by Roxane Gay
This thirty-seven acres is yours.
Immediately as you step foot under the canopy of trees, you are eaten by mosquitoes. Meg has something in a small flask; she offers it to you, and you take it down fast, lemonade and something bathtubby. Meggie giggles uncontrollably and admits that she’s always wanted to visit California and start herself all over again.
But dreams cost, she suddenly moans, her lips puffed out with fake citrus.
At the next clearing, she stops and puts her cheek against your arm. You had the best mom in the world, Meggie says.
You tell her you know.
Meggie ignores you, saying, She saw me on one of your visits—I think you were only seven at the time. Your mama saw me and marched straight to my mama—God rest Evangeline’s soul but my mother was a dumbass—and told her I was having a quote unquote rough time of it. That I needed more taken care of. That she only had one Meggie in the world, and what was the sense in ignoring that?
Your mama, she says. She saw my belly bowling out like a sail in the wind. She saw my legs bow and the ringworm on my cheeks blossom like flowers. Your mama saw, Sasha Jean. And she said something. And at that point, my mama had no choice but to look at me.
You want to ask her what happened, but Meggie is already walking away. You remember Meggie’s family, the father whose eyes were so outlined in whiskey they looked like huge beetles on his face, the mother whose cough shook every house on the road of relatives. Once they both took you to church and called you their adopted daughter—Look at this good skin, they’d said, almost in unison. You laughed when they did this—was it 1970 or even earlier?
You arrive at a grove of pear trees, tucked away neatly in this back wood against a small bluestone quarry. Vines everywhere come alive as snakes and then go back dead as plants. This is where Grandma Elldine used to go for her canning fruit. You smell their fragrance, wish to reach for the fruit. Your mama, Meggie keeps saying, If it wasn’t for her I wouldn’t’ve been alive.
Your mother died on her way to the VFW nursing home where she was a volunteer. She’d been planning to visit her own ailing mother in Kiel, had even booked her tickets. But then her heart conked out, and she had to be placed in the nursing home morgue. The veterans went crazy, sliding their wheelchairs into walls, throwing food at each other. How could Mrs. Elspeth be gone? And so young?
Try as he might, the Polish doctor in charge could not get those men to calm down for weeks and weeks.
Dansk
You are ten and Fortunoff is the store of dreams. Like your Aunt Vitrine once said to you: don’t let your eyes get bigger than your stomach! Well, this is your mother in Fortunoff. She wants everything; as our neighbor Miss Jerldean sometimes says behind her back, Fifth Avenue tastes on a Bowery budget. It is a Saturday when the two of you escape here; your father lies in the backyard with a cold compress on his forehead; it was only the day before that you told your mother about the nighttime touching. In Fortunoff, you and she can forget the world.
Your mother admires the blue onion pattern of the Wedgwood, the clean dullness of the Rosenthal. Are you in the market for bone today, the salesgirl asks. Her tag says EVIE. It’s a bit early, but have you seen the Christmas Spode?
Your mother says as a matter of fact, she was in the Christmas mood right now. Who says you can’t have Christmas in July?
Here, Evie says, Feel this. Villeroy and Boch, straight from the Manhattan showroom. Hold one of these cups up to the light and you can see clear through, like it’s a veil.
Last spring, the Church Mothers of Pomegranate Baptist chipped in to get your mother a set of white coffee cups, a thank-you for being such an inspiration to the kids at Tuesday Teen Services. Who knew that hearing all that talk about life during the Big War would have made such a difference to these young folks? Always mouthing off as if they knew life better than everybody else—thank God for Miss El and her tales of woe at the hands of that Nazi scum! (The Church Mothers were not above occasionally using a swear word in their speech.) Four white mugs, supposedly out of pure Japanese china, had been stuffed in a Christmas box and tied together with twine. I seen those very same mugs in White’s Department Store, two for a dollar, said Bob. Why these females have to be so damn cheap? There isn’t a damn thing for you in that church.
Evie goes in the back and brings out a soup tureen. This is my personal favorite, she announces happily. Her lips, your mother notices, are the color of strawberries.
For those women not afraid to spend a little more on themselves, Evie adds, a bit louder; perhaps she has noticed your mother’s thick accent.
The trip to Fortunoff is a major departure. You both were supposed to go to the Fruit Tree, and then to White’s for some tube socks, and then to the doctor, the one who will tell your mother that IUDs don’t normally fail, and if she is in the family way, it is due to her own recklessness. Then on to the butcher for lamb chops, and finally to the dentist, where she would have that impacted wisdom tooth looked at.
So much to do.
But early this morning, when the dawn was sparkling with a few lights over Pomegranate treetops, something possessed your mother. She waited. She called Miss Jerldean and asked her to pick the boys up from school later—Johann from the first grade, little Keith from kindergarten; she pulled you from your bed and tossed you into the backseat; she drove at the speed limit to Westbury, where Fortunoff loomed like a Long Island Everest.
You’ve always wanted to come here. You’ve always wanted to go with your mother. But it would take until now, the day after you told your mother. In the store she doubles over the counter and begins to cry. To you she whispers that the word finger literally crushed her spine.
Ma’am, are you OK? Evie asks.
Utter exasperation. Your mother replies she’s fine, all the while caressing the bottom of the dark blue salad bowl on the counter. It isn’t the blue onion, but rather a blue fleur-de-lis. It is a pattern she is gradually and quickly falling in love with. The small bowl has a rounded bottom and soft, wavering edges. You touch your mother’s hand with your own.
Sorry, ma’am, you can’t just buy one piece. It comes in a five-piece place setting. Tureen, large cake platter, medium cake platter, teapot, coffee pot, creamer, sugar additional.
You look up and see the impatience in Evie’s eyes.
And can hear your mother’s thoughts, loud and clear, funneled into your own head, the small bowl in her hands: how wonderful it would be to run away, with just the girl. To come back in a few weeks for the other kids. But just have this girl, all to myself. To hear what the world has been saying all along.
The bowl is hard as a rock.
Your mother purchases an entire dinner service of the unnamed pattern, twenty pieces in all, but says she’ll have to come back at a later date for the soup tureen and cake platter. She is, after all, not made out of money.
Lenox
With the first light of her first morning in America, El felt the wind blowing in from the open window. A train clanged by, as if the track were close by. Bob, she called out again.
She found her suitcase in the front room of the apartment, right where Bob had dropped it, and she immediately went for the lock she’d snapped shut after tossing the cufflinks back inside.
The tea and coffee pots were fine, maybe a tiny chip on the edge of one lid. The platter was broken in three places. With glue, it could be restored. A bit of glue and some sun, some fresh New York air. The skyline, the taxis, the restaurants, the department stores. Gin and tonic flowing like a gulfstream toward Jamaica Bay, and from there out to the beckoning Atlantic.
She laid the Melitta dishes—blue pansies etched on a white background—back into the suitcase and went into the kitchen. The radio played soft and loud at the same time. Outside this window, which was covered with an eyelet curtain, a woman and child walked by, laughing.
El’s hands felt damp. She smelled like Bob’s hair, his chest. Surely there was a tea kettle somewhere in this kitch
en. Above the stove a small plaque bearing the face of a black man read: I’VE BEEN TO THE MOUNTAINTOP.
She would have to shower, she would have to wash her hair.
Pfaltzgraff
The swim was more delicious than food; afterward, you all rest on your backs on the slick bluestone shore, you and Monique and Kate (high as kites off some pills they borrowed from Stanley) and Meggie, who can’t seem to stop crying. Her face has gone back to childhood, with its circles of ringworm and eye dirt. She says she will never get over the day your mother saved her life.
Once, she says, there was a family all living on top of each other in a double-wide but still there was no room. We ate Cap’n Crunch every day and felt hungry all the time. Then this lady appeared out of a cream-colored DeVille. She was wearing a blue scarf on her head, like a turban, and she smelled of lilacs.
Little girl, she said to me. Don’t make such a sad face.
She lifted me into her arms, and I could smell baby roses over those lilacs. The powder blue ones, the kinds with the thorns that don’t make any difference.
Little girl, she said, Would you like to come live with me?
And I was all set to drift asleep, let this fine lady take me with her, away from the smell of unwashed cereal bowls and all the feet of my brothers.
She was better than a fairy godmother. She was cleaner than a queen. There was a pot of summer rhubarb boiling somewhere. And just like that, I recall my mama having words with her. Saying some nonsense about how her daughter was not some African orphan in the desert.
The truth was, I would’ve gone to any desert.
My mama lived twenty years after that day. You know what happened to me. On her last day at Auntsville Rehabilitation, where she was fidgeting with her kidneys, she told me I looked like a million bucks. How was it I raised such a gorgeous gal, she asked. Her lips were like quarry silt.
You did such a good job, I told her. I didn’t want to bring up the cream DeVille. I didn’t want to talk about that blue scarf or the queen walking into every house like she owned it. I was afraid of seeing the last drop of my mama evaporate on the spot.
Anchor Hocking Homestead
Quit that bellyaching, Monique says, laughing. We all been there. We never look back, dummy.
What you need is a baby, says Kate, who is the only one—besides you—who is childless. She adds, A baby to love in the right way.
Monique swats her cheek gently and says, Lucky for us, there will never be a shortage of kids. Take your pick you want another one. Myself, I got three I’d love to give you. And I think Sasha Jean about ready to tell us of the newest addition, isn’t that right?
No one waits for an answer: instead, they laugh faintly and remove their wet shirts and shorts. They are becoming mermaids, and for some reason, you can’t stand to watch. Is it ever too late? Would swimming be better than a life of feathers? You know you’re no different from the rest—so you get up and dive back into the hole, letting its blackness swallow you. Too late: at water’s touch, your arms become fins and your legs fuse together. Your belly feels cold as you plow through the underground ripples; your neck has grown bright brown scales. The others don’t seem to notice. But moments later, they call out to you, and then dive in themselves.
Do they change? You can’t really tell. Eventually, you all swim, however, with the same ease, the same ruffled glide, to a mangrove tree, the roots of which sit like umbrella handles above the water. When you come up for air, you all look strangely bloodless. Tell us, Monique finally says, resting one arm on a root, What would you say, Sasha Jean, to some extra cash?
When you raise your eyebrows, she says, I plan to empty out the uncles’ payday accounts tomorrow. I figured out a computer way.
Please don’t name me accomplice after the fact, Kate says, swooping over to kiss Monique on the lips. Meggie blushes.
You are quiet, bobbing your head halfway into the water. And then you plunge as deep as you can to the bottom. You can hear the girls shout after you—Rude Bitch, why can’t you answer the question! You gone tell on us?
It’s lonely down below but also green. Pallid, alive. You wonder, as you open your eyes, where all the green has come from. There must be snakes here, you think, as you pull yourself—with fin arms—down farther into the hole.
He will never love you like he used to, your mother told you.
But he says I’m his favorite.
You are an angel, she replies, wincing. I have to live with that.
Down below, you believe you see your mother’s bluestone eyes, feel her farm-toughened hand upon your forehead. In Laboe there is an authentic German submarine on display on the sand; you can read the plaque and you can wail but you can’t go in. You look past the motionless sea plants and recognize a knife in your mother’s apron pocket. If he ever says “finger” again, she warns, then lifts the knife to her breast. You reach out and she vanishes among the weeds—how could you tell her that he never once even uttered that word?
When you bubble up out from the depth—when you gasp for air and hold tightly to Meggie’s arm—you hear Kate, speaking in a thick Southern accent, imitating someone back at the reunion. Hattie or Cathy or LaWanda or Ancient Hattie Mabel. Chris or Daquan or Malik or Harris. You think they’ve forgotten you when suddenly Monique nods toward the reunion noise in the distance and says, If Bobby Lee intends to take back Grandma Elldine’s house, he’s got another thing coming. Family is family. We got our own ideas.
You and what army, Kate asks. That house needs bulldozed, plain and simple.
It’ll be a place for you and me one day, Monique announces, taking Kate’s hand and pressing it against her neck. You and me.
Y’all better cut that shit out, says Meggie. But don’t forget to make me bridesmaid.
They laugh. They touch. Sunbeams try hard to burst through the woods’ canopy. You’re supposed to evict them all.
Kate says, I like it here. I open my eyes and every day it’s a new surprise.
Only a white girl would say that, Meggie laughs.
Why don’t you say something, Monique suddenly asks.
But you’re sure you are saying something, that words are actually exiting your mouth and penetrating their ears. You’re pretty sure you’re telling them that as of nine months ago, you inherited everything here, as far as the eye can see. Thirty-seven acres. You paid for it. You can’t imagine ever wanting to set foot here again.
And perhaps they have heard. Monique flips her fins playfully in front of her. We’d miss you if you never came back, she says, not understanding. This is a sign. They hear what they want to hear. And that’s fine with you. You can never really be free, but you’re already there.
Crows and starlings screech through the landscape. In the distance there is the fragrance of the pig being roasted on the spit. You hear the old shingles peel off the Victorian and land in the elderberry hedge. The house will certainly die.
You clear your throat, make your way to the other side of the pond. The others release themselves from the umbrella handles and follow you, drifting on their backs. A child screams into the woods and waits for an answer. Ancient Hattie Mabel is shouting the words to “I’m Getting Ready.”
You all dive again, this time not needing to come up for air. This is the world and there is no need for stealing, kissing, anger at past wounds. This world operates on scales and silt.
You expect it to end. For the fins to melt, the tails to finally recede, the women to call you all back to the tables. Hair will be quickly braided or wrapped into shirts, skin smoothed back into order. You expect that soon you will all tramp slowly and un-eagerly through the forest—Kate will suddenly squeal in horror as she steps upon a harmless worm—and then it will take forever for Meggie and Monique to tame her cries with their hands.
A fantasy arises in which you all continue your walk, even with the brays and hollers of the slave women in these woods, their feet smashing snakes, their arms tattered by thorned vines, thei
r minds agape with the babies they could not afford to carry. The slave women are deafening, the slave women are worse than ghosts. You wonder if your parents are trapped here with the slave women. Would they torture your parents like ghosts in a cheap horror flick? Would that make you feel any better?
But this is all so conveniently stashed away. The world you’re in now is all scales and silt. Meggie, Monique, and Kate dive deep, trail air bubbles behind them; their light and dark brown breasts hang over their bellies, not in perfect mermaid style, but in the style of girls who have longed to do this since the day they were born. Their hair floats in the depth like a series of snowballs. They remind you of Christmas. There is swimming, miles of it—and a surprise underground clearing, and giggles over mermaid nipples and moles, and promises, and some hope. Why ever resurface? Why not stay here for all time? Dandelion wine and nougat truffles. You could live like kings.
It’s tempting, but not going to happen. Land ho! Meggie screams, laughing as she runs on ahead; she’ll be the first one to fill up another plate and hug the kids. Kate and Monique touch fingers to lips behind every tree, vow to go to Stanley’s room and steal the rest of his “raw material.”
And over midnight margaritas on Aunt Nephronia’s roof, you tell them (these girls now your girls) in clear, cement words, that you have no idea what your father is planning on doing to the land. But you promise it won’t be anything bad.
Royal Copenhagen
El lifted her hand to her throat and felt the tiniest swell there, like a foamy wave bundling itself to the shore. She would have to go out and see Jamaica Bay up close. She would have to find that chocolate-wafer edge of the world, once again.