Blue Hole Back Home

by Joy Jordan-Lake

  “It’s sambol,” Sanna told me. “Like this is the way you must eat it.” She scooped it up with her right hand and pushed it into her mouth with her thumb.

  I braced myself for another bite but stalled, thinking up what Momma would have said, and then making myself say it: “Your mother must be considered a marvelous cook in Sri Lanka.”

  Farsanna nodded and watched me.

  “My father works often late,” Farsanna offered, a few moments into our meal. “Tonight also he will not join us for dinner.”

  “His job worked out then? That’s good news.”

  “Not,” she said slowly, “the job for here we moved.” She shook her head. “Not the job for which we moved here.”

  “Say it too right and you’ll sound all wrong, like L. J. Just the job we moved here for. So this isn’t the same one?”

  “The one that was promised,” she looked across the table at me, and I had the sensation of her punching the words, “seems no more to exist.”

  “Not to exist?”

  “Not to exist. For him.” She raised her eyes, and I had to fight the instinct to duck.

  “Oh. That’s not such good news.” I waited.

  She stabbed at her rice.

  “So then,” I asked, wondering if I shouldn’t, wondering what Momma would say, “where’s he working?”

  She found things to stare at in her rice. “At the paper mill is where for my father there is work.”

  “Way over in Clive? That must be thirty miles away!”

  “Yes,” she said. “It is. And he comes to here with a degree from the University of Sri Jayewardenepura. My father is a smart man.”

  I sat, rearranging the sambol to appear substantially nibbled. Mrs. Moulavi limped back through the kitchen door to refill our water glasses and our rice. Rising, Farsanna caught her mother’s arm. “Mata, you must not need to serve us. Sit. Rest your legs.”

  But Mrs. Moulavi shook her head. Her head was slip covered, as usual, but if that was supposed to hide her good looks, it didn’t much help: seemed to me it put a frame on the face and lifted it off the dark of the wall behind her. One hand on the table and helping her balance, she straightened a little. “I am not tired.” She kissed her daughter on the top of the head and stroked her daughter’s hair. My breath snagged on my throat as I wondered if she could feel a knot or gash where Farsanna had been wounded on Seventh.

  Sanna adjusted her mother’s hijab. “You are never saying you are tired. But sometimes I know you are tired.”

  Mrs. Moulavi turned to leave. “I am worried only,” she whispered.

  “Doesn’t your mother,” I suggested when the folds of gauzy fabric retreated, “want to come sit down and eat with us?”

  “She will wait for the return of my father from work. Then eat in the kitchen.”

  I was at a big, empty loss for anything gracious to say that would make that information seem normal. “Yeah?” was the best I could manage.

  “My mother prefers for herself the old ways of our—of Sri Lanka.”

  And then, as if she’d been listening, Mrs. Moulavi appeared in the doorway.

  “Well,” I said when it was clear she had no plans to speak, “thank you for the delicious dinner.”

  Chips of charcoal looked out of her face. They were like Farsanna’s, those eyes, at least in color and shape—but the mother’s looked like they might already have burned out, couldn’t any longer catch fire.

  “How do you like your new home?” I asked, trying the tone Momma would’ve used at that point.

  Mrs. Moulavi’s eyes, whatever she could see from them, lay on her daughter. “Our home is Sri Lanka.”

  “Oh.” I shifted in my seat and had to unpeel my hot, sweat-damp skin from the metal folding chair. “How do you like it here?”

  She rotated her gaze to me, and then to my legs sprouting out from the frayed blue-jean growth of my cutoff shorts. Perhaps she could see at least that much.

  “American women …” she said vindictively almost, her accent thicker, murkier than her daughter’s.

  “Mata!” Sanna put in, a warning, effectively truncating at least that one sentence.

  There was no tablecloth to cover my legs, skinny and bare, and they stuck out from me, obscene.

  “At the store,” Sanna’s mother continued, “spices I do not find.”

  I pictured the Piggly Wiggly shelves. Were there not plenty of spices? Cinnamon, allspice, cloves. Lots of brown sugar.

  Farsanna rose from the table with an upheld palm for me to remain seated—a sign that reminded me of the map she made with her hands. She and her mother gathered dishes in a single sweep and disappeared into the kitchen.

  Their voices collided, hard-edged syllables gathering speed, driven at each other head-on, and crashing.

  When Farsanna appeared at the door, she wasn’t smiling, wasn’t pretending anything other than that I’d heard every word. That I’d understood not one word didn’t matter, and she knew it. I’d understood plenty: that Sanna and her mother had been arguing over me—and what I represented.

  She swiped at one of her own bare thighs below her khaki shorts, like she was dusting off dirt I couldn’t see. “You would perhaps like to walk?”

  For a second, I thought she was asking me to leave. And then I saw her reach for a fistful of coins left on a rickety stack of veneered shelves, and realized she meant we both might need a walk.

  “Where to?”

  “You did not like your dinner.”

  “I—”

  “Possibly you’d like ice cream?”

  It hit me suddenly she’d been using contractions here and there. “But,” I tried pointing out, “there’s no car—”

  “The Dairy Queen’s down the road, not very much far.”

  I pictured the thin-shouldered highway outside her house, imagined the day’s heat, stored and heaved back at us from the asphalt. But I considered also this hot cave of a house, and Sanna’s mother so full of worry and sharp-sided regret. I felt for change in my pocket, and nodded. “Okay.”

  Stepping out the back door, she patted her thigh and the Stray appeared at her side. She scratched him behind one ear, and I did the other as we attached a makeshift leash to him and set off.

  _________

  Dusk had dropped gray sheers over Stonewall Jackson Pike and fireflies pin-pricked the gray. The occasional eighteen-wheeler thundered by us as we walked on the road’s shoulder, but other than that the highway was not heavily traveled that night.

  Sanna glanced at me as we walked. “You will please forgive that. My mother,” she began.

  “Please.” I held up my hand. “I understand how mothers can be.”

  “My mother is sad for leaving Sri Lanka. She did not intend meanness.”

  “I reckon most of them don’t—mothers, I mean. Most of the time. And still!”

  “Still,” she agreed.

  And we smiled at each other.

  “My mother,” she said, “didn’t like to come to America.”

  “It was your dad’s idea, huh?”

  “Only my father’s. For many, many years, my father’s.”

  “Your mom’s objection was what, mainly? All the skin we show here?” I lifted one bare leg—bony, but at least freshly shaved—for demonstration.

  “My mother does not like American women. Perhaps fears. For me. For my sake.”

  “Why? Because we’re all tramps?”

  “You must understand: Rape among my people … among my parents’ people, people of my grandparents’ religion is almost unknown.”

  “No kidding.”

  “There are many reasons. It is the same with men and women who wish to love each other. To marry. They do not first undress.”

 
I nodded. “So that’s good, I reckon.”

  “These things to my mother make sense.” She glanced my way to see my reaction. So I nodded again.

  “And also,” she added, still watching me, “to me. Much of the old ways make sense, no?”

  “So how come,” I asked, “you don’t wear a headscarf like your momma?”

  Farsanna may have shot me a look then, though I couldn’t have seen it. She waited a moment to answer. “It is your opinion that I should wear a hijab?”

  “Me? No. That is, I don’t care one way or the other. It’s just that your mom … and you seem … that is, you never seem embarrassed that she’s wearing one.”

  “It is not right for a daughter be embarrassed by her mother, no? She is her daughter. That is enough. My mother was raised in Sri Lanka, a Muslim. My father wishes for me to be raised in America.”

  “And your family is not all that devout, but without the headscarf, the hijab, don’t your parents worry about … you know. Boys? Your being looked at by boys?”

  “And American parents, they do not worry about the boys?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “You must tell me,” she said, her voice dropping lower, “what means Beau—” she stopped and corrected herself, “what does Beauregard mean?”

  “Mean?”

  “You said to me that Jimbo Riggs’ name …”

  “Well, yeah. It is.” I would’ve liked to have left it right there. But she stopped walking and waited. I doled out a little more, and even that was whittling away at my own insides. “Middle name. His ancestor was a Civil War hero. That is, depending on whose side you’re on.”

  “Whose side you are on?”

  “I mean were on. Are on. Same difference, I reckon. You know. The war. Civil War. The War.”

  “The war,” she repeated.

  “What Bo calls The War to Make the Confederacy Comfy for White People.” It didn’t come out sounding anything like what Momma would have said just then—and so maybe shouldn’t have gotten said at all. “The Mrs. Reverend Regina Lee Riggs,” I added, “doesn’t much like his calling it that.” I’d meant this to help. But there the awkward still sat, heaving between us like a sick cat. And me wondering how to swat it out of the way.

  Farsanna stared straight ahead. “This Beauregard—?”

  “Confederate general. Real smooth with the ladies, people said. Reckon he passed that on down the line.”

  She looked at me, her face telling me nothing.

  “Yes,” she said. And still nothing.

  I’d no idea what my face, which had never been loyal or discreet, might tattle to her about me. So I studied the way the pavement petered out into clay, which surrendered to weeds, which infiltrated the asphalt in cracks.

  Soon we were within sight of the Dairy Queen, its fluorescent swirl corkscrewing up into the dark. Several Jeeploads of teenagers were just piling themselves in for departure, their vanilla ice creams frosting each other’s hair as bodies squirmed for position on floorboards and seats.

  A white pickup that looked a little like Em’s from the back was parked just beneath the glowing cone.

  Farsanna nodded toward the truck. “That is your brother’s, yes?”

  We’d neared the parking lot by that time to see that the white pickup had red lettering on its door. I didn’t need to read “Big Dog Lawn and Garden Beautifiers” to know she was right. The Stray had already leapt to greet someone he’d sniffed out as familiar.

  I saw Em, his back to us, standing in front of someone unreasonably blond—a shock of yellow showing behind Emerson’s brown.

  I stopped in my tracks, my arms making a knot. “Well, what the heck does he think he’s doing?” I inspected Farsanna’s face for twinges of jealousy—or maybe she’d not seen the shock of blond—then took her by the elbow. “Come on.”

  Neesa’s hot pants were as tight as they were short, and her orange halter top with daisies plummeted into a canyon of cleavage.

  “Jeez,” I muttered as Farsanna and I approached. “What is he thinking?”

  “Something is wrong?”

  “That something’s name is Neesa.” I checked again, real quickly, for signs that maybe Farsanna felt threatened. Sad. Jilted. But her face told me nothing at all.

  “Something’s wrong with this Neesa?”

  “You mean besides the fact she can’t spell her own name?”

  Farsanna studied her from the distance quickly decreasing between us. She nodded, accepting my judgment, but asked, “Why is she stupid?”

  “Because she’s pretty.”

  Farsanna frowned, unconvinced.

  I tried again. “Because boys like her that way: stupid. At least all Southern boys do.”

  Farsanna considered this. “All?”

  I halted, my hands to my hips. “You got the ugly truth right there before you. I reckon they do.”

  She gazed off into the woods, then shook her head. “I cannot think all of them.”

  Maybe as a protection against the possibility of losing his share of the new girl’s affections to his best friend, Emerson must have decided to drown his sorrows in Old Seasick Hips. Maybe, I thought, just like small children find comfort in hollow milk-chocolate bunnies, men find comfort in figures alone, without caring if there’s nothing inside but air.

  “My own brother,” I sighed.

  “But if your brother prefers …” Farsanna suggested.

  I shook my head. “Don’t ask. Come on. We can at least slow down her frontal assault.”

  After buying our ice cream, I elbowed a place in their circle for Farsanna and me, right beside Emerson, and nibbled at my cone slowly. I turned to Neesa.

  “Emerson here loves seventeenth-century poetry. I bet you’d want to know that, Neesa, may be some sort of something in common between you two.”

  My brother looked from Farsanna to Neesa to me and looked as if he might lose the two scoops he’d just eaten. “Cut it out, Shelby Lenoir,” he hissed in my ear. “Quit trying to make Neesa look dumb.”

  I whispered back, “If it wasn’t so easy, I might could resist. You know I can’t stand stupid girls. Or you making an idiot of yourself just because you’re jealous of—”

  He began to respond, but Farsanna was speaking.

  “In my school, my old school, in Sri Lanka, we read Paradise Lost. To practice the reading English. Is that of the same time?”

  Em beamed at her and nodded.

  “Ever had sambol, Neesa?” I purred to my right.

  “Do what?” Neesa was eyeing the Stray at her feet, her glance weighing Em’s friendly welcome of the dog with her own obvious discomfort. “Does he bite?”

  “Not too awfully often,” I told her, pretending to pause a moment and count on the hands of one finger. “At any rate, sambol’s a Sri Lankan delicacy. Ever had it?”

  Neesa’s eyes stayed on the dog. “What? Where?”

  “Sri Lanka. Where Farsanna comes from. It’s in South America.”

  “It’s—” Farsanna protested.

  I stopped her rising arm. “On the West Coast. Next to Kenya.”

  Emerson turned his mouth to my ear. “Cut it out, Turtle.” He called the Stray to him and held onto the dog’s collar.

  Reassured, Neesa took a deep breath and swung her blond hair to the right and the left. “Never been there myself. Like my daddy says, ain’t too much point in travelin’ when you like where you are just fine.”

  “You know, I never thought of it that way myself. What about you, Em?”

  Emerson wouldn’t look at me.

  “Or,” Neesa added, shifting her hips in Emerson’s direction to brush up against him, “when you like who you’re with.”

  I smiled just real sweetly. “Whom. Right, Em? W
hom you’re with.”

  Emerson researched the ridges of his cone.

  Neesa turned to me. “Why, Shelby Lenoir, don’t tell me you’re already drivin’ already. Or wait, don’t tell me you walked.”

  “We walked,” I told her.

  “Well, get out of town. What in heaven’s name is there around this little ol’ nowhere place to walk from?”

  “My house.” Farsanna put that in. And I liked her for that.

  Neesa peeked out from under a canopy of mascara. “Well, isn’t that sweet. Are y’all staying up late?” She waited until I met her eye. “You spending the night with the new girl there, Turtle?” The canopy lowered at me. “You always were the sweet little ol’ thing.”

  I patted my brother’s shoulder. “We gotta run. Things to do. Em, sugar, that was good of you, helping Momma that way, bless your heart. Comfort to have a strong man around. I know unplugging that upstairs commode was some kind of chore.”

  The slow, constant sway of Neesa’s hips, always seductive, even when she was standing in place, jerked to a stop. I’d done some damage at least.

  Already beginning to back up, I blew my brother a kiss. “You have a nice night, Emmy, honey. Run on home now and be good.”

  Em stepped forward and reached to catch hold of Sanna’s arm but she’d already turned and patted her leg for her Stray.

  “Sanna—” he began.

  Maybe she didn’t hear him, her attention having turned to the dog.

  And, just as we turned to leave, a truck parked near the back of the Dairy Queen turned on its lights and started its motor—not that it struck me as strange at the time.

  “For Emerson to like her,” Farsanna asked as we walked along the gravel shoulder in the dark, “you don’t want this?”

  It was another contraction, like maybe her speech at least was settling in. It occurred to me then that I liked that about her, the fact she was trying so hard, slowly scratching the exposed roots of her heart into our granite-soiled Ridge.

  I shrugged. “Men are generally idiots, you know. But the good ones don’t want to be all the time. They need our help not to be.”