by Danzy Senna
3 . PLUMS IN WINTER
Soledad smells what’s happening under the table, but she doesn’t say anything. It doesn’t seem appropriate to mention, given the circumstances. Nobody else says a word either. They just eat their food in silence. A new one floats up, and Soledad tries to hold her breath as she takes another bite of the honey-baked ham. It’s more difficult than she imagined, to eat without breathing.
Soledad’s mother died yesterday. She died quietly, all drugged up, in a white room surrounded by soft-spoken Filipina nurses. It was a planned death, like a planned pregnancy. Everybody had plenty of time to mourn before the official end. Relatives from both sides have come to town for the funeral, which will be held tomorrow, and the aura at the table now is one of suppressed relief, and impatience for the ceremony to be over.
The last time Soledad saw her mother was two weeks ago, in the hospice in New Haven. Her breasts were gone and she wore a Yankees cap on her head, so that she looked like a young boy. Her blue eyes looked hard as marbles, a doll’s eyes that rolled back in her head when she writhed on the bed. She drifted in and out of awareness, but when she was awake, all she could talk about were plums, their blue-red skin, their sweet messiness, their coolness, the flat smoothness of the pit against her tongue. She talked about how there was no other word to describe their color but the name itself. Plum. Wasn’t that remarkable? Soledad went all over New Haven that cold gray day looking for plums, but they were out of season, and when she came back to the hospice her mother was not talking about plums anymore. Her eyes were closed and it was time to catch the train back to campus.
A new smell wafts up from under the table. It’s unbelievable that such a small dog could make such a big impact on the world. Soledad holds a napkin over her mouth and eyes the other guests. They scrape at their plates unhappily.
“Pass the macaroni, Soledad,” her father says, nodding his big head toward the bowl. He looks fatter than he did two weeks ago. The weight sits in his bulbous belly, like a phantom pregnancy. She passes him the macaroni.
Aunt Rose made all the food. She and Uncle Izzy drove down from Boston this morning with a whole trunkload of steamy Tupperware.
“Have you chosen a major?” Izzy asks her from across the table.
“Women’s studies,” she says.
“Uh-oh, Dave,” Izzy says, smirking at her father. “Sounds like trouble. Should have sent her down south for college.”
She wants to say to him what she has learned, none of it in class: Some women are born to play dumb, and some women are too smart for their own good. Some women are born to give and some women only know how to take. Some women learn who they want to be from their mothers, some who they don’t want to be. Some mothers suffer so their daughters won’t. Some mothers love so their daughters won’t. She wants to tell him that she has lost the one thing tying her to this scene. That nothing binds her to this anymore. That she is light and she is free and she is mourning not just her mother but her prison too.
Instead she forces a smile at him and sips her water.
Through the window above Izzy’s head, she can see it has begun to rain. The wetness creates a kind of Impressionist haze that she finds comforting. She can make out through the wet half darkness the branches of the apple tree where she used to sit as a kid, hiding from the world. She went there for many reasons, but the one she remembers best is her father. The first time it happened, when she was twelve, she got out of school early for some reason and came home unannounced—came home to hear music playing, old soul music, in the middle of the afternoon. Confused, curious, she went toward the source, her father’s office. The door was cracked open. The girl had black ringlets and high yellow skin and looked like a student, in faded jeans, an army jacket. Her backpack was in the middle of the floor, on the Persian rug, and she was sitting on his lap, laughing. Her father was speaking in a kind of affected slang she’d never heard before: “Why you been playing hard to get?” And the girl was saying, also in forced slang, “You have quite a reputation, Professor-man.” Then their private laughter. Soledad turned and walked outside, her cheeks burning and her head down as if she’d been chastened. She climbed the tree and waited among the branches for the girl to leave and the house to become her house again. When the sky had turned a swirl of purple and gray and the air began to smell of burning wood, the girl emerged out the side door looking younger and a little unsteady, like a version of Soledad herself. She walked toward a beat-up Toyota halfway down the block and then she was gone.
Another fart floats up just then, a real doozy. Aunt Rose coughs into her napkin.
“Goddamn it, now that’s enough,” her father says, standing. His chair falls to the floor behind him. “Where is that thing?”
He reaches under the table and she hears a yelp as Blue is dragged from his hiding place. Blue is old, nearly toothless. He was her mother’s dog, a replacement baby for when Soledad got too old to hold, and she took Blue everywhere. Now he sleeps almost all the time. Her father grips the dog by the scruff of the neck and belts him once, twice across his rump. The dog scurries away, whimpering, his tail between his legs.
Her father picks up his fallen chair, looks down at the table, daring anybody to say a word.
Izzy snorts with laughter. “I thought it was you all that time, Melvin.”
Aunt Rose chuckles a little and everybody goes back to their food.
Except Soledad. She stares out the window, where the rain is falling harder. When she was a kid, Soledad used to play a game at dinner: She would imagine she was a passerby on the street out front, somebody who just happened to glance in through their picture window at this dinner scene. She would imagine herself and her family through that stranger’s eyes: a portly black man at the head of the table, a white red-haired woman in a peasant blouse serving food from the kitchen, a yellow teenaged girl with corkscrew curls feeding scraps to the dog under the table. Would they guess the good professor, with all his Poitier dreams, was living a double life? Would they see the duplicity behind his smile? Would that stranger understand that this was not the revolution they had been waiting for, not the fulfillment of some folk-song plea? Would they see the daughter’s burden of too much information? She always smiled hard and wide on Picture Day, so wide her jaw hurt a little, hoping that her smile could keep calamity at bay—hoping to keep her mother’s innocence intact and the picture of the patchwork family intact. And maybe it worked, because somehow her parents stuck together, started to look a little alike. And in the end, her parents’ parting came from the inside out—an ending of the most pedestrian and blameless variety.
Later, Soledad lies in the dark of her bedroom staring at the embers of her teenaged self. A poster of Public Enemy still hangs above her bed, another of Jennifer Beals from Flashdance beside her dresser mirror. Her stomach makes unhappy sounds. Aunt Rose’s ham isn’t sitting well with her, but somehow she drifts off to sleep.
She wakes sometime later in the darkness to the sound of beeping garbage trucks outside.
Her mother looked almost beautiful in that hospice bed, androgynous and finally thin, the girl-woman a thousand diets had failed to make her. The last thing she said to Soledad: “What I wouldn’t do for a nice cold plum.”
Soledad gets up and goes to the bathroom off the hall with the puffy pink toilet seat that makes a sighing noise when she sits down on it. It’s only 4:30 a.m. She heads back to her room, but instead of getting back into bed she dresses in the dark, then goes outside and sits in her father’s Subaru with the motor running, letting it warm up before she rolls slowly out of the driveway.
Connecticut is an embalmed state. The houses sit like taxidermy, their marble eyes watching her as she cruises past. The Star Market is open, although the parking lot is empty. She doesn’t know if it’s been open all night or has just now opened for the morning. A man stands behind a table, under a sign that says ENSURE: COMPLETE, BALANCED NUTRITION FOR A HEALTHIER YOU. Behind him is a sculpture of bottles wit
h the same words on them. When she moves past, he holds up a Dixie cup with white fluid in it. “Would you like to try Ensure?” She stares into the cup, always tempted by free lunches, but it reminds her of the hospice. She shakes her head and moves on toward the produce department.
The fruit is piled neatly, identical apples and identical pears, not a mark on their waxy skins. There are plums too, imported from Ecuador at $3.99 a pound. They are mostly hard, gold still showing under the purple. She fills a bag with six of the ripest she can find.
Outside, the sky has begun to brighten. She sits in the Subaru with the motor running, eating a plum. It doesn’t taste sweet or messy. It is a hard, clean, bitter thing, and after a few tries, she sets it on the seat next to her.
She remembers that afternoon so many years ago, when her mother came home to find Soledad in the tree, still hiding from her true father. Her mother put her hands on her hips and laughed at the sight. “Is that a monkey up there?” she called up. “Come on down, babe, I need your help.”
That evening, Soledad sat at the kitchen table and chopped collard greens and watched her mother move around, cooking dinner, cheerful and oblivious, humming along with Karen Carpenter on the radio. Or maybe it was Joni Mitchell, she isn’t sure. As she thinks about it, she isn’t sure about any of the details. She can’t remember what her mother was wearing, whether she was thin or fat, how she wore her hair back then, in a braid down her back or frizzed up and wild around her face. She can’t remember what her mother looked like before the illness. Hard as she tries, she can’t conjure up her face. It’s slipping away already. She knows there will come a day when she doesn’t miss her mother anymore—a day when she only misses the feeling of missing. But she’s not there yet. She still feels something of the dead hovering inside of her. It lives for a moment in her chest, misshapen and bruised as a backyard fruit. She closes her eyes and lets it hang inside of her. Then it falls away, too heavy to hold. She starts up the engine and moves toward the road. It is still wide open.
What’s the Matter with Helga and Dave?
When I married Hewitt, I didn’t realize—among other things—that I would become a member of that mewling and defensive group of people known as Interracial Couples. And who could fault them their mewling? Everywhere I went with Hewitt, strangers commented—in subtle and not so subtle ways—on the fact of our unlikely union: me, a white woman, married to him, a black man.
The world, it seemed, though not united in their opinion of our kind, was united in their awareness of our kind, and by extension, their need to remark upon it—the fact of me, a white woman, married to him, a black man.
The only problem, of course, was that it wasn’t true. Any of it.
I was not a white woman and Hewitt was not a black man—at least not technically speaking. We were both of mixed heritage. That is, we each had one white parent and one black parent. And we’d each come out with enough features of one parent to place us in different categories. Hewitt had come out looking to the world like a black man, and I’d come out looking to the world like a white woman, so when we got together, it was like we were repeating our parents’ history all over again. We were supposed to be the next generation, all newfangled and melting-potted, but instead we were like Russian nesting dolls. When you opened our parents’ bodies you found a replica of their struggle, no matter how hard we tried to transcend it.
In any case, I was passing and Hewitt was passing when we moved into the Chandler that July.
Did I mention I was nine months’ pregnant with our first child? I was huge, but I felt strangely light, as if I was floating in water all the time. Pregnancy was a state of permanent romance. I was waiting, breath held, to meet the great love of my life. We both were. We held hands everywhere we went, me a white woman, him a black man.
The Chandler stood out on that strip of beautiful old buildings. It had been built a year before we moved in, despite protests from the old guard who said it was tacky, would ruin the row of otherwise historical buildings from the Golden Age of Hollywood, buildings that had housed the likes of Mae West, Ava Gardner, and Cary Grant. The Chandler was ugly and new and sat at the edge of the country club, with a banner in front that read NOW LEASING—THE CHANDLER—AN ELEGANT APARTMENT ENCLAVE. As you walked up the ramp to the building, another sign, smaller, encouragingly said, You’re Almost Home!
The people who lived in the Chandler were an odd assortment, every variation you could think of on new money: yuppies and film executives and starlets-in-training and people awaiting renovations on their houses in the hills and foreign businessmen who must have liked the sterility and convenience of hotel living. I’d been drawn to the cleanliness and orderliness of the building and the apartment, the gleaming new washer and dryer, the stainless-steel stove and refrigerator. I knew that motherhood would bring plenty of mess—shit and spit-up, diapers piled up to the ceiling, stretch marks. The old me would have wanted to live somewhere crumbling and old, with the charm of gilded-era Hollywood. The new me wanted a sleek, modern hotel suite with centralized air-conditioning and no history and no dirt.
It was only after we moved into the Chandler that I noticed all the interracial couples traversing the halls and loitering around the coffee machine.
The building manager herself was in that group—a plump Italian-American girl from Queens who had somehow landed in Los Angeles. She was married to a guy I only ever knew as Dude, a short black man with a Mighty Mouse physique and a high, soft, girlish voice like Mike Tyson’s. They had a child together, a very pretty two-year-old monster named Gregoriah. Hewitt and I blanched every time Gregoriah happened to get on the elevator with us. Usually it meant we were going nowhere, as he would lie down halfway in and halfway out of the elevator, his arms and legs splayed out, laughing, while the doors stayed open and the elevator stayed still and one of his parents tried to coax him on or off the thing.
Then there were Patricia and Tibor. Patricia was a svelte brown-skinned black woman in her sixties with the fading glamour of a retired actress. Tibor was her Hungarian husband, a lawyer in his seventies who was built like a snowman—a belly that jutted out as far as mine did during that long, hot final month of my pregnancy.
And then there was the couple down the hall, Helga and Dave. For months Dave remained a shadowy figure. I’d catch a glimpse of his big bright smile and shellacked brown skin occasionally on the local morning news, as he interviewed a lion trainer or stood at the base of a mud slide in a fancy suit. But I rarely saw him in the halls of the Chandler, and when I did he would offer his newscaster’s accentless and cheery “Hello!” and little else.
It was his wife, Helga, whom I got to know that fall at the Chandler—and it is Helga I think about whenever I drive by that building now, looking somehow still gleaming and new on that old and winding road.
It was a week after I gave birth, when I was a battered and swollen mess, that I first saw Helga. I had big plans that day to go for a walk with George, who was still tiny and otherworldly, not altogether human. It was the first time either of us had left the apartment since we’d come home from the hospital. I made it as far as the sidewalk in front of the Chandler. The cars on Rossmore Avenue were speeding past and the sun beat down from a cloudless sky and I stood with my hands on the stroller, unable to continue. George, asleep in his pram, looked too tiny and too new for such a world. I turned around and went back inside.
It was in the elevator going up that I first laid eyes on her, pale, emaciated, stern-faced, in dark jeans and sunglasses. I glanced in her stroller and took note of the baby’s brown skin and corkscrew black curls. She looked only a few months old, but I could not imagine that the mother—with her svelte shape and placid expression—had ever carried a child inside her, much less pushed one out.
The woman glanced at George and me without much interest but didn’t say a word.
A week later, while out on a walk with Hewitt and George, I saw the woman again, but she was without the baby, and thi
s time—after looking back and forth between my face and Hewitt’s—her face broke into an excited smile. She said, “You’re one of us!”
I nodded, and said, “Yes, we live in the Chandler too.”
She introduced herself as Helga. This time, she peered into the pram at George and proclaimed him adorable, winking up at me as if we were members of the same elite club.
The next day I found a gift for George on the doorstep—a tiny pair of UGG boots, the trendy shearling ones made for skiers that all the starlets in Los Angeles liked to wear with microminiskirts on ninety-degree days. There was a note attached: Welcome to the Chandler! We are so thrilled to have you as our neighbors. Drinks? Dinner? Soon! Helga and Dave.
I tried the boots on George. They fit okay, but he was wearing only diapers, and when I brought him into the living room to show Hewitt, he said, “He looks like a member of the Village People,” and made me take them off.
I was living on no sleep. George woke every two hours to feed on my sore and chafing breasts.
Hewitt, in a gesture of solidarity, insisted on getting up in the middle of the night with me, and so we began our ritual of sitting up together in the dark on the sofa in front of the flickering television while I nursed the baby.