I smile with the irony of it. Tilo he is as certain as you were on the island, and as little-knowing. So now you, like the Old One, must take on the cautioning role.
We are standing in the aisle of snacks. The American holds up a packet of chanachur on which is written LIJJAT SNACK MIX VERY HOT!!!
“It really is,” I say. “Why not try one of the milder brands. What are you trying to prove.”
He laughs. “My machoness, of course.”
It is Monday. The store is officially closed. For Monday is the day of silence, day of the whole white mung bean which is sacred to the moon. On Mondays I go to the inner room and sit in the lotus asana. When I close my eyes the island comes to me, coconut palms swaying, soft sun floating on the evening sea, smell of wild honeysuckle in the sweet heavy air, so real I could weep. I hear the thin call of ospreys as they dive for salt fish. It is a sound like violins.
The Old One comes to me also, and around her the new girls whom I do not know. But the gleam on their faces is heartbreaking-familiar. The gleam that says We will change the world.
On Mondays I talk to the Old One. For Monday is the day for mothers, the day they should know all their daughters’ doings. But lately I do not tell everything.
As I will not today.
This is what happened today: The lonely American came to the store. In daylight. For the first time. Why is this significant, you ask.
Night draped in her glamor-scarf of stars often deceives—especially when we want something just so. It is only in the impartial light of day that we are forced to learn the daytime reality of men.
I sensed his coming long before he stood at the locked door of the shop looking at the dog-eared CLOSED sign. His body had been a column of heat shifting through the busy streets, his gait firm yet gentle as though it were not concrete but the earth’s skin he stepped on.
Ah my American, waiting part in dread and part in desire I said to myself, Perhaps now I will see that he is only ordinary after all.
Standing outside in stillness, did he feel me too? Pillar of ice frozen on the other side of the door, and inside me all the old voices clamoring Don’t answer. Clamoring Have you forgotten, today is the day consecrated to the First Mother, when you must speak to no one else?
I think he heard them. For he did not knock. He turned away, my American, giving me a chance. But at the first step he took backward, I opened the door.
Just to look. That is what I told myself.
He didn’t speak. Not words. Only the gladness in his eyes telling me he saw something more important than my wrinkles.
What are you really seeing?
American, I am gathering the courage to ask you this. One day soon.
And for the first time inside his mind I caught a swaying, like kelp deep undersea, almost invisible in salt shadows.
A desire. I could not read it yet. I knew only that somehow it included me.
I Tilo who had always been the one who granted wishes, never the one who was wished for.
Gladness tugged at the corners of my mouth also, though we Mistresses are not given much to smiling.
Lonely American you have passed the test of day. You have not dwindled into commonness. But how will I rest until I discover this your desire.
I pushed at the door to open it more, expecting resistance. But it swung easy and wide, like a welcoming arm.
“Come in.” Nor did the words stick raw and jagged in my throat, as I had feared.
“I didn’t want to disturb,” he said.
Behind us the door glided shut. In the hushed, listening air of the store my voice floated, a bell of glass.
“How can one be disturbed by those one is happy to see.”
But inside me a question, grating as an eyeful of sand: Spices are you with me truly, or is this a new game you are playing.
“There’s something I have to warn you of,” I say as I hand my American the chanachur.
Inside my head: No Tilo you don’t, why not let it be. After all he chose it himself.
Temptation, soft as a silkbed. It would be so easy to let my body sink into it.
No. Lonely American, later you must never say I used your ignorance.
So I continue. “The main spice in it is kalo marich, peppercorn.”
“Yes?” But his attention is mostly on the packet, which he is smelling. The spices make him sneeze. He laughs, shaking his head, lips pursed in a silent whistle.
“Peppercorn which has the ability to sweat your secrets out of you.”
“So you think I have secrets.” Seeming-unconcerned, he picks up an awkward pinch of the snack, pieces falling from between fingers. Puts it in his mouth.
“I know you do,” I say. “Because I have them too. Every one of us.”
I watch him, not knowing if the spice will work now that I have told its power. This is a new way I am going, and in front all is bramble bush and dark fog.
“I’m not doing it right, am I,” he says as more chana drizzles from his fingers, studding his shirt front yellow and brown.
I have to laugh. “Here,” I say, “I’ll make you a cone like we use in India.” From under the counter where I keep old Indian newspapers, I shake out a sheet. Roll it up and fill it.
“Pour some onto your palm. When you get really good you can toss it up and catch it in your mouth, but for now lift your hand to your lips.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he says with mock humbleness.
So now my American is sitting on the counter swinging his legs and eating hot snack mix from his paper cone as though he’s done it forever. His feet are bare. He took off his shoes at the door. (His shoes, handmade of softest leather, whose shine comes not from the surface but somewhere deeper. Shoes Haroun would have loved and hated.)
“For respect,” he said. “Just like Indians do.”
“Not when they are in a store.”
“But you’re not wearing any either.”
So many months, so many people coming and going, and only he noticed. Is it foolish to feel pleasure like an electric tingle in my dusty soles?
“I’m different,” I tell him.
“What makes you think I’m not?” He smiles that smile I am learning to watch for.
My American’s feet, I decide, are beautiful. (And his face? Ah already I have lost the distance needed to discern that.) But his feet, the toes slender and free of hair, the curve arching just enough, the soles pale ivory but not too soft: I can imagine holding them in my hands, rubbing their hollows with the tip of a finger—
Stop Tilo.
He eats with gusto. Strong white teeth crunch unabashed into fried garbanzos, yellow sticks of sev, spicy peanuts in their red skin.
“Mmmm, great.” But he is sucking in air, little cool sips of it to lessen the burn on his tongue.
“It’s too hot for a white man’s mouth. That’s why I told you to try something else. Maybe I should get you a cup of water.”
“And kill the taste,” he says. “Are you kidding.” And sips some more air, but absently. Something distracts him.
After a moment he says, “So you think I’m white.”
“You look that way to me, no insult intended.”
He half smiles at that but I can see his mind is puzzling something else. I don’t try to read his thoughts. Even if I could. I want instead for him to give them to me.
“If you tell me your name maybe,” I say, “I’d know what you are.”
“Is it so easy, then, to know what one is?”
“I never claimed it was easy.”
He eats in silence until the chana is gone, shakes his head when I offer more. He opens up the cone and smooths out the paper on the counter as though he is planning to use it for something important. There is a sharp crease, displeasure or pain, between his brows. His eyes, lidded like a hawk’s, look past me at what only he can see in the air.
Was my question too intimate, asked too soon?
He stands up, dusts off his pants briskly like
he’s late for somewhere else.
“Thanks a lot for the snack. I’d better get going. How much do I owe you?”
“It was a gift.” I hope my voice does not give away my hurt.
“I can’t keep letting you do that,” he says, the words stiff as a wall between us. He puts a twenty-dollar bill on the counter and walks to the door.
Tilo you should have waited. Now you’ve lost him.
His hand on the doorknob. I feel it as though it were fisted around my heart.
Peppercorn where are you in my time of need.
He twists the knob. The door glides open, treacherous-smooth, not a sound even.
I think, Don’t go please. You don’t have to say anything you don’t want to. Just stay with me awhile.
But I cannot speak them, the asking words that would lay bare my need-full heart. I who have until now been the giver of gifts, the Mistress of desires.
He stands on the threshold for a long moment. What he is deciding I do not know. My held breath scrapes my chest, dry like claws.
In one angry motion he pulls the door shut. The thunderclap sound shakes me.
My American, what is it that angers you so.
“What name shall I tell you? I have had so many.”
His voice is harsh and hurting, like rock on rock. He does not look at me.
Still, relief runs through me like a river. When I breathe in, the air is sweet as honey in my throat. He did not leave he did not leave.
“I too have had more than one,” I say. “But only one of them is my true-name.”
“A true-name.” He chews on his lip for a moment. Flicks back a sheet of black satin hair. “I’m not sure I can tell which one it is. Perhaps you’ll know.”
And that is how he begins.
“I’m not surprised you thought I was white,” says the American. “For a long time, growing up, I thought so myself. Rather, I didn’t think of it at all, like most kids. Just accepted.
“My father was a quiet man, big and slow moving. The kind that when you’re with them you feel yourself slowing down too, calmness covering you like a cool blanket, even your heartbeat. Later I would wonder if that was why my mother married him, hoping.
“Of all things about him I remember his hands best. Large and callused from the work he did up at the refinery in Richmond, the knuckles skinned raw. Half-moons of oily dirt under the nails no matter how often he scrubbed them with the brush Mother had bought for him. He was self-conscious about them, I think. How they looked next to my mother’s quick, manicured fingers, the nail polish always gleaming perfect no matter what she’d been doing around house or garden. The rare times when company came around, mostly people Mother had met at church, he’d jam his hands in his pockets, where they sat knotted like roots until the visitors left.
“But around me his hands were easy. He’d lay one on my head when I told him about school or a new game I’d made up, and it was the stillest thing I’d ever known. I could feel the listening in it. When I was hurt or upset or sometimes late at night for no reason at all, he would come sit by my bed and rub my back, his callused thumb making little circles over my shoulder blades until I fell asleep. I loved the smell his hands left, on my body, in my hair. An old, wild, patient smell, like a forest swamp.”
My American’s voice is glazed and heavy like medicine honey, the words catching in its bitter sweetness, the memory of things lost. They wrench open in me chambers I thought I’d shut for always.
“I guess I idolized him,” he says, “the way kids do their parents, you know.”
No, American. I do not know. As you speak a memory rises out of my childhood, my parents scolding me—or trying to—for something I’d done. Perhaps a dish I’d thrown to the ground because I did not like its taste, perhaps a fight I’d had with a sister, scratching her face, tearing her hair. I see my father’s finger pointed accusing, my mother shaking her head as though I were beyond remedy. And I—how angry I was that they dared criticize me, I who was responsible for all their wealth, for how people looked at them with awe in the marketplace. How I fixed my scornful gaze on them until they lowered their eyes and backed away.
But today as I listen to my American’s voice I see them newly. I see bafflement and fear in the slumped lines of their shoulders. In their lowered eyes, the desire to be good parents, the desire, even, to love. But not knowing how. I see now that they are the eyes of lost children, and seeing, I want to weep.
Perhaps one day American I will be able to tell you of it. I Tilo who has until now been the patient listener, the solver of everyone else’s problems.
But he is speaking, and I must push back my own sorrows to give my attention over to his words which scour the skin of the evening with their sudden harshness. And that is how I know I have come to a hurting place.
“My mother, she was—different.”
I hold my body still as wood earth stone, even my breathing, until he begins again. Now I find his voice has taken on smoothness, his phrases grown full and formal as though this is a long-ago tale of someone else. Perhaps it is the only way he can bring himself to tell it.
“What I remember most about her was how she was always cleaning, with an angry kind of energy. Dirt on anything—Dad or me included—she took as a personal affront. She spent hours at the washboard battling Dad’s stained overalls, and every night when he took a bath she scrubbed his back until it was red. We lived in a small house on the edge of a run-down neighborhood, mostly factory workers and dockhands, men who sat out on the porch in the evenings in undershirts, staring out at the yellowed lawns, nursing bottles of beer. But inside our home you’d never have known this. Everything had a shine to it, the lemon linoleum kitchen floor, the TV in its fake-walnut console, the curtains clean and sweet-smelling from something Mother put in the wash water. Matching silverware on the table, and her watching to make sure I used it right.
“She didn’t like the neighborhood kids, with their loud laughter and curse words and shirts with too-short sleeves on which they wiped their noses. Still, she was a good mother, she knew a boy needed friends. She let me play with them and on occasion bring them into the house. She served them juice and cookies which they ate uneasily, sitting on the edges of chairs that gleamed with furniture polish. But when they left she would make me wash—face, arms, legs, everything—over and over as though to make sure all traces of them were removed. She would sit at the dinner table with me as I did my homework, and when I glanced up there would be a look on her face, an intent, pained love I didn’t quite know what to make of.
“She had a ritual every night before bed. When I had changed into my pajamas she would slick my hair down with water and comb it back neatly. So I could go meet my dreams looking good, she said, planting a kiss in the middle of my forehead when she was done. Other boys might have been impatient with such things, but I wasn’t. I loved the strong, supple way she moved the comb through my hair, the way she would hum under her breath. Sometimes as she combed she would say she wished my hair was more like Dad’s and not so coarse and coalblack, falling all over my forehead no matter how much she worked on it. Secretly, though, I was pleased. I loved Dad, but his hair was a thin, brittle red with bald patches already showing through. I was glad my hair took after mother’s, except that where mine was straight as string hers curled around her face in the prettiest way.”
In the opaque evening air of the store, shapes take form. Old desires. A woman, her whole body tensed to lift herself out of her life, a boy looking at his mother with all the world in his eyes.
Is he still speaking, my American, or am I dreaming his dream inside my heart?
Understand this, says the boy-shape. Don’t dismiss it as adolescent fancy. I thought my mother the most beautiful woman in creation. Because she was.
I see for a moment the other women that graze the edges of his life, hanging up clothes in the backyards next to his. Mouths full of pins, swollen bellies, the fallen flesh of their arms and throats, thei
r breasts. The sweat that made their shifts stick to their backs. Or at school, the teachers with their thin mouths, their tired red-rimmed eyes, their fingers curving hard around pointers, chalk, dusters. Dry dead things.
But her. The lacy wrists of her nightdresses, the way she would do sit-ups in the morning, her spine curving cleanly, the smell of the cologne she splashed extravagantly over her throat. Her clothes were few, but always from good stores. Her shoes, high on pointy heels which made her dresses sway around her legs as she moved around the house as if she were in a movie. Even her name, not Sue or Molly or Edith like the neighbor women but Celestina, which she spoke liltingly and never allowed anyone to shorten.
Her hair was always fresh-washed, a halo of wavy black that gave her a radiance which the boy thought was not unlike that of the saints in the holy pictures the nuns handed him in Sunday school. Sometimes she’d pin the curls back with barrettes. Gold, silver, pearl. She kept them in a small carved wooden box and let him play with them and pick out a pair for her to wear.
“She took such good care of them I didn’t know until years later that they were fake,” says the American. The word is a hard, hitting sound in his mouth. “Or that her hair wasn’t naturally curly. The day I found the bottle of perming chemicals in the garage behind a stack of old magazines, I was too mad to even speak to her.” His voice shakes again, remembering, then changes to a harsh laugh. “Except it didn’t matter, because by then we weren’t talking much anyway.”
“Wait,” I say, puzzled by his vehemence. “Why did it upset you so much? In America it is common that women curl their hair. Even I know this.”
“Because by then I knew why she’d done it. Why she did everything I’d admired. The lie of it all.”
“Growing up,” says the American, “I thought of my father as a rock. And my mother like a river falling onto it from a great height. Or perhaps it was only later I remembered them as such. The silent power of him, her restless beauty. And I—I was the sound of water on stone, which sounds like nothing else, which needs to be related to nothing else. And so I never thought of who my people were, or where I came from.