by T. C. Boyle
Neither could any of her relatives. But they sent presents, once they had an address. A microwave oven, a Mr. Coffee, an electric blanket for the cold mountains. They were a practical and liberal family; they wanted to be helpful. “I know it’s hard for you to imagine,” Kiki wrote, “but we do very well without electricity here. Every morning I make a wood fire in the stove. Very good-smelling smoke. I make a little fire in the bottom of the water heater too.”
Kiki built fires? No one could imagine her as the pioneer wife. Her brother, Alan (who later became my father), was always hoping to visit. Kiki said not a word about making any visits home. No one nagged her; she’d been a touchy teenager, given to sullen outbursts, and everyone was afraid of that Kiki appearing again.
She stayed for eight years. Her letters said, “My husband thinks I sew as well as his sisters” and “I’m rereading my copy of Ovid in Latin. It’s not bad!” and “Winter sooo long this year, I hate it. Osman has already taught me all he knows about the stars.” No one could make sense of who she was now. There were no children and no pregnancies that anyone heard about, and the family avoided asking.
Her brother was just about to finally get himself over for a visit when Kiki wrote to say, “Guess what? I’m coming back at last. For good.” No, the husband was not coming with her. “My life here has reached its natural conclusion,” Kiki wrote. “Osman will be my dear friend forever but we’ve come to the end of our road.”
“So who ran around on who?” the relatives kept asking. “She’ll never say, will she?”
Everybody wondered what she would look like when she returned. Would she be sun-dried and weather-beaten, would she wear billowing silk trousers like a belly dancer’s, would the newer buildings of New York amaze her? None of the above. She looked like the same old Kiki, thirty-one with very good skin, and she was wearing jeans and a turtleneck, possibly the same ones she’d left home with.
Her luggage was a mess, woven plastic valises baled up with string, very third world, and there were a lot of them. She had brought back nine carpets! What was she thinking? She intended to sell them.
Her brother always remembered that when they ate their first meal together, Kiki held her knife and fork like a European. She laughed at things lightly, as if the absurdity of it all wasn’t worth shrieking over. She teased Alan about his eyeglasses (“you look like a genius in them”) and his large appetite (“has not changed since you were eight”). She certainly sounded like herself.
Before very long, she moved in with someone named Marcy she’d known at Brooklyn College. Marcy’s mother bought the biggest of the rugs, and Kiki used the proceeds to rent a storefront in the East Village where she displayed her carpets and other items she had brought back—a brass tea set and turquoise beads and cotton pants with tucked hems that she herself had once worn.
The store stayed afloat for a while. Her brother wondered if she was dealing drugs—hashish was all over Istanbul in the movie Midnight Express, which had come out just before her return. Kiki refused to see such a film, with its lurid scenes of mean Turkish prisons. “Who has nice prisons?” she said. “Name one single country in the world. Just one.”
When her store began to fail and she had to give it up, Kiki supported herself by cleaning houses. She evidently did this with a good spirit; the family was much more embarrassed about it than she was. “People here don’t know how to clean their houses,” she would say. “It’s sort of remarkable, isn’t it?”
By the time I was a little kid, Kiki had become the assistant director of a small agency that booked housekeepers and nannies. She was the one you got on the phone, the one who didn’t take any nonsense from clients or workers either. She was friendly but strict and kept people on point.
As a child I was a teeny bit afraid of her. She could be very withering if I was acting up and getting crazy and knocking over chairs. But when my parents took me to visit, Kiki had special cookies for me (I loved Mallomars) and for a while she had a boyfriend named Hernando who would play airplane with me and go buzzing around the room with me on his back. I loved visiting her.
My father told me later that Hernando had wanted to marry Kiki. “But she wasn’t made for marriage,” he said. “It’s not all roses, you know.” He and my mother had a history of having, as they say, their differences.
“Kiki was always like a bird,” my father said. “Flying here and there.”
What a corny thing to say.
I grew up outside Boston, in a small suburban town, whose leafy safety I spurned once I was old enough for hip disdain. I moved to New York as soon as I finished high school, which I barely did. My parents and I were not on good terms in my early years in the city, but Kiki made a point of keeping in touch. She’d call on the phone and say, “I’m thirsty, let’s go have a drink. OK?” At first I was up in Inwood, as far north in Manhattan as you can get, so it was a long subway ride to see her in the East Village, but once I moved to Harlem it wasn’t quite so bad. When my son was born, four years ago, Kiki brought me the most useful baby stuff, things a person couldn’t even know she needed. Oliver would calm down and sleep when she walked him around. He grew up calling her Aunt Great Kiki.
The two of us lived in a housing project, but one of the nicer ones, in an apartment illegally passed on to me by an ex-boyfriend. It was a decent size, with good light, and I liked my neighbors. That fall the TV started telling us to get prepared for Hurricane Sandy, and Oliver had a great time flicking the flashlight on and off (a really annoying game) and watching me tape giant X’s on the window glass. All the kids on our floor were hyped up and excited, running around and shrieking. We kept looking out the windows as the sky turned a sepia tint. When the rains broke and began to come down hard, we could hear the moaning of the winds and things clattering and banging in the night, awnings and trees getting the hell beaten out of them. I kept switching to different channels on the TV so we wouldn’t miss any of it. The television had better coverage than my view out the window. A newscaster in a suit told us the Con Ed transformer on Fourteenth Street exploded! The lights in the bottom of Manhattan had gone out! I made efforts to explain electricity to Oliver, as if I knew. Never, never put your finger in a socket. Oliver wanted to watch a better program.
At nine-thirty my father called to say, “Your aunt Kiki doesn’t have power, you know. She’s probably sitting in the dark.” I had forgotten about her entirely. She was on East Fifth Street, in the no-electricity zone. I promised I’d check on Kiki in the morning.
“I might have to walk there,” I said. “It’s like a hundred and twenty blocks. You’re not going to ask about my neighborhood? It’s fine.”
“Don’t forget about her, OK? Promise me that.”
“I just told you,” I said.
The next day the weather was shockingly pleasant, mild, with a white sky. We walked for a half-hour, which Oliver really did not like, past some downed trees and tossed branches, and then a cab miraculously stopped and we shared it with an old guy all the way downtown. No traffic lights working, no stores open—how strange the streets were. In Kiki’s building, I led Oliver up four flights of dark tenement stairs while he drove me nuts flicking the flashlight on and off.
When Kiki opened the door onto her pitch-black hallway, she said, “Reyna! What are you doing here?”
Kiki, of course, was fine. She had plenty of vegetables and canned food and rice—who needed a fridge?—and she could light the stove with a match. She had daylight now and candles for later. She had pots of water she could boil to wash with. She had filled the tub the night before. How was I? “Oliver, isn’t this fun?” she said.
Oh, New Yorkers were making such a big fuss, she thought. She had a transistor radio so the fussing came through. “I myself am enjoying the day off from work,” she said. She was rereading The Greek Way by Edith Hamilton—had I ever read it? I didn’t read much, did I?—and she planned to finish it tonight by candlelight.
“Come stay with us,” I said.
“Wouldn’t you like that, Oliver?”
Oliver crowed on cue.
Kiki said she always preferred being in her own home. “Oliver, I bet you would like some of the chocolate ice cream that’s turning into a lovely milk shake.”
We followed her into the kitchen, with its painted cabinets and old linoleum. When I took off my jacket to settle in, Kiki said, “Oh, no. Did you get a new tattoo?”
“No. You always ask that. You’re phobic about my arms.”
“I’ll never get used to them.”
I had a dove and a sparrow and a tiger lily and a branch with leaves and some small older ones. They all stood for things. The dove was to settle a fight; the sparrow was the true New York bird; the tiger lily meant boldness; and the branch was an olive tree in honor of Oliver. I used to try to tell Kiki that they were no different from the patterns on rugs. “Are you a floor?” she said. She accused my tattoos of being forms of mutilation as well as forms of deception over my natural skin. According to what? “Well, Islamic teaching, for one thing,” she said.
Kiki had never been a practicing Muslim but she liked a lot about Islam. I may have been the only one in the family who knew how into it she’d once been. She used to try to get me to read Averroës, she thought he was great, and Avicenna. Only my aunt would believe that someone like me could just dip into twelfth-century philosophy if I felt like it. She saw no reason why not.
“Oliver, my man,” she was saying now, “you don’t have to finish if you’re full.”
“Dad’s worried about you,” I told Kiki.
“I already called him,” she said. It turned out her phone still worked because she had an old landline, nothing digital or bundled.
She’d been outside earlier in the day. Some people on her block had water but she didn’t. Oliver was entranced when Kiki showed him how she flushed the toilet by throwing down a potful of water.
“It’s magic,” I said.
When we left, Kiki called after us, “I’m always glad to see you, you know that.” She could have given us more credit for getting all the way there, I thought.
“You might change your mind about staying with us,” I called back, before we went out into the dark hall.
I had an extra reason for wanting her to stay. Not to be one of those mothers who was always desperate for babysitting, but I needed a babysitter.
My boyfriend, Boyd, was spending three months at Rikers Island. He was there for selling five ounces of weed (who thinks that should even be a crime?). For all of October I’d gone to see him once a week, and it made a big difference to him. I planned to go that week, once the subways were running and buses were going over the bridge again. But it was hard bringing Oliver, who wasn’t his kid and who needed a lot of attention during those toyless visits.
I loved Boyd but I wouldn’t have said I loved him more than the others I’d been with. Fortunately no one asked. Not even Boyd. There was no need for people to keep mouthing off about how much they felt, in his view. Some degree of real interest, some persistence in showing up, was enough. Every week I saw him sitting in that visitors’ room in his stupid jumpsuit. The sight of him—heavy-faced, wary, waiting to smile slightly—always got to me, and when I hugged him (light hugs were permitted), I’d think, It’s still Boyd, it’s Boyd here.
Oliver could be a nuisance. Sometimes he was very, very whiny after standing in so many different lines, or he was incensed that he couldn’t bring in his giant plastic dinosaur. Or he got overstimulated and had to nestle up to Boyd and complain at length about some kid who threw sand in the park. “You having adventures, right?” Boyd said. Meanwhile, I was trying to ask Boyd if he’d had an OK week and why not. I had an hour to give him the joys of my conversation. Dealing with those two at once was not the easiest.
I got a phone call from Aunt Kiki on the second day after the hurricane. “How would you feel about my coming over after work to take a hot shower?” she said. “I can bring a towel, I’ve got piles of towels.”
“Our shower is dying to see you,” I said. “And Oliver will lend you his ducky.”
“Kiki Kiki Kiki Kiki Kiki!” Oliver yelled when she came through the door. Maybe I’d worked him up too much in advance. We’d gotten the place very clean.
As soon as my aunt emerged from the bathroom, dressed again in her slacks and sweater and with a steamed-pink face under the turban of her towel, I handed her a glass of red wine. “A person without heat or water needs alcohol,” I said. We sat down to meatloaf, which I was good at, and mashed potatoes with garlic, which Oliver had learned to eat.
“This is a feast,” she said. “Did you know the sultans had feasts that went on for two weeks?”
Oliver was impressed. “This one could go on longer,” I said. “You should stay over. Or come back tomorrow. I mean it.”
Tomorrow was what I needed—it was the visiting night for inmates with last names from M to Z.
“Maybe the power will be back on by then,” Kiki said. “Maybe maybe.”
At Rikers, Boyd and the other inmates had spent the hurricane under lockdown, no wandering off into the torrent. Rikers had its own generator, and the buildings were in the center of the island, too high up to wash away. It was never meant to be a place you might swim from.
“You know I have this boyfriend, Boyd,” I said.
Kiki was looking at her plate while I told her, as much as I could in front of Oliver, the situation about the weekly visits. “Oh, shit,” she said. She had to finish chewing to say, “OK, sure, OK, I’ll come right from work.”
When I leaned over to embrace her, she seemed embarrassed. “Oh, please,” she said. “No big deal.”
What a mystery Kiki was. What could I ever say to her that would throw her for a loop? Best not to push it, of course. And maybe she had a boyfriend of her own that I didn’t even know about. She wasn’t someone who told you everything. She wasn’t showering with him, wherever he was. Maybe he was married. A man that age. Oh, where was I going with this?
When Kiki turned up the next night, she was forty-five minutes later than she’d said she’d be, and I had given up on her several times over. She bustled through the door, saying, “Don’t ask me how the subways are running. Go, go. Get out of here, go.”
She looked younger, all flushed like that. What a babe she must’ve once been. Or at least a hippie sweetheart. Oliver clambered all over her. “Will you hurry up and get out of here?” she said to me.
The subway (which had only started running that day) was indeed slow to arrive and very crowded, but the bus near Queens Plaza that went to Rikers was the same as ever. After the first few stops, all the white people except me emptied out. I read People magazine while we inched our way to the bridge to the island; love was making a mess of the lives of a number of celebrities. And look at that teenage girl across the aisle in the bus, combing her hair, checking it in a mirror, pulling some strands across her face to make it hang right. Girl, I wanted to say, he fucked up bad enough to get himself where he is, and you’re still worried he won’t like your hair?
Of course, I was all moussed and lipsticked myself. I had standards. But you couldn’t wear anything too revealing—no rips or see-through fabrics—they had rules. Visitors must wear undergarments.
After I stood in a line and put my coat and purse in a locker and showed my ID to the guards and got searched and stood in a line for one of Rikers’ own buses and got searched again, I sat in a room to wait for Boyd. It was odd being there without Oliver. The wait went on so long, and it wasn’t like you could bring a book. And then I heard Boyd’s name read from the list.
Those jumpsuits didn’t flatter anyone. But when we hugged, he smelled of soap and Boyd, and I was sorry for myself to have him away so long. “Hey there,” he said.
“Didn’t mean to get here so late,” I said.
Boyd wanted to hear about the hurricane and who got hit the worst. Aunt Kiki became my material: “Oh, she had her candles and her pots of water and her c
ans of soup and her bags of rice, she couldn’t see why everybody was so upset.”
“Can’t keep ’em down, old people like that,” he said. “Good for her. That’s the best thing I’ve heard all week.”
I went on about Kiki’s gameness. How she’d taught me the right way to climb trees when I was young, when my mother only worried I’d fall on my head.
“I didn’t know you were a climber. Have to tell Claude.”
His friend Claude, much more of an athlete than Boyd, had recently discovered the climbing wall at some gym. Boyd himself was a couch potato, but a lean and lanky one. People told him he looked like Lebron James, only skinnier. Was he getting puffy now? A little.
“Claude’s a monster on that wall. Got Lynnette doing it too.” Lynnette was Claude’s sister. And Boyd’s girlfriend before me. “Girls can do that stuff fine, he says.”
“When did he say that?”
“They came by last week. The whole gang.”
What gang? Only three visitors allowed. “Lynnette was here?”
“And Maxwell. They came to show support. I appreciated it, you know?”
I’ll bet you did, I thought. I was trying not to leap to any conclusions. It wasn’t as if she could’ve crept into the corner with him for a quickie, though you heard rumors of such things. Urban myths.
“Does Claude still have that stringy haircut?”
“He does. Looks like a root vegetable. Man should go to my barber.” The Rikers barber had given Boyd an onion look, if you were citing vegetables.
“They’re coming again Saturday. You’re not coming Saturday, right?”
I never came on Saturdays. I cut him a look.
“Because if you are,” he said, “I’ll tell them not to come.”