expect the best from him. John sometimes thought this was solely his fault, but it wasn’t. Orelia had been brought up in a family and a society in which men did not frequently
do
their best in relation to women, but rather a kind of exaggerated approximation of what their male peers told them was correct. Then, too, at a very young age, when she was no more than seven, her older brother, Raymond, gentle and loving, whom she had adored, betrayed her. Her other brothers, insensitive and wild, had designated an ugly, derisive nickname for her, “Rhino” (because even as a little girl dryness caused the skin on elbows and knees to appear gray and thick), which she had borne as well as she could until one day he called her by it. She was shattered and never again really trusted a man not to unexpectedly and obliviously hurt her feelings no matter how much she loved him.

So John was not trusted, no matter what he did, and sometimes he pointed this out to her, but mostly he kept quiet. No matter how many times he proved himself different from other
men, in her eyes he always seemed to measure up just the same, and this was depressing. However, he loved Orelia and understood many of the ways she had been hurt by society and her family and empathized with her.

While they were eating he mentioned how glowing she looked and she simply smiled and forked up bowls of salad. He was surprised she didn’t tell him immediately what she had done to herself—that was her usual way.

That night before she went to bed she washed herself from face to feet in the tin washbasin he had bought, a feat that regularly amazed him because she did, indeed, manage to get clean in less than a half gallon of water, whereas John felt the need each night to fire up the wood-burning hot water heater and luxuriate under a hot shower that used gallons. While he bathed in the bathhouse outside, she went wild in the kitchen with the olive oil, massaging it into her scalp, between her braids, into her face and body, into her feet. Glowing like a lamp she preceded a bewitched John up the narrow ladder to the sleeping loft.

Alas, the day must soon come when John got back his sense of smell; his colds rarely lasted longer than a week. Orelia thought about this every day as she slathered on the olive oil. She had grown to love the stuff. Unlike her various sweet-smelling oils and creams it really combated and won the battle over her skin’s excessive dryness, and its purity brought the glow of honest health to her skin.

Orelia and John had been intimate for so long that any little secret kept from him was like a sharp piece of straw in his sock. One night when the worst of his cold seemed over, he took his shower early so that he could be in the room with her when she
bathed. Over the pages of his
Natural History
he watched her peel the mauve-colored thermal underwear from her dark, glowing body and fill the tin washbasin with hot water from the copper kettle, which was almost the exact color of her face. He watched her soap her cloth and begin industriously if somewhat bemusedly washing her face, neck and ears. He watched her soap and palpate her breasts, and he longed to be where the soap was, covering her deep brown nipples with his tongue. She looked over at him as she moved down her body with the soapy cloth and finally squatted over the pan. John riveted his eyes, which he felt were practically steaming, on a story in his magazine about the upside-down eating habits of flamingoes. By the time he looked up she was sitting decorously in a kitchen chair, her feet soaking in the pan. And while she sat, she was busily rubbing something into her skin.