As if she could sense my longing, Grandmother’s demeanor toward me shifted ever so slightly. She wasn’t necessarily warmer, but less technical and more reflective in her words. I learned to believe in magic when I least expected to and in the most satisfying way, because the lesson came from the woman I knew to be stern and upright and unfrivolous to a fault. She unearthed the little girl I had buried, who’d snuck away every afternoon to the land of daydreams.
As we sat in the garden or bent down to our chores, Grandmother told me more about her history, her youthful fantasies of castles and faraway lands. Like every other girl, she had been convinced she was different and would someday be singled out from her more common peers to live an exceptional life. But her father was a butcher, and immediately after high school, she was obligated to work in his shop for the least glamorous and most degrading work a girl could imagine. She had recently begun a new and unhealthy habit—romanticizing her lowliness as a means of accepting her fate—when Andres appeared. The first time she saw him, he was dressed in a freshly pressed suit and tie, with a rose tucked into the pocket. In the recesses of her mind, she had long ago envisioned what the handsome and elegant man she’d marry would look like—Andres embodied her prince in the flesh. His eyes twinkled and his shoes shone. She, on the other hand, had just left the shop, and her dress contained smatterings of chicken livers and pigs’ blood. Her hair hung limp with grime, and she was anxious to bathe off the dead animal smell that nested in her pores. When she saw Andres standing there, he looked at her and smiled, handsome and twinkling, and all she could do was run.
From then on, in addition to her apron, she wore gloves all day and a shower cap over her hair. She kept a change of clothes, a hairbrush, flowery soap, and a bottle of perfume in her bag to freshen up for her walk home with Andres. His job on the railroad yard meant he was up before dusk and off work in time to shower and pick her up with a different flower each day, plucked fresh from his neatly ironed pocket.
After they married, she quit her job at the butcher shop, but the dead animal smell continued to plague her. While seeking a way to deodorize her skin, she perfected a method of making rice wine, which she used for cooking and entertaining, in addition to washing her hands. Her guests were so impressed by the wine’s clarity and flavor that they ordered bottles of it for their own homes, and for a time, Iolana was busy running this new business, earning regular money that would one day pay for her son’s medical school bills.
The early years of marriage passed, and Iolana and Andres were content, except for one thing—they could not conceive a child. She worried that she was barren, so when my father finally arrived she dedicated all her energies to raising him.
Iolana’s stories tended to linger around the men in her life—Andres and Papa. When the topic branched and it seemed she might venture into the realm of my mother, interruptions never failed to ensue: a neighbor dropping in, the phone ringing, a teakettle whistling, or the dogs barking. But Iolana’s newfound chattiness had made me bolder; I seized the next opportunity to ask her about Tala directly.
“Why did she leave?” I asked as we harvested our sweet potatoes, and she did not pretend ignorance about the subject of my question.
“All this time I spend gardening, tending the vegetables in our little back plot, because nothing compares to the feeling of home, making it comfortable, making it yours, and watching what you’ve made surround the people you love with peace and joy,” Grandmother said. “I’ve dedicated my life to this little plot and have never felt ashamed to flaunt its bounty, which is much more than vegetables and fruits. It is a faithful husband, dutiful son, and then, a beautiful granddaughter of my own.
“But there are those to whom life deals less fortunate blows,” she continued, sweeping the dirt off of a kamote with her fingers before dropping it into the basket, not looking up as she worked. “And I don’t consider myself above them. Who am I to judge when so many are born with less from the moment they open their eyes to the world? Your mother was one such individual. But I must say that character is established when such individuals are given choices—to continue upon their wanton paths, or to rise above when such an opportunity presents itself.”
“So you know the truth?” I pleaded. “I know the stories of wings and flying away are lies.” My heart thumped a faster rhythm, and for a moment I felt overwhelmed by the loss of breath.
“Truth has many colors, at times wondrous, at other times deceptive.” Her voice changed, softening even from her reminiscing tone, and Grandmother stopped her work to stare into the foliage of the garden. “Sometimes the colors are not always distinguishable from one another.”
“I want to see it in black and white. For once, Grandmother, please.”
She turned her gaze to me and switched from a kneeling to sitting position. I took her lead and did the same, knowing this was a sign that gardening had, for the moment, come to an end, and a different yield would be harvested. We had planted ourselves in the soil.
“We’d always known she had a past, one that had nearly swallowed her whole. She kept her distance from it, and we respected her silence in that regard. She and your Papa fell in love the way you’re supposed to—without shame, without patience, with their whole selves. I don’t remember when the picture began to crumble. Perhaps it was when her past began creeping up on us. She had a so-called brother, and it turned out that for who knows how long, three of her so-called sisters had been living next door to us at the old maid’s house. One day, they all disappeared—Tala, the brother, and the sisters. You were still a baby.
“I found your Papa huddled up in his office on the morning she disappeared. His things were scattered everywhere; this could have been his doing or hers. His closet was thrown open and a big hole gaped from one of its interior walls. She had apparently been hiding things there: drugs, weapons, money—who knows? But she had taken it and fled. They suspect she left as a means of protecting you and us, to keep her gang from getting too close. A few days later, a woman’s body was found in the river several miles downstream. The authorities said this woman had been surviving in outhouses and barns, in the hollow trunks of trees. She had died in the river’s clutch after drifting along its path for days. No one knew or claimed her; her face was bloated and unrecognizable. Many believe it was Tala, for the other three girls had been younger, smaller. Your Papa refused to identify the body.”
I sat and blinked, conscious of my eyelids opening and shutting while the rest of me sat motionless. None of it surprised me, as if I had heard it all before, or more likely, it had matched one of the many explanations I’d dreamed up on my own. Still, the finality of this reality filled me with sadness.
“So that’s it, then. Thank you, Grandmother. Now I know everything.”
Grandmother lifted my chin with her finger and placed a hand on each of my cheeks.
“Truth has many colors. Maybe, most likely, you know nothing.”
I questioned her with my eyes.
“One of our neighbors, a quiet housewife who lived two houses that way, pronounced that Tala was not the drowned woman. She affirmed your Grandfather’s story about Tala flying away on a pair of wings, said she had been outside hanging laundry when a sudden, intense wind tore her clothespins off the line. She’d chased a damp sheet across the yard, only to witness a giant angel floating over a tree in our yard. According to this woman, the angel spent a good deal of time spinning in circles above the courtyard, holding you in her arms, then kissing you and placing you on the ground before flying away alone. She did refute one aspect of your Grandfather’s story, said he had not attempted to fight her off, as he’d claimed, but had hidden behind the trees in sheer fright.”
“Which story do you believe, Grandmother?” This time my heart didn’t plunge me into sudden chaos. Anticipating an answer I was both frightened and thrilled to learn, my chest heaved slowly, deeply.
“In answer to that, I’ll tell you a story of my own, one I’d intended to
take to my grave. But you alone may have it, with the condition that you never bring it up in my presence again after this day.”
24. Conception
Those who know me hold me in the highest esteem, but I am no different from any other woman. I have my secrets. I’ve committed my share of sins, none of which I’m proud of. Still, if I had them to do over again, I would. I would sin again; I would not change a thing, because some acts are essential to survival. Just as violence can be essential to maintaining the peace, infidelity can seal a marriage into permanence. The logic isn’t something I know how to explain. I can only ask that you listen with your heart and what you know deep inside to be true.
As a young girl, I held lofty expectations of my future. These shrank with each passing year, until all I hoped for was to marry a respectable man and escape from the prison of my parents’ business. Your grandfather was this man. Beyond that, he taught me love. I quickly learned that he was more than just a vehicle, but my destination. Walking side by side, we embodied beauty and strength, whatever perils might come our way. Your grandfather taught me how to feel at peace.
And so I became a protector of that peace, watchful against potential intruders as I insulated the nest for our days of love. We both knew how to work hard, and our initial years of marriage passed in both material comfort and physical satisfaction. But disappointment was inevitable. We could not have a child.
This is where my story twists. I had thought that your grandfather was the interceptor, the one who’d knocked my comet in an alternate direction, but I still had so much to learn—about life and about myself—before I could begin to put my marriage into perspective.
I could not imagine a life without children. Though that reality had been presenting itself for years, I realized it suddenly, and the impact was that much sharper. I spent that day sitting and staring, unable to lift the weight of my body off the chair. When I finally got up, it was to go to bed, for night had settled and your grandfather had long since turned in, having given up trying to elicit a response from me. The next morning did not shake me from my doldrums. I wandered around listlessly, without motivation to cook, eat, or clean. For days on end, your grandfather came home to an empty dinner table, and even though I did not remember the last time I’d prepared a warm meal, dirty dishes found a way to pile up around the sink. I neglected a dozen orders for my rice wine—this in fact is the time I stopped making it altogether, and your grandfather was obligated to refund my customers who’d prepaid for their supply.
I did not spring to action, even when he resorted to eating dinner at the neighbors’, bringing home a covered plate for me. Maybe because he knew or shared the cause of my suffering, he did not question or prod me. Every day, he made some sort of contact, rubbing my feet as I stared into the empty spaces or filling me in on the goings on around the block or within our extended family. During one of these moments, when he rubbed my feet and I stared into the fog, I managed to look at him and see that his eyes were full of pain, sucking in a well of tears, even though his voice was calm and soothing, his body bent into a source of comfort. I could bear my pain, but not his.
The next day the kitchen sparkled and rice porridge waited on the stove when he awoke in the morning. We went back to the way things had always been, never bringing up the anguish of recent days. Your grandfather assumed that the old me had come back, but something inside me had broken from the mold. I was not misplaced in my home or marriage; I was more certain of this than ever. But secretly I sought every remedy to fill the missing piece. I listened to my doctor and consumed more protein. I purchased herbs from the local medicine woman. I came up with my own inventions before, during, and after sex. Nothing worked. Pride in house and home left me embittered, wishing I could go back to the woman who’d once aimed for intangible greatness. But I could think of no role more bountiful than motherhood.
At the time my hair hung long, down my back, past my hips. After staring too long in the mirror one day, I felt the impulse to cut it all off. I walked to the river with black ropes of it in my fist, swinging in the wind. “Give me a child,” I implored. “Please find a way to give me a child.” I opened my fist and thousands of strands swam and separated, disappearing into the tumbling waters.
He came that very night. No sound awoke me, but I sensed him approaching from the other side of the window. I sat up, intensely aware, afraid because no logic accompanied this certainty. Your grandfather slept deeply beside me, his head reclined, by choice, on our flattest pillow. I looked at him and almost retreated into our sea of blankets. But something dark and irresistible called me. I was impatient to reach the window, to disappear behind the curtain’s veil.
At first I could not see anything but darkness. He began as the movement of shadows, a whirling cloud that rose and dove in the spaces between earth and sky. The whirling gradually widened and slowed, anonymous night shadows coalescing into the outline of a man.
He was almost too beautiful to look at, with a depth to the eyes that seemed to contain centuries of pain. This did not soften his expression, but heightened the intensity of his scrutiny, the way he read me, hearing my thoughts, the corners of his lips upturned in a knowing dare. His muscles rippled, exposed at the chest, arms, thighs, hinting at the strength to dominate and carry forth the secret maneuvers women dream that men will know. Only he was more than a man; a creature, demon, or god, with an intensity that made me shudder. Two humps folded into his back bobbed in a beastly fashion as he crept toward me. He held out his hand, half smiling, half sneering, and I leapt.
What followed could have consisted of hours or days. I cannot tell you exactly what happened except for the fact that I lost myself in that strange mirror—a world identical to ours were it not for the reflection shimmering on the other side—the reflection of us. A single strand kept me moored to the fabric of my previous life, and as my lover and I grew in desperation to lose ourselves in pleasure, each day greedier than the last, I longed to sever that strand forever.
I conceived my son in the mind before the body, as if I could see him waiting on the other side of the cosmos. I could see his face, every little feature, fully formed—his perfect lips and inquisitive brow. When I had long abandoned the possibility of returning to your grandfather, it was your grandfather whom I envisioned as I writhed beneath my lover’s pumping wings, manifesting my son from a mental image to physical molecules replicating that image atom by atom. When my son called out from the void, demanding to be claimed in a high-pitched register that resembled the language of whales, I responded, a new and forever mother, instinctively wired to that cry, and reaching for him, I found myself leaping out of that world as I had once done toward it, only this time I was alone, falling into an endless reflection.
I awoke with a start, wet from head to toe with perspiration, covered by too many blankets. The room’s familiarity returned, object by heavy object, though it had shrunken in size and the air within felt compacted and stuffy. Your grandfather slept peacefully on the bed, undisturbed by my rude return, and for a moment I dreaded that my lover had sprung from a wild invention, a cruel trap of insanity in which I was breathlessly spinning. I closed my eyes to regain some balance, fearing I might faint or scream. It would have been too much to bear, losing the reality of what I’d known with the winged man. I remembered pushing his nakedness into me as he clung on harder, responding to thoughts I never said aloud, understanding my body’s every gesture. I wept with longing and willed myself to walk the cliff into permanent delusion. Then I felt the feather tickling my chest, sticking to the sweat on my skin. I picked it up and inspected it ravenously, the soft underside of wings. Knowing was enough. So that your grandfather would never see, I swallowed it.
So you see that even though logic reveals the obvious, I believe what I know to be true, the unlikely and the unproven, because how else could it be that my son, your father, would grow to find and choose a woman with wings, an aberration, though there are hundreds of thousands e
nough with legs and arms, if not for the fact that he alone could see her, bestowed, no—cursed—with a vision of where he comes from, of what he is, though he does not, and shall not ever know. Not only do I believe the far-fetched stories of your mother’s flight, I blame myself for it, for that and so much more.
25. A City Rising
I gather the courage to confront Papa at the river, where he sometimes wanders to at night. Walking the distance across quiet pathways streaked with moonlight, I ponder the darkness and what people fear. It’s not so much what they can’t see, but what they can’t know.
When I get there, his eyes widen. I’m clearly not who he expects. I doubt anyone could be. He tells me to go back to bed. Instead, I sit with him on the long, flat stone. With light tosses, I sprinkle pebbles into the water as he gazes up into the treetops. Neither one of us speaks, and something about the river feels suspended in time. He is part of this mistiness, this waiting, as if all his muscles were connected to the water, the pebbles, and the leaves, roots and veins intertwined, and none of them existed except in memory. I remember the ghost stories, vampires feeding on pregnant women, dwarfs from underground hypnotizing farmers, and as much as I don’t believe, there’s something of them here, eerie and frightful.
With Papa, it is not make-believe, it is something tangible in his communion with the river. He is the first to speak.
“Your mother did not leave me. I asked her to go.”
And finally, Papa told me his story.
As I did in the rest of the house, I kept my professional area neat and tidy. I alphabetized my medical books, left my desk bare except for a mug full of identical pens, promptly filed my patients’ records, and organized my instruments by order of use on a rolling tray beside the examination table. I sanitized surfaces, disposed of used examination gloves and tongue depressors, and restocked my own supplies, leaving the women little excuse to go meddling there. Tala had understood the sanctity of this space, believing it had something to do with my being a doctor and the sacred rites I shared with my patients. At my request, she only came in on occasion, to find some lost household item I had left there or to call me in to dinner. Sometimes, when I was out on rounds, she sat in my chair, fiddled with my pens, opened drawers, and lay down on the examination bed. I knew even this about her.
The Hour of Daydreams Page 20