The Melting Pot

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  She was seventeen. There was talk in the house about where she would be sent to college. Oh, how she kept them young, kept them abreast of things. She said to her grandmother in the kitchen, making the fish for Friday night, “You have to tell me now. Or I’ll go away forever, I swear it.”

  “Big shot!” Sonia says, her fingers plunged deep in the bowl of chopped fish. “Where will you go? And with what?”

  “There’s always a way for a girl to make a living, Grandma. This is 1974, after all,” and she smirks brazenly. “I know plenty of places I can stay.”

  A look of doom streaks over Sonia’s face, and it is not so much prostitution she is thinking of as certain types of irregular living conditions: dope fiends, drifters, hippies, pads. Rita is bad enough already, with her ideas, her gypsy clothes, her unexplained forays into Manhattan, her odd-looking inky newspapers, the closely typed petitions she brings home indefatigably for them to sign; but at least she sleeps in her bed every night and takes showers. ... At the same time, the vision of such irregularity holds a fascination for her grandmother, Rita can tell. She sees enticement seasoning the horror in her eyes, orange flecks against the green. Sonia might have tried it herself if she hadn’t been so tired, sewing in the factory. Sometimes she even signs the petitions, after Sol goes to bed.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Sonia says confidently, blinking away her enticement, slapping the fish into ovals, and she shoves the bowl in Rita’s direction for help. “Just to college like all your cousins.”

  “But I’m not the same as them. I have a right to know what I am, don’t I? All these years you would never answer me. But I’m not a child anymore. It’s my life.”

  There is something different, this time, in the way she says it, or maybe Sonia is simply worn down—Sol will be going to the hospital for his throat operation very soon; there have been doctors’ appointments, consultations; he lays down the law in an ever hoarser voice. “You can’t ask this of me!” she groans, but they both understand she means the opposite. Rita waits, her hands growing cold in the bowl of fish. She forms an oval and places it in the baking pan.

  “They were separated. They never could get along. I knew. I used to speak to him all the time. No one could stop me from using the phone.” She looks at Rita curiously. “I even knew about you.”

  “What about me?”

  “That they had you! But I didn’t tell him. That’s what he wanted, not to know anything. Like he was dead. So let him not know, I thought.” Sonia sits silent, not moving, a hostile witness in the box.

  “So?”

  She sighs as though she had hoped for a reprieve, that this much would be enough. “So he went over there to get something. They had an argument.”

  “And?”

  She wipes her hands carefully on a dish towel. Then she takes the towel and holds it up to her face, covering her face. Her words come muffled through the towel. “She stabbed him.”

  “She what?”

  “With a knife.” She weeps behind the towel.

  Rita is weirdly calm. Of all the scenes she has invented, never anything like this. Much more romantic, her visions were. Lost at sea. Activists kidnapped by the Klan. Wasting disease. Cult suicide. Yes, her nights have been busy, but all wrong. “I don’t believe it.”

  “Don’t, then. You asked. You pestered me for years.”

  “It’s not possible. He must have been stronger than her.”

  “But he didn’t have the knife,” she wails. “Oh, my baby.” Shoulders heaving, towel over her face.

  Suddenly Rita cannot bear that towel anymore and snatches it away. Her grandmother’s hollowed face is wet and blotched and smells of fish. “No. That can’t be the whole story. He must have attacked her first.”

  Sonia gives the maddest laugh, a witch’s cackle. “He? The gentlest boy who ever breathed?”

  Rita could almost laugh too. Their child, gentle! But she also knows they do not attack. A picture is coming into focus, a kitchen, a hysterical woman who looks like an older version of herself, waving a bread knife; a pale man trying to wrest it from her. But she’s too quick, too fierce. ... Oh God, already she’s becoming a type, a caricature. Leave her be. Leave that room altogether, before it gets bloody. ... What about the baby ... ? The baby is in another room, mercifully sleeping, yes. Go back, try again, try it in the living room. The scene has endless possibilities, bloody ones, Rita could labor over it for years. Give up the rest of her life to screening it every possible way: He said ... No, she said ... She grabbed ... No, he ...

  “Wasn’t there a trial? Didn’t the facts come out at the trial? I bet she was a battered wife.” Yes, lately even juries have learned to sympathize. Her poor mother, black and blue? Sonia looks baffled—this is beyond her imaginings. “I’ll find out the truth,” Rita shouts. “I’ll visit her in jail.” Where she languishes, thinking only of her lost baby.

  “She’s not in jail.”

  “No?”

  “Finished. Six years and out. Good behavior! Rita, everyone said it, even her brother, what kind of woman she was, how she treated him so terrible. He was a good man, the brother. He wrote us a letter about ... I felt sorry for him.”

  The outrage. She killed Rita’s gentle father and she walks the streets free. “She never looked for me?” Now, now, she feels tears. This is the real outrage. Sonia feels it too.

  “We wouldn’t have given you up anyway. You were my reason to go on living. Two years I waited to see you.” She covers her face again, this time with her hand and only for an instant. “And then I got you for good.” As she gazes at Rita, her brow, for once, is calm. “You’re just like him.”

  Me! thinks Rita, with my murderer’s face? It must be a torment to have me around, reminding everyone. And what is just like him? They never say. Now more than ever she wants so badly to see him, it is almost like a sexual longing—she will die, just shrink and evaporate, if she cannot see him, touch him. She does not recognize the feeling till much later, though, when she knows Sanjay.

  (“When I know you,” she says. “When I know you.”)

  For her mother Rita does not long—she feels she has her already, in her bones, her blood, the coarseness of her hair. In some essential, inescapable way, she carries her around.

  “Why did they get married?” she whispers to Sonia. Why does anyone?

  “Ha!” Sonia is recovered now, is getting back to her work. She must know these spasms of grief intimately after so many years, the way people know their attacks of epilepsy or asthma—the shape of their parabolas, and the intensity. She must have learned how to assimilate them into her days and proceed. It strikes Rita that she has never seen her grandmother idle. From dawn onwards Sonia scurries about, shopping, cooking, sewing, driving. Then at ten o’clock she falls exhausted into her old stuffed chair in the living room to read novels under a solitary lamp, while Sol calls every ten minutes, “Come to bed already!”

  “Why did they have me?”

  “Come on with the fish, Rita. It’ll be midnight at this rate before we eat.”

  There is only one place she wants to go to college: Berkeley. Her grandfather is sure it is because they have the most hippies there. Her grandmother knows better, but in the end Rita gets her way. They are old and weary, no match for her in her new wisdom. For what scope and vision she suddenly possesses! Now she understands why her grandfather cleaves to the rules and her grandmother cleaves to him, all the while raging against God and driving like a maniac. She understands why the family, those stolidly decent people, look at her with a blend of pity and suspicion—it’s not the color she is, no, it’s that at any moment she may show her true colors. ... She understands so much, it feels at night as if her head will burst with understanding and with blood. Only the one thing she wants to understand she doesn’t.

  She will find her and make her tell how it was. How to think about it. Until she knows, between her and the rest of the world is a wall of blood, ever fresh, never clotting, and she
will never cross it into a life.

  Her mother must have been a Catholic; as a girl she must have knelt and confessed to puny childish sins—lying, being unkind, thinking wicked thoughts. Maybe the Christ in her village church dripped with crimson paint and so she got used to spilled blood, it didn’t seem alien and horrifying. It doesn’t to Sanjay; he is used to handling it, but what does it tell him?

  (“Stop torturing yourself. It’s only a physical substance, a liquid. It carries things, but not the kinds of things you mean. Don’t tell me I traveled halfway across the world to find a mystic.”

  He’s getting to sound like a Jew, thinks Rita. They are changing places.)

  When she goes away to school her grandparents are afraid she will become a hippie, a druggie, but instead she spends her free time in San Francisco, the Mission district, where the Mexicans and Chicanos live, looking and waiting. A deranged sort of looking—she doesn’t really want to find. She wants to be found. She learns Spanish—relearns—and it nestles lovingly in her mouth. Her tongue wraps around the syllables like a lover returning from exile to embrace his beloved, feeling the familiar contours. People say she sounds like a native speaker. She learns it so she can ask around for her, but she never asks. She doesn’t even know her mother’s name. Carmen, yes, but not her last name. Useless to ask for her own last name. Her mother does not seem one of the family. She would not have kept it.

  (“How did you expect to find her? What did you think you were doing?” Sanjay is incredulous. The Rita he knows is so sane, so sensible, aside from the nightmares. So presentable. It would be his pleasure to bring her home to meet his family, once they had gotten used to the idea of a half-Jewish, half-Mexican American lawyer twenty-two years younger.)

  What did she think she was doing? Wandering around the Mission looking for a woman who looked like her, who would be looking in turn for a girl like Rita. Only the woman isn’t looking. She has never looked. Luncheonettes, candy stores, bars—Rita can’t get to like the food she buys as her excuse for being there, heavy and beany, maybe because for her it is the food of despair. She reads the names of singers on posters outside cafés, she reads the personal ads in newspapers, she even studies the names alongside doorbells in dingy, flaking old buildings. Crazy, she knows it. No explanation or story could change the fact. Like God in the trials she staged as a child, it remains: One lives having killed the other. It would be the same fact if the roles were reversed.

  Nothing ever happens except some men try to pick her up, and once her pocket is picked in a movie line, and she makes friends with a girl who works in a record store and goes out with her brother for a few months. Rita is drawn by the easy friendliness of the family. She sees a life there that she might retreat into, but she would have to tell so many lies, and even so she would never fit in, never feel quite right. By what right is she anywhere, she the most contingent of contingencies, a superfluous mystery? So she breaks it off. And with that, the quest breaks off as well. Enough. She is worn out, like a soldier after battle, like a battleground in the night. For a month, over Christmas vacation of her junior year, she goes home to do nothing but sleep, grinding her teeth.

  When Sonia asks anxiously what she plans to do after college, she says she will apply to law school. Because she is tired of her obsessions, tired of the parents she can’t remember and who have left her this hard inheritance to swallow, tired of breaking her teeth on it. However hard she gnaws, the mystery won’t crack. World without end, she is two years old, and in the next room is some kind of dreadful racket going on that will not let her sleep, some kind of screeching not at all like the singing she is used to, and maybe it is all a bad dream, but the next thing she knows she is in an airplane with two strange men who are interchangeable and who weep, and it is a miserable trip, she wets her pants, she throws up.

  “Rita, Rita.” Sanjay takes her in his arms. “Lie down and rest. Give it up.”

  Lying there, Rita wonders once again who she would be had she been left with her aunt and uncle in the bar. Maybe then her mother would have rushed to her when she got out of jail, like a doe flying to her fawn, and sheltered her and told her ... everything. Or would she have done as the mother eel, who flees to the other end of the world and leaves its young behind, groping in slime? Maybe she could have become a nightclub singer too? But she has no voice—she would probably work in a store like Rosalia. Or go off to New York to search for her father’s family, who would appear exotic and a little alluring. She might speak English with a rippling musical accent and move and dress and feel about the world in a different way. She could be almost anyone, and anywhere. Even now, there are times when she thinks of her name and who it stands for, and it feels like looking in a mirror and seeing a blank sheet, the sheet covering a mirror in a house of the bereaved. But she is this, and here, this person in Sanjay’s arms.

  She thought he would be horrified, repelled by her. Instead he has fallen asleep holding her, his arm draped across her middle like a sash. She watches him sleep for a while, then gets up and tiptoes around the bedroom. She takes a good look at the photograph of his wife. Yes, there is a certain resemblance. The result of nature, history, the migrations of people, and love.

  It is strange that with all the hours she has spent in this bedroom she has never poked around. She opens the dresser drawers, one after another, but all she sees are Sanjay’s socks and underwear and handkerchiefs neatly and predictably folded. Then, on a shelf in the closet she finds a pile of saris, also neatly folded, all colors, generous, deep colors, gold threads running through the fabrics. She chooses a red one, the bridal color. But she can’t figure out how to get it on right. It is fun, this dressing up; she did it as a child. Vashti. Finally she gets the sari on in a makeshift fashion, not the way Sanjay’s wife used to wear it. In the bottom drawer of the night table she finds little jars of powders—red, amber, green, blue—and she plays with them, dabs them on her hands, puts some green on her eyelids. She has seen women with a spot of red in the center of the forehead, but she is not sure what it means, maybe a symbol of Hindu caste or rank; she doesn’t dare do it. She appraises herself in the mirror. Queen Esther, at last. Behind her in the mirror she sees Sanjay roll over and open his eyes. He blinks and the color drains away, leaving him yellowish:

  “Rita? What are you doing?”

  “How do I look?”

  “That’s not how it goes. Don’t, anyway. Take it off. It’s not right.”

  She steps to the edge of the bed, presenting herself. “Fix it. You must know how it goes. You must have seen it done a million times.”

  “I don’t. Do you know how to tie a tie?”

  She tries to dab some red powder on him, but he moves out of reach. He won’t play. “Please, Rita. Stop.”

  She yanks off the red sari, the bridal color, rolls it into a ball, and weeps into it.

  “But I love you,” he protests, a frightening look of middle-aged acceptance on his face. He does not show any shock at what she has told him—that is what is frightening. Will time do that to her too, and then what will she have left? “I do, Rita.” If she didn’t know him, his smile might seem simpleminded. “You don’t have to masquerade for me to love you.”

  But she cannot believe it. It costs so much.

  The Subversive Divorce

  THEY HAD EXPECTED TO stay married, that is, to live in a plague-ridden land uninfected, immune to the prevailing currents. In their early youth, divorce had been a germ confined to movie stars and misfits, and over the years marriage, like a layer of fuzzy insulation, had kept them wrapped in that safe climate. Till from their own involuntary clawing the insulation grew frayed, and let in the tainted air.

  The trouble was a mutual and consistent failure to say or do the right thing at the right time. It was a failure, they recognized in less feverish moments, springing from the premise of marriage itself, which licensed the expectation that each would say and do the right thing in all seasons. In bouts of hoarse shouting and t
ears, the air between them whipped by gusts of words, they tried to transform each other into more fitting people, without the slightest effect, save that they came to take a perverse pleasure in thwarting expectation.

  Then would come a truce. They would recklessly reveal the ingredients of an ideal mate like chefs revealing a secret recipe, and each one would try to cook it up out of the provisions at hand, would try even to procure the absent ingredients from the air. But like inept loaves, their efforts fell flat; like cuts of meat, they were overdone or underdone, with sauces too thick or too thin. When they served these failed dishes there were stinging scenes of reproach. By the end, even if one of them did happen by instinct or accident to say or do the right thing at the right time, the thing was unacceptable, coming as it did from someone already proven to be wrong.

  The words of reproach were made more terrible by their banality. For in a process of verbal erosion, theirs became a primitive language, a once-advanced civilization reduced to scratching stick figures, rock scraping rock. I can’t take this anymore, it’s ruining me, how did I get into such a mess. If one of the teen-aged twins was around, the words would be hissed through teeth scored by nighttime grinding. Go, then, go. I’m not keeping you.

  Despite the evident meanings of the words, married life would continue: dinners, children, jobs, recreation, domestic maintenance, and even making love as usual. They liked each other; what they loathed was the distortion of identity marriage produced, marriage so public and powerful, marriage imposing its rites, grinding away the personal in the service of an inferred higher good. Making love by its nature does not permit very much distortion of identity, yet insofar as they were simultaneously married and making love, a certain element of distortion, of institutional service, crept in.

  Then one evening when both their son and their daughter were out, leaving them to rant unrestrained, at the instant that he shouted, I can’t take this anymore, and she responded, Go, then, go, she realized that this time she meant it. Why right then is a mystery, the pretext being no more virulent than most. She knew only that if she consented to mean what she said, she would never again need to take part in this fevered dialogue.