Now Raven turns to me with a determined smile. “Enough of the past,” he says, as though he has wrested it back into its lawful place, away from now. As though such a thing were possible. “Shall we head to the beach? There’s just enough time for a stroll along the ocean before we return. If you want.”
“Yes,” I say. “I want.” And deep in me, under the sorrow and the longing to console—for such is the paradox of the heart—a selfish hope I am half ashamed of stirs: Perhaps if I look out. If I call. The snakes.
Hope not built on reason brings disappointment only. That is what the First Mother would say.
But I cannot resist. There is something in the air, a sense of benediction, undeserved gifts floating down on thick dust-gold sunbeams. If ever the snakes were to come back to me, it would be today.
At the very end. I will call to them just before we go back.
We walk on the cold speckled sand, feel the give of it under our weight, the way it wells up to mold itself around our ankles.
Ah ocean it has been so long. Every footstep is a memory, like walking on broken bones. Like that old tale, the girl who wanted to become the best dancer in the world. Yes, said the sorceress, but each time you set your foot on earth will be like knives slashing. If you can stand the pain, you will be granted your desire.
First Mother, who would have thought the taste of salt-spray on my lips as I walk beside the man I must not love would bring this longing for that simpler time when you made all decisions for me.
“There are moments in our lives,” says Raven, “you of all people surely know them. A few rare moments when we are given a chance to repair what we damaged in unthinking rage. Such a moment came to me once, and I threw it away.”
We are walking back up the beach, retracing our steps. The sea air is like a drug that fires my senses. I am aware of everything with knife-keen precision: the way drops of water hang for a moment in the air when a wave explodes against the cliff, the tiny pink flowers growing from crevices in sea-rocks where one would expect nothing to grow, and most of all the rasp of regret in Raven’s voice as he lets himself be taken by the undertow of memory.
“A few minutes into our journey home that day, the car stopped at a red light. My mother took her hands off the wheel to rub tiredly at her eyes. I watched the long, bent line of her neck, and her throat, so naked and fragile, and a thought came to me: Throw your arms around her, call her by that magic childhood name, Mommy, which once made everything right. There will be no need for further words, apology or blame. Let skin speak to skin as you press your face into her neck, that fragrance you have known forever.
“But something kept me in my seat, immovable, stubborn as a stone. Maybe it was that sense that comes to us all at some point in the growing-up process, that we are separate from our parents and must suffer our own lives, with our own sorrows. Or maybe it was something simpler, a childish spite, Let her hurt like I’m hurting. And then the light changed and she started driving again.”
I see them in the car, mother and son, tied together in the bond of blood which is closest and perhaps most painful. I feel in the back of my throat the aching force of the words dammed up in theirs. I know how with every mile it will be harder to say them. Because with every mile they are moving farther from each other, farther from that moment of grace offered to them briefly. Even as their breaths mingle, even as her elbow grazes his when she reaches to change gears. Until the distance that stretches between them grows too vast for human traversing.
“After that day,” says Raven, “I became a different person. My world was like a bag turned upside down, with all the certainties shaken out of it.
“We’d be doing something ordinary—maybe my mother would be driving me to the dentist’s, or we’d be at the store picking out clothes for school. I’d look up to make a remark, and suddenly the memory of that dark room would drop like a film over my eyes, changing everything I looked at. I’d stare stupidly at the Levi’s I’d been wanting for months, or the sign on the dentist’s wall that said YOU DON’T HAVE TO BRUSH ALL YOUR TEETH—JUST THE ONES YOU WANT TO KEEP, which I’d found so funny the last time I was there. But now they meant nothing.”
Fear breaks over me like a black wave as I listen to Raven. If a single brush with the life of power could leave him so bereft, what would happen to me. I Tilo who have given up all to be Mistress. How would I bear it if the spices ever left me.
And Tilo, by doing what you have done today, are you not pushing them toward such a leaving.
I want to stop Raven. To say, Enough, take me back to my store. But I am in it too deep now, his story. And beyond, Haroun waits.
Tomorrow, I say to the spices, trying to believe my promise. From tomorrow I will be obedient.
Overhead, the gulls’ call is like raucous laughter.
“My mother too had become a different person. Something went out of her that day in the car, some core of resolution, some drive, which perhaps she’d used up when she spoke that fateful no. She kept on doing all the same things—our home was still meticulously clean and cared for—but not with the same intense belief. Where before she’d liked sound—the radio would always be playing in our house—now I’d come home from school to find her sitting by the window in silence, gazing out at the empty lot across the street filled with high, swaying weeds. Perhaps the journey back to where her life had begun had made her see that in some way she hadn’t really escaped it, not in her heart, which is the only place where it counts.
“But all this I thought of much later. At that time I’d look at that brief unfocusedness in her eyes before she hurried to fix me a snack, becoming housewife and mother again, and I’d think, guilt. And with the cruelty that perhaps only children can feel toward their parents I would think, Good. She deserves it And I’d think of ways to punish her further.
“One of these was to watch her. Just sit and stare at her as she did her chores—mopping the floor, dusting the furniture—but where before in her movements I’d seen the natural grace I’d so loved her for, I would now see strained effort. The effort to be as different as she could from the women she’d left behind, greasy-haired women with a bunch of kids pulling on their faded dresses, crying. Women who’d lost control of their bodies and their lives the way she was determined never to. I’d pretend to do my homework while I watched her helping my father with the accounts, her fingers moving nimbly over the calculator. I’d sit in a corner of the room with a book and watch her pouring tea into matching cups for her church friends, passing around home-baked shortbread as if she’d done it every day of her life. And all the while I was waiting for the mask to slip, the muscles to slacken, a dullness to overcome her features. But of course it never did.
“I could tell it made her uncomfortable, though. If we were alone, she’d say, What’s wrong with you, don’t you have anything else to do? And when I shook my head, her eyes would darken—with guilt, I would think again, though now it occurs to me that perhaps it was only helplessness—and often she’d leave the room. If others were present she’d send me a silent, imploring glance, please go, and when I looked blankly through it, she’d get flustered so that sometimes she added things up wrong or spilled the tea.
“Her friends would say, What a quiet, polite boy you have, Celestina, how lucky you are, wish mine were like that. And I would lower my head modestly for them and smile a quiet, polite smile, but from under my lashes I would glance up at her. I knew she knew what I was asking her without words: What would your friends say if they found out where you came from, who you really were? What would Dad think?”
Raven gives me a rueful smile. “Coming from your Indian culture, you probably can’t even imagine behaving this way toward your parents.”
I smile at the double irony of it. My American, how you have romanticized my land and my people. And most of all me, I who have never been a dutiful daughter, not to my birth parents, not to the Old One. I who have given only trouble wherever I went. Will there ever co
me a day when I can tell you this.
“The Indian culture isn’t quite what you think,” I say wryly.
“But tell me the truth—aren’t you thinking how insufferable I must have been, what a deplorable, unnatural son? And you’re right, I was.”
I want to say, It is not my place to judge you, nor my desire. As a Mistress of Spices, I should not. As a woman imperfect as you, I cannot. Besides, you have done the judging already, year after year after year.
But I can only put my hand on his arm and say, “Raven, you are too hard on yourself.”
He shrugs and I see that he has convinced himself otherwise.
“My mother was a controlled woman,” he continues, “not given to outbursts, but once in awhile I’d manage to make her lose her temper. I’d feel a bitter satisfaction when she started in on me, quiet at first, then her voice getting louder as I put on my don’t-care face, till at the end she’d be shouting, I don’t know why you’re behaving like this, don’t know what to do with you! She always stopped short of saying anything really cruel—even then I felt a grudging admiration for that. But later I’d go in the bathroom and look closely in the mirror. I’d run my fingers through my hair, which seemed coarser each day. Touch the blunted bones of my face. I’d spit out the words which surely had been in the back of her mind all the time: What else can I expect from you, you no-good Indian.”
So many years, and still I hear in his voice the dregs of that bitterness, hatred of oneself which must surely be the worst hate of all.
“But why did you feel she’d think this way?” I ask. “From what you’ve told me, she doesn’t seem the kind—”
“Yeah, I thought that myself sometimes. An old memory would come into my head, a rainy day cuddled under a quilt with her as she read to me, or when I’d been sick and she stayed up all night holding ice packs to my forehead. I’d tell myself I was wrong, that I was overreacting. Then I’d remember the day in front of that clapboard house which smelled of unwashed blankets and dirty diapers. I’d remember the disgust in her voice as she told me to look carefully. Disgust for the men eating frybread with gravy dripping down their chins, the women tipping back their heads with the ease of old habit to drink from bottles. But also for herself, the part which was of them and always would be, no matter how well she hid it.
“And if she hated herself this way, I thought, what chance did I have?
“If we’d been able to talk about that day just once, if we’d fought about it openly, things might have turned out okay. But she couldn’t. Her past was too deep in her, like a broken arrowhead. You live carrying it carefully, but you never touch it, because that might set it to traveling again, straight for your heart this time.
“I can see that now, but I was young then, and she was the adult, the one I’d always depended on. So I waited for her to make the first move. Waited and waited, hurting and confused and angry, and then it was too late.”
I watch him in the last of the light as he stops to look out at the ocean, eyes narrowed against the gold glare. It’s been a long way from that narrow bathroom mirror to this ocean which lies open to the whole sky. He holds himself with such assurance that no one looking would think those old words about him. Hurting and confused and angry. Yet somewhere inside they are still embedded, and I must find them and pluck them out.
But I cannot until he tells me the entirety of his pain. And so, unwillingly, I must probe.
“What else, Raven, what else made you so angry?”
For a moment he is silent, and I think he will deny it. Then he says, so softly that I must strain to hear, “The bird.”
“Yes, that beautiful black bird which I’d shied away from when my mother cried no, which disappeared into the sky with its sad eyes like rubies, its more-than-human cry. I’d dream about it from time to time, and when I woke, my palm would tingle where the feather had melted into it. And again I’d remember the feel of my grandfather’s hands holding mine.
“I’d be angriest with my mother then, though in the way of children I included myself in that anger. I’d tell myself she made me lose that bird and all it could have given me. The next moment I’d be kicking myself for not having been quick enough to do something. Why didn’t I grab hold of it, why didn’t I shout a yes to counter her no? And then I’d think of the power I’d felt for a moment near that bed, an amazing blast of heat like you might feel if you suddenly, unknowingly, pull open a furnace door. I felt somehow—although I didn’t have the words to explain it to anyone, not even myself—that that power countered all of what my mother had pointed to with such distaste. It was a more real truth than the dinginess and dirt, the poverty and the alcohol. She knew this, I told myself, and yet she pushed it away so it was lost to me forever.
“That’s when I’d act the craziest.
“I started cutting classes and hanging out with a bad crowd. I got into more fights and discovered I enjoyed them—the feel of putting all my strength behind a fist, the thwack as it split open flesh; the smell of blood which is like no other, the pain in my hands which made me for a little while forget that other pain inside.
“My mother would be called in to the principal’s office. She’d listen in silence and later, in the car out in the school parking lot, she would put her face in her hands and say—she’d stopped shouting when she realized that it was what I wanted her to do—I can’t handle this anymore. I’m going to have to tell your father. But she never did.”
“Your father,” I say, remembering the quiet man with hands like a forest. “What did he make of all this?”
We’re almost at the end of the beach now, gilt water pooling around outcrops of black rock. The mournful, foghorn calls of seals fill the air. Raven sighs and starts again.
“My father was the real casualty in the silent war between me and my mother. Whenever he was home we were careful to be nice to each other—it was our unspoken pact, the one thing we had left in common, our love for him. So we talked normally, we smiled, we did our chores together, we even quarreled about them like we used to. But he wasn’t fooled. It was as though he heard the unspoken hate-words I launched at her, every one of them. They made their way into his heart until it was shot through and through, nothing but holes. He went about his everyday work, a sieve of a man, all the will to live seeping out of him.
“The saddest part was how hard he’d try to make us happy. He’d take us special places over the weekend, boating on the lake, the rodeo at Cow Palace. The movies. We’d be riding in his truck, the three of us pressed up close, my mother dressed pretty and sitting between her two men, as she called us. The people we passed on the road must have thought we were the perfect family. My father would make a joke, a weak one, usually—jokes weren’t Dad’s thing—and we’d both laugh really hard, harder than the joke merited, harder than we would have before. There we would be in the truck, the cab echoing with our fake laugh. Dad would look at us, and there’d be such knowing sorrow in his eyes, I felt I could drown in it. But how could I tell him what was tearing at me without betraying my mother? And no matter how much rage I felt toward her, I couldn’t do that. “Then time ran out on us.
“I remember that afternoon like I’m looking at it. I came home from school and Mother had made brownies. I loved brownies. I’d beg her for them all the time when I was little. But on that day it only made me angry. What did she think, she could make up for messing up my life by baking a bunch of brownies? I didn’t touch a single one, though I was starving. I made myself a sandwich instead, poured a glass of milk and went up to my room. I wolfed down the sandwich, drank the milk, and lay on my bed feeling sorry for myself. The whole house smelled of chocolate, making my stomach growl. I paid no attention when the phone rang. I was thinking how I’d like to run away from home, how that would make her worry. Next I knew, she was knocking on my door. I opened it, ready to say something nasty.
“She stood there with the car keys already in her hand.
“We have to go to the hospi
tal, she said, her face like ashes. Something exploded at the refinery.
“Then we were holding each other, both trembling a little. Even through the fear that shot up my veins making my head swim, I remember waiting for it to happen, like it did in the movies. The tragedy to bring us together. But it didn’t. Not then, and not later when we sat by the bed where he lay swathed and still in his bandages, doped to the max with painkillers, which was all the doctors could do for him. He must have been hurting, because he’d give a little jerk with each incoming breath. But when he died in a few hours it was quietly, the breath just stopping—the way blessed souls die, I would later read in a Buddhist text. His death was like his life, not even his closest ones really knowing how much he suffered.
“When mother realized he was dead she started to cry, ugly, gulping sobs that racked her whole body. She cried like her own life had ended, and in a way it had. Because the one person close to her who believed in the self she’d created with such care was gone.
“I pushed back my own shock—somehow I hadn’t believed he’d actually die—and told myself I’d have to deal with it later, alone. Right now I had to take care of my mother. I put my arm around her and tried to feel what she must be feeling so that I’d know how best to console her. And you know what?”
I am afraid to look into his stormcloud eyes.
“I couldn’t feel a thing. Nothing. Here I was, holding my weeping, widowed mother, knowing all the things I should feel, pity, remorse, protectiveness and love—yes, that most of all—and feeling none of them. I held her because that was what one was supposed to do, but inside I felt disconnected, totally separate, like someone had taken a giant cleaver and chopped off all ties between me and her—no, between me and the whole human race.”
“It was just the shock,” I say. My words sound weak even to my ears.
“If it was, it didn’t go away, not in the next few weeks, or months, or when I went away to college. Sometimes I feel it even now.” And he rubs again at his chest, my American, his eyes empty as holes bored into the night sky. “Do you know, Tilo, what the saddest thing in the world is? It’s when you hold someone whom you’d loved so much that just the thought of her used to be a huge flash of light inside your head, and you feel—no, not hatred, even that’s something—you feel this vast coldness ballooning inside of you, and you know you could keep your arm around her or drop it and walk away, and either way it would make no difference.”