Now she woke. Or thought she woke. The sound of someone weeping. She put her ear against Ming’s wall, only silence. But emanating through the wall, a smell sourish and feral, smell of a room with awful secrets. Wrapping her sleeping sarong tighter, Jess moved slowly down the hall. Downstairs, beside the kitchen a dim light shone from Run Run’s room. Jess moved fast thinking she was ill, then froze before the open door. Run Run in a rocking chair, wet-faced and rocking slowly, Pono sprawled weeping on the floor beside her, head and arms in Run Run’s lap. All around lay photo albums, snapshots of their mothers through the years, and of the granddaughters posed self-consciously with Pono. Photos of women, mostly women, husbands and sons peripheral, blurring off to crumbled edges where mucilage had dried.
Jess stood paralyzed. I have never seen her cry. It was like looking at the very fiber of a soul.
Lifting her head, Pono stared unseeing. “He forbids me. He will not let me tell.” She dropped her head again, shoulders, all of her—the massive beauty of this strange forbidding human—shaking, shuddering, like a child.
Running, stumbling through the halls, Jess felt she had swallowed a small, deadly animal, that it was lodged somewhere in her ribs, attacking her, gnawing its way out through her heart. She closed her door, leaned against it, terribly alert.
Something else is in this house. “He.” She said, “He.”
Someone had a grip on Pono. She was hostage to some past. It meant she was human, frail, not always in control. Jess slid to the floor, amazed, wondering if all these years, Pono’s demands on them were really needs disguised. “Her girls”—the only thing between her and the intrusive, outside world. Jess thought of the raw hunk of boar liver she could not swallow as a child. Maybe all these years we were Pono’s shield, the cheek within which she stored something she could not digest, yet could not tell.
She watched the easing of night, sly coming of dawn, and hung her head exhausted, thinking of her grandmother, the rest of the women in this house, each one such a raw, unique event, they seemed a miracle. Their frailties, conspiracies, their private deaths. There is so little left. We must not brutalize each other.
Later, from deep within the creaking house, she heard sweet native voices, Ann and Abe Dudoit singing in soft falsetto “Ke Kali Nei Au,” the classic “Hawaiian Wedding Song.” She pictured Pono lying on her bed, listening, wrung out from the night. She pictured Ming, too, holding her small pipe, cuddling it like a doll. Soon she would wake, fill it again, until the pellet glowed, became another cindered mummy. She would come to breakfast calm, her gestures slowed, pain a dog sleeping at her feet.
She lay back in bed, trying to see Ming in a new, a sympathetic, light. What was addiction, anyway? Another form of sleep. There had always been about her an innate lawlessness. Vanya was angrier, full of rhetoric, all knife-flash, no blood. But Ming was always the quiet anarchist. Jess thought with great sadness how much she loved her, how none of them could ever understand her pain. How that pain kept her in a state of grace, and how her addiction sustained that grace, waltzing her further and further outside the zone of other humans.
She thought of Rachel then, and how in the past month she had surprised Jess, showing a certain toughness and diplomacy regarding Ming.
“I’ve seen her every day for over twenty years,” she said. “I’ve watched what lupus does, the slow, inevitable, cellular deterioration. That’s what the doctors call it . . . cellular . . . deterioration. Do you know how many people go insane?”
Jess argued with her. “She should get into therapy, get psychological help. Or ask for stronger medication.”
Rachel had spun round so swiftly, Jess expected to be struck. “You! You come home on vacation with your round-trip air tickets. You sit here and judge. You and Vanya, with your busy lives, checking in now and then, like we’re just another port.”
She smiled then, her face so perfect it seemed to produce a glare. “I know what you both think of me. A paper doll, a toy, something Hiro dresses, undresses, plays with, puts aside. You have no idea what marriage is, what it takes. Yours lasted what, Jess? Eight years? Ten? I have been with one man . . . over . . . twenty-five years!”
She turned away then, not wanting Jess to see the weight of things. “When we were kids, I loved you. I still do. But life has intervened. There’s been no one to listen, no confessor. Only Ming. And I am here for her.”
“I only meant,” Jess said, “therapy might give some quality to her life, so I wouldn’t feel we’re losing her to that unspeakable stuff. Everyone’s in therapy in this day and age ...”
“What’s the day? What’s the age? Wake up, Jess. Our cousin’s dying.”
Jess’s shock was absolute. In the ensuing days, she saw a part of Rachel she had never known, resilience, a way of handling Ming, of letting Ming retain authority and dignity as the eldest cousin.
“Of course Pono knows,” Rachel said. “It’s killing her. But what is a little addiction, compared to what it could be. Ming racked and mindless, like something on a plate.”
At meals, she tenderly lifted Ming’s kimono sleeve from the guava jam, finished sentences when she got lost. At night she drifted in and out of Ming’s room like a rubber-soled nurse, her perfect face tacked on as a joke.
“She’s been like my child,” Rachel said. “A wise, old child, who teaches you the verities.”
“Like what?” Jess asked.
“That there isn’t much we can change. That each of us has our dirty little secret, our addiction. That we can only attend to that which we can attend to.” She paused, studied Jess. “You’d understand Ming’s needs if you came home more often. You’ve been dying to come home for years. Why do you hold back?”
I’ll end up like my mother. A sacrifice. Instead, she said other things. “Well, there’s my daughter . . . my practice ...”
“Your daughter’s gone. Your practice should be here. We need you, Jess.”
Now, exhausted, still fighting sleep, Jess drew cool sheets across her chest. “He.” Who is “He”? The word flickered, a flame that momentarily scorched the nostrils. Then pure fatigue turned everything to dreams.
Next day the house was very still, as if the women therein could not rouse themselves from sleep. Ming smoked and dreamed. Pono played old records, strummed her ‘ukulele, wept alone. Run Run cooked a meal, left the dishes covered, and dozed off in her rocker. In early evening, Jess sat up, something whistling through the riggings of her nerves. Disoriented, not knowing if it was dawn or dusk, not sure of the day, the hour, she groped her way down the hall towards the shrill ringing of a phone.
She lifted the receiver, talked a while, listened, inhaled deeply, and responded. Then slowly, dreamily, she groped her way back to her room and sat in a chair, facing the sea. Cautiously, in slow motion, she lifted a hand-mirror to her face, astounded, thinking how simple life was, how all the mysteries, riddles, the trick figures hidden in dreams, were often merely one’s reflection. And she thought how things that seemed to happen by chance were long ago seeded in one’s subconscious, how thought was incipient action.
That night at dinner, she looked round the table, not quite sure of her expression, if she looked happy, or confused.
“One of my associates at the clinic called today. I’ve been talking about leaving New York for years . . . they want to buy out my share of the practice.”
The table was silent, hands poised over plates. Ming smiled, nodding and nodding. Run Run twisted her napkin in her lap, trying to contain herself, big yellow teeth snaggling her grin.
Then Pono spoke, voice deep, contained. “Go back next month. Close your house, put your life in order. Be back here October for coffee harvesting.”
“Here?” Jess said.
“Here!” She banged her cane for emphasis. “Home. Where you belong.”
Ke One Haena
* * *
Barking Sands
PLANE TRAVEL DID THAT TO HER. She would feel the metallic chill, close her
eyes, and be standing again in a desert morgue looking at her mother’s feet. She leaned back in her seat on the flight bound for New York City, remembering her mother’s letters describing how Tuareg women had stained the soles of her feet with indigo dye, in miniature desert scenes of palm trees and figures in robes. The morgue attendant with murky, submarine eyes, had studied Jess while she studied her mother’s feet, as if she were planning to steal a part of her lower body.
. . . Tattoos had turned her soles soft blues and greens of bruises . . . little palm trees, swaying men. The attendant pointing repeatedly to her face, while I leaned closer to her feet. I had an image of that face, carried it with me. How she looked in death had nothing to do with it. My hand on her cold shoulder, wanting to sink my teeth into the curve of that shoulder out of grief. Morgue attendant sliding her away. My hand seeming to enlarge, a lobster’s fighting claw. I wanted her back, wanted to know her . . .
.. . A morgue in Tamanrasset, Algerian oasis town dead-center in the Sahara. Three and a half million square miles of sand. Mother, for Godsake, why? . . .
Jess sighed, pulled an airline blanket tight around her shoulders. In half sleep she remembered the tiny airport outside Tamanrasset, tarmac landing strip, bronze-colored men in tunics, camel pants. One of them approaching. She remembered eyes of an Oriental slant, cheekbones broad and high, hands long and graceful like leather cured in sun. He had the air of an impoverished prince swathed in faded blue head wrap and billowing blue tunic. Under a pollen of dust, his feet had a greenish cast like old seamed jade, arches carved, beautifully high. Rassi ould Mahmould ould Sheddadi. He had been her mother’s lover for two years.
. . . And then that drive through desert in his oxidizing van. Nothing, only spindly acacias, camel skeletons, abandoned cars of foreigners who had disappeared. Why had they left their cars? Were they searching for water? Rassi shaking his head, saying it was something else. “La Baptême de la Solitude. Often, they feel . .. they are called” . . .
Then, Tamanrasset. Tourists in virulently colored Western clothes looking cheap beside blue-robed Tuaregs, so lordlike in their stride. A single paved street, dirt alleys radiating off in all directions, concrete dwellings behind mud walls. Inside one wall lay swaddled infants, flies lining their eyes like sequins. A woman in black robes had smiled shyly from a doorway.
. . . That dwelling, a place built of concrete blocks the size of a single-car garage. Mother’s home for two years . . . living there with Rassi, his wives, five children, Mother supporting all of them. When she first wrote of her “oasis” I pictured courtyards, trickling fountains . . . a mosque-like house with onion domes. Mother perfumed, draped in robes, servants in gauzy trousers . . .
Jess had stepped inside that dwelling and half learned what she had never learned, yet knew so well. It was never happiness her mother sought, but something else. Forgiveness, perhaps. The place had been immaculate, like a Vermeer, bare except for sleeping rugs, blankets, a tray and tea glasses. And a clue to a life she would never know: smoke of cindered desert branch mixed with odor of goat and camel.
... Rassi showing me her paintings, one canvas repeated and repeated: palm trees, swaying natives, an ocean looming and endless. Mother’s life spent painting the wished-for innocence of childhood in the Pacific . . . Rassi’s wives staring at me, robes half drawn across their faces like confessional curtains between us. Pale, boy-hipped, face nondescript, brown hair shorn like a recruit. How could I, they must have wondered, have been her daughter? People had always wondered. Even I had wondered . . .
And then a two-day camel ride deeper into the Sahara, to Assekrem, religious retreat, where her mother had spent many hours. “This man,” she told Rassi, “. . . this seer my mother confided in, I want to meet him.”
Blinding sands, stones cracking in the sun. Rassi with his soft, elastic tread, tending fires, brewing tea. And frigid nights, the moon massive, close enough to freeze her cheek. And heat, oppressive sense of carrion: flesh of the newly dead withering on bone stalks, great pickets of camel ribs, once a human skull inside a half-buried suitcase.
. . . How had she survived there? So close to death, maybe the automatic response was to fight back, to live. Until one got past wanting to . . .
Jean-Marie, part hermit/priest, part seer and medicine man for the Tuaregs. His hermitage in the Hoggar Mountains was two stone huts just beneath a sandstone mountain top. A wiry old man with rather sad, juridical eyes, he had ceremoniously poured green tea, then led Jess to a tiny chapel in one of the huts where her mother often meditated.
. . . Sitting there facing the altar, letting the room work on me. Wanting to feel her presence, feeling nothing ...
For a moment, Jess had thought she smelled Mitsouko, the perfume her mother wore for years. It came and went, quick syllable, profit of a wish. She had dropped her head, recalling fragments of her mother’s letters.
. . . We tend to wash piecemeal with basins and rags at the points d’eau, keeping clean, and on the move. . . .
. . . You ask if I’m lonely. The desert has nothing to do with loneliness. Its more a solution. Here, everything counts. The smallest word, gesture has enormous power. It redeems, leaves you pure like a child. . ..
Jess had pictured her then, swimming into the dunes, giving in to the undertow. The thought of it filled her with such grief she wanted to rip the chapel apart with her teeth. What good had praying done her mother? She had died alone, mouth gaping sand. Later Jess stood with the hermit sage, looking out over the desert, the sandstone Hoggars recalling dreamlike and misty extinct volcanoes.
“We did not discuss religion,” he said. “Much of her time was spent here on the terrace, brooding.” He waved his hand at thousands of miles, empty beyond sensing. “Your mother came because she loved the view. It reminded her of the Pacific, to which she could never return.”
Jess had thought he was trying to trick her, hide from her that her mother had become a zealot, a convert, perhaps she had gained clairvoyance, something he would not share.
He continued, as if talking to a child. “You are searching for a solution to something you imagine as irreducible about your mother. She was not that complicated. Your father died, you were beginning your own life, travel was her way of mourning. As for her paintings, I think her greatest work of art was herself. All in all, she had managed. She survived.”
“Can’t you tell me any more?” Jess had practically begged him. “I need to understand why she died. I have to live with this ...”
He sighed, gave what he could. “Her death was not intentional. Nor was it accidental. She walked too far into the dunes without water. Fasting had become a habit. Or a test. That is all, my child.”
She left the hermitage empty-handed, no answers, no clues. In Tamanrasset, she had given her mother’s clothes to Rassi’s wives, then slid her canvases into cardboard cylinders. At the airstrip, Rassi stood beside her, radiant with the unsaid. She suspected he had loved her mother very much. Beyond her lush beauty and generosity, she had possessed an innocence like an invisible shield nature had placed around her. Rassi would have protected her, defended that shield to the death. They embraced, then he stood waving, immaculate against the sands.
On the small plane out of Tamanrasset, Jess’s hand had slid up and down the cardboard cylinders, remembering how her father had referred to her mother’s painting as a “hobby,” not as a way of belittling her talent, as much as a way of keeping her attention focused on him. That night she lay on her bed in a hotel in Algiers, a leather box on her stomach.
. . . Her ashes. The weight of it. Picking the box up, walking around thinking, “This is my mother.” Remembering her raw moods, tearing off jewelry and clothes, yelling at my father, how they were placeless, without family or blood, how they lived like Gypsies, and how would their child be normal?. . . My fear that she wouldn’t know how to stop tearing things, that she would begin tearing at her skin . . . Then, her gentle, dreamy moods bringing me relief, hoping the go
od moods would outlast the bad and she wouldn’t go insane . . .
With a sense of fatigue, Jess had opened a box of old snapshots, her mother and father. Her mother, a child, held in Pono’s lap. Her mother holding Jess. She studied the pictures, then opened one of her mother’s journals.
. . . this snapshot of me rollicking in mud of taro patches, Mama dark, stately, watching. And chasing mongoose across lava shelves, and running, running to her, from her. Then running forever with Vernon, pale and blond . . . running from the horror, what she told . ..
... like that snapshot in Vernon’s trunk. His father in Decatur, Alabama, 1921. Wearing a white robe, funny cone-shaped hood. Behind him other men in robes and hoods, and masks with eyeholes. Peekaboo. I could smell the kerosene, hear the crackling wood, the flaming cross. That night, afraid to lie down beside him, locking myself in another room, falling asleep on my feet like a horse . . .
.. . This snapshot has always puzzled me. Emperor Hirohito and his wife, walking their palace grounds, their dog beside them, leaping and yapping in the sun. Two days before Hiroshima. I never understood that dog. Didn’t he know what was coming? Aren’t animals intuitive? Each time I see this photo I think of Vernon taking me home to meet his folks in Alabama. Didn’t he know what was coming?. . . A doorbell ringing, curtain twitching, his folks looking through a window at my skin. How long we rang that bell! And no one ever answered . . .
. . . couldn’t go forward, couldn’t go back. Life lived on the point of a pin. Thank God Jess’s skin is pale like his. Life will not test her every day. Strangers won’t stare . ..
... the years . . . and every summer Jess comes back from Kona deeply tanned, Hawaiian working its way out from the blood. Something registering in Vernon’s eyes, until her skin fades again, the paleness of an Anglo ...
. . . Then Vernon’s skin becoming something else, ballooning like layers of mushrooms. Loss of thirty pounds. He remembers sweeping decks of U.S. Naval ships in the Marshalls in the ‘50s. They were testing Atom bombs. He remembers rash, vomitting, and then it went away . . .
Shark Dialogues Page 36