And so when Nayendi tried on her wedding dress for the very first time, its maker, her mother, was not with her as she turned like a fan in front of the spotted mirror. Mama Lota was with her instead. The older woman could barely make out the girl’s serious face and the dress, a thin white cloud. It was dark in Mama Lota’s bedroom, the avocado tree outside the window casting a thick weave of shadow within. Nayendi squinted, stepping forward to evaluate herself. Sighing at what she saw, she glanced back up to her neatly cornrowed hair, and only then did she seem to notice Mama Lota’s face hovering over her shoulder in the mirror.
Mama Lota smiled, but only to let the girl know she was not alone. Mama Lota disliked looking in the mirror, much less smiling into it. One of her eyes always drooped and the hitch of her smile puckered the wrong cheek. It felt thin, too, her smile, more so today because something was missing. Nanjela. Why was her old friend brooding? Nanjela wasn’t lingering at meals or flattering the in-laws. She’d declined to advise the couple, refused to help with the cooking. When Mama Lota asked her, “What is happening here?” Nanjela demurred sulkily. She would leave the bonding ceremony to Mama Lota.
“I’m old. I’m tired,” she said. “I just want to take care of the grandchildren.”
“Ah-ah! And what about your own daughter? Who will take care of her?”
And here was her answer, Mama Lota thought, peering at the nervous ghost in the mirror. Nayendi. Still a child practically, the hunger in her eyes like a baby eyeing a nipple. The bride looked at the reflection of Mama Lota’s eyes and began to explain about the Western-style dress. Mama Lota laughed and took the girl by the shoulders and turned her around so they could see each other truly. “Nayendi, Nayendi. My husband was a pastor. I know all about white dresses!”
There was a knock on the door. A child came in and knelt down and breathlessly declared: “They’re here.” Mama Lota hastened from the room, closing the door behind her, leaving Nayendi to change out of the white dress into the chitenge outfit she’d wear for the traditional ceremonies.
Tonight, there’d be a feast! Mama Lota thrilled. Chickens to be plucked! Groundnuts to be shelled! Thumbs to be recruited! Mama Lota was electric with the stuff of preparation. She felt as though she were in charge of a fleet of kapenta canoes, accounting for the wind and the waves, shouting orders for boats to be washed and nets to be gathered and bait lights to be lit. All those slippery silvery fish would tumble into their laps, eventually, even if they lost a few in the mud. She would see even those, would scoop up even those, feed them to her lovely new dogs. Yes, Mama Lota had always kept her eye on everyone and everything. Perhaps it came with being so tall.
And yet she barely noticed when her nephew Lukundo left the candlelit living room that dusky evening just as the final ceremony began. A dozen married couples, ranging in age from thirty to eighty, were sitting in a circle around the couple kneeling on the floor. The experienced spouses were all nodding their heads like flowers in a rain shower, concurring with the advice that intoned from one corner of the room or another. In the gentle lull of consensus, Mama Lota hardly blinked when Lukundo hunched his way out of the room. Probably going to the outhouse, she thought, fingering the scab on her eyebrow, still damp at the edges and smelling like an ngwe coin. Mama Lota tried to focus as an old man droned on about the importance of sharing, no matter how little you have. Even when there is only one peanut left, the man said, even a peanut can be halved.
Meanwhile, as these parables echoed on without her, Nanjela was keeping her promise to care for the grandchildren. She stalked the yards of the adjacent houses, yanking toddlers out of danger, pushing the little monsters off each other, spanking those too slow or too stupid to get away. It was exhausting. She’d only ever had two daughters, and the chaos of even these three children, for instance, each arguing a different version of who’d done what to whom and why, was too much. Was there no one who had been watching, no one who could tell her what had really happened? The children shrugged. Nanjela sent them off to bed, shaking her head at their lunacy.
She floated along the edges of the yard, avoiding the elders and the children, avoiding the dogs and her daughter’s hungry eyes. Night fell. Under the trees, moonlight lay like the tatters of a veil. Nanjela found herself near the storehouse. Broken glass from the robbery still lay on the ground, the splinters flashing broken light. A dim yellowish glow gaped from the hole where the window had been. Had those thieving boys returned? She could hear nothing but the grating sound of insects courting each other. Nanjela moved closer, stood on her tiptoes and peered in through the blank window. The first thing she saw was a disc of light quivering on the floor. It was an electric torch, and something was moving violently beside it.
The insects creaked on and the wind picked up and Nanjela stared and stared until she made out a head bobbing in and out of the light. She had been looking for half a minute when a sobbing sound rose up and a shadow shifted and the thin shiny seam of a hair-weave glistened like a snake. It was Mary. The man shifted—the rocking lovers were seated, facing each other now—and Nanjela caught a glimpse of his back, still studded with the pimples he’d managed to clear from his face. Idiot boy, Nanjela spat to the ground. Idiot girl. Does she have no loyalty?
As if Nanjela had conjured Nayendi with the thought, there her daughter was, opening the door to the storehouse, standing across from the window through which Nanjela was spying. The lovers froze. Nayendi stood, staring at them. Then her eyes darted around the clasped figures and caught her mother’s eyes and held them. Nanjela felt the urge to run but she knew her old knees wouldn’t take her far. This moment of seeing felt even more private than the smell of sex in the room. Nanjela looked down first. She was heartbroken for her daughter, who would be heartbroken for shame, who knew nothing, Nanjela thought, of the willingness to be hurt that marriage breeds in you: how at first you pull back your palm from the slap, but over time simply wince and look away, and eventually just hold your hand out, patient as a beggar, resigned. When Nanjela looked back up, her daughter was gone, and she could see Mary’s face full on now, chin tipped to the moonlight, radiant with laughter.
By the time Mama Lota arrived at the scene—having grown suspicious that both groom and bride had left the bonding ceremony—clothes were back on and pacts had been exchanged. But Mama Lota knew. She looked pointedly at Nanjela and asked, “What is happening here?” Nanjela took her friend’s hand in hers and told the truth. The older women both realised that even at this point, no one else had to know about this dramatic betrayal. The wedding guests were drunk on food and beer and marital amnesia. No one had noticed anything amiss.
Mama Lota found the bride sitting under the avocado tree, weeping. One of the tied-up dogs was by her side, licking her hand with animal compassion. Mama Lota levered herself to the ground and put an arm around her. Nayendi looked up and said, “Tell him yes, tell him yes. Tell him yes, I’d marry him.” Mama Lota sighed and patted her dog on the head. Eventually, they all went up to Mama Lota’s bedroom, the oblivious elders still intoning below. Lukundo sat by the dresser, his head in his hands. A bored Mary leaned against the spotted mirror. The old women knelt on the ground beside each other. Nayendi sat on the edge of the bed, nodding down at her hands in her lap.
“Tell him yes,” she said again and again, as if he weren’t there. Awed by her, ashamed of her, tired, the others remained silent as she persisted. All for nought. Lukundo left before they could marry. He left that hot, close bedroom and packed his things and just as the sun cracked the pale shell of the sky, he walked off down the village road, leaving the wedding to collapse in on itself.
Mama Lota and Nanjela never speak of that night except in the most roundabout way, sucking their teeth at the good that begets evil, shaking their heads at the evil that begets good. How is it, for example, Nanjela often wonders to her friend, that the child conceived that dreadful night, or perhaps a short while earlier, had turned out so well in the end?
??
?Ah-ah. But we’re the ones who raised him,” Mama Lota chuckles.
“Yes, but that one is a demon and that other one is a vulture. How did they make such a good boy?”
And so it goes. One despairs; the other reassures. Nanjela steps sprightly beside her lanky friend as they tend their small field of crops. Mama Lota has grown shorter over the years, bending like a crane. The evening of their heights has brought them closer, as has the shared undertaking that began one morning a year after the wedding that never was.
Mama Lota and Nanjela, stepping outside after an amiable debate over the relative merits of mobile phones, had found one of the doublemen licking something under the avocado tree. Nanjela got there first. She took a deep breath and smacked the dog firmly on the nose. He wandered off, accustomed by now to her disdain. Nanjela gently picked up the mewling, swaddled creature. Three or four months old by the look of it and—she checked—a boy.
Mama Lota approached. “What is this?”
“Shh-shh-shh,” Nanjela said with warning eyes, pressing the baby’s face to her chest to calm him. Mama Lota stood by, fists on her hips, impatient. Only when he was quiet did one friend lower her arms to present to the other the child’s untouched face, familiar as a reflection.
“Look,” said Nanjela. “Look who it is.”
ROBINSON CRUSOE AT THE WATERPARK
ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN
THEY HAD COME TO Galveston, the boy and his fathers, to look at the ocean and chaw on saltwater taffy, but Galveston was solid November fog. As they drove down Seawall Boulevard, the Pleasure Pier emerged from the mist like a ghost ship: first the multicoloured lights of the rollercoaster and Ferris wheel, then an enormous sign that read, BUBBA GUMP SHRIMP CO.
“Good God,” said Bruno, the older father, the old one. The sky was mild as a milk-glass hen. He would have said this aloud but nobody else in the car would know what milk glass was. Instead he tried, “I hate the seaside. Where are we going?”
“You know where,” said Ernest, the younger father, who was driving.
Bruno had understood—when he fell in love with a young man, when they bought a house together, when he agreed to having children (one child at least)—that his life would become narrower and deeper, fewer trips to Europe, more moments of surprising headlong love. He had never imagined that family life would mean this: a visit to an indoor German-themed waterpark in Galveston, Texas. The fog had done it. They were headed to a location called Schlitterbahn, where there was an artificial river, for their river-obsessed son.
“You’ll feel at home,” said Ernest consolingly. “Being German-themed yourself.”
“Darling, I’m German-flavoured. German-scented. Only my mother.”
“A mother counts double,” said Ernest.
Bruno inclined his head towards their son—born to a surrogate, with an anonymous donor egg—in the back seat. They had forbidden him video games, so the boy had fallen in thrall to a pocket calculator, which he carried everywhere, calculating nothing: he could count, reliably, to six. “Well,” Bruno said.
“I mean, your mother,” Ernest said. “Your particular mother.”
But that was something Bruno and their son had in common. Bruno had an adoptive German-born mother, and a presumably biological English mother who had left him at a public library in Manchester, England. Not in the book deposit, as he liked to claim, but in the ladies’ room. In this way Bruno and the boy had the same mother: Anonymous. As in anthologies of poetry, she was the most prolific in human history. This particular Anonymous—Anonymous Manchester—had left him behind like a love letter to strangers; his parents had adopted him; his parents had divorced; his mother brought him to America. That was his provenance. He catalogued manuscripts for an auction house in Houston, other people’s love letters, other people’s diaries. Provenance was everything, and nothing. The point was not to stay whence you came, but to move along spectacularly and record every stop.
Still, he did hate the seaside. His beloved worked as a PR person for a technology company that specialised in something called Cloud Services, but Bruno was a person of paper, and the ocean was his enemy. The seaside turned books blowsy and loose. It threw sand everywhere. Its trashy restaurants left you blemished, oil-spotted. It drowned children, according to Bruno’s mother. She had few fears but drowning was one, and she had handed it down to her only son, like an ancestral christening gown that every generation was photographed in.
The fog made them drive slowly, as though not to break their car upon it. A wedding party walked towards them along the beach: bride, groom, six blue-clad bridesmaids, two men in tuxes, all of them overweight, one whippet-thin photographer walking backwards. The lactic light made them look peculiarly buoyant on the sand. Above them, a line of large khaki birds flew parallel to the ocean, heads ducked to avoid the clouds.
“Pelicans!” said Ernest, and then, in a hopeful, accusatory voice, “A wedding.”
“Pelicans?” said Bruno. “Surely not.” But there they were, single file and exact, military even, with the smug look of all pelicans. “Pelicans flock!”
“Well, sure,” said Ernest. “What did you think?”
“I thought they were freelancers,” said Bruno. “Pelicans!”
“They looked like brother and sister,” said Ernest, “the bride and her groom. Like salt and pepper shakers.”
“They did,” said Bruno.
The three people in the car, on the other hand, looked nothing alike, though strangers could see they belonged together. Strangers were always trying to perform the spiritual arithmetic: the tall paunchy goateed near-senior citizen, the short hirsute broad-shouldered young man, the otherworldly child, who called now, from the back seat, in his thrillingly husky voice, his dreams filled with artificial rivers, “Schlitterbomb!”
“Bahn,” said Ernest, and Bruno said, “That’s right, darling, Schlitterbomb.”
Ernest and Bruno had not married, not legally and not, as Ernest would have liked, in a church, or in a friend’s backyard, or on a beach. Bruno did not believe in weddings, though he’d been married once, once for fifteen years, to a woman. He’d been the young husband then. Now when Ernest brought marriage up, Bruno said, “I’m an old hippie,” which was true insofar as he, unlike Ernest, had been alive in the 1960s and had done some drugs.
Why marry, after all. The boy stirring in the back seat was their marriage, even though, from the first, it was Ernest who had summoned him up, first as a dream and then as a plan and then as a to-do list. It was Ernest who wanted a child, and then specified a biological one, who found the donor egg, and the surrogate, and then offered to Bruno what seemed like a compromise: they could mix their sperm together. “Oh God, how revolting,” said Bruno, and Ernest pointed out gently that it wouldn’t exactly be the first—“But not in a laboratory,” said Bruno, who ordinarily was the one with a sense of humour. And so the boy was Ernest’s child by blood, and Bruno’s by legal adoption. Ernest was Daddy and Bruno was Pop; Ernest believed in vows, Bruno in facts and deeds. The important fact was four years old. The fact was named Cody. The fact had never-cut red hair that hung to his shoulders and was so fair-skinned as to be combustible. Every day he was slathered in sunscreen; the first freckle would be a tragedy Ernest might never recover from. God knew when they’d manage a first haircut. When Cody and Bruno were out in the world together, they were generally taken for grandfather and granddaughter and this thorough wrongness incensed Ernest, though Bruno had learned over the years not to take the mistakes of others too seriously, not when his own mistakes required so much analysis. He couldn’t explain to Ernest the real trouble with a wedding: Ernest’s terrible taste, which he, Bruno, would have to go along with, and smile, and declare himself happy. “I like peach,” Ernest would say, displaying a napkin. Or, “My family loves disco music.” Or, “We could have Beef Wellington.”
Once upon a time, Bruno had had opinions about everything—the politics of Eastern Europe, baby clothes, how airline stewardes
ses should comport themselves, interior decoration. Then: Ernest. Ernest, from a happy Cuban-American family, had grown up going to Disney World for vacations and watching sports on television and buying clothing in actual shopping malls. Ernest had quite the worst taste Bruno had ever encountered. Up-to-date, American taste. For instance: Bruno had never imagined that a person he loved could admire, never mind long for, the abomination that was an open-plan house. Proper houses had doors, had walls, had secrets. But as they watched real estate programmes for tips on buying—neither had ever owned property, Ernest because he was young and Bruno because he was lazy—he was horrified to hear Ernest say, “Now see, that’s perfect. You can see everything from the kitchen.”
“Do you know who else likes to see everything from the kitchen?” Bruno asked. “The Devil. Hell is entirely without doors.”
“Heaven doesn’t need doors,” said Ernest.
Then Bruno had to remind himself that Ernest actually believed in heaven and hell, at least a little. So he said of the interior decorator on the television, “Look at that fool. I’m to trust him to arrange my furniture when he can’t even wear a hat at a convincing angle?” Look at that fool, yes, he thought to himself, of himself. That old fool would live in a panopticon, for love of Ernest.
And so Bruno decided to treat his opinions like a childhood collection—decorative spoons, matchbooks—something comprehensive and useless. Put it all away, beneath the bed. Let Ernest decide; let Bruno feel superior. Now they owned a house in Houston, Texas, where when you walked in the front door you could see the kitchen, the dishes in the sink, the nook with the small offering to the gods that was the child’s breakfast: a stem end of baguette, split and spread with jam. The playroom, the backyard, all the ways you could bolt.