She mustered barely enough courage to say something, and couldn’t hear her own voice, but apparently Portia did, for there was the slightest rumbling. The smile quivered for a moment and Portia said, “Time? How much time do you need to decide? I have to know now, Ms. Ramoud.”
Then the dress began to turn, the universe of flowers eclipsed itself, and Portia gestured to Jem with one finger. Jem was drawn from the desk, through the pathways of printers, filing cabinets, other desks, towed by her own fear toward the open door. Portia, a Milky Way of light, proceeded through it, then disappeared. It was impossible for Jem to see in, but impossible to remain standing alone outside. She turned briefly and saw the faces of her co-workers behind her as distant stars, a galaxy of passive faces, witnessing her passing. For heaven’s sakes, she thought, a quick dart of irritation. Then, abandoning hope, she entered.
The light in the office was aquatic, like in outer-space movies; everything was hushed, the floor blanketed with darkness. Somewhere at the center of the room where a desk might have been was a shape of extinguished color, afterglow of auburn, white, and black. It was Portia herself, swathed in a kind of Oriental wrapper and reclining on cushions on the floor. “Here,” she said, tapping the floor beside her. “Come sit. Let’s get to know each other.”
Jem sat on the floor and tucked her legs crossways before her. The floor was covered with a coarse carpet that she saw, as her eyes adjusted, was Persian. There was one large picture window, but that was tightly shuttered with blinds and admitted threads of light that stitched the room without illuminating it. She could make out shelves covered with irregular shapes, knickknacks. Nowhere were the papers, folders, furniture, or even the telephone she expected. It seemed suddenly that such artifacts were all merely props for a play, and Portia, with her streamlined body, had no need of props. She was the thing itself. A planet, floating close enough to touch, allowing Jem a look at the marvel of her surface.
Then Portia said, “Did I ever tell you I knew your mother in college?”
Jem held her breath; her thoughts scattered. Portia had drawn an arm through the space between them and caught up Jem’s hopes in one hand. For a moment she thought Portia might be able to tell her the purpose behind her mother’s death, answer the mystery of its suddenness. Perhaps, Jem thought, she had been mistaken about Portia’s intentions. She’d read her all wrong, they all had; Portia might be an angel, a buddha, adrift between worlds, seeing the invisible.
But then Portia shifted, rolling herself back against the cushions, facing her ceiling. She sighed dramatically, ridiculously. Jem felt a clammy cold under her collar and in her palms; her mouth turned to tissue.
The only college photographs Jem had seen of her mother were in her school yearbook, the girls’ basketball team. The girls were lanky, lined up front to back, grinning lopsided, and under each was a word in quotation marks, “Divebomb,” “Blitzkrieg,” “Warrior.” Under Jem’s mother it said, “The Natural.” Jem had assumed her mother had known only women like these, laughing and athletic. Matussem called Portia Therabit Eyn, Evil Eye. It was all wrong, their ages were off; her mother would have predated Portia by a good ten years, Jem guessed.
“She used to be a good Catholic girl, did you know that?” Portia was saying, facing the ceiling, her face a white spot. “Used to be in our church group when she was a freshman. We all went to Mass together every Sunday and holy days of obligation. I met your grandparents once when they came down to visit. Good Christian people. They didn’t see their daughter that often. It was a long drive. I suppose even then she was running from them, starting to rebel.” Jem watched the white spot crane up a few inches off the floor, turning toward her. “I bet you thought I was a Jew. With a name like mine.” She snorted. “Hardly. I’m grade-A all American, missy. Now you’re the one with problems.”
If it hadn’t been so suffocating, the air sinking onto Jem’s shoulders, if she could have remembered where the door was, through the darkness cloaking the room, she might have run out at that moment and saved herself. Instead, she pulled up her knees, drawing into herself, her heart condensing to lead, and within that an iron ember of rage beginning. Portia wouldn’t stop talking, directing herself toward the ceiling, her voice going on and on, “Your mother used to be such a good, good girl. She was so beautifully white, pale as a flower. And then, I don’t know. What happened? The silly girl wanted attention. She met your father in her second year and she just wanted attention. We just weren’t enough for her. I’ll tell you, we couldn’t believe it. This man, he couldn’t speak a word of our language, didn’t have a real job. And Nora was so—like a flower, a real flower, I’m telling you. It seemed like three days after she met that man they were getting married. A split second later she was pregnant. I know for a fact her poor mother—your grandmother—had to ask for a picture of the man for her parish priest to show around to prove he wasn’t a Negro. Though he might as well have been, really, who could tell the difference, the one lives about the same as the other….”
There was a long pause. Jem’s forehead was pressing against her knees, the anger was moving, lining her veins, dull, filling her eyes and mouth. She began to shake.
“She never did finish college after that, never got to be the woman she could’ve been. A husband and baby at twenty. Look at what I’ve done with my life. You know, it’s not too late for you. Oh, sure, you’re tainted, your skin that color. A damn shame. But I’ve noticed that in certain lights it’s worse than in others. Your mother could have made such beautiful children—they could have been so lovely, like she was, like a white rose. Still, it could definitely have been worse for you, what with his skin. Now, if you were to change your name, make it Italian maybe, or even Greek, that might help some. I’m telling you this for love of your mother. I’ll feel forever I might have saved her when that Arab man took her and you kids back to that horrible country of his over there. It’s a wonder any of you survived that place, so evil, primitive, filled with disease! I should’ve spoken up twenty years ago, but I didn’t. I thought, the Lord will provide, blah, blah. She could always have the marriage annulled. I thought I should butt out, let Nora make her own mistakes. Well, not anymore, now I’m telling you, Jemorah Ramoud, your father and all his kind aren’t any better than Negroes, that’s why he hasn’t got any ambition and why he’ll be stuck in that same job in the basement for the rest of his life. They’d never promote him any higher. He only got where he is now on my say-so, because I feel for you kids. And now you can go that way, too, or you can come under my wing and let me educate you, really get you somewhere. We’ll try putting some pink lipstick on you, maybe lightening your hair, make you American.”
“My father’s mother was black.” The statement came from the back of Jem’s throat, so sudden she hadn’t known she was going to say it, the words like iron. Jem leaned back on her elbows, locking them against her shaking. “Yeah, a former slave. She married her master who had twenty-six other wives. They were black, brown, and yellow, and some didn’t even have skin.”
The pale spot once again craned upward, looked at her a moment. Portia’s eyes reflected splinters of light; she blinked slowly, like a cat. Then she said, “I love back talk; it tells me so much about a person. It explains why you’re in heat over garbage like that Ellis kid. White trash worse than lazy darkskins. Multiplying your mother’s mistake. That’s what it leads to, breeding worse and worse trash. Here I am offering you a real chance and your mind’s too trash-low even to see it.”
Jem lifted herself off her elbows. For Ricky she unfolded; she felt delight, relief, and anger. She stood as Portia was saying, “This is my whole point, I want to save whatever of your mother’s clean blood is left. For your own good, Jemorah, I can’t let you quit. Don’t you see? You stay here, we’ll work together, I’ll scrub all the scum right off you, make you as pure and whole as I can—” She was twisted toward Jem, propped on one elbow.
Jem stood, stepped back. “You know what?” she s
aid. “You’re pathetic. If I didn’t think you were so repulsive, I might even feel a little sorry for you. You don’t know me and you don’t know a thing about my mother. She would have hated you, your tiny, hateful little mind. You’re a bully, a liar, and a bigot. You can take your crappy job and shove it!”
Jem hurried toward the door, but in the thick darkness she couldn’t find a knob, or even a frame. She swung her arms out, her hands scrabbling among the walls and shelves. The knickknacks scattered, some smashing, toppling; books fell out of place. “Let me out of here!” she shouted.
Portia was sitting up. Jem could just see the edge of her shoulder in the thin light like a crescent moon. “I’m not letting you out,” she said. “Not till you say sorry.”
Jem became frantic, stumbling around the room, until, tripping over Portia’s legs, she fell against the window blinds. They clattered down with a huge crash, and Jem realized how much the office staff must have feared Portia not to have run in at that point. The light broke through like waking; suddenly she could see outside the hospital. She saw Crowes Street and the Physicians’ Office Building, people strolling by with shopping bags and purses.
Portia’s office looked makeshift and dreary in the light. The desk and files and telephone were set up in a corner; among the broken shards were several ceramic dolls and trolls, glass animals. It reminded Jem of the bedroom of a twelve-year-old. For a moment she did feel pity. Across the room, standing near the door, Portia looked shrunken and water-wrinkled, washed-out in the daylight. She lifted her palms to Jem with pleading fingertips, her eyes swollen, and said, “I don’t hate you, I love you, I don’t hate you!”
Jem began walking straight toward her, the anger winding around her, legs and arms and face all shining. She felt as if she was growing as she moved, tunneling air out of the room. She had never felt so clearheaded before. Her feet pounded the floor and she came at Portia as if to run her over, and Portia threw back her hands, her face drained of expression, and shrieked, “No!” Jem charged straight past her, shoulder striking shoulder, grabbed the door, and walked out.
SHE WALKED THROUGH the vacuum of the outer office, past the desks of workers in suspended animation—or perhaps it was she who was suspended, moving in silence and invisibility. Not a face turned in her direction, every head was bent to its task, and Jem knew then why people who entered that office were rumored never to return: no one ever looked toward Portia’s door if they could help it.
She left the hospital and walked into a new city, a place that had intensified over the course of her morning, become color-saturated, where the faces of strangers turned around her like knives. The sky was sharpened to a crystal point, the diamond edge of coming winter. It was hard to breathe; the air was thin and felt wreathed in ice; it snagged in Jem’s throat. She felt the points of strangers’ eyes and fingers turning toward her. And though she waited to be stopped—feeling she had committed an unnamable crime—she walked freely to her car. Two of the gardeners she usually passed on her way in to work were out trimming the Johnson-Crowes hedges. One briefly touched his cap to her; she couldn’t manage anything in return.
It struck her after she reached the car and locked herself in, that the thin breath in her lungs and the tightening sensation in her stomach were fear. Not merely the fear of being caught, but of everything around her—of the way the strange faces turned and rushed forward, of gestures and glances, of the world of these people, who didn’t know her or want to know her. Who might even have wanted to hurt her. Somehow the world had shifted; she’d entered a place that no longer felt benign.
She drove through the lot, past the security booth and beyond the parking gate to the street. Looking left and right, she felt she was seeing with Aunt Fatima’s eyes; she heard her aunt’s voice saying, “This is not our place, not our people.” Jem didn’t want to drive home; she was afraid to see her house in this way, yet she was still heading there. When the on-ramp for the highway came up, she passed it and took the smaller city streets, meandering into the neighborhoods. She drove through the Northside, with its two-story houses ringed with soot and the smells of frying onions, garlic and sausages, past porches and brick stoops, past Columbus Bread where two squat men stood in the window dressed head to toe in flour, past the Thanatoulos Bakery which had a sign on the door: Closed—LeVar’s First Communion.
She imagined what the old buildings looked like inside, in their hunch against the night. She had a yearning to sit in the front parlor of one of those houses, on a horsehair couch, the TV flickering with late-afternoon reruns, while dusk came to the neighborhood, seeping in the front window, settling in pools around the set and curtains, welling in the kitchen.
She thought she’d contracted homesickness from her father, that it was passed on like a gene to the child of an immigrant. Any place might look like home: suburban neighborhoods, apartment buildings, far-flung country houses; the desire quick in her veins. She envisioned walking the flagstone path, up the wooden steps, through the door and settling in. Now she drove past blocks of barbecue grills, groceries, baby carriages, the business of the world. She was lost.
The car moved from the neighborhoods to the old shopping plazas, past the radio and TV aerial towers, down Electronics Parkway to that spot where the highway cut through open grass and fields, a stretch that Jem had seen from her school-bus window. The tall weeds shook; she felt their shiver in the pit of her stomach. They held currents of her childhood unhappiness, the fear and anxiety of the bus ride. The feelings budded open, disturbing enough that she tried not to remember.
She couldn’t find a life here with Ricky Ellis, his job at a gas station, her work in a business office. She couldn’t hide in Euclid and disappear. Her hands tightened around the steering wheel and the force of understanding churned in her stomach. She steeled against it, shaking her head clear. She wanted more; after so many years of holding back, losing herself in dreams. Her mother had left before she could show Jem where her place might be. Jem averted her eyes as if her sadness clung to the windshield. She would not let herself vanish. She would live.
ONCE HOME, SHE checked the mail. When Jem saw the envelopes she took a deep breath. One was from Uncle Fouad, the other from Stanford University, Department of Psychology. She remembered in that moment: Melvie had fished her application out of the garbage and sent it in. Jem knew that in any case she’d completed the application so hopelessly and late in the year that her only chance for fall admission would have come if an earlier applicant turned down an offer. She tore Stanford’s letter open, let the envelope fall in two pieces and in her hands was a yes.
“Ah, good,” Melvie said, when she returned that evening. “There it is. Very satisfactory. I could’ve told you—hard work, industry, and brilliance will always triumph in the end. Of course, I would have preferred you applied in astrophysics, but I’ve learned the importance of compromise. Peachy, for example, may not go to college, but she’ll learn to read. Now I’ll take this.” She snatched the letter from Jem.
“What for?”
“To make copies, of course!” Melvie glared at her. “The first is going up in the nurses’ station on sixth. I’ll call Dad and the rest of the family. You call Aunt Fatima.”
Jem groaned. Why not engraved announcements? she thought. Melvie marched out of the room. She remembered Fouad’s letter then and tore it open. There was a check inside, made out to Jem for twenty-five thousand dollars. The note on the bottom read “Year one, gradual school.”
Chapter 33
IT SEEMED TO Jem that when the calls started, they came all at once like a burst of daggers. Beginning in early August, a month after Fouad’s departure. “May I speak to Mr. Fouad Mawadi.”
“But—he doesn’t live here—” Jem would say.
“This is given as his home phone.”
“He lives in Jordan.”
“Jordan, near Elbridge?”
“Jordan, the country.”
Usually there’d be some sidesteppi
ng, a few leading questions, a couple of sidelong accusations. Then Mrs. Baymore or Ms. Harrison or Mr. Minway would get down to business, the message always the same: we have charges here for a purple Naugahyde couch…a statue of a giraffe…thirty-five Hawaiian shirts…a Barmaster blender…
Always overdue. Not a penny paid.
Fouad had apparently begun opening store accounts and charging the moment he’d first stepped off the plane in America, two months ago. This was only the first wave of creditors just starting to tense up over missed payments; there was no telling how much he’d charged in more recent weeks. When Jem had some time between calls she would pause to wonder about what might have been going on in Uncle Fouad’s mind during those apparently intoxicating moments of transaction. Was the plastic card some sort of miraculous passkey to him? Funny-money to be used over and over, like something out of a kid’s dream? More likely, as the shrewdest, most successful businessman in the family, Fouad knew exactly what a credit line was. Not that Jem felt he had no scruples, exactly, only that he was able to push inconvenient matters of conscience to the back of his brain. A place where the idea of family was not real, but a kind of needlepoint that Fouad could hang over the mantel while he boarded a plane, leaving behind over a hundred unpaid bills.
In the Old World, Jem thought, family must be as abundant and invisible as air—just as precious—just as easy to exploit. In America, maintaining a family at all sometimes seemed like a miracle.
The collection calls went on day after day for a week. Nothing stopped them, not begging, reasoning, or sighing. Nothing until Melvina answered the phone at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning. Jem sat up in bed eavesdropping through the wall to Melvina’s bedroom.
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