Too late now. Too late . . .
When had she lost it, the impulse to go charging on, the zest for it all? When? She had always loved living. She had been adored by a grandmother. She had had a great, if imperfect, love. She had developed a conscious philosophy of being: motherhood as power. In her own way, she was an artist: a master of cooking. Yes, for most of her life, she had loved living. Absolutely loved it! She wasn’t sure most people did. Not the way she had. To the contrary, she suspected most people actually wanted out—the way she did now. The way she had for some time. But since when? When had she become normal, run-of-the-mill, un–Holly Golightly, ready to retire, inclined to recline, as now, more desirous of rest than recreation? Any questions? Still so many. Here at the end, you’d think there’d be answers. But no. Not yet . . .
And now again—that other question: What had she forgotten? The letter!
“The letter,” she mumbled aloud.
“The letter?” asked Ramadan, standing nearby. Did she mean the letter he had found in the store? But how would she even know about that? Plus, except for a few words on the envelope written in English, he couldn’t even read it. So, of course, Mama Joon couldn’t either. What could the letter matter to her? What did it matter at all? Backing away from her bedside and settling into the chair in the corner of the hospital room, he sighed, tearing up at the inscrutability of everything: Arabic; Mama Joon’s improbable last word; his strange lack of fear.
The letter, she thought. Yes, that was it. An answer—not a good one. She’d meant to destroy it. It was useless to anyone, even to her, after all these years. She had held on to it because it was her last letter from Judge Dumas. Love, Manny. The only time anyone had signed a letter to her that way. It was a celebration of Alicia’s birth and their love—of course she’d kept it. But it was the letter’s darkness that did not need to see the light of day.
What if? she wondered. What if the judge had felt about Clarissa the way he felt about Alicia? (Light-skinned and shrewd, Clarissa was actually much more like him than her sister, who looked and loved like June.) Would Clarissa have been a different person? Better? Would her boys have been different, better? Oh, God—that day her appendix had burst and Damon had picked her up without anyone asking, picked his grandmother up and carried her like a baby to the car and then into the emergency room—Don’t worry, Mama Joon . . . I got you!—she’d seen it in him, again. That sparkle—the beauty, strength, and pricelessness—that had made her once call him Diamond. It could have been him. With just a little more luck, a little more love, he could have been her first Ramadan—she could have had two. Would even she, June Ramsey, have been a better person if the judge had treasured his firstborn? Oh, well, even if Clarissa found the letter, it would only mean she’d know something about her father. (Her lifetime lack of curiosity about him was, to Mama Joon, her greatest charm.) So, then, so what if she found it? So what! What, would it make her any more bitter than she already was? That seemed hardly possible. Nothing would gall her more than not getting her hands on Mama Joon’s money.
Besides, the truth did not always come out. If anything, the truth rarely came out. People say that what’s done in the dark always comes into the light. Nonsense! Again, the opposite was closer to the real truth. Everybody eventually learned this, as she was learning it now. Everybody felt it in their bones, as she was feeling now: What’s done in the light, like say, life, recedes into darkness—death. Always. Now that was certainly true. Name the biggest unknown you could name, the biggest thing hidden in darkness: Who is God? No one would ever know that. Ever. Moses had stared right into His radiance and asked Him, and all he got was “I am that I am.” Really? A truth that big was just a riddle? Well, maybe that was all it could be. The riddle of being. Sensing sin in her inquiry, she twitched, losing a few precious seconds’ worth of her fast-dwindling strength, and she said a quick Hail Mary in penance, rushing through a ragged, silent recitation, racing to finish before it was too late: Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death! Amen.
Whew! The fear of every praying Catholic, not making it to the end, at the end, of this one perfect prayer, when you need it most. Now—and at the hour. Right now. But she’d made it.
Religion was right: Eternal life was real! Only not as they imagined it. It—this—would always be true. Eternally. There was no stopping this truth. There was no taking her life away from her now. Strangely, only the end of it made this so. Only this finish gave life its power. The darkness was the light. Made the light visible. That was what those people who had “died” and lived to tell about it had seen and nearly walked into. Black enlightenment.
She got it now. All those stars that lit up the sky were dying. Would we even have their light without their deaths? Our own sun even, the source of it all, was dying. We were all living on death. The moon—her precious moon—but a reflection of that dying sun, yes, just a shadow of a deathly thing, was light! In the end—she knew this now—it was Death that had made her do everything. (Ah! Alicia’s death—that was when she’d lost it, the will to live fully. That was when she had lost her Holly Golightly! And Alicia’s death had given her Ramadan, all to herself. But Ramadan could not bring Holly back. Even Ramadan was not enough.) Death had made her prepare for It. Death had forced her to put her things in order. Death had forced her to teach Ramadan how to cook, so that he could eat and grow—survive! Death had got Ramadan his passport to the other side of the world; Death was hers. Death had fired her up, empowered her, powered her. People think it numbs you. But no! Death charges you. Death is electric! They think it’s all about darkness. But no—Death lights the way!
And Death would take care of Ramadan, too. It already had. It would again, she sensed. It would have to. First Alicia. Now her. Who was next? She couldn’t say. But someone else would have to die for Ramadan. She saw it plainly. The three steeples of St. Louis Cathedral. Ramadan’s big future up there high in the middle. There was always a trinity. The past, present, and future. The tarot card lady’s connectedness. Mama Joon felt she was but the second in a trinity of death. Yes, someone else would die for her boy. Maybe already had, and she just didn’t know who it was. So be it! Death would keep him alive. Death would save Ramadan. But then, Death saved everyone, she thought. Death was the deliverer. Ah! Of course—this was why the story of Christ rang so true! A man up on a cross being crucified! Lord have mercy, for real. How in hell could a death so vile make the world rejoice! And she realized now something she must have known all along, something she must have believed all along, as she had allowed herself to die, as she had let cancer crucify her. Now she knew who she was—a savior! Now she knew what her life was about, what her death was about: the Redemption of Ramadan.
Alicia flitted through her mind again, and she flinched—a near-final, near-fatal physical sensation. Had her child died too young to find meaning in life? Too young to find a truth for herself that would make everything all right? Maybe she had. No—she hadn’t! She was smarter than Clarissa, smarter than her mother. Besides—and Mama Joon accepted this and let go, finally, of the agony of having lost Alicia—dying, as the priest had said of soul searching, wasn’t rocket science! It wasn’t physics or advanced math. (Even Clarissa would die well, she concluded, though not for some time. Hers was not the third death that would save Ramadan. That much she was sure of. “The good die young” was the saying. Nobody dared to say anything so pithy about “the bad.” They didn’t write songs about how the bad live long. Maybe it was too offensive a thought, too ugly an irony, to acknowledge—but that didn’t make it untrue. No, Clarissa had years and years of crassness and laziness and greed ahead of her. She would die old. Oh, well . . . the French had coined a phrase for the general acceptance of cruel truth, and there was never a more appropriate moment to be reminded of it than this one: C’est la vie!) Anyone could die perfectly. Everyone was born knowing how. Everyone, when the time came, did it flawlessly, as she was doing right now.
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br /> And she thought this, felt it fully at the last (in homage to Moses and his meeting with the Maker on the mount), with the absolute understanding that her mark, however modest, was indelible—her life was over; her existence, everlasting—I was that I was!
9
Inheritance Taxes
I’m the mama now!” Clarissa had burst into Ramadan’s bedroom as if conquering long-disputed territory.
Arms akimbo and brow furrowed, she scowled down at her nephew, who was lying on his bed staring at a French workbook, even though the start of the new school year was still three weeks away. Her main intention was simply to make a good show of appearing strong, assertive, and borderline mean. Such theatrics, combined with snippets of vulgarity and a bit of physical force, had usually worked with her own sons, whom she had watched grow from playful pups into full-grown pit bulls in what, looking back on it, seemed the same flash of time required to complete the actual canine progression. Now, hearing them call each other “dog” or “dawg,” in the urban male-to-male parlance of the day, she was glad she had been quick-tempered with them whenever her once lovable little beings had turned defiant, if not downright deviant. (The question of whether her sons’ referring to themselves as a lesser life-form owed to their being treated or behaving as such did not confound Clarissa; she wasn’t that inquisitive or cynical. That accepting them as “dogs” made her a “bitch” was vaguely appalling to her. But there were days when she needed to be a bitch, anyway—a big one—just to maintain her sanity. The disgust she sometimes felt about it all was a small price to pay for order and survival. When her boys had become less and less responsive to her verbal admonishments, she gave them the occasional slap on the backside. Later, as they grew bigger, stronger, and wilder, she resorted, on an as-needed basis, to outright violence, employing the last-resort disciplinary implements of ghetto motherhood: a belt, an extension cord, an airborne shoe, both ends of a broom. She had tamed them—thank goodness—so that any danger they posed (a significant amount, if their rap sheets were to be trusted), as they did battle with a world so ruthlessly and inventively opposed to them, did not extend to her. Maintaining the balance of her own preservation with theirs had always been tricky, but with guile, threats, rib shots, Advil, and a succession of forgivable micro-loans from Mama Joon, she had managed. Crip, Booker T, Damon, Romeo and Julius, the hulking men who surrounded her, all of whom, on occasion, had been jailed—caged, as it were—recognized her as part mama, part master. Sure, she had meted out punishment, sometimes harsh, when they had gotten out of line. But she had also fed them, uncaged them when necessary (a.k.a. bailed them out), and rewarded them when they did as she commanded.
Admittedly, her quest to dominate Ramadan was beginning somewhat late in his development. But he had none of her boys’ natural aggression anyway. He was a totally different breed—a collie or a lab or, at worst (she was remembering his early years), a yappy terrier. Whatever methods Mama Joon had employed to rid him of his madness—all that lovey-dovey, spoil-him-rotten crap—had actually worked. If there was any doubt in Clarissa’s mind that he would ultimately bend to her authority, it had something to do with his braininess, with whatever he was acquiring in those books he was always studying, and with that dormant streak of passion he used to flash without warning. At any rate, she had decided it was best to catch him off guard, thunder into his room unannounced and, not having combed her hair, show him her best Medusa.
Ramadan, though, looked up from his French textbook and saw not the imposing figure Clarissa had meant to project, but a comic one. Maybe it was that he was conjugating the verb rire—as in, “to laugh.” Or maybe it was that rire was pronounced “rear,” and his aunt’s butt was wide enough for him to see its outer edges trembling behind her even as she faced him. Tautly stretching her blue-and-white floral-print dress, her backside quivered with the fright she hoped to elicit from him. He considered hiding behind the mask of preadolescence and faking fear, but his intellect betrayed him. He had to stifle a chuckle. Putting his head down, he pretended he was laughing at what he was reading, which in a way he was.
“You can laugh all you want, but things about to change around here. I don’t care what Mr. Lawyer Man said. You can’t just be a child, all unsupervised, living up in here like a king. The world does not work like that. No, sir, it does not. Mama Joon musta been outta her everlasting mind!”
“Ever-loving,” Ramadan corrected her.
“Ever-what?”
“Nothing.” He looked down at his workbook again.
“That’s right,” she said. “Go on back to your books. You don’t need to be worried about none of this mess anyway. I’ll take care of everything. Everything’s gonna be all right.”
“I know,” Ramadan said.
“Up in here living like a king,” she muttered on her way out.
After the door slammed, he heard Clarissa trudging down the hall, toward the back of the house. Whatever humor there was in the situation left the room with her. Mama Joon had told him she was leaving him in a position to take care of himself. Mr. Dumas—“Call me Mr. Willie”—had reassured him as well, even coming by the house once already since the funeral to check on him. Until now, he had had no reason to question his security, and so he had given no thought to the idea of anyone stepping into Mama Joon’s role. Besides, there was only one Mama Joon. Only one person had held him like he was a part of her she had lost and that only he allowed her to touch, to feel again. No one would ever love him that much. He wondered if his aunt even liked him. So, then, what was to become of him if, as Clarissa had just proclaimed, she really was the mama now?
* * *
CLARISSA FLUNG OPEN Mama Joon’s bedroom door as forcefully as she had Ramadan’s. The same conquistador spirit consumed her now, pressing her forward with a Cortésian glee. Her Montezuma was no more, and what was left behind rightfully belonged to her. She wanted what every looter wants. Loot, of course—on the low end, anything of value; on the high, something precious, unexpected, unknown. Without hesitation or strategy, she proceeded: rifling through dresser drawers; crouching on her hands and knees to check under the bed; lifting the mattress; swinging open the closet door; tossing blouses and dresses wildly over her shoulder.
After a solid fifteen minutes of effort—resulting in knee bruises and a brief, uncontrollable, dust-induced fit of sneezing—she had unearthed remarkably little of value. The first letdown: a single quarter found in the back corner of the bottom dresser drawer under the lacy edge of an old, stretched-out pair of Mama Joon’s panties. When a lift of the mattress revealed a crisp twenty-dollar bill, she had flipped the entire queen-size cushion over and shoved it against the wall. But nothing else green was sprouting there. The dozen or so retired purses she discovered under the bed also looked promising at first. But each, once opened, turned upside down, shaken loose of even lint, had proven improbably penniless.
The closet, of course, had the vastness of a vault. The instant she began raiding it, the disappointment she was feeling from not having made a quick, big strike faded. Every hanging garment had the rough silhouette of her mother. Maybe she needed to hack her way through this phalanx of Mama Joon phantoms, as shady as the slights she’d endured her entire life. Maybe that would clear a pathway to the recompense she had earned for suffering through decades of not being told, but somehow still knowing, that she was not truly cherished. Forging ahead, she felt as if she were peeling away layer after layer of Mama Joon from the premises. Yes! she thought, committing to the task, lifting weighty bunches of clothes all at one time. She would have to put some muscle into moving Mama Joon out of the way, so that she could find her true reward. Of course—to arrive at what belonged to her, the thing that would reveal her true worth, maybe her true self, she would have to go through Mama Joon. Somewhere in here, hidden under all this stuff, was the real treasure: her. Yes, the only way to uncover the mother lode would be to remove the mother load! As Clarissa tossed aside armfuls of JCPenney, f
loral, poly-blend Mama Joons, more and more light flooded the closet, filling her with hope. Sure, the physical nature of what she was doing—the squatting, bending, pulling, throwing—was partly responsible for the adrenal surge. (Plundering, however petty, was still work.) But the real cardio workout for Clarissa was the release of a lifetime of pent-up Mama Joon emotion.
The unshakable sense that she was insignificant in her mother’s eyes had been debilitating. She had scant evidence of any real difference between how Mama Joon had treated her and her sister, but wasn’t the proof in her lack of self-worth? If Alicia had outshined her—and Clarissa was convinced she had—it was because their mother had stroked and polished her with pride. If she had had any doubts about her suspicions, Ramadan’s anointing dashed them away. She had produced five—five!—handsome, if complicated, boys. (Of course they were complicated—she had passed her disillusionment on to them like a cleft chin.) Any one of them could have been Mama Joon’s number-one guy. Clarissa could have lived on that—and off it—both emotionally and financially. Crip and Booker T had each looked the part of a prince. But, okay, maybe Clarissa, insecure and already growing bitter, had clung to them too much. Plus, Mama Joon had just had Alicia. In retrospect Damon, her middle son, had probably had the best shot at royalty. Mama Joon had even dubbed him “Diamond,” only days after he was born. But he was barely walking when he stopped putting a sparkle in her eyes. Alicia, only three years older than her newest nephew, was already the fairy princess by then, anyway—that lil wench could rock a tutu. Watching her prance around in lace-encased splendor, scepter in hand, at her fourth birthday party, Clarissa had felt a warmth rising in her chest, her own inner Tinker Bell almost reviving. Meanwhile, where was Damon? At the table spilling his punch on the cake, wetting the candle wicks before they’d been lit, dousing dreams. Mama Joon had quickly downgraded the would-be gem to a rhinestone. The twins never really had a chance—not that they deserved one. Even Clarissa would admit that. As adorable as their professional football player father—a memorable one-night stand—they were also just as self-centered and ruthless. If she could have traded them through free agency, she would have listened to offers, let them go at a loss for the sake of the franchise. But family was a team for life. Against the world, you had to field the players drafted by fate. You could bench them, but not release them. The only game changer was death.
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