“Only for the sink,” she said. “And take your shirt off so it doesn’t get wet.”
I had boats I liked to float in the sink, pretending the bubbles were icebergs and I was an Arctic “ ’plorer”; I struggled with X’s when I was young, and S’s as well.
I pulled off my T-shirt and dropped it on her bathroom floor. “Mr. Pajamas and Mrs. Tittlemouse are having a party and they invited everyone ’cept they won’t have Mr. Jackson,” I informed her.
“Why don’t they want Mr. Jackson to come to the party?” Mom responded, no doubt after she stirred up the water—trying to create more bubble coverage, I realized as I stared into her empty slipper tub. How had I never realized that as a child?
“His feet are muddy! Mrs. Tittlemouse doesn’t like him, ’cause she just cleaned and cleaned, so it’s all nice and shiny.”
“Her floor?” Mom asked.
“Her whole house!”
“I see,” Mom said. “Well, why don’t you ask him to wipe his feet?”
“I can’t ask him, Mommy. It’s a pretend, and I’m not in the pretend. Only Mr. Pajamas and Mr. Jackson and Mrs. Tittlemouse are in the pretend.”
“I see.” She turned the water on again, adding more warmth and more bubbles. “Perhaps Mr. Pajamas could ask Mr. Jackson to wipe his feet, then.”
“He doesn’t want to.”
“I see,” she said once more. “Perhaps they could hand him some tea out the window in one of your teacups, then? Not that cup with the bubble bath in it, though.”
I giggled and said, “He would make bubbles when he talked if he drank bubble-bath tea!”
As I ran off, Mom called after me, “Remember, only in the sink!”
She was relaxing in the tub to the sound of the water running in our bathroom. Sink volume, not bathtub rush. I wouldn’t drown in the sink. I would have my step stool pulled up to the vanity, and I would be—
“Heavens to Betsy!”
She hopped from the tub, threw a towel on, and bolted into my bathroom to find poor stuffed Mr. Jackson already submerged in a sink full of bubbles from which he never did recover.
In Mom’s cottage, I stepped into her empty slipper tub and lay back against the cool white porcelain. I was still clothed, with only my feet and my hands bare, my neck, my face. “Who was my mother?” I asked the cold unvanilla emptiness.
I climbed from the dry tub, collected my journal and pen, and climbed in again. I stared at the first page for a long while before writing the date at the top of the page. A date and nothing else.
“Beatrix?” I said the name aloud, trying it out on my tongue, whispering to the cold, empty tub, the cold, empty cottage. To the same imagined Beatrix Potter my mother wrote to in her journal, the same Bea my mother imagined herself with here, when she was away from us.
Outside, it was dark, all the things that might be beyond the window shaded, indistinguishable from the trees. Only the smooth surface of the lake bumping up against the shore was clearly visible.
I wrote the first words that came to me then, before I could question the writing of them:
It never struck me until I was grown up myself how often the Wednesday Sisters tell me what to do.
“Is this how you do it, Bea?” I asked. “Is this how you start writing a thing you both want to write and don’t?”
The only response I got was the smooth press of porcelain against my unmanicured toes, the cold tingle of it above my shirt collar, on the bare skin at the back of my neck.
From the Journals of Ally Tantry
19.11.2009, Ainsley’s End. Heavens to Betsy, it’s raining so much that the roads to Ambleside have been cut off, and the inn I’m staying at has flooded, and Bowness is largely underwater as well. You can row right through the trees around the lake. Bea and I would have been wading through it ourselves if Graham hadn’t sent a rescue boat and offered accommodations higher up from the lake, at Ainsley’s End. He would offer us the cottage so we might have more privacy, but it, like the inn, is in danger of taking on more water than one can sleep in unless one is a fish. It’s quite awful: so much ruin. And yet it’s fascinating.
I had a crazy notion this morning that we should hike up to Stock Ghyll Force, to see how the falls look after the storm. The road between Ainsley’s End and Ambleside is flooded, so we got the old fellow who hires boats to come fetch us. Graham doesn’t keep a boat, he hates being on the water, but I dragged him with me. Napoleon, who is no fonder of boats than Graham is, stayed home.
Beyond the revolving gate, water poured over the weir in a frightful torrent, but fools that we are, we braved the slippery stone path to the lower walking bridge across the beck. It, too, is a falls now, submerged in rushing water except for the railings, so that if we’d tried to cross, we’d have been washed away. And yet we continued on uphill, Graham urging me to turn back but following me. You’d have thought I was Hope, the way I wanted to be in the midst of all that turmoil. Hope or Anna Page. The path itself had turned into a small stream so that we had to wade out to the overlook. The falls aren’t three separate falls anymore but a single deluge, the pool where we might have gone for a dip indistinguishable from the splash.
—Now, Allison, Bea said. Ask him about your mother.
—I think that was my mother, I said to Graham.
The words out before I realized I was saying them aloud.
—Pardon? Graham said.
—My mother, I repeated.
I told him then about the marriage license with my mother’s name and his father’s.
—That’s why I came to Ainsley’s End, I said.
—But you were getting out of the rain, he said. You’d been wandering around Wray Castle, and you were caught in the rain.
—That’s what I wanted you to think, I said.
—And now the rest, Bea said.
Standing in the heavy mist of the rushing water, holding tightly to the rail and hidden by the hood of my raincoat, it did seem possible to say the thing aloud. I could claim Graham misheard—the rushing water and the wind and the spray distorting my words—if he looked appalled.
—I think we might be siblings, I said. I think you might be my brother.
He didn’t say anything, he just turned to me, and he didn’t seem … disgusted, I guess was what I’d been afraid of. That he would think I was sick. So I kept talking.
—Half siblings, I said. I think my mother was your father’s British wife. I think she was pregnant with me when she left England.
That’s the timing. That’s what the date on the ship passenger records I found in Liverpool suggests. Like all of this, it doesn’t make sense. And yet it does.
Half siblings. I had put it to Bea first, trying it out, afraid even to commit it to paper. It explains so much about Mother. Why she never talked much about her life before she married Father. Why she never did accept Jim and Hope and Sam.
Had she known she was pregnant when she fled? She must have suspected by the time she met Father—on a ship during the war. No one waited to marry during the war, Father always said. No one waited for anything. You met and you fell in love and you had the ship’s captain marry you.
Had he known Mother was pregnant? Was that something Father would have done? Met a pregnant young beauty—my mother had been beautiful—and wanted to take care of her, even if she was pregnant with another man’s child? He couldn’t have failed to know for too long, unless he chose not to, which is easy to imagine as well. Father was pock-faced and quiet. He had bad teeth when he first met my mother. In the pictures of them before he got his dentures, he looks a bit like a mutt she’s brought home to care for. But perhaps he was the one who did the caring.
Had Graham’s father known Mother was pregnant when she left, that he had another child somewhere? Mother might have kept this secret her whole long life, even from the man who raised me as his daughter. She might have gone to her grave denying the truth. Or she might have spit it at Graham’s father as she left him. She wasn’
t beyond bitterness. She wasn’t beyond wanting to make sure people who hurt her felt pain, too.
—Come stay with me, Graham said.
This was much later, at Ainsley’s End. Hours and hours of talk later, about how we wouldn’t have discovered each other or any of this if I hadn’t gone in search of some reason for Mother abandoning me, if I hadn’t found that marriage license and not much else. About how it felt to Graham to suddenly have a half sister when he thought he was the end of the line. About how I would ever explain this to Jim and Hope and Sammy when I’d barely mentioned the name Graham to them, when they thought of him, if at all, as just some British gent I’d met.
—Come stay with me, not only now, not only until the floodwaters recede, he said. I’ve so many empty rooms here. Or you can stay in the cottage. I could have the cottage fixed up for you, for whenever you come.
And later,
—You take the house, and I’ll take the cottage. That made us both laugh—it’s all so unreal.
—You’d be his oldest, he said.
“His,” not “our father’s,” although when he said it, I tried to imagine what the man must have been like. I’ll ask Graham; he’ll tell me all he knows. But there is time for that.
—You’d be his oldest, he repeated. You ought to be his heir.
The words spoken as if Graham wanted to give me everything he had, now that he had family to share his life, or something like family.
—Except, of course, that I’m female, I said.
And Bea whispered to me that I should take the cottage, that I should let Graham give me that. It was much cozier than the big house, she said. She could sleep on the love seat. I could have the bed. We would both love bathing in the slipper tub.
When Mr. McGregor returned about half an hour later, he observed several things which perplexed him … he could not understand how the cat could have managed to shut herself up inside the green-house, locking the door upon the outside.
—FROM The Tale of Benjamin Bunny BY BEATRIX POTTER
I DREAMED THAT NIGHT THAT MY MOTHER’S PUZZLE BOX WAS EMPTY. I sat by a warm fire in a comfortable chair and opened it, expecting to find Mom there, but when I adjusted the last panel and slid the Madonna and baby aside, the box was swept clean. I woke with such a start that I turned to Kevin, only to touch an unfamiliar tangle of long hair that sent my heart into an even more frantic rush. I turned on the bedside light to see Anna Page stirring beside me, and Julie turning over on the love seat. Not wanting to wake them, I clicked the light back off.
When I’d finally settled out of the fright of it—just a dream, just a dream—I gathered the box and my journal, and I crept down the steps to the cottage kitchen, to the small window facing uplake to the darkness where Wray Castle was. I set a finger on the baby’s gold halo and traced it over the edge to the third flower. Slide, click, adjust. Adjust, slide, click. The movements familiar. They should have been easy, but my fingers shook, and I lost the thread of the steps. I couldn’t make it open.
I turned to Mom’s journal and took up a pencil, decoding in light marks right on the page, above her writing. An entry about the flood she’d told me about, and my grandmother being married to Graham’s father, who was already married to a woman from India. About my grandmother being pregnant with Mom when she fled to the U.S. to start over.
Was that why my grandparents had refused ever to see me, because I evoked something from my grandmother’s past that she couldn’t bear? I closed my eyes, remembering a conversation I’d had with Mom after I’d read a New York Times piece about kids like me. Multiracial. At college campuses, it said, kids were taking back the term “mulatto,” but did it work that way? Is it like what they say about banana peels: if you slip on a banana peel, everyone laughs at you, but if you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, you own the joke? They have student groups for multiracial kids now, sort of like EKTA, the South Asian Student Association that had just started at Smith when I was there, that I never did belong to, since I never felt exactly Asian, even if I never felt exactly not. The Asian kids always saw me as not quite Asian, and the white kids saw me as nothing but. I was glad for those kids in the article and maybe a little jealous of what I hadn’t had. A little confused about it all, though: if you don’t belong anywhere, then you belong with us?
“Remember when you took me to meet your parents?” I’d said to Kevin one night the week after Mom died; we’d settled on the benches facing The Gates of Hell in the Rodin sculpture garden at Stanford, passing a thermos of margaritas back and forth. “The first thing your mother said was ‘Oh, you’re Indian!’ And you said I wasn’t Indian, I was a half, my dad was Indian and my mom was white.”
“That’s the way you say it, Hope,” Kevin said. “I just explained it the way you say it.”
“It didn’t feel like that. It felt like you were trying to distance me from my dad. You know, ‘She’s not all Indian.’ ” I reached for the thermos and took a sip, staring up at the bodies falling toward damnation. “Like you were telling them not to worry, your Irish blood would dilute my Indian so their grandchildren would look Italian, at worst.”
“Hope. You know I don’t think that.”
“But your parents did.”
“My parents didn’t, not really.”
I passed the thermos to him, but he only held it.
“Why was your mom so surprised, Kev?” I asked.
“She was just meeting you, Hope. She was meeting you for the first time. She didn’t mean it like you think she did.”
“You never told her before that? You never told your parents, ‘Hey, I’m dating this terrific woman, she’s half Indian’?”
“Oh, good Lord. For all the white girls I brought home, I didn’t say, ‘I’m dating this terrific girl. She’s white.’ That isn’t who you are any more than the fact that I’m so pale I’m practically see-through is who I am.”
“But you—”
“I didn’t tell them, Hope. I didn’t think to tell them.” He lowered his voice as a student passed on the sidewalk by the road. “It isn’t the way I think of you.”
“Isn’t it?”
“You know it’s not, Hope.”
“We’d been engaged for months, Kev. We’d dated for a year.”
“But you were busy at work, Hope. You were the one who had this deal to close, or that meeting or partners’ weekend, or a damned hair appointment that you couldn’t miss, for God’s sake! We were supposed to go at Thanksgiving, then you had that deal that didn’t close on time. We had the plane tickets, you know we did.”
“Over a year, Kev! Over a year! We’d dated for over a year, and we’d been engaged for months, the wedding invitations were out, and you’d never even shown your parents a photograph of me?”
Kevin took a drink, tipping the thermos high. He lowered it, his eyes fixed on The Three Shades at the top of The Gates, the same distorted figure replicated three times, all pointing to the graceful Thinker.
I’d known this about Kevin when I walked down the aisle, that he’d been embarrassed to have me meet his family.
“Hope.” He set the thermos on the ground and turned to me, his face pale in the darkness, like an early moon. “Hope, you can’t not know how much I love you. You can’t not know that.”
Out in the direction of the science buildings, someone laughed, a male voice that went unanswered.
“Nobody loved your dad more than I did, Hope. You know that. You can’t think I’ve ever thought of either of you as ‘other.’ ”
“Not one photograph—”
“Okay! Okay, I take your point. I understand. Don’t beat me to death about it.”
“Now it’s my fault?”
“For God’s sake, Hope, tell me you’ve been wearing this like a hair shirt for the last five years. Is this why you don’t want to have kids, because my parents might not have wanted to take them to the freaking zoo? Why did you marry me, then? Why didn’t you walk away?”
“I do
n’t know.”
“Oh, Hope.” He leaned forward, forearms to thighs, hands clasped between his knees, and stared at the pavement. “Don’t say that, Hope,” he said, his pale eyes in his pale face devastated as he turned to me. “Don’t say that. Don’t think it. You love me as much as I love you. You know you do.” He pulled me to him and wrapped his arms around me. “This isn’t you talking, Hope,” he said. “This is the grief at losing your parents. It’s the weight of the grief.”
I set Mom’s journal down and picked up my own, opened it at the scarred wooden table in my mother’s cottage kitchen, and wrote, Is it just the weight of the grief? I stared at the puzzle box I couldn’t open. It doesn’t feel like that, I wrote.
Mulatto. Quadroon. Octoroon.
Would that be better for my kids, to be able to say to people demanding to know what they are, “I’m a quadroon”? The terms all have the ring of not belonging, of being neither one thing nor another. “Other.” That was what Dad and I both were most of our lives. It sounds so innocuous, but it’s dehumanizing when it’s the only description left to you. You aren’t white. You aren’t black. You don’t belong.
I tried to talk to Sammy about it once, but maybe it’s different for him, or maybe he’s convinced himself it is. He doesn’t look at all Indian; he looks like Mom, but in a bigger, like-Dad version, with skin that is darker than hers without actually being dark. His friends, when they meet Dad and me, often aren’t great at masking their surprise that we aren’t white. When faced with a box to check, Sammy doesn’t hesitate. We were raised by a white mother in white neighborhoods where everyone sees us as white even if we’re part Indian, he says. But I check both boxes now, because I finally can.
Yes, I’m white, I wrote in my journal. And yes, I’m Asian. Here I am, finally, thank you very much.
It isn’t even that I want people to see both of my races. It’s that I want them to see beyond my race. I want it not to matter. I want them to see the person I am.