Daughter of the Queen of Sheba

by Jacki Lyden

  My mother still sits before her vanity and dons her costumes, big frilled skirts the size of rainbows and pantaloons with cancan ruffles and turquoise concoctions with lace trims and those puffy-sleeved off-the-shoulder blouses, trimmed in ribbons. It's her Dolly Parton square dance look. She square-dances three or four times a week. I went with her once recently on a rainy night to a local primary school and watched her promenading around the room with the Swinging Stars and the Hoedowners, the Dudes and Dolls, the Taws and Paws, the Boots and Slippers. The Wisconsin Square Dance motto this year is "For unmatched comfort and fun, dance and mix in ninety-six." The room was full of elderly children, Dolores among the very youngest of them, hooting and skipping, laughing a lot, doing the allemandes and spin-the-bottles and banner-stealing. The caller addresses them as "girls and boys," when they are not "ladies and gents," and tells them to "make a wave down the middle." They do so, and there is Dolores. She is concentrating on her skips, letting the breeze from the floor fans ruffle her auburn hair, flirting with one of the Dudes, whose wife stands impatiently waiting for him to finish sashaying my mother around the dance floor, her turquoise skirt doing a full-circumference sail. Kate and Sarah, home on a visit, stand with me as we watch our mother. In the square dances that her group performs, there are sixty-eight main steps and a plus set of twenty-seven, and our mother knows them all. She twirls in front of us while we sit on the sidelines.

  "Isn't this fun?" she calls out, laughing. "Why can't we do it?" we say. She whirls the span of the equator. She has the energy of someone I have seen before. She has the memory of that energy that can do anything.

  I still dream of Sheba. For me the need to know more of her lies beyond tomorrow; burns and calls. For a long time after my mother's last confinement, I would still see them all, the girl in the well, the beckoning hand with its long pointed nails, the veil in the mist. I traveled within months of my mother's recovery to India, and then was briefly based in London, and went eventually to Jordan, where I fell in love with the Middle East. I arrived in Jordan a few days after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and tourists were fleeing west on the airline I was boarding to go east. Women in bronze face masks and inky black veils sailed by, and the sky was the blue of lapis lazuli, the moment the Persian poet Bijan Jalili calls happiness, a blue sky with a few clouds. Time suspended and has never been the same again. I felt the power of someone returning home after a long, long trip, in the desert. I loved the camaraderie of my colleagues, some of whom were scoundrels who had been out there way too long, and some of whom had grown up in the countries that were now being held hostage by other nations, and others who spoke three or four languages because that's what had come of going to Oxford. Some of my colleagues were so utterly charming that King Hussein and Queen Noor would have them quietly to dinner, and I lived as the person who sat at the Mad Hatter's Tea Party and entertained my friends as we waited in long shadows for coming annihilation with stories of what had happened in the twilight worlds in which I had tried to discover the Queen of Sheba.

  And that is where I am now. Somewhere else. I fall in love with strange places and strangers, many of whom become my friends, and I know when I think of them and my mother and my past, and even the air on which we share our stories, that as in Walt Whitman's words, I contradict myself. Do I contradict myself ? Very well then I contradict myself I am large, I contain multitudes. My mother contained multitudes in our small town. I never doubted it.

  I have written most of this book in Canada, and will probably finish it in my grandfather's ancestral town in Ireland, but I remember starting it in a garden in London and showing it to a friend in 1990 in Baghdad. It was just scraps of memory then, Sheba, my souvenir stubs, passport stamps from the trip. And it's time to pack up now and put things away. Soon I will be saying good-bye to one of the more tender traveling companions in my life, whom I met in Tehran, to which he will return. Though I can tell you where I am going next, I do not know where I will call home, where I will settle, and I don't know who I shall ever share a home with, though in recent months, or is it just recent days, it seems that I could do that, given the right city on our spinning globe, crowded with its ballerinas and despots and incantations and explosions. A city I would have to love because it is eccentric and strange and full of the kind of people who would say, "Ah, your mother thought she was the Queen of Sheba? Tant pis. Mine thought she was the Queen of the Universe!"

  My mother, the 1950s housewife, never asks me to settle down. I am as content as any traveler deducing that she has everything she needs for the road. I have my books, and I have my friends, I have my incarnations of what is holy in a slew of religions and I have my letters and my need for speech. Like my mother I can look into the future and see a thousand stories waiting there. And maybe a home defined by that shared and sacred space with which we redeem our lives.

  But when I think of the word home, and I think of the word mother, I see our small house at the edge of the pasture, the one my father helped to build. I see Kate and Sarah and me running through long grass to settle in the afternoon on our mother's bed, where she sat before her vanity and held up first one bauble and then another to her ears or throat, a goddess brushing hair that gushed like a flume down her back.

  "Always remember," my mother is saying, as the brush descends, "that you are the most beautiful woman in the room," and I think of myself waiting the world over, waiting, waiting for the children of Londonderry or the body counts in Tel Aviv or the shouts of Death to America to die away in Iran, waiting for the snow to stop so the ferry can come to take us for a glass of wine, over Lake Ontario, waiting for comfort and for change. And I think that no matter where I wait I have something no one else has. I have carried a framed photograph of my mother with me in all these places. In the picture she is dining out, wearing the satin brocade sheath made just for her on the Kowloon Road in Hong Kong in 1960, an exquisite dress with embossed pagodas and Chinese characters and plumed peacocks. She is in her mid-thirties in the picture, dark-haired and dark-eyed and glowing, younger than I am now. I wear her dress with its matching bolero for special occasions. I wore it for my thirty-fifth birthday in Hong Kong. For my thirty-seventh birthday with Geraldine and Tony and Renee in London. For my fortieth birthday with all of them and more in Washington. Perhaps I will wear it the next time I fall in love. I do not know where I will be, but I do know that wherever I go, and whatever I intend, I will carry the photograph of my mother in this dress. Sheba lurks behind the smile of the woman in this picture, perhaps in the darkness next to her, present, a threat who could emerge, should emerge, but who in more than half a decade has not. Lithium, pray to God, keeps her at bay. Her powers remain, however, her maps and territories, her songs and poems, her history and the tiny ways in which she curls her hair and paints her lips. As a daughter I have exhumed her and studied the arch of her eyebrows, the cleft in her throat. I have tried to fix her on these pages, so that wherever I go I can say to her, "I had you there, then. I caught you, forever." What I know of her resides in the calcium of my bones, the rose quartz of my heart, is stuck beneath my teeth.

  "Always remember you are the most beautiful woman in the room," my mother is saying in my head. I look at her photograph, right now this minute, and she is. She looks a lot like the daughter of the Queen of Sheba, who is, like Sheba, at last at peace.