When they arrived at Aunt Lily’s squat green house with its orange and lemon trees in the yard, far from canals and even streetlights, they were met in the narrow hall by five of her aunt’s seven foster children and a young woman who had been a foster child herself but was now sharing the house and helping to look after the children with Aunt Lily. Her name was Raymyna Ann.
Aunt Lily had, a long time ago, a baby son who died. For years she had not seemed to care for children; Rosa had never felt particularly valued by her whenever she’d come to visit. Aunt Lily acknowledged her brother’s children by bringing them oranges and grapefruit packed in orange net bags. She rarely hugged or kissed them. Well, she rarely touched these foster children, either, Rosa noticed. There were so many of them, so dark (all as black, precisely, as her aunt) and so woundedly silent. But at dinner the table was piled high with food, the little ones were encouraged to have seconds, and when they all trooped off to bed they did so in a cloud of soapy smells and dazzling linen.
Rosa lay in the tiny guest room, which had been her grandfather’s room, and smoked a cigarette. Aunt Lily’s face appeared at the door.
“Now, Rosa, I don’t allow smoking or drinking in my house.”
Rosa rose from the bed to put her cigarette out. Her aunt watching her as if she were a child.
“You used to smoke and drink,” she said, piqued at her aunt’s self-righteous tone.
“Your mama told you that lie,” said Aunt Lily, unsmiling. “She was always trying to say I was fast. But I never did drink. I tried to, and it made me sick. Every time she said she didn’t want me laying on her freshly made-up bed drunk, I wasn’t drunk, I was sick.”
“Oh,” said Rosa, who had the unfortunate tendency of studying people very closely when they spoke. It occurred to her for the first time that Aunt Lily didn’t like her mother.
By why didn’t Aunt Lily like her mother? The question nagged at her that night as she tried to sleep. Then became lost in the many other questions that presented themselves, well into the dawn.
Why, for instance, did Ivan no longer like her? And how could you live with someone for over a decade and “love” them, then, as soon as you were no longer married, you didn’t even like them?
Her marriage had been wonderful, she felt. Only the divorce was horrible.
The most horrible thing of all was losing Ivan’s friendship and comradely support, which he yanked out of her reach with a vengeance that sent her reeling. Two weeks after the divorce became final she was in the hospital for surgery that proved to have been minor only after the fact. He neither called nor sent a note.
Sheila, now his wife, wouldn’t have liked it, he later (years later) explained.
And she had said, by then:
“Who? Who wouldn’t have liked it?”
And he had had to remind her who Sheila was. This was not because her memory was so poor—it actually was poor—but because he no longer called his wife by name but by some more generic “mother/housefrau” appellation made up after their babies started to come.
The next day all the children were in school and Barbara stood behind Aunt Lily’s chair combing and braiding her long silver hair. Rosa sat on the couch looking at them. Raymyna busily vacuumed the bedroom floors, popping in occasionally to bring the mail or a glass of water. She was getting married in a couple of weeks and would be moving out to start her own family. Rosa had of course not said anything when she heard this, but her inner response was surprise. She could not easily comprehend anyone getting married, now that she no longer was, but it was impossible for her to feel happy at the prospect of yet another poor black woman marrying God knows who and starting a family. She would have thought Raymyna had already had enough.
But who was she to talk. Miss Cynical. She had married. And enjoyed it. She had had a child, and adored it.
In the afternoon her aunt and Raymyna took them sight-seeing. As she understood matters from the local newspapers, all the water she saw—whether canal, river or ocean—was polluted beyond recall, so that it was hard even to look at it, much less to look at it admiringly. She could only gaze at it in sympathy. The beach she also found pitiable. In their attempt to hog it away from the poor, the black and the local in general, the beachfront “developers” had erected massive boxlike hotels that blocked the view of the water for all except those rich enough to pay for rooms on the beach side of the hotels. Through the cracks between hotels Rosa saw the mostly elderly sunworshipers walking along what seemed to be a pebbly, eroded beach, stretching out their poor white necks to the sun.
Of course they cruised through “Little Havana,” which stretched for miles. Rosa looked at the new Cuban immigrants (gusanos, Fidel called them, worms) with interest. Startled that already they seemed as a group to live better and to have more material goods than the black people. Like many Americans who supported the Cuban revolution she found the Cubans who left Cuba somewhat less noble than the ones who’d stayed. Clearly the ones who’d left were the ones with money. Hardly anyone in Cuba could afford the houses, the cars, the clothes, the television sets and lawn mowers she saw.
At dinner she tried to explain why and how she had missed her grandfather’s funeral. The telegram had come the evening before she left for Cyprus. As she left her stoop next morning she had felt herself heading in the wrong direction. But she could not stop. It had taken all her meager energy to plan the trip to Cyprus, with a friend who claimed it was beautiful, and she simply could not think to change her plans. Nor could she, still bearing the wounds of her separation from Ivan, face her family, so many, perhaps all, of whom had been uncomfortable with him anyway.
Barbara and Aunt Lily listened to her patiently. It didn’t surprise her that neither knew where Cyprus was, or what its politics and history were. She told them about the man whose son was killed and how he seemed to hate his “worthless” daughter for being alive.
“Women are not valued in their culture,” she explained. “In fact, the Greeks, the Turks and the Cyprians have this one thing in common, though they fight over everything else. The father kept saying ‘A man should have many sons.’ His wife flinched guiltily when he said it.”
“After Ma died, I went and got my father,” Aunt Lily was saying. “And I told him, no smoking and drinking in my house.”
But her grandfather had always smoked. He smoked a pipe. She’d liked the smell of it.
“And no cardplaying and no noise and no complaining because I don’t want to hear it.”
Others of her brothers and sisters had come to see him. She had been afraid to. On the pictures she saw, he always looked happy. But when he was not dead tired or drunk, happy was how he’d looked. A deeply silent man with those odd peaceful eyes—she did not know, and she was confident her aunt didn’t, what he really thought about anything. So he had stopped smoking, her aunt thought, but her brothers had always slipped him tobacco. He had stopped drinking. That was possible. Even before his wife, Rosa’s grandmother, had died he had given up liquor. Or, as he said “it had given him up.” So, no noise. Little company. No complaining. But he wasn’t the complaining type, was he? He liked best of all, Rosa thought, to be left alone. And he liked baseball. She felt he had liked her, too. She hoped he did. But never did he say so. And he was so stingy! In her whole life he’d only given her fifteen cents. On the other hand, he’d financed her sister Barbara’s trade-school education, which her father, his son, had refused to do.
Was that what she held against him on the flight away from the South, toward the Middle East? There was no excuse, she’d known it all the time. She needed to be there, to say good-bye to the spiritcase. For wasn’t she beginning to understand the appearance of his spiritcase as her own spirit struggled and suffered?
At night, massaging Barbara’s thin shoulders before turning in, she looked into her own face reflected in the bureau mirror. She was beginning to have the look her grandfather had when he was very, very tired. The look he got just before something br
oke in him and he went on a mind-killing drunk. It was there in her eyes. So clearly. The look of abandonment. Of having no support. Of loneliness so severe every minute was a chant against self-destruction.
She massaged Barbara but she knew her touch was that of a stranger. At what point, she wondered, did you lose connection with people you loved? And she remembered going to visit Barbara when she was in college and Barbara lived a short bus ride away. And she was present when Barbara’s husband beat her and called her names and once he had locked both of them out of the house overnight. And her sister called the police and they seemed nice to Rosa, so recently up from the South, but in fact they were bored and cynical as they listened to Barbara’s familiar complaint. Rosa was embarrassed and couldn’t believe anything so sordid could be happening to them, so respected was their family in the small town they were from. But, in any event, Barbara continued to live with her husband many more years, and Rosa was so hurt and angry she wanted to kill. But most of all, she was disappointed in Barbara, who threw herself into the inevitable weekend battles with passionately vulgar language that Rosa had never heard any woman, not to mention her gentle sister, use before. Her sister’s spirit seemed polluted to her, so much so that the sister she had known as a child seemed gone altogether. And once gone, she had never come back.
Was disappointment, then, the hardest thing to bear? Or was it the consciousness of being powerless to change things, to help? And certainly she had been very conscious of that. As he punched out her sister, Rosa had almost felt the blows on her body. But she had not flung herself between them wielding a butcher knife as she had done once when Barbara was being attacked by their father, another raving madman.
Barbara had wanted to go to their brother’s grammar school graduation. Their father had insisted that she go to the funeral of an elderly church mother instead. Barbara had tried to refuse. But crack, he had slapped her across the face. She was sixteen, plump and lovely. Rosa adored her. She ran immediately to get the knife, but she was so small no one seemed to notice her, wedging herself between them. But had she been larger and stronger she might have killed him; for even as a child she was serious in all she did—and then what would her life, the life of a murderer, have been like? Thinking of that day she wept. At her love, her sister’s anguish. Barbara had been forced to go to the funeral, the print of her father’s fingers hidden by powder and rouge.
She was little and weak and she did not understand what was going on anyway between father and sister. To her, her father acted like he was jealous. And in college, after such a long struggle to get there, how could she stab her brother-in-law to death without killing her future, herself? And so she had lain on her narrow foldaway cot in the tiny kitchen in the stuffy apartment over the laundromat and had listened to the cries and whispers, the pummelings, the screams and pleas. And then, still awake, she listened to the silibant sounds of “making up,” harder to bear and to understand than the fights.
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.