by Cheryl Reid
“Go sit,” she said. “Don’t worry.”
The mockingbird flew up as Louise passed. When she was inside, it hopped close to me and stood with its head cocked to the side like a begging dog.
I gathered the mail from the step and followed her inside. The house smelled of Lila’s bacon and cigarette smoke. I had not cooked in two days, not since Elias returned from Orlando Washington’s house. For Elias, I had made gravy, warmed some flatbread, greens, purple-hull peas, and ham. I had sliced a fresh tomato from the garden. After that, I had made nothing with my hands, no bread or pies, no food for myself, nothing to sustain life.
I laid the mail on the table and told myself, This will pass. Very soon, I hoped to make bread for Marina and prepare a mezze, a table full of food, around which my family would sit, and I would watch them eat while I held my grandchild.
Louise opened the mail, all of it prayer cards. She arranged them on the buffet for people to see. “So many cards so soon,” she said. Then she scuttled around the kitchen, going into the cupboards and pulling out cake flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, orange-blossom water. The soles of her black lace oxfords brushed the floor like a worn-out broom. The refrigerator door opened and closed. Glass dishes rattled as she lined them up on the counter. There was too much food and no place to work.
“Where do you want these?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
My kitchen had become hers, my routine upended, all because of his death. I had been foolish to think life would go on as normal.
I moved tins and pans of food onto the kitchen table. Marina would direct us all soon enough.
Louise lit the oven and began measuring flour. She had cooked all of yesterday, and she was starting again.
“Louise, you want to bake a cake?” I put on an apron. “I will do it.”
“No.” She wrapped her thick arms around me and squeezed. She led me to the hallway, where heat from the kitchen and heat from outside had begun to collide. She returned and clanked around the refrigerator until she found the eggs. I entered the kitchen again to help her.
“No,” she said. Her warm, thick hands settled on mine. “No. You do nothing.” For some reason, she loved me—maybe because she had known me as a girl before my mother died. She had watched me grow up and had seen how Nelly and Elias treated me. I sensed Louise was happy for me that I was free of him.
“Marina wants a cake. But I tell her, nothing sweet at a funeral.” She shook her head. “She says she will buy petit fours. I tell her, too expensive from the bakery, but she says, we need a sweet. So I tell her, and now I tell you, I bake a cake.” She patted my arm.
“I’ll help you.” I started to enter the kitchen. I wanted something to do.
“It doesn’t have to taste good.” She winked at me and smiled. “So, I can do it.” She noticed my hand. The bandage seeped fresh blood. “Go. Change it.” She untied my apron and put it on herself. The ties barely met around her thick middle.
The doorbell rang.
“Go, now.” She shuffled past me to answer the door. “Take care of yourself.”
From the hall, I saw a delivery boy behind a large wreath. Louise opened the door wide and pointed to a corner in the living room. He positioned a tripod and hung the circle of fat white mums. “There’s more,” he said. Five more trips and six wreaths crowded the fireplace. He said, “Good day, ma’am,” to Louise and was gone.
The house swam in a thick perfume of lilies and mums. The hot stove let off a metallic smell. Louise returned to the kitchen and measured sugar and baking powder.
I turned on fans and opened the windows to let hot air escape. I looked at the cards and who had sent them. Michael’s parents, a few customers, church ladies, Father McMurray.
I wanted to be near Louise, near someone who cared for me. I sat in the corner near the telephone. I dialed Gus and Lila’s house and hoped Eli would answer and say he was okay. I wanted to see Eli with my eyes. I wanted to know he was safe and that Orlando Washington was safe too, but no one answered.
I watched Louise move about my kitchen. I had walked the same circles—from the icebox to the sink to the stove. I could have been watching myself. Soon Marina would be here, setting things right. Earlier it had been Lila feeding and caring for me. All of us tied to the stove and the sink and the work to keep life moving forward. Nelly had done the same.
Soon his body would be back, and I feared my house would hold the sickly odor of embalmment and smell like a funeral home. The stove ticked up the heat. The pendulum of the cuckoo clock swung. This will pass, I told myself. Soon Marina would arrive. I needed to bathe and dress before she saw me. She would hate the sight of me and the state of the house. There was the yard to clean and the table to set before people came. I had to get through this day and the next. I thought of my mother as a girl crossing the ocean, looking at the stars and sleeping on the deck, hopeful, counting the minutes and hours and days to get to where she was going. That was all I had to do.
Wedding Day
Standing in the church before the altar, Elias and I said our vows and I placed the gold ring on his finger. His green eyes were drowsy from the long Mass. He lifted my veil. His aftershave, a concoction of cloves and oil, flooded my senses. My hand brushed the fine wool of his sleeve. I thought, This is my husband, and I am his wife, to serve and obey and carry his children. I knew he would make me his wife that night, but I did not know the physical process of how it would happen. I knew nothing past the romantic play, the emerald ring and the beautiful dress. No one had ever told me. Nelly mewled in the front pew. His dry lips grazed over mine and I felt sick that we would share a bed later that night.
Outside the church, Elias asked me if I minded riding in the back seat of his new Buick. He whispered, “I don’t think she can fit in the back.” He gestured toward his fat mother and looked embarrassed. The back door was narrow, so I agreed and waited while he and Ivie flapped around Nelly. Finally she eased into the front seat and Ivie scooted in next to me.
Elias drove toward our new house, and Nelly bawled. “My sweet boy is gone,” she said.
“Mother,” he said. “I’m not gone anywhere.”
She tilted her head and said in a schoolgirl voice, “You are a good boy.” She touched his hair. “You will always take care of me.”
Ivie kicked Elias’s seat. “Shut up the titty-baby routine.”
Nelly sucked her teeth at Ivie.
At the stop sign, Elias looked back at me with moon eyes and mouthed, “I’m sorry.”
Ivie grunted and I had to look out the window to keep from bursting with laughter. When Elias pulled into our new drive, I hurried away from them, through the crowd of distant cousins and Syrian businessmen from other towns, to the kitchen to find my mother’s sister Elsa, who had been cooking for three days. We received the guests in our new house, because the rooms above my father’s store in Mounds would never do, and Elsa was too proud to let Nelly prepare the wedding feast and lord it over her.
With the skirt of my wedding gown gathered in my arms, I clung to Elsa as she moved about the busy kitchen. I tried to bury my face into her soft neck. “It was awful in the car,” I whispered. I told her how Nelly had carried on and how Ivie had insulted Elias and their mother. “I’m not sure what I’ve gotten into.”
Elsa sucked her teeth in disdain. “Too late now,” she chided. “He’s got you.” The corners of her eyes curved up with her smile. “And you’ve got her.”
I wanted to pull her away from the stove to ask her what would happen on the wedding night. She was practical and pragmatic, and surely now that I was married, she could tell me what to expect or do—that is, if she knew.
Elsa patted my arm and dismissed me. “Child, I’m busy.” She looked frazzled. She was not in her own kitchen and this was the largest number of people she had ever cooked for. She had Thea and two other women helping her, but that made her anxious too. I was the bride, so I could not help, and
she didn’t want Nelly, because Nelly would have taken over, and if anything, Elsa’s pride and honor rested in her cooking.
I turned to Thea for comfort, and she looked at me with kind eyes. She’d had a son. She had been a midwife and knew the ways of nature. She would tell me, I thought, better than Elsa could, but every time I got close, Elsa barked, “You are in the way. You cannot interrupt Thea right now.” Thea was doing two jobs at once, stirring a pot of rice pudding and displaying the pastries on a tray.
Thea smiled at me. She whispered, “Your mama would be so proud.”
I wondered what I had done that would have made my mother proud, but Thea had known her best. Thea was the one to hand her Gus when he was born and the one who held the dead babies, the one who prayed for Mama’s soul the moment it left her body. I accepted Thea’s words as truth. I would bide my time and find a way to ask her.
Elsa motioned me closer. Her breath was warm and smelled of mint. “They think I don’t know what they do. But I am watching.” Maybe she would comfort me now and give me a chance to ask my questions. “One of them put a spoon in her dirty black mouth and back into the pot. I sent her home. No pay.”
Thea’s lips drew tight. She knew Elsa and her prejudices. Elsa wouldn’t let Thea work in the house, except to do laundry or the floors. I wanted to stand near Thea to shield her from Elsa. I could get my information and help Thea too, but Elsa prodded me toward the hall.
“Go and change your dress,” Elsa said. “You will have a daughter to wear this.”
I would have a daughter—children were the duty of marriage. I panicked. I was not ready to lie next to him, and I worried I should have heeded my father’s warnings. He had tried to tell me I was too young, but I was too naive to understand what he meant.
I wanted to cross the room to Thea and thank her for her words about Mama, and then pull her away and tell her I was terrified of what was soon to happen. But Elsa did not relent. “Go on.” Elsa pushed me out of the kitchen, and guests began streaming in to see Elsa and the food she was preparing. Louise and Joe, Elias’s cousins, Nelly, Papa’s brother and his wife, their grown children and their little ones—all of them coming to fuss over Elsa’s food and to kiss my cheek as if I were a sick child.
When Aunt Elsa announced the food was ready, the women prepared plates for the men and then fed themselves. I was too nervous to eat. I was about to go upstairs and change as Elsa had instructed me, when Gus called from the living room. “Open your presents, Anna!” So young, only fourteen, he thought the presents made the occasion. Gus smiled and his white teeth beamed across his face. He was happy for me to be married to Elias. He liked him. Gus looked up to us because he saw us as adults in charge of our own lives. Gus was happy that I had a new, big house on the white side of town, and I supposed he hoped the same for himself one day. Seeing Gus so happy eased my nerves. I smiled back at him, but then I questioned his glee. The boy in him must have thought about it, the act that was to take place. I was angry that he probably knew, had probably discussed it with other boys or men, and I had had no one to tell me and had been too ashamed to ask or give it much thought until now, when I was faced with the impending act. I shuddered to think that everyone in the room knew what was to happen between us, except me.
I tried to calm myself and notice the beautiful things in the living room. For days, Aunt Elsa had sat in the house waiting for each piece of furniture to be delivered. Papa chose the carpets himself. My eyes fell on him in the corner. His food sat untouched on a side table near him. He ran his thick hands across his large, balding head. He looked at me and then averted his gaze to the floor. I felt a wave of shame, because he knew I would not be his innocent girl anymore. I was another man’s wife.
Elias stood near, and I felt his warmth as I opened Gus’s present first—a mahogany box filled with silver. I ran my finger over the pattern, a delicate etching with our initial, N. Papa must have paid for it, and the jeweler would have helped Gus choose it. I kissed his warm cheek and wanted my brother to remain close, but he dashed to the other side of the room in his excitement. I opened gifts of plates, dishes, crystal bowls, and a camera from Ivie. From the corner of my eye, I saw Papa’s bowed head. Maybe, I told myself, he was sad and thinking of my mother or the fact that this house should have been built for her, but I knew it was more than that.
The last gift was Nelly’s, a woven tablecloth worked with lace around the edges. “It was my mother’s. I brought it from the old country.” She smiled, close-lipped, with tears in her eyes. She wrapped her arms around me and whispered in my ear, “I did not want him to marry you, but he decided on his own. I pray you will be a good wife to him.” She released me. She smiled and revealed the dark edges of her tea-stained teeth. She wanted everyone to see that she wished me well, but the tone of her voice sent chills down my back. I handed Elias the tablecloth to admire and I left the room to go upstairs.
Elias followed me into the hallway. He grabbed my hand and I started to cry. “What is wrong?” Elias gathered me in his arms, closer than he had ever held me before.
So much was wrong, I was not sure where to start. My nervousness, his mother, my father. “Your mother has a strange way of wishing me well, and my father acts like he is at a funeral,” I said.
Elias groped my sides and his thumbs brushed against my breasts. He whispered, “It is a hard day for them.”
I looked into his face. Soon, he would do something to me, something I did not understand, and suddenly he seemed to be leering, and I felt like a lost child.
“They are getting older and we are moving on.” His words rang true. He hugged me once more, and I liked the warmth of his arms around me. I liked the way he smelled. I thought maybe he was nervous too, maybe I was putting too much worry into a natural thing.
I wanted to say that I wished my mother were alive to see us. I wanted to tell him, She would be happy for us, but if I said those words, my mother, I knew I would not stop crying.
He lifted my chin and said, “You should be happy. It is our wedding day.” He looked to see if anyone was close. He whispered, “It’s soon to be our wedding night.”
I nodded and forced a smile.
He wiped the tears from my cheeks.
The men were calling him from the front room. My uncle had brought home-distilled arak and now the men were drinking and talking loud.
“It has been a good day.” He let go. “I’ll check on the guests.”
He left me and I pulled the bridal veil from my hair. The pins fell to the floor. I looked into the kitchen and a host of women chattered as they cleaned dishes and put away food. I saw the top of Thea’s head across a sea of ladies. To get to her, I would have to swim through cousins and churchwomen. I would never make it to her, for each woman would stop me to wish me well and offer a piece of advice, and even if I did, the likelihood of Elsa giving Thea leave from her post was not good. I imagined grabbing a random woman, pulling her upstairs to make her explain to me what should happen. But that would send everyone into a frenzy and I would look like a fool.
I walked upstairs to my new bedroom and listened to the party carry on. White curtains hung beside the gleaming new windows, and outside, the green pecan leaves filtered blue sky. A dark four-post bed was made in a linen coverlet, starched and smooth. The sun began to sink and shadows of leaves danced across the ceiling.
I decided to change and return to the party, but I was trapped in the wedding gown. The buttons ran down my back, and every effort to undo them was foiled. That morning, Aunt Elsa had buttoned me into it. She had said, “I could have married, but I did not want it. A lot of trouble. Look what it got your mother.” She had made a sign of the cross at the mention of my mother, but I had been distracted by the veil and the emerald ring and the cloud of silk I wore. Alone in my new room, her words nagged me: “You remind me of Vega, how intent she was on Faris, and you are as focused on this one.”
I did an inventory of my body, of the parts and the whole,
the regular and the private. I worried about the place from which I bled each month, and thought of my poor mother bleeding her life out through that place. I knew babies came from there, and that it must be the place the seed entered. I wondered which of my parts he would want to touch. I knew what he had. I had changed my brother’s diapers and given him baths when he was a small child. But I did not know what that became on a man or how awful it would be to see it so close and for so certain a purpose. My skin was on fire with indignity. I lay across the bed in a heap of white silk. I had never been in such a beautiful house or worn such a beautiful gown or felt like such a little girl playing dress-up in shoes that did not fit.
The screen door opened and closed. I heard voices on the porch. I sat up and looked out the window. Papa, my brother, the priest. Behind them, my father’s brother and his family, Ivie, and the others trickled out onto the lawn, the street, and into their cars. My lanky brother looked back up at the house with curious eyes. The sun sat just above the horizon.
Leather soles scratched like sandpaper on the stairs. Then, Elias stood in the door of what I thought was to be our room, but was mine alone. “So, what do you think?” His voice was low. “The house is beautiful.” There had been a great effort by him, Papa, and Aunt Elsa to make sure the house was finished and furnished for our wedding day.
“Yes,” I said. My dry lips stuck together.
He spread his arms in the doorway like branches on a great tree.
I was trapped in the room. I was not ready for what he wanted.
The sun was setting and the room seemed to be lit with fire.
“Thea, make sure those gals get the dishes dry,” Elsa’s voice, harsh and direct, jolted up the stairs. “We have to take them back to the church.”
Nelly spoke to Elsa in Arabic. The two women cackled. I felt certain Nelly said something about me with my dress off, something about her son having his way, but I did not know.
“Come here,” Elias said. It was an order—kindly spoken, but still an order. “I will help you out of your dress.” He leered like a wolf, his head down, his intense eyes grazing over me.