A Simple Distance

by K. E. Silva

  I ignored her ring, lay in bed on the verge of getting up, pulling on shorts, starting the day with a jog and some music on my Walkman, but her second call caught me off guard—changed my plans.

  I picked up to her raspy Hello.

  She spoke in that low voice of hers, the one that says, I’m weak, take care of me, the one that makes me want to scream, the one she used all those years she lay in bed without actually being sick, with her Reader’s Digest condensed classics and jug, always a jug, of cheap white wine, stretching the telephone cord long beyond its intended curl. I know because all those years I sat at the top of the front stairs just outside her door, and watched.

  She whispered, I’ve packed my bags and had Fatima put them in the Jeep. I was waiting for your call about England. Were you able to change the tickets?

  I hated her for needing me; hated her double for choosing me second, over Auntie Lil in London; hated myself most for feeling this way.

  Never having called the airline, I continued to lie. No, Mom. The airline wouldn’t let me change them. You can’t visit Aunt Lillian. I’m sorry. She’ll have to fend for herself this time.

  Hollow, like a ghost giving in, she agreed. Okay, Jean. I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ll call Lillian when I reach you.

  * * *

  My mom told me once how kids used to tease her, call her wide hips the spreading baobab tree, pretend to take their shelter there. Yet those hips never sheltered me, and when it came my turn to do the blocking, to break the wind, call the airline, to soften the violence of its impact before it reached her small body; when it came my turn, I stood as thin as possible beside her, closed my eyes, held my breath, hoped it would just blow through.

  That morning I lay in bed longer than planned, remembered a time when I was five and sick to my stomach. I had called for my mom to come help, not even help really, but just to come and maybe hold my hand. I remembered she called back from her bedroom and she said: Oh, just do it yourself, child.

  That morning I did not rise. Stared across the room at unanswered letters.

  * * *

  I picked her up at the gate. American Airlines, flight 2330. Baobique to Puerto Rico; Puerto Rico to Houston; Houston to San Francisco. Three legs to my mother’s journey away from her home, to mine, to rest after a year of caring for her dying brother.

  As always, she had too many bags: an overnight case; two large paper shopping bags, handles tied together with twine; her purse, overstuffed. The steward helped her off the plane only to hurry her along.

  Her eyes were red like the blood in those oranges whose name she used to write on the grocery lists I could never completely purchase. She was shorter, her neck more rounded, than the last time I’d seen her. It took me aback.

  Oh my God! What’s the matter with your eyes?

  Here, take my bags from that man and give him a dollar.

  We hugged, leaned in with just our shoulders, embraced with just our forearms; pressed our cheeks together, left as much space as possible in between.

  I took her luggage from the steward. Tipped him. Moved on to baggage claim.

  On the drive home, her bags in both the backseat and the trunk of my Mazda, as if each day of her scheduled threeweek stay would require a distinct new outfit, she told me about her eyes. It’s the stress that’s making me sick. Ever since George’s funeral. All those people on the porch one on top of the other, touching all my things … They tried to let them in the house, you know. My house! As if I had no say in the matter at all. Mama acts as if Godwyn isn’t even mine.

  Well, the title’s joint, Mom. You both have equal say.

  Jean, I’ve spent the past nine years in that house! The only reason Mama wants it now is because of what I’ve made of it. She started to cough.

  After the funeral she had lain in bed for two days, head throbbing, throat swollen and closing in on itself every time she swallowed, lungs too heavy to push all the air out, but chest too burdened to resist the exhale. Her right eye had turned red, perhaps from the exertion of pushing out the yellow mucus her head and lungs were trying to clear. Then, her left. The nurse, at the hospital named after my grandfather, said the redness was bacterial, gave her antibiotic drops to be used every four hours.

  * * *

  When my mom first returned to Baobique, Godwyn was practically abandoned. My grandfather, buried out back, who walked its rooms at night, was the favorite story of my cousins. To her nieces and nephews, my mom would say the ghost of her father only protected her. To her brothers, she admitted being frightened by the isolation of the house, just up the hill from Sommerset, its rough characters and drug smuggling, and not within sight, or earshot, of even a single neighbor. So Uncle Martin gave her the best bitch from his second litter. And Uncle George bought her a little handgun, like the kind my aunt shot her son-in-law with when he was beating my cousin. My mom kept it underneath her pillow when she slept, even though she never learned to use it.

  Everyone thought she was crazy to move in. But later my cousins would come ’round asking about her health, hoping she’d pass before Granny, lose her hold on land they wanted to claim as their own inheritance, not hers.

  The driveway, closely cut grass, she lined with yellow and green crotons. The approach to the house, small palms, just beginning to demand notice. The backdrop to the west, the Atlantic. And to the east, Morne Volcan, my mother’s strength—the mountain she’s looked to for anchor since she was a child. Volcan is covered in rainforest, shrouded in mist, bigger and more aware of its position than any other mountain on the small island. Her back porch, off the kitchen, looks at Volcan, as if to keep the mountain secret, while the eyes of visitors look toward the ocean from the public front.

  Much of the estate is cliff, but parts are level enough for planting. So while her family, the Pascals, weren’t using the land, people from Sommerset, the village down the road, were.

  They set up gardens.

  Technically, they were supposed to pay rent to Uncle George, but the payments had never been strictly enforced because Sommerset was an important constituency of his. When my mom moved in, she decided the gardeners should start paying. The gardeners, however, thought otherwise.

  Back then, my mom had a woman from Sommerset, Mrs. H, come up to help every day with the washing and cooking. Mrs. H’s husband sometimes came around to spray the fruit trees with pesticides banned in North America and to clear away underbrush. The first report of how the gardeners felt about paying rent came from Mrs. H, who’d heard it from her husband. Rumor had it that some of the men in Sommerset thought my mom was being quite presumptuous to come back to Baobique after thirty years, stay all alone at Godwyn, and tell them to pay rent for land they had been using for long before her return. Some of those men thought they should go up there late one night and teach dat ’oman a lesson, na, rough her up like only a man could. The rumor was repeated to my mom by the old man with the apple-core head who used to sleep in her shed at night in exchange for dinner; an arrangement which gave him food and shelter and gave my mom a second presence on the estate when she was asleep and most vulnerable.

  Turned out to just be a rumor though. Unsettling only because it came from Sommerset.

  * * *

  My studio sat half a block from one of those trendy Bay Area streets, like 24th Street or Castro in San Francisco; 4th Street in Berkeley; mine being Piedmont in Oakland, and the whiteness of the walls offered me a blank slate of which I appeared to be in particular need.

  It occurred to me, as I drove my mother home, that I had yet to place anything on those walls, and while for so long their lack of clutter had perhaps provided me with a certain solace, they had now turned into something of a little pebble fallen in my shoe that rubbed and rubbed and rubbed against my skin. I knew the walls would strike her as freakish. Again I’d be the odd duck, a failure at all things feminine, like simple decoration and sleeping with men.

  I turned into the tight driveway that separated my building from t
he next, parked in the dirt under the lemon tree in back, not really a spot but big enough for my practical hatchback.

  Jean, you’ll have to back up for me to get out. I’m right in the dirt here.

  I backed up, let her out on the cement, re-parked, and began unloading her bags as she walked up to the back door; the curve of her neck, more pronounced than ever before, made her look older than merely middle-aged.

  Here, Mom, I’ll let you in. You must be tired.

  I unlocked the door for her, returned to the luggage as she disappeared inside.

  By the time I’d carried in the last of her belongings, she was asleep on my futon, still folded into a couch. That night, I slept on the air mattress.

  CHAPTER 4

  She woke me placing her bags one by one by one on my creaky futon, though I lay still a minute before I mumbled, Morning, wiped the sleep from my eyes, and rose from the air mattress.

  She’d done that to me all my life. When I was a teenager, she’d vacuum right outside my bedroom door weekend mornings when she thought it was time for me to get up and get to work on something or another.

  I mustered up maturity.

  Jean, she said, why haven’t you done anything with these walls? I feel I’m in an insane asylum.

  Irritated, I ignored her, retreated to the bathroom for an inordinately long time, washing my hair squeaky-clean; wondering if we couldn’t, maybe, catch a double-feature that afternoon at the theater down the street; kicking myself for not thinking—scheduling her arrival to fall on a weekend instead of a weekday when I’d have a reason to be at work.

  Perhaps I had no excuse to be acting like such a child. But her being in my space, it all came back. Ours was an uneasy reunion.

  Everything would be fine if we could just speak to each other as little as possible.

  I was thinking about a movie later, Mom. Maybe a double-feature, down the street.

  I didn’t tell her the only double-feature was back-to-back Star Wars: the last one, and then the prequel. She might have balked.

  The movie didn’t start until 2:00, but it was hard enough spending the entire morning locked in my studio with her, unpacking and unpacking and unpacking for what seemed like forever, her clothes taking up more of my closet than mine. Every five minutes commenting on my absence of décor.

  So we bought our tickets right after lunch. I figured we’d wait out the last forty-five minutes standing first in line at the theater.

  But I hadn’t figured on running into anyone. My heart stopped for just a second when I saw walking toward us on the same side of the street as our nonexistent queue: Linda, my client Cynthia’s ex, and their daughter Sadie—the subject of the custody battle. Hand in hand.

  Neither of them knew my face. Cynthia kept Sadie far away from our firm, wanting her to be around as little conflict as possible regarding the suit. And there’d been no reason for us to meet with Linda as yet. The hearing was still a week away and any attempts at negotiation would not likely happen until just before. There was nothing for them to recognize in me, although I felt I knew them both intimately from my meetings with Cynthia and the family photos in her file.

  My stomach started to tighten. More than I’d realized from Sadie’s photos, there in person, by both looks and predicament, she could have been me at her age. They had gotten the sperm from an international bank and didn’t know much about Sadie’s father, only those things he chose to report—ordinary illnesses, education, race. A Jamaican intellectual with a predisposition toward melancholy.

  * * *

  The night before my father left, I caught them. I’d pulled off my thin cotton sheet to get out of bed, stepped to the creaky wooden floor, walked only in the places I knew wouldn’t give me away—close to the walls—and moved toward their voices. Down the hallway and the dark back stairs. My breathing short. My eyes wide.

  The door to the kitchen, at the bottom of the stairs, was ajar. Just enough.

  My mom was pressed up against the sink, plates stacked precariously by her side. Earlier that evening she’d made me pull up a chair, like always, so I could reach the faucet and wash the dinner dishes, but I hadn’t taken care to place them properly in the rack. She wore a white nightshirt and her skin was glowing through it, dark and red, under the florescent light from the ceiling.

  My dad was there too, holding a belt in his right, dominant fist, looped like a teardrop. They were saying things, blurry whispers short and angry, more like spitting than speaking. But their words came to me strange, like the flapping of a flock of autumn birds flying south: starting far away, their wings only loud for the second they passed, and then quiet. So all I really heard, for sure, was the clear, crisp slapping.

  There, on the stairs, the consequences of my next step in either direction, backward into the dark or forward into the kitchen, held me still.

  Maybe if I’d taken more care to sturdy the dishes as I’d placed them to dry, we all could have pretended it never happened. Maybe it was my dad’s fault for pushing her too close to the rack, or hers for letting him. But something happened, some part of them bumped up against it, and all at once, everything came crashing down—all of dinner’s dishes, along with my mom, landing hard and broken on the floor in front of the sink. And it was one of those screams that was halfway out before I realized it was me. So I couldn’t take it back.

  Both of their eyes, my father’s and my mother’s, caught mine as my dad raised his arm again. And the awareness that his fist was in a place it shouldn’t have been obscured its purpose for just a moment. But then it came down—again and again and again; their eyes never leaving mine.

  The next day, he left us in his old pea-green Mustang.

  * * *

  I was waiting for my father to pick me up for the weekend the first time I realized I was black. I was standing in the downstairs bathroom, wearing red hand-me-down Garanimals from my sometimes best friend Becky: elastic-waisted pants crawling with fruit trees and monkey faces; plain red shirt, turtlenecked for a cold fall, thin frills at the wrists and just below my chin.

  It was never warm enough in our house. My mom would set the thermostat at fifty-five degrees and call it the comfort zone. But I knew better. I never felt comfortable in that house. I used to sit, knees to chest, in front of the metal vents when the temperature fell to fifty-four and the forced air clicked itself on.

  On really frigid days in winter, I’d fill the sink with water, hot from the tap, keep my sleeves rolled down to my wrists, and soak my hands and forearms until the blood under my puckered skin came closer to the surface. Then I’d sit in front of the vents, because they warmed me even better when my shirt was wet. The water, I learned, had a way of conducting the heat more directly to my body than just plain air.

  It was one of those days: bitter cold, made colder by the crack in my father’s broken promise to come get me, letting in the outside air sure as any open door. I’d waited for him since after school, had come straight home.

  I always waited for my dad about three feet off the ground, on the ledge of our big picture window in the living room that framed my world: the tall oak across the street, whose lowerhanging branches I’d climb and swing on; the wire fence that separated our house from the old peoples’ home next door; the mulberry trees on the other side of that fence, in easy reach after scaling the links, their fruit bursting dark, fat, and purple on the branches; the blue jays that flew into the glass when it was too clean and the sun reflected only clouds and sky; the three strips of gray concrete my dad put in as a driveway before the divorce, two for the wheels, one for walking, running parallel to our house, where the green Mustang used to rest before he took it with him and my mom started renting parking space to help with the mortgage. That mortgage with the special rate because our town had been told, just before we got there, to increase its efforts at integration.

  But I didn’t make it to the heater that day. Or to the ledge. That day, as I turned to open the bathroom door—wet sleeves a
nd wrinkly hands making their way to the white porcelain knob—the mirror, half-broken from one of my parents’ fights, left off the top half of my reflection. So it was my hands, bellyhigh, that stopped me: brown hands against that white knob. It was right there in the mirror. The contrast.

  I thought maybe that was why my dad forgot so often to come pick me up when it was his turn. Maybe he was mad at me for coming out like her. And maybe that was why my mom stayed in her room all the time, door closed to my face, reminding her too much of her own. Maybe I’d failed them both, coming out the way I did.

  I was in the first grade and just getting accustomed to that idea when I met Mr. Walker, came to find out I wasn’t black enough at all. He had some of the big kids drag me, literally, upstairs to the second floor, where he was sitting on his stool in his classroom: a king surrounded by his subjects, waiting for the offering of my small body. Mr. Walker was the only black teacher at Lincoln. Ever. He was a very large man.

  After the big kids pried off my banana hat, long and yellow with a green loop on top for hanging, Mr. Walker took one look at me and smiled a great, big Cheshire cat smile, the one he’d wear for years to come, every time he saw me, all the way up from the first grade to the sixth, when he recruited me into his class. If nothing else, he was a patient man.

  Even when I was in his class, every day looking at his face, nothing about Mr. Walker felt familiar to me like he thought it was supposed to. He would have our class read books out loud about African-Americans and slavery in the South, and I learned it right along with all the little white suburban kids in my class, but it never hit home. Not really. We learned cotton and Confederates, ignored cane and Caribbean and other such things that would have helped me make sense of my hands and their history when I looked in our half-broken mirror.

  One day, Mr. Walker kept me back from music class—where Ms. Costa, the music teacher, would sit us in a circle, play “Kumbaya,” “Michael Row Your Boat Ashore,” on her acoustic guitar, and we’d sing along to mimeographed lyrics—to tell me about the way the world was. He sat me down in someone else’s desk, pulled his stool up close. He told me junior high was going to be different; there’d be black kids there and I’d have a very hard time if I didn’t start hanging out with them. Told me I’d need to switch sides.