The cat always found the family, a wandering family that left one house for another because it was easier to take the path unwritten than it was to settle down and tally how many: cups of tea sipped, pounds of rice soaked, coats of paint brushed, roses clipped, light bulbs changed, prayers recited, funerals attended, days, weeks, months, and years elapsed, since the war began. It was easier to fill and unpack boxes than it was to admit that the red rug looked rather at home in the living room. And it was wiser to choose the day and time of departure and arrival. The family came to the new neighborhood, put down rugs, positioned furniture, unpacked clothes and dishes, cut open and devoured a watermelon, adjusted the TV antennas, watered lawn and tree, planted flowers and herbs, hid treasures, set clocks and polished mirrors, cooked a meal, hung curtains and a swing, and soon after the cat appeared in the yard, or by the back door, or sometimes inside the house, curled on a shirt or a skirt, in a closet or beneath one of the girls’ beds.
The girls loved the cat, and each with a child’s ardor, one that suffered love on an enormous scale, in magnitudes at odds with their own small statures or the size of the thing beloved. They loved with an ardor that utilized all parts and faculties: hands, eyes, scent, teeth, heart, dreams, appetite, memory, and breath. The girls recognized the cat as their own upon its initial appearance, saw it first as fur and ears and lit eyes, then perceived an outline drawn around its small form, a neat contour that distinguished the cat from all that surrounded it, all that was new and strange and limitless, and belonged to others. And although they had never had or held one before, the cat was theirs upon arrival, and introduced itself as such, though it did not speak, had no words. And each time the cat arrived, in a black or a striped or a spotted coat, with blue or green or golden eyes, it made itself at home among the family, in the house, beneath the car, in the tree, and in the neighborhood, which was new to the family but not to the cat who knew its conduits and its hiding places.
With the sisters, the cat played and purred alternately. It hid silently behind doors or beneath tables, then pounced suddenly on their shuffling feet or tapping fingers. It lay across their books or their backs as they read for school or studied ants. From its higher perches, atop the refrigerator or in the limbs of the tree, it leapt noiselessly to land in and swing from their long hair. The cat woke them in the night to stare deeply into their eyes and hum soothingly into their chest cavities. By day, thin red lines appeared across their skin, running the length of the girls’ forearms or across the backs of their hands, though the playful cat was not to be seen. The cat, which enjoyed play as much and as often as the girls did, kept its nails sharpened, its whiskers groomed, and all lids over its bright eyes ajar.
And the sisters did not fight over the cat because the cat belonged to each girl and was devoted to her alone. It was in five places at once and attuned itself accordingly, becoming humble, silly, or ferocious, light in weight or upright in posture. It fell in line with each sister, knew who moved with ease and who moved sharply, understood who was and was not speaking to whom else, sensed who was and was not dreaming when the lights went out. And each sister held the cat close, shared with it her best secrets, and kept for it her tastiest morsels at dinner.
But where the cat went or what it did when the sisters were not looking, not petting, or pulling, or chasing, no sister knew. In regard to its nocturnal practices and wanderings, the only certainty was that the cat always returned. Whether gone for hours or for days, it faithfully came home, always their cat, yet each time altered. And attempts by the two small brave sisters to follow it out into the night disclosed none of the cat’s secrets. Instead, the sisters’ ventures revealed a neighborhood changed by moonlight and silhouette, a place unfamiliar, filled with shadows deep and shadows tall into which the cat leapt and disappeared. The neighborhood at night was a place shifting. Houses shrank as the sisters neared them, and cars and street lamps receded so that a block that was now fifteen houses in length was in the next moment fifty. Trees doubled in size to tower over telephone poles, and shrubs ballooned to block interior lights streaming forth from windows, while porch lights flickered and grew faint. And lawns, still twinkling with the sprinkler’s dew, like many small lakes, swallowed toys left out by children now in bed, to grow denser, darker.
The sisters, who would not disturb the night, peeled off shoes to walk with bare feet, and took in soft, measured breaths, not eager to steal oxygen from the respiring trees, which swayed deeply though no breeze lifted the sisters’ hair. With limber necks, they peeked beneath cars, over neighbors’ walls, and under the lids of trash bins, but the cat remained elusive. They turned two corners and found themselves again on the same street, in front of the same house. When they stopped to wonder, they saw that: puddles reflected more than starlight; flowers, which had closed at dusk, now bloomed again in colors richer and emanated scents sweeter; large sycamore leaves, in twos, stepped, not aimlessly, down sidewalks and up walkways; stones stirred, disappeared, then rematerialized ten steps away; and street lamps pulsed blue then red as if the stars themselves had alighted in the sleeping neighborhood. As their eyes adjusted, the sisters came to see that within shadows resided deeper shadows still, and from the depths of the darkest corners, eyes languid and eyes alert appeared and watched them in return. Where initially they’d strained to hear distant horns in the night, they now heeded each crackle, whir, slosh, and sigh by their sides or at their heels. The sisters were not afraid. The trees spoke, and the flowers spoke, and the stars whispered. And all that they said was wonderful. The sisters looked about them and laughed. They grabbed each other’s hands and skipped back home, jumping puddles, kicking stones, and left the cat to its own amusements.
anger
When Mother was angry, she was like a dragon: her fiery breath blew hot words through the halls and doorways of the house, singed the sisters’ brows or the fine hairs on their long arms and legs, and melted the cubes of ice in their cups. Mother’s breath created hotspots in the corners of rooms, and eddies over the sisters’ heads, forcing their hair upright, to sway and swirl like small tornadoes, which made their heads nod yes or shake no in answer to her questions: “Did I not ask you three times this morning to take down and wash and iron the curtains?” or “Did we leave everything and everyone behind to bring you here to speak and dress and behave like this?” or “Was it you who hid your sister’s book in the rice bin?” And the offending sister who liked to wear her hair in braids had them undone by the turning, hot currents of Mother’s words. And the sister-in-trouble whose hair was loose was left with it knotted in a great mass and standing askew on her head when Mother was done with her. Before her anger erupted, Mother swelled, measuring her intake of air, first shallow, then deep, first rapid, then deliberate. And the girls sensed this recalibration of Mother’s great instrument long before Mother spoke, long before she entered the rooms they occupied: one sister felt it on her face, on the side not covered with the telephone receiver, another felt it brush across her fingers, which held a pencil raised above a sheet of paper. And each sister froze in space and time and took the opportunity before the storm to assess her day and her actions, those taken and those not accomplished, those categorized and those forgotten across the stretch of day. And each sister wondered, is it me? And if me, how shall I brace myself, let me first put aside my homework lest it get scorched, let me hang up the telephone and move gently across the linoleum to the kitchen sink to finish rinsing the pile of dishes, so as to counter Mother’s impending words with the chiming of glasses and the tinkling of spoons and forks. But much like the dragon’s scorching breath, just as suddenly as it appeared, her anger dissipated, and the girls were left with a glow on their cheeks.
When Father was angry, the house filled with a white fluff, like the cotton he’d picked and cleaned as a boy for his mother to spin on her wheel, and which he now seemed to unspin back to the natural fiber—rarely, a sister listening might make out the whir of their grandmother’s spinn
ing wheel and guess Father had somehow brought that machine with him, managed to sneak it past the guards and out of the first country, in one of his many pockets, perhaps. The white stuff that was Father’s anger was born in the remotest parts of the house: the inner corners of closets where Father kept his old shoes, his umbrella, and his holy book, and the spaces around the appliances he maintained for the family—the nooks behind and beneath the refrigerator, the washer, and the dryer. The cotton stuff silently filled these spaces first, generally unknown to the sisters, who went about their day, ignorant and noisy. But once started, Father’s anger did not retreat, as Mother’s did when she found herself rushing in judgment or felt herself unfair (Mother’s memory kept her always in two worlds—that of motherhood and that of her own girlhood, so it was not difficult for her to feel with and for her daughters). No, Father’s disapproval had a mission and would fulfill it. His anger grew silently and after filling the quiet spaces of the house, it softly tumbled out of the closets, the doors of which gave to the growing pressure from within, and pushed out from the sides and tops of the large appliances. Father’s anger-like-cotton fell forth in silent clumps and grew into small hills. It moved down the hall, along baseboards and over rugs. It climbed up the corners of each room while the girls played or read or cooked, each busy and unknowing until the last moment when, looking up, they saw the avalanche and panicked at its imminent cascade upon their heads. Or they felt it from below: tipping their chairs this way and that; lifting their arms so that they dropped and immediately lost markers and crayons, nail polish or forks, in the white clouds; causing them to spill water or tea on the Eastern rugs, which were now no longer visible, covered as they were with Father’s unspoken disapproval. The billowing mountains muffled the girls’ voices, covered their ears and their eyes, left them floating in a white fluff. The movable sisters feared Mother’s tempest but were more affected by Father’s silent disapproval, which was rare and potent with its enveloping, noiseless pressure. His anger did not make them take action as Mother’s did. Instead it made them consider, forced them to turn inward, to knit their brows and become humble.
scene
The girls jump. The planet spins. And when their feet find earth again, they find themselves in a new yard, in a different neighborhood, welcomed by the grandfather tree—who does/does not travel—and peered at from beneath the rosebushes by a new cat with the old familiar eyes.
brother, sister
The two are small boys, aged five and six. They chase each other about their neighborhood, down alleys and over mounds of refuse and rubble. They throw stones and make faces at one another, call each other the cruelest, dirtiest names they can muster or imagine with their small-boy minds. They hide behind the trunks and in the canopies of trees, climb them to reach ripe fruit, to rob nests of colorful eggs, or to spy over walls into yards and through windows. They have recently met and are friends already. The five-year-old is new to the neighborhood. He goads the older boy and lets him hold the lizard he has captured. He shows him the large scab on his elbow and drops pears into the waiting boy’s outstretched shirt. He whistles and snaps his fingers and the older boy, with diligence and aspiration, learns to do the same. They line up marbles and squint their eyes. They squat as the adult men squat; they spit, and click their tongues. The foreign soldier passing the boys in the alleyway pays them no heed. He stops beside a house, looks over its garden wall, enters its yard through its back gate to use its outhouse. He has leaned his rifle against the outer wall of the house, beside the gate. The younger boy does not hesitate. He runs over and picks up the heavy automatic rifle. He has seen it used more than a few times. He knows how to hold it, how to engage and release it, and he uses his whole body to brace the machine. He yells to the other boy, “Look up, look up to the sky!” The older boy looks up, squints, makes out a hawk circling high up in the air. The boy with the machine gun empties it of its rounds into the squinting boy’s body, in a straight line from the ground to the sky. The older boy is split in two cleanly, vertically. His two halves fall backward and away from each other onto the dusty earth. The soldier, hearing the shots, runs from the outhouse, the yard, climbs and jumps the front gate of the house into the busy street, races down the hillside, down into the city below, leaves his helmet, his gun behind. The younger boy too falls backward, under the weight of the gun. He scrambles out from beneath it, runs to his house, to his grandmother and his sisters, in the wrong direction, bewildered. The boy split in two lies staring with dust-coated eyes at two separate skies. The hawk returns to circle in one of them. One by one the people of the neighborhood venture out. They scream, they heave air, and else; they run from and return to the body; they pull at their hair and chew on their knuckles and on their sleeves.
The cleaved boy’s mother is brought to him. She sees her son in two, two small halves, neat, mirror images separated by a pool of red, she falls to her knees, silent, unable to take in what is before her, she is herself split, never the same again. The break is instantaneous. In her mind, she returns to the days of her own childhood, becomes sister to her small daughter, becomes a muttering and obedient servant to her husband, who soon takes on a new wife, younger, keener, not unhappy to take the position of first wife. The mother/child/sister/servant ages even as she lapses back into her childhood. Her dark, flowing, silken hair transforms into a white woolly heap on her shoulder. Her morning-dew skin grows leathery. Her teeth twist and turn, crack and brown in her mouth. Her eyes lose their acuity and turn inward. Sleeping under quilts next to a fire one winter night, she dreams of a long-ago school outing to the city’s flour mill and stretches her feet into the nucleus of the coals, which take her toes gladly. Her young daughter/sister dreams of a roast goat on a spit, and waking, smells it roasting still. She finds her mother asleep next to her, unconscious, unperturbed, unaware of her toes burning among the coals, toes melted, then fused again. The cleaved woman can nevermore walk on her feet. She further ages, is bent farther forward in body, further back in mind. She is a child, a not-yet-wife, a not-yet-mother standing over a small boy who is split down the middle and lies in two in the dust with his sundered eyes bound skyward. The transmuted woman’s daughter/sister, now mother/servant to her, metamorphoses into a beautiful young woman herself. She betrays her legacy and exhibits the silken black hair, the soft milky skin, the steady, knowing eyes. And though many come to win her hand, she does not marry. She is her mother/sister/daughter’s keeper. She bathes the leathered skin and combs the rough woolly hair on the aged woman. She brings the tea and sweets and lays the cushions and quilts nightly. She empties the bedpan and dances while her mother plays the tambourine and jubilantly sings the early songs. She ushers the guests away from her mother’s hidden quarter of the house, keeps her mother engaged while her siblings, her step-mother, and her father attend the parties, the parades, and the festivals.
coil
And all that winds will unwind.
the sisters did not fight
The sisters did not fight. They simmered, dug into memories of yesterday or yesteryear, and excavated old hatreds for one another. They revisited old hurts caused by this or that sister to add to their personal brew of present anger and new grief; each sister kept a bubbling cauldron into which she regularly dropped her hurts. They picked old scabs, nearly healed, and added these too. They stirred in Mother’s look of admonishment from the breakfast table, that silent but potent drop of “never-you-mind” or “shhh, not in front of the guests” or “sinful, insolent girl.” Each sister tended her own cauldron, though sometimes two or three gathered around a single large pot to whisper and bemoan shared injustices, to stir and stew, to add their own heat for fuel and gripes for flavor. They sprinkled in grievances over promises not kept, rights denied by, or injustices suffered at the hands of, the offending sister. And the sister unloved was always a different one, though each had her preferred target/offender. Into the dark and cloudy brew, they dropped in and pushed under those possessions esp
ecially prized by the hated sister—pages from her beloved book, a single earring, a section of her dark hair clipped in the night, her best music cassette, a doll’s shoe, a blue jay’s tail feather.
And as she stirred, the wounded sister swore and, beneath her breath, recited rhyming hexes using both of her two tongues. The pot sputtered and popped, it spewed its caustic solution into the air, onto the girl’s hair or clothing or bare feet, which scalded and blistered and formed new scabs. This cooking and stirring and this regular adding of fuel and seasoning soothed the sisters to a small and necessary degree. But it was not a release in any true sense. No, the sisters did not fight. They held in and held back anger, spite, and hurt. Each nursed her own cauldron of unexpressed emotions and when she felt she could no longer keep it in, when she felt that her pot might crack from the heat of all that was unsaid, she simply dipped her cup into the murky, hot liquid, filled it to the brim, and drank from it swiftly but deeply with tightly shuttered eyes and plugged nose. Then she went on with her day as if all were right with the world and in the house.
The five sisters suffered to keep peace within the walls of their home while conflict festered within their small bodies and in the distant and war-sealed country that was their birthland. They deceived nearly all who saw them with: their large, sweet eyes; their timid, smiling lips; their deference and modesty, worn well; their eagerness to help and serve; their quiet tones—unmusical, unpretentious; their spare frames and spindly limbs; their colorful and peculiar, thrift-store and hand-me-down garb. They were slight but cavernous, unassuming but knowing. Early on they had been entrusted with the darkest secrets of the human heart and mind. They understood the power of words spoken and understood that words kept in held equal power. The utterance of a few words in jest had put their young uncle into an early grave, a mass grave, with others still breathing. The utterance of their father’s name on national television, broadcast belatedly, a week after their silent departure from that first country, had fallen on the relieved ears of the few family members who’d been burdened with and kept the fleeing family’s secret. But the list had contained the names of many others who did not have the means or the forethought to escape, and each name spoken was a sentence passed.
Above Us the Milky Way Page 11