by Laura Furman
“What did you do?” Papa asks again. I turn to him, pleading, wanting desperately to make my case, but I don’t find the words. I turn to Mama. I beg her to explain. She looks blankly at me, a little confusion in her eyes. I stand in the middle of them, frozen with something like fear, something not quite guilt.
By then, even Emmanuel has made his way into the house, abandoning his post at the gate. He stands just behind Mama, and his peering eyes seem to ask me that same question: What did you do?
My legs feel weak. I turn to Eno, I smile at her. I think of Mama with her yellow skin, with her creams. “Don’t worry,” I say. “We’ll find something that works.” Eno screams.
They leave the bathroom quickly then, all of them, Ekaite and Papa leading Eno. The door crashes closed behind them, their voices becoming increasingly distant, still frenzied. I blink my eyes as if to blink myself awake.
Days later, when the scabs start to form, I imagine peeling them off like the hard shell of the velvet tamarind. Eno’s flesh underneath the scabs is a pinkish-yellow like the tamarind pulp, only a little like a ripe pawpaw peel. And even if I know that this scabby fairness of hers is born of injury, a temporary fairness of skinless flesh, patchy, and ugly in its patchiness, I think how close she has come to having skin like Onyechi’s, and I feel something like envy in me, because what she has wound up with is fairness after all, fairness, if only for a while.
Kristen Iskandrian
The Inheritors
SHE AND I wORKED together in a consignment shop called Second Chances, which many people thought was a homeless shelter or a soup kitchen due to the name; the round, convivial font on the sign; the lack of any qualifying tagline; and the part of town it was in. Also, the front windows were thickly curtained, making it necessary to go inside to find out what was inside. In fact, I had gone there initially to inquire about volunteer work, but as soon as I entered I felt compelled to pretend that there had been no mistake, that I was a bona fide thrifter, and when the owner introduced himself it seemed inevitable that I would either buy something or ask for a job. The other person in the shop came over from where she had been doing something with safety pins; greeted me curtly, one pin in her mouth; and asked the owner a question about a credenza. Immediately, she reminded me of someone I couldn’t place. For weeks after I started working there, having abandoned my plan to achieve some degree of insight about my life through unpaid service to others, she irritated me, because she had used the word “credenza,” but more so because she was familiar in a stubbornly untraceable way. I couldn’t look at her without not seeing her and seeing instead a placeholder, a version of her as she was reflected by my straining memory. Then I realized that it wasn’t a person she reminded me of, but a thing, a thing depicting a person, and by then the gradations of recall and association had blended into a kind of folkloric confusion to which she, in my mind, remained bound.
The thing she reminded me of was a painting that used to hang in my parents’ living room of a girl waiting for a train that was approaching from the upper-right corner of the canvas. The girl stood with her back to the living room, relieved or frightened, who could know, by the train’s imminent arrival, with her wrists poking out from the too-short sleeves of her red jacket, one hand white-knuckling the handle of a weathered suitcase, the other stretching itself, fingers spread and pointing downward, as though trying to pull clean of its arm. Her feet were close together and turned slightly inward, and her legs, thick and a bit misshapen, shone whitely where her gray skirt ended. The painter probably wasn’t much of an artist; I think my parents bought it at one of those hotel expos, along with a few smeary watercolors in thick gilt frames that hung in the powder and guest rooms. But I always liked this girl and wished I could see her face, and H. Teale, whoever that was, had done a nice job with her hair, a bob that looked womanly somehow, not the flaxen, glistening hair of children, but dusty and heavy. Sad hair. The hair and the stance of protracted waiting are what brought her to mind when I thought of the painting, and what brought the painting to mind when I saw her.
I don’t know what happened to it. After my mother died, a lot of things went into boxes that then disappeared, and for a while I hoped and half believed that it would turn up in the shop, and I imagined that I would have a hard time deciding whether to give it to her or keep it for myself. Most of what’s now in my dad’s condominium in Florida, save for a few ashtrays and photo albums, is unrecognizable. I don’t like going there. It makes me sad, being amid all of that desperate, widower-y newness. It’s the sort of sad that makes me angry, a feeling she termed sangria during a particularly slow day at work, with not a little bit of pride. She claimed as a pastime the reappropriation of words and was oblivious to how distracting it was in the midst of serious stories. She also greatly enjoyed using certain expressions and figures of speech, however wrongly, such as, for example, ad nauseam, trump card, au courant, and countless others. I like being sad, which mystified her; I like it until I reach the nadir where sadness changes, as if chemically, to repulsion and self-loathing, making me wish that I was “capable” of “handling” things instead of turning away from them in disgust until my disgust disgusts me, and my anger at my inadequacy as a human being angers me, and all of that pure, easy, delectable sorrow gets squandered. She refused, cheerfully, to understand this, and it wasn’t her refusal that was maddening but her cheer.
But both of us liked old things. She liked them as a lifestyle, a matter of ethics. She clung to old things the way I cling to sadness. And she could be emphatic, which could be tiresome.
“There’s just no need for it. This world is choking with stuff, drowning in it. I think there is enough stuff in the world for every single person to have plenty, enough old bikes for every kid in the whole world to have a bike and enough coats for everyone to have a coat. Buying new, it’s pretty much criminal,” she said. “Everything, and I mean everything, in my apartment is pre-owned.”
“Same here,” I said, which wasn’t completely true. “Except for socks and underwear. That I can’t do.”
She sniffed. “Oh.” She was sorting buttons and had a large red one between her teeth. “That doesn’t bother me,” she said around the button. “In fact”—she took the button out—“my mom got me a three-pack of underwear for Christmas last year and I never opened it.”
“What about your appliances?” I asked. My landlord had put in a new refrigerator that year. I loved it. Its hum was almost melodic, and the freezer made perfect half-moons of ice, automatically.
“Nope,” she said. “Old, old, old. My stove takes twenty minutes to heat up and then burns everything.” She sounded pleased. “So do you want the underwear?”
I checked to see if she was joking. She was not. “No,” I said. “But … thank you.”
She made a face. “Fine,” she said, moving some buttons around on the counter. “It’s a shame, though, since you like brand-new underwear and everything.”
For a while, I wasn’t sure what kind of friends we were, she and I. It appeared at first that we could become close, but I don’t tend to make friends like that. My closest friend had been my boyfriend once, but we somehow transitioned seamlessly from having sex to not having sex and were able to meet each other for breakfast and watch movies on the weekends and fall asleep on each other in comfortable and unromantic positions.
Then he moved to Oregon to be with someone he’d known for a week, and my life fell apart a bit, as it would have if we had never stopped dating. I hated Oregon with a hatred that became almost exciting. There were other men, before and after, and other friendships, mostly before, but nothing lasting, nothing remarkable. So I remained confused about relationships, all of them, and she seemed especially hard to place. I couldn’t even remember what she looked like when she wasn’t around; every time I saw her, her features came as a vague surprise. I wanted to know how she felt about me, if she considered me a person in her life or just a person. If she asked for a ride home, did t
hat mean something? Probably less than it would mean if she borrowed a sweater. I wish that people, eligible friends like her, came with conversion charts. Without mile markers, material guidelines, I feel lost. Mornings, I looked hard at myself in the mirror and practiced making kind, open expressions. But then I would walk around brushing my teeth and return to the mirror and see my face as it normally was—worried and weirdly cavernous, everything pushed back, my cheekbones and eyelids like awnings. Throughout the day I reminded myself to smile but then would do so at the wrong time—not after a joke or greeting but in the middle of a conversation when it was my turn to speak, when certain words, and not a facial contortion, were appropriate, or else alone in the aisle of a grocery store, grinning at boxes and cans like a demented person. Having a disruptive mien, I felt certain, was not conducive to making friends. This had been my problem throughout school, throughout my life.
“You always look like you’re up to something,” she said.
“Like what?” I concentrated on looking hapless. I felt hapless, and I wanted my face to look hapless also. That nothing about me happens automatically, without self-consciousness, seems to me significant. Or maybe it is my thinking so that makes it seem that way. In general, I had too many thoughts about my thoughts, a condition that translated into an uncontrollable urge to doodle if pen and paper were at hand. “Hypergraphia,” the school nurse had called it.
“No, the ‘something’ is part of the expression—‘up to something,’ ” she said. She sounded exasperated, like a teacher, or a substitute teacher. “Identifying the ‘something’ defeats the idiom.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m not, I don’t think.”
She looked at me for a long moment. “At first I was sure you were stealing things. When you drove me home I was going to make an excuse for you to open your trunk.”
I laughed. She laughed. “What would you have said?”
“I don’t know, I couldn’t think of anything. Something about your spare tire.” We were laughing hard now, just letting the laughter be the reason for more laughter. I felt something shift, something skeletal and real, like discovering a new vertebra and then walking differently. We were nearly friends now, and for the moment, I wasn’t questioning it.
At a bar in the early afternoon, she talked about being adopted. That was the first time she’d ever mentioned it and subsequently it came up a lot, casually and in passing. The owner had told us to close early. It had been a slow day and a slow week; the whole town appeared to be hibernating or shopping in department stores. She took the lack of business personally.
“No one cares about stories anymore, about history,” she said as she counted out the register. “The world doesn’t want a lampshade that is a lampshade. A lampshade that collects dust and gets dusted every week by a person, maybe an old lady, maybe a divorced man. They want biodynamic lampshades, or lampshades that double as clever hats or wall sconces.”
She was probably right. Everything did seem newly invested in multifunctionality. My father had a refrigerator with a television built into it. Unless it was, maybe, a television with a refrigerator built around it. I looked about me and everything in the store looked dingy, primitive.
“Those are pretty,” she said. “I’ll probably buy one.” I was folding a stack of tea towels, softened with age. I imagined the Floridian widowers’ variety: self-cleaning, self-folding. I saw them scrubbing out their own stains, embroidered corners curling in like starfish, while maybe simultaneously announcing the time. I wanted to say this to her, wanted her to find me funny, and I also wanted to unravel her, to find a loose thread and pull at it, as though she were the towels I was folding, which felt suddenly twee and self-satisfied.
“Are these called ‘tea towels’?” I asked. “Tea towels?” My voice was high, almost hysterical. “It doesn’t even sound like English.”
She looked at me quizzically.
“It sounds like some old Welsh saying reserved for wedding days,” I said. “Wedding days during the rainy season.” I don’t know why I felt cross. “Tee-tow-wuhl.”
“That’s silly. Tea. Towel. It makes perfect sense,” she said.
“But why are they called that? Are they only supposed to be used for cleaning up tea? For wiping one’s fingers if they get tea on them? Aren’t they just fancy dishcloths? What is their meaning?” I wanted to stop, but felt unable. And she wasn’t cooperating. “Seriously, who has the time for tea towels?”
“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” I didn’t know.
“We should drink beer,” she said. “Do you want to drink beer?” It was a nick-of-time clemency. It was okay with her that we did not share a sense of humor, that she liked to laugh at real things as they happened and I liked to laugh at imaginary and macabre things that would never happen, that she took most things seriously whereas I did not, and that these characteristics made each of us occasionally lonely and agitated around the other. I felt grateful, humbled by her forgiveness, and I did my best to leave it at that, without further aggravation for unknowingly having needed it.
We turned out the lights and she locked up. I drove. She didn’t have a car. She fiddled with the radio, as she usually did when I took her home, then turned it off.
At the bar, I drank my first beer very quickly. She was only about a quarter way through hers. “Two years ago, I started calling adoption agencies and asking if they had my records.”
“Why didn’t you just ask your parents for them?” I concentrated on saying every word. The beer made me feel pleasantly out of control.
“My parents insist that I’m not adopted. They insist that I am their biological child,” she said. “But I know I’m not. I just know it.”
“How do you know?” I was intensely curious. The intensity of my curiosity seemed, to me, to be worthy of discussion in itself.
She took a straw from the plastic cube on the bar that also held cocktail napkins. She stuck it in her beer. After a labored sip, she looked at me closely. “I know that I do not, biologically, belong to my parents. Like, if I told you that the bartender was your father, what would you say?”
I never knew how to answer taunting questions like that. I tried never to ask them. I suspect she liked the drama of them. “I’d say, no, he’s not.”
“But what if I told you I was one hundred percent positive that he was your father, then what would you say?” She took another big sip with the straw and the bartender brought a second beer for me. I kept my head down. I didn’t want him to hear us.
I made a noise. “That man is not my father. My father is on a beach in Florida, memorizing the jokes in Reader’s Digest. You’re making an absurd analogy.”
She leaned in, and her eyes were the color of every color having quit its dream and taken a straight job. Give-Up Green, I thought. Broken-Down Brown. Bruised-Hopes Blue. “That’s exactly my point. It’s as absurd to me to think of my ‘parents’ as my real parents as it is for you to think about that bartender as your dad. They’ve buried the paperwork really well, but I’ll find it.”
If she weren’t so convincing, I’d have thought she was crazy for sure. Or her convincingness made her a kind of crazy that I envied. What was family, anyway, I mused drunkenly. Skin and cells chafing together, hatching things, and then demanding loyalty? I wished I had something to prove or disprove, something outlandish. We talked about what our mothers looked like, her saying that she dreamed frequently of hers, her “real” mother, who looked like Eva Marie Saint, nothing like her pseudomother, who was small and dark. I said that my mother’s ears never aged, never looked sick. She said something about plaster of paris and used “tête-à-tête” incorrectly and then she paid for our beers and we left, me blurrily driving twenty miles an hour and her singing snippets of songs as the radio scanned from station to station.
I was taking nail polish off using nail polish remover and toilet paper when she called. There’s still a bleached, grayish spot on the
side of the phone where I touched it with damp toilet paper. I put the phone between my cheek and shoulder and continued plucking at my fingers. She was telling me that she’d been bored for a week.
“Even at work. Just … bored,” she said. “I don’t feel bad or anything. But I can’t believe how aware I am of each minute. It’s like I’m waiting …” She paused. “Waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
A new one, I noted. The nail polish wasn’t coming off all the way. “What’s the first shoe that dropped?” The nails on my left hand looked pink and bleary, as if they’d just woken up. I could hear her start to protest.
“Never mind. What will you do today?” I asked. It was a Monday, and the store was closed on Mondays.
“I don’t know. I just had sex with someone. I thought it would help, but I feel even more bored now.”
I don’t know why I felt surprised, and very surprised, but I did. There was something about her that seemed to predate sex, that seemed to live wholly beyond and in spite of it. Maybe it was her pervasive certainty that she’d been adopted, that she had occurred by the regular means but then been removed from her sources. I concentrated on my nails. “Who did you have sex with?” I was making a little progress. My thumbnail was getting whiter.
“This guy. He just left. I met him at the grocery store this morning.”
I stopped rubbing, focusing entirely on her. I felt maybe this was a test of some sort. But she kept talking. “Anyway, I got a squash. I’m going to make it. You want to come over?”