Amor and Psycho: Stories

by Carolyn Cooke

  OPAL IS EVIDENCE

  In a state of mindful trepidation, Jude brought her friend Trina to her house-sit at the Goldsteins’ yurt. Trina would help out during Jude’s daughter’s recovery from surgery and give moral support, since Opal’s recovery was expected to be temporary, really part of an overall decline. On the ride from Oakland to Panther Point, Opal slept in her infant car seat between Jude and Trina. The car seat still fit, sort of, even though Opal was nearly ten; it cradled her small body while she slept. Opal was still not entirely here, Jude reminded herself when Trina passed a doobie across Opal’s body. The tissue around her brain still ebbed and swelled, the hospital’s plastic diaper crackled under her nightgown, and a bandage bound her head. Yet—how Opaline—she wore pink lipstick and a dangling bead earring. A felt bag Jude had run up on her sewing machine hung from Opal’s round wrist, filled with jelly beans Opal had tried (and failed) to count in the hospital. Jude looked away from Opal while she blew smoke out the window. When they got to the Goldsteins’, Jude lifted her limp daughter from the car seat. Opal shouted, “My purse! My purse!” without really waking up. Her hands beat against Jude, found the jelly bean purse, then settled.

  As Jude carried her across the threshold, Opal opened her eyes and said, “What’s this?”

  “We’re staying at the Goldsteins’ yurt, babe,” Jude told her. “It’s round.”

  “Cool,” said Opal.

  The Goldsteins’ yurt, in fact, formed a hexagon (a level of detail beyond Opal at the moment), with a pickle barrel attached to one wall. It was cool. At the apex of the dome, a window like a lens peered up at the sky, or zoomed in, like a microscope. Even in the main space of the yurt, you could feel the efflorescence of the grow room downstairs, where the plants sprang up lush under lavender grow lights, ripe-smelling, skunky and green.

  Jude’s job: to house-sit for a month while the Goldsteins laundered their marijuana money in Hawaii. Coals to Newcastle, Jude told them, but they didn’t know what she was talking about. Jude hailed from back east, from a farm in Pennsylvania, where the references were different.

  Trina had promised to help with Opal, whatever Jude needed. But once in the yurt, comfort overwhelmed her and she behaved like a guest. Jude made pancakes; dishes piled up. For their third night together, Jude defrosted one of the Goldsteins’ free-range chickens and organized a dinner party, a celebration of Opal’s return from the hospital and ritual removal of her head bandage.

  Jude’s friend Egon arrived at six—he’d gotten a ride from some friends who planned to wait for him in the parking lot at the pier. “Why don’t you invite your friends to join us?” Jude asked sincerely. She suddenly felt the need of more celebrants, more company, but Egon seemed to know better.

  Opal dressed in the pickle barrel, where Jude had set out clothes and stuffed animals. Jude put the chicken in the oven to roast and made a salad, using the Goldsteins’ mahogany salad bowl and tongs, and lettuces from their garden. Trina and Egon talked about where they’d come from. Egon had lived in Bolinas, then Germany, then here. Trina had built up camps all over the Midwest and the West, but mostly she had been run out of campgrounds.

  “My camps were burned to the ground,” Trina said. “I was run out of Bellingham, Christopher, Curtis, Marcus, Ronald and Lyle, Washington, as a witch. Run out of Donald and Eugene, Oregon. Everywhere I went—ostracized. I built up a beautiful compound, with tepees and healings. A beautiful place.”

  “Where did you build up the compound?” Egon asked.

  “In every place,” said Trina.

  “That’s too bad.”

  Trina shrugged. “Good comes from bad—that’s my religion. It’s karmic science.”

  “What religion is this?” Egon asked.

  “True religion,” Trina said. “It’s Buddhist-Wiccantheosophy. Have you heard of Sufi Nigiri?”

  Egon shook his head. “I never heard of it.”

  OPAL EMERGED from the pickle barrel wearing a wedding dress—a bristling garment of tea-colored lace. It dribbled down over her feet on the rug. Jude put her hand over her mouth when she saw Opal and her eyes filled with tears. “You look gorgeous, babe,” she said.

  “I know,” said Opal.

  They sat on the rug, an enviable Persian kilim. The efflorescence of the grow room produced an atmosphere that adhered to the inside of Jude’s nose. In spite of herself, she mapped out venues where she could unload a few ounces. To calm her monkey mind, Jude organized the altar: a candle, an abalone shell, a sage smudge stick, a feather, a cloth snake filled with buckwheat hulls. Opal sat cross-legged in front of Jude while Jude cut through the head bandage, removed it from Opal’s head and laid it—stained with blood and pus—in the center of the altar.

  Let them see it! Jude had seen it. Opal had worn it. Not an ordinary American life, but her life, and Opal’s life—let America see. Jude lit the sage with a Bic lighter and cleaned herself with the smoke, drawing it around her head and down the outline of her body—her shoulders, waist and legs, around her feet. She smudged herself—story of her life—then she smudged Opal in the candlelight. The atmosphere here so different from the hospital, where white lights had burned beside Opal’s hospital bed, parked next to the nurses’ station. (Jude stayed there, too, of course, almost every minute, crawling into the bed next to Opal for an hour now and then to fall into an instant sleep in which she dreamed that she was awake, sitting on Opal’s bed in the hospital, next to the nurses’ station.) Here at the Goldsteins’, though, Jude controlled the atmosphere. She handed the sage to Egon, who smudged Trina. Trina smudged Egon, who handed the smudge stick to Jude.

  Jude handed the bird feather to Opal. “You speak first,” she said. Opal took the feather, gathered up the skirts of the wedding dress and said, “This is a ceremony for my brain tumor. I have had an operation to take the tumor, but now it is growing back over my speech and hearing. This is why I have called you all here.”

  She looked at Jude, who said, “Go ahead and sing a little song, Ope.” Opal sang:

  Help me help me spirits go away

  Help me help me spirits go away

  My brain tumor is growing

  But I want to stay.

  She stopped and stared upward, through the lens of the yurt, then lowered her eyes and handed the feather to Trina.

  “Perfect, beautiful,” said Trina.

  “I know,” said Opal.

  Trina held the feather and crossed her arms over her chest. She bowed her head and waited so long in such stillness, Jude wondered if she’d gone to sleep. Finally, instead of speaking, she made a gargling sound and sucked moisture up into her nose.

  “Who are you?” Opal asked.

  “Your next-door neighbor on the boat,” Trina said, wiping her eyes.

  Jude smiled at Trina. “She knew you as a man,” she said.

  “I don’t remember him at all,” Opal said.

  Trina pulled a handkerchief from her fanny pack and blew her nose. She thought some more and then said, “Precious Opal, precious, precious jewel, I talked to the Great Spirit and she said this tumor is not part of you. She said to open your mind to healing, and the light of love and health will shine in and the cancer will fizzle like a pizzle.”

  “What’s a pizzle?” Opal asked.

  “Bull’s willy,” said Jude.

  Opal stood up. “Mom, can I take off this dress?”

  “Sure you can,” said Jude.

  Opal pulled the dress over her head. Underneath she wore a white nightgown and cowboy boots.

  Trina handed the feather to Egon, who said, “Wow, I’m blown. I am blown away,” and handed the feather to Jude.

  Jude said, “Apple juice, cell phones, aluminum cookware, fluoridated water, formaldehyde carpets, lead toys, lead fish. My father still smokes, his farm a poison swamp. Opal poisoned before she was conceived. What more evidence do we need? Opal is evidence. But who do I kill? You know what I mean? America?”

  Trina nodded, and said, “I’ve be
en run out of half the small towns in America because I profess the true religion. How sick is that?”

  Jude bent over her buck knife and began cutting Opal’s head bandage into strips so everyone could burn some. “We’ll use the woodstove—we’ll definitely be fire-safe this time!” she said.

  “I’d like to sing another song,” Opal said. Her arms waved like wands in the air and she sang:

  My tumor grows bigger in my brain.

  But here in this round room

  People pray

  For me here with my tumor

  Growing in my brain.

  Trina wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands. Egon played “Kumbaya” on an acoustic guitar, and Opal sang along in a sweet, high voice. Jude lit the fire, which hissed and popped in the woodstove.

  Trina picked up the wedding dress from the floor and laid it tenderly over a chair. “How do you save all this stuff?” she asked Jude. “The whole time I’ve known you, you’ve lived on a boat or a bus.”

  Jude shrugged. “This was my mother’s wedding dress,” she said. “Those were my cowboy boots when I was nine years old.” She laughed. “It’s all my legacy,” she said. “I had every Barbie doll, too, but my sister sold them on eBay. I have my grandmother’s photograph album of scary Scandinavians. I have her china cupboard filled with a dinner service for twelve. It’s lived everywhere I lived because I thought there would be a future. Who knows? Maybe.”

  Jude’s jaw clenched. She felt the furious solitude of her fate—to fight for the weak and expose the guilty. It was the sap in her veins that kept her body upright.

  Opal sang:

  America, America, God shed her grace on me!

  And crown her good with brotherhood

  From sea to shining sea!

  Jude handed out pieces of the head bandage to Opal, Trina and Egon. One by one, the four of them threw their bandages into the woodstove. The strips of gauze blackened and melted together into a viscous, hard helmet, which smoldered on, even hours later, when they ate.

  AMONG THE MEZIMA-WA

  My son, Sam, spent a year on a fellowship doing advanced work on the culture and civilization of the Mezima-Wa. When he came home for the summer, he brought a Mezima-Wa woman with him. Natalie was not a traditional Mezima-Wa; in fact, she’d grown up in St. Louis, where she attended the Burroughs School on a merit scholarship before matriculating at Villanova and taking the Mezima-Wa option for her junior year abroad. A year among the Mezima-Wa had irrevocably changed both my son and Natalie, they agreed. They were blown away by the culture, the colonial legacy, the horror, the architecture, the tribal music and the tribal language (Mezima-Wa). They came back earnest and politicized, decrying the effects of U.S.-backed “economic development” projects that supposedly raised the standard of living of the Mezima-Wa but commodified the forests and shorefront, on which the entire culture depended. I roasted a chicken and made a pilaf, and as we sipped vin ordinaire, I asked about their experiences among the Mezima-Wa; I asked for pictures. But they couldn’t tell me anything, because I had not been there; it was as if the year among the Mezima-Wa had cleaved them away from common life and made us (parent, offspring, girlfriend of offspring) strangers to one another. Of course, Natalie was a stranger. I know nothing of the customs of the Mezima-Wa, nor even those of young American women from back east.

  In those first weeks in July, during which they kept erratic hours—not to impugn Mezima-Wa hours—Natalie and Sam tried to be patient. In short: When I woke, they slept, curled together in Sam’s childhood twin bed; if I brushed my teeth and put on pajamas, they spontaneously decided to make a feast of Mezima-Wa foods from the hill country. This required a ritual bathing of their feet in the bathtub, followed by a cleansing of the tub with my good balsamic vinegar and hideous bathroom sponge. They then filled the floor of the tub with the tough leafy vegetables, dampened grains and fish, which, along with a tuber called chloc, form the basis of Mezima-Wa cuisine. (Sam and Natalie substituted frozen hake for the usual stockfish and jicama for the chloc.) They pounded and stomped the mixture with their clean feet, forming the solids into neat balls by manipulating their toes and rubbing their soles together.

  Seeing the two of them sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on the edge of the tub in their bright-colored tunics and cutoff jeans reminded me of what Roland Barthes called “the fabulous comforts” of domestic life. Since my ex-husband Bob’s defection from marriage and from America, prompted by certain impetuous but unoriginal actions on my part, life had devolved into tidiness and convenience. Natalie and Sam, ankle-deep in their bathtub stew, reminded me of my own erotic history and, by extension, the whole human history of messy pleasures.

  Sometime after midnight, they poached the fish balls in my wok (the Mezima-Wa drop them into clay vats of oily broth, where they rise like matzo balls) and used the liquids (traditionally scraped from the mashing tub with a freshwater shell) as the base for fiery sauces. Natalie produced endless spice packs, which she kept not in the kitchen with the other spices, but in her own purse.

  This was not to be ungenerous, she assured me—generosity was the highest value among the Mezima-Wa—only for safety: Mezima-Wa spices were mildly psychotropic and could cause seizures in any but the smallest doses. Each was absolutely essential to the authenticity of the dishes.

  They fed the fish balls—boibois—to each other in the Mezima-Wa way, reclining on my off-white sofa near dawn, their fingers in each other’s mouths. My pleasure in their company was diminished somewhat by perimenopausal symptoms—sporadic irritability, trouble sleeping, numbness, a new rigidity in my shoulders and spine. (Dr. Berman had suggested homeopathic doses of bioidentical estrogen and a pinch of testosterone—good for the libido, she said.)

  Sometimes I rose to the demands of maternal generosity and offered to make a Western breakfast when Sam and Natalie awoke at one or two o’clock in the afternoon. Natalie would whisper into Sam’s ear at such length and with such urgency that I thought she must be revealing some secret. My first thoughts ran to pregnancy, a thrill and a panic—what beautiful, brilliant children they could make!—until finally Sam nodded and said, “Natalie would like two eggs over easy with some ham and, if you have them, a few sardines. Canned are fine. I’ll just have Grape-Nuts, thanks.”

  While among the Mezima-Wa, Sam had sent regular texts from his cell phone—a form suited to his terse, epigrammatic style. From these communiqués, I’d gathered that Natalie’s year abroad had not pleased her parents, who actually stopped speaking to her for several months. Part of the trouble seemed to be cultural; having so recently left the region themselves for the economic opportunities they hoped a life in America would make possible for their daughter, they objected to her return to the nation-peninsula (engaged in a civil war when they left, which Natalie barely remembered) and to her study of the Mezima-Wa culture as a living, dynamic possibility. It seemed to them that they had the best of both worlds in St. Louis—Mezima-Wa values within an American economy and a capitalist structure that protected their investments, including and especially Natalie. After Villanova, they expected Natalie to attend Harvard Medical School and become, like her aunt, a pediatrician.

  Maybe, too, Natalie’s return to the Mezima-Wa struck them as romantic or frivolous. “Bet they grieve loss of their homeland,” I’d texted Sam.

  “Grief counselor examines world through lens of sorrow,” he’d texted back.

  What other lens could I use? Four mornings and two afternoons a week, grief knocked at my office door, presented evidence (lost children, failed marriages, demented parents, financial ruin, existential dread). This is not to say that I don’t love my job; grief counseling is the most satisfying work I have ever done—it brings me pleasure, and I believe in the process. Twenty years of compelling narratives have convinced me that as an organizing principle for life, grief works.

  DURING THE COURSE of their daughter’s year abroad, Natalie’s parents came to understand and accept that Sam was not a tradition
al Mezima-Wa man. (The initial confusion stemmed from Sam’s name, which is actually the Mezima-Wa word for “calabash” or “capacious urn”—an auspicious symbol.) They realized that in returning to Mezima-Wa, Natalie wasn’t unraveling all their work in coming to the United States, but, rather, reclaiming her identity and cultural heritage as a Mezima-Wa while maintaining a friendly, nonsexual relationship with a promising and affluent(!) American-born boy. On the other hand, when they learned that Sam wasn’t Mezima-Wa-American, but just a random person Natalie had met during her year abroad, and with whom she lived in unseemly proximity, they naturally began to worry that Sam might not fully appreciate the urgent, paramount importance of Natalie’s remaining a virgin until her wedding day. Their concern eventually reached a hysterical pitch.

  Then came the bombshell, a text from Sam: “Natalie and I plan to marry on return to States. Yes we’re sure.” Sam assured me that Natalie’s parents were relieved and had expressed willingness to accept Sam as a husband (according to Mezima-Wa tradition, he would be called “Husband” not only by Natalie but also by her parents). They had also accepted me as the husbandmother.

  Natalie’s parents arrived at the beginning of July at my house in Santa Cruz for the monthlong visit that precedes any Mezima-Wa wedding. During this time, although we all lived under one roof, Sam and Natalie could have no physical contact at all. They couldn’t even sit at the same table to eat, though no one objected to them Skyping from their laptops between the rooms. At first, I felt glad to have Sam back to myself, whatever that means. But delicate marital matters demanded his—our—full attention: determining the agreed-upon number of children the couple would produce, for example, and the penalties should either side (not just the husband and wife but also their extended families) default. Natalie kindly pointed out that her family would naturally assume that as the husbandmother-to-be, I’d demand a number of children higher than Natalie could comfortably or safely bear—and only then would we negotiate.