by Alice Walker
“‘I never liked her,’ says my aunt, ‘even though she was my baby sister.’” Arveyda stretches his eyes very wide to express his astonishment at this news. “‘No, never could stand her phony, filthy ways.’”
“Wow,” says Fanny. “No tongue biter, she.”
“But wait,” says Arveyda. “Carlotta says to her: ‘Aunt Frudier, you didn’t like Arveyda’s mother? But why?’ She asked this gently, as you would ask a question of someone who’s ill. ‘She was a fake, she was a phony,’ says my aunt, ‘she was never satisfied to be herself.’
“Back at my aunt’s house she showed us some old photographs of my mother. Carlotta looked at them first, and I thought she grew pale. Then Aunt Frudier brought out an old silver-framed photo of my father. Carlotta grew paler still. And thoughtful. With a gentle hand on my arm, she passed the pictures to me. The one of my father had stood on a table beside my bed for a long time when I was growing up. But I’d forgotten it. Now I looked at my parents’ faces, and I can’t imagine how I must have looked myself. Because my mother and father looked nothing at all like Aunt Frudier—a dark brown, heavyset woman with scowling features—but looked instead like members of Carlotta’s family—if, of course, she had had any, other than her mother, that is.
“‘Our family,’ says old Aunt Frudier, ‘was part African/Scots and part Blackfoot. Your mother got the Blackfoot part. And your father, who came through here to work on the road-construction gangs, was black Mexican mixed with Filipino and Chinese.’ He was by far,” says Arveyda, in wonder, “the best-looking man I’d ever seen. ‘But yet and still,’ says Aunt Frudier, ‘your mother was just plain Georgia Smith, because that’s the name our parents gave her. But would she have it? No. “The damn thang don’t fit for shit,” she’d say. Likewise, the colored men that were always hanging around her. She said they bored her silly. No dash, no flash, no money, either. After all, by that time she was Katherine Degos from Santa Fe, nineteen and with a wasp waist. Tan legs under dresses that never hid much ...’
“As she talked,” says Arveyda, “I could feel, after all those years since they were in their teens, the hatred Aunt Frudier still felt for my mother. It gave me chills to think of my mother growing up the object of such contempt. I felt almost sick.
“The trip back to Terre Haute had been possible for me largely because of Carlotta’s support, and as we endured the envy and spite, the repressed hatred of over fifty years, that Aunt Frudier spewed over us, I was glad she was there to help prop me up. Even though I am a grown man, with children of my own, each of her words against my mother struck me as a blow; as if I myself were still a child. But, oddly enough, as she raved, I felt closer and closer to my mother.
“Aunt Frudier had married a plumber; and, strange to say, he was still alive!” Here Arveyda suddenly laughs, that pealing, gut-deep laugh of his; throwing back his head to let the sound come freely out.
“He was alive!” he almost shouts. “The old survivor, God bless his pitiful soul! After God only knows how many years of suffering under Aunt Frudier’s acid tongue.
“He just stayed as close as possible to that TV, though,” Arveyda says, soberly. “I think he was watching ‘Soul Train’ when Aunt Frudier announced dinner was ready, and she simply passed in front of him and switched it off.”
Fanny feels sad at this picture of Aunt Frudier’s husband.
She tells Arveyda about her grandmother Celie’s former husband, Albert, and about how, all the time she knew him, his favorite activity, there being no TV, had been to stare off into space. “Maybe these old, old men just have to sit down after a while and compress life to the straight and narrow view.”
“Well, but listen to this,” says Arveyda. They have left the piano bench, the studio, and the house and are walking slowly up the road from Arveyda’s house to Inspiration Point. “So I am feeling pretty timid by then, you know, and I’m afraid to hear anything else. But Carlotta means to hear it all, and so flings herself into the breach. ‘We heard about her church,’ she says, as if this is some recent gossip that just happened to come our way. We are at dinner by then, and Aunt Frudier is about to toss a wide chunk of pot roast into her spacious mouth. She drops the fork, pot roast and all. ‘Humph,’ she snorts, ‘some church.’ She looks at me with the same expression she must have looked at my mother: cold, cruel, contemptuous. ‘The church the rest of us went to wasn’t good enough for her. She said from what she’d heard, everybody ought to stop going to church at once and use that time instead to do for the poor. She run around for a few years after you were born “doing” for the poor. But by then your daddy had gone away on a job in the next state, and never did come back. And she soon run out of steam. Later on we heard he was killed; fell off a bridge that his gang was constructing. There was no body, nothing. We only heard about it by accident.’”
Arveyda looks so bereft, thinking about this tragic end of his beautiful father, that Fanny leans over, there in the open, on the trail—where there are sometimes rapes and even murders—and kisses him. To her, it offers the comforting, automatic reassurance of a hug. But she’s been kissing a long time, and is very good at it. Her soul flies right out of her mouth, and into Arveyda’s own. He feels on his tongue its warmth, like an ancient, sun-ripened plum, and is suddenly confused. But Fanny has already turned away from him and started back up the trail.
Arveyda swings along after her and soon matches her easy climbing stride. His mind is still on the kiss, but he says calmly: “Everybody loved my mother; that is what Aunt Frudier thought, anyway. That even though she was a phony and a fake and refused to be Georgia Smith or to marry a regular colored man or to go to church—and,” he says, chuckling, “even though she named me after a bar of soap from India that my father gave her—‘Aryuveda,’ which, I think, means health—somehow she got all the good things in life anyway. Great looks, a beautiful figure, a houseful of anxious suitors ... a fabulous-looking man, who didn’t look like anybody she’d ever seen—except maybe herself—and who loved her. ‘Worked himself to death for her,’ my aunt said, with total incomprehension and envy. In my mother’s life there was a child. Passion. My aunt hated her,” says Arveyda, “because she exposed herself to what she wanted. What she didn’t want, she made very clear. She took risks. She jumped, as that writer Carlotta used to teach in women’s literature says, at the sun.” Arveyda pauses; they have come to the top of the hill and can see for miles in all directions.
“These are the very things,” he says, with the fullness of a grateful heart in his voice, “that I love about my mother. And ... about my father.”
Fanny and Arveyda sit on the top of the hill, just down a bit from the path. They do not touch, except in spirit. They think about these two, Arveyda’s parents, in whom the African and the European and the Mexican and the Indian and the Filipino and the Chinese(!) met. Adventurers and risk takers, lovers, all of them.
Arveyda holds the knowledge of his mother’s dissatisfaction with her limited reality close to his heart; he is amazingly comforted by it. And he suddenly realizes that it was Fanny’s pamphlet, The Gospel According to Shug, and Carlotta’s sharing of it with him that he has to thank.
CARLOTTA AND SUWELO REMAIN in the hot tub while Arveyda and Fanny go off to the sauna. After the sauna, Fanny has promised Arveyda the massage of his life.
Arveyda says he is thrilled at this opportunity to be touched, perhaps even healed, by the hands of the master!
Fanny looks at his high little buns bouncing along in front of her and can hardly resist cupping one of them in her palm.
It is a chilly night in the Berkeley hills, but the water in the tub is one hundred three degrees. It is a perfect temperature, and Suwelo and Carlotta sit on their benches in the water or lean into the Jacuzzi jets and look up through the overhanging foliage of the trees at the stars.
The two couples are now close friends. Though Fanny and Suwelo are constructing a house and live an hour away on an old chicken farm outside Petaluma
, they find themselves visiting Arveyda and Carlotta often. They are always welcome; the house is large and comfortable; there is wonderful music, food, good vibes. Besides, they all vaguely realize they have a purpose in each other’s lives. They are a collective means by which each of them will grow. They don’t discuss this, but it is felt strongly by all. There is palpable trust.
Fanny and Suwelo, who are childless, are happy to be around Cedrico and Angelita, who would call them aunt and uncle if they didn’t consider such titles nerdy. They are both going through the trials of what once upon a time was pre-teeny bopperism. Fanny takes them on hikes. Suwelo takes them to movies and for swims. They are both called upon from time to time to help with literature and history lessons. Tonight, though, the children are sleeping over with friends.
Suwelo thinks about the house he and Fanny are building on their homestead. It is modeled on the prehistoric ceremonial household of M’Sukta’s people, the Ababa—a house designed by the ancient matriarchal mind and the first heterosexual household ever created. It has two wings, each complete with its own bedroom, bath, study, and kitchen; and in the center there is a “body”—the “ceremonial” or common space, which contains a large living room, a loft above it covered by a skylight, and a tiny kitchenette for the making of soup or hot cocoa or tea. There is a fireplace, too; and there will be couches and tables, bookcases. A stereo. Maybe even TV?
Fanny and Suwelo often read passages from the five volumes written by Eleanora Burnham and given to Fanny by Miss B. In these books they have discovered the amazing story, told to Eleanora Burnham’s great-aunt by M’Sukta herself, of a peaceful, equalitarian, ancient way of life that appeals to them.
After thousands and thousands of years of women and men living apart, the Ababa had, with great trepidation, experimented with the two tribes living, a couple to a household, together. Each person must remain free, they said. That is the main thing. And so they had designed a dwelling shaped like a bird.
Suwelo’s mind drifts. He enjoys the feel of the pulsating water against his genitals. It is as if hundreds of minnows from the river are nibbling at him. He enjoys the nearness of Carlotta; though, because of the rising steam, she is only a blur on her side of the tub.
Suwelo chuckles.
“What is it?” she asks.
“When I first saw Arveyda,” says Suwelo, “I was so astonished, I actually felt weak in the knees. But that was nothing compared to Fanny’s response when I told her who I’d seen.”
“Oh?” says Carlotta. She has no family to impressed that she is married to a big star. Arveyda himself is like one of those great old civilizations he has sung to her about: totally unaware of being great. Only greatly conscious of being alive.
“Well I was amazed that that’s who you were married to. I knew your husband was a musician. But Fanny was amazed that he wasn’t dead!”
“What do you mean?” Carlotta asks, fighting the drowsiness she also loves.
“Fanny, you know, is always falling in love with spirits—with hundred-year-old souls a specialty. She’s loved Arveyda’s music since she was in high school, but he himself was never real to her. I think she just assumed that anybody who moved her as much as Arveyda does in his music had to be a spirit. Someone already dead.” It occurs to Suwelo as he speaks that perhaps Fanny falls in love with spirits rather than living people because they are the only ones she can trust. Also, spirits can be claimed and cannot reject you, maybe, but living people can and often do.
“Come to think of it,” he says, “we used to make love to Arveyda’s music. It was the only music Fanny could make love to. Everybody else’s music boxed her in, she said. She used to play ‘Ecstasy Is the Sun’ over and over again. It made our lovemaking feel like flying, she said.”
Suwelo laughs.
“‘Yes,’ I used to say to her, ‘but am I on the same plane?’ He does not say what Fanny sometimes said to him in reply. “Frankly, Suwelo?” she would ask, seriously. Then she’d say, “Actually, no.”
Carlotta smiles. She thinks, Why is the language of lovemaking so hard to learn? Why is the body so often dumb flesh? Why does the mind so often choose to fly away at the moment the word waited for all one’s life is about to be spoken? She sighs.
“We thought my mother was dead,” she says slowly, trailing a hand in the water. The moon has come up, and Suwelo’s face is very clear to her. He shaves his eyebrows, to shape them and make them smaller, he has told her. That is one reason his face is different. He also wears contact lenses. “I was tired of looking so owlish,” he has said. “Tired of Fanny knocking on my head and going ‘Who? Whooooo?’”
Suwelo knows nothing of Carlotta’s mother, and for some reason his stomach tightens at the very mention of her. He takes a sip of water from a glass near the rim of the tub. His own mother, Marcia, flashes across his mind. It is as if she appears at a door in his memory. He slams it shut. No, he doesn’t slam it; that is what he’s always done before. Now he peeks at her face from behind his hands and gently eases the door shut.
“We thought,” says Carlotta, getting out of the tub, “that she’d been killed by counterrevolutionaries in Guatuzocan, where she grew up.” She goes over to the shower and splashes cold water over herself. Then she dashes inside the house. Moments later she reappears with a record album. She has put the record on the stereo inside, and soon chimes and bells, the music of flutes, the calling of birds fills the air, but quietly. It is as if they are in a dense green jungle. Suwelo is lying alongside the tub, his body steaming. Carlotta hands him the album.
“My mother, Zedé,” she says.
An old blown-up photograph of a scared-looking young woman and her child covers the front of the album, which is called Escuchen (Listen). On the back, surrounding this same photograph, in a family portrait, Carlotta and Arveyda and the children are grouped. They resemble a new, small nation.
The tender music, weeping and laughing, plays.
Suwelo holds the album cover closer to the light of a flickering candle stuck in an abalone shell at his elbow. He reads the story of the return to her country of Carlotta’s mother, accompanied by Arveyda. There is mention of Zedé’s job with the North American movie company. There is the story of Zedé’s search for her own mother. Suwelo reads about her death: She and her mother were ambushed by counterrevolutionaries in the mountains leading out of Guatuzocan.
“My mother and Arveyda were lovers,” Carlotta says simply. “And from their love, I have learned many things. Things my mother could not tell me herself. Things that were, somehow or other, bound up too tightly with her shame.
“We mourned for her so long and hard,” she says. “Arveyda and I. And I made him tell me over and over again every word she said to him. I even made him tell me how my mother spoke the language of love. He thought that to know these things would finish killing me; but it didn’t. I just began to see Zedé as a woman, a person, a being. Sacred. And to love her more than ever.”
Suwelo is touched. He feels himself slipping into an intimacy with Carlotta he’s never, even with Fanny, known. He is speechless, as he plunges himself once again into the tub—only this time it feels like a baptism, and he deliberately dives to the bottom of the tub, keeping his head, for several moments, beneath the warm water.
Carlotta also returns to the tub, her slender, flat-breasted body as vulnerable, Suwelo thinks, as a flower. The damp spikes of her short hair, exquisite petals.
“You don’t look like a woman anymore,” he says, impulsively. Surprised to be saying such a thing. Fearful, after he’s said it.
Carlotta only laughs. “Obviously,” she says, “this is how a woman looks.
“Anyway,” she says. “There was one part of the story that”—she laughs—“rang a bell in me. It was the story about my grandmother, Zedé the Elder, who created the capes made of feathers for the priests; the woman who taught my own mother how to make beautiful feathered things. She had been a great artist, and she had had a little
chime outside the door of her hut. She would strike it, and listen closely to it, and if the sound corresponded with the vibration of her soul at the time, she would nod, once—Arveyda told me Zedé told him—and begin to create.” Carlotta leans back against the side of the tub.
“That’s how,” she says, “I became a bell chimist.”
Suwelo feels Marcia knocking timidly at the door. Knock, knock. But he is afraid his father is behind her. He pretends he doesn’t hear.
“She wasn’t dead,” says Carlotta, triumphantly. “Neither was her mother. They escaped from the counterrevolutionaries and now live in Mexico. My mother married a shaman. My grandmother became one.”
“A happy ending!” Suwelo cries, flinging his arms around her.
“MY MOTHER IS DEAD,” Suwelo says to Carlotta. It sounds as if he’s finally admitting it to himself. He sees Marcia once again timidly approach the door. She stops, her fist upraised to knock, and listens. She is so surprised to hear he is speaking of her! ‘Come in, Ma,’ he says. But she stands there frozen, in shock, her fist in the air. And, just as he feared, she looks behind her.
“She was killed ... along with my father, in something that was called a ‘car wreck.’ It was really,” Suwelo says, “a people wreck. They were driving along—my father was driving—very fast. ‘For some reason,’ as so many people phrased it later, the car ran off the road, hit an embankment, at ninety miles an hour, and they were both killed instantly.”
Suwelo recalls Miss Lissie’s voice on the tape. “Remember the last time you stood over them,” she said.
He will try.
He had taken the bus home from college, an hour away, and someone, a relative, had driven him to the funeral home. Both his parents were laid out in the same room, just as they’d been brought in. There were black and purple swellings and bruises, and deep cuts, on both their foreheads, from crashing against the windshield. His mother had crashed all the way through; his father’s progress had been blocked by the steering wheel, which had crushed his chest. They were dressed for church. His mother wore a red-and-white flowered dress that Suwelo had always liked because it made her look so girlish, and lime-green T-strap slippers. His father wore his one good navy-blue suit.