Above Us the Milky Way

by Fowzia Karimi

  It was first and foremost from Mother that the girls had inherited this desire to please with gifts made by hand and with tenderness. Mother looked on with the same quiet smile as her birthday-daughter opened Mother’s gift, and the one “from Father,” wrapped in the same paper. Mother was a fount of giving, and never tired of it, was rather made larger, pulsed brighter by it. On Sundays, she prepared her meals with this same intention. And the aromas that wafted beneath doors and out to the farthest edges of the garden, down to the ends of the block, whichever block they lived on that year, called in each girl, Father, and the cat long before it was time to gather to eat. Mother cooked a food that fed their noses, their eyes, their tongues, their stomachs, their dreams. The meals she imbued with her love fed them to the bottoms of their feet, and its effects traveled further still through those feet and deep into the ground to come up elsewhere, the girls were sure, as flowers and herbs, as clear mountain springs or brilliant rainbows, as agates and opals.

  The family were always bringing forth something new into the world. Father planted trees that bore peaches and apricots, sometimes on the same tree, bushes that churned out rose upon rose, onions and potatoes that multiplied, as the girls did, unseen and furtively. He constructed tables and ladders, and under his quick and steady hand, brick walls went up. In the garden, the sisters stretched a bed sheet this way and that way, hung a lamp, gathered the neighborhood cats, dogs, rabbits, and birds, painted their faces, and a circus was announced. Mother set out an old nightgown and a sister made a new top and a purse with it. Pictures were cut out from old schoolbooks to make masks or to people a cardboard train. Socks became dolls, and twigs were lumber for the doll’s house. When a thing expired, another was born of it.

  The materials were all around them; their lives were unsteady. Their imaginations were fertile and restive; the distant goings-on made them so. Their own strange, unfolding history in a bright and sheltered land made them so. When a sister felt unmoored, she cast out her yarn and took out her knitting needles, or she painted the solar system and its imaginary ellipses and marked her place along one of them. When Mother remembered her lost loved ones, she rolled out dough and cut it into neat long strips, hung them to dry, and the next day cooked her dead sister’s favorite noodle dish for her daughters. In the house, the transfiguration of the used into the new, the overlooked into the wondrous, the pain into delight, this was common, was necessary, and was, in nature, devotional.

  tireless

  And though the sky had no feet, it seemed to the sisters that it walked and walked tirelessly around them, dawn to dusk to dawn again, year after year, neighborhood after neighborhood.

  But they also sensed in their slender bodies that it was they who whirled and whirled endlessly. It was they who careened through the blinking heavens.

  conveyance

  The sister-always-flitting-skipping-sprinting caught a glimpse of the cat in the corner of her eye as she bounded diagonally across the yard, from the scorching patio, over the hissing sprinklers, to the back gate, up which she routinely liked to climb barefoot, and over which she liked to keep an eye on the goings-on in the alleyway the gate bordered. Having spotted the cat, she stopped before the gate and, rather than climbing it, leapt again over the sprinklers in a direction perpendicular to the fence to slide into the cool, dry, shade under Father’s grape arbor. The cat, unperturbed, lay in a corner stretched out along the arbor’s trellis; the sister sat cross-legged in front of it, so that the two met eye to eye. She looked over her shoulder and about her, across the expanse of lawn and toward the house: she and the cat were alone. The midday sun kept the others indoors; Mother’s cooking on a Sunday drew them to her circle. The animated sister settled down and began to match her breath to the cat’s idle, resonant purr, and tried to elongate her pupils to match the cat’s vertical slits. The cat stared. The sister stared. The two respired in synchrony.

  The sun pushed its rays through the grape leaves onto the cat and the sister’s fur and hair, warming them in patches. The sister and the cat gazed at one another. The sprinklers pattered softly across lawn, rosebush, and patio in the distance. And then the girl fell, head-first, into a slumber that was not a slumber, into a world that was mirror-image to her own world in all but one way: here the cat spoke in the sister’s first tongue. Yes, the cat, in this world, very plainly spoke in the sister’s birth tongue. And the cat asked the sister, do you truly enjoy running through and leaping over the odious wet sprinklers? To the cat, the sister looked happy enough, her wild hair swinging across her shoulders, her flushed face revealing teeth and tongue, which released the intermittent whoop and roar as she bounded here and there. Or have your Mother or sisters doled out the terrible punishment because you have misbehaved again? Have they discovered your collections of dead flies and beetles? The cat stared and waited for an answer. It was familiar with the family’s ways but didn’t always comprehend them. The cat waited. The sister purred.

  boy

  He was not a soldier: not a rebel soldier, not a soldier by training or by force, not any kind of ————. He had picked up a rock. And then a second, and a third, and a fourth, and so on, until his fists were like two large, knobby ——————, his mother said. He held fast to the rocks-smooth and rocks-jagged, clenched tightly his fingers around them until blood ran over his knuckles and up his forearms. He was not innocent; they said his eyes were like coals, his lips like barbed wire. His fists were two large, ripe pomegranates, she said.

  look out!

  Look in,

  says the book.

  the library

  And the sister who reads, who has just learned to fathom the new alphabet, on any day of the week, after school, or before a trip to the sea on a Saturday morning, is called to the library by a force not dissimilar in strength to the one that draws her to the ocean’s edge. She enters the great public institution, and makes her way to the shelves that hold the tales. The fairy tales, the ghost stories, the adventures, and the mysteries have drawn her across the valley, down the streets, up the avenues, past the convenience stores, the mechanic shop, and the basketball courts. Once inside the quiet sanctuary, she finds her way to the tales and reaches for the books, stoops for the books, fits her small frame through the narrowest spaces to angle for those that have called her. These books have made promises and will keep their promises of adventure, fright, kinship, wisdom, and wonder. On the shelves she finds the faded-thumbed volumes. Between their pages the sister discovers the beautiful forms, the ancient forms, and the novel forms. And it is all an enchantment to her. She is spellbound. The fairy tale, perfectly and concisely, illuminates the marvels of the world and categorizes its atrocities. How brilliant! The dead haunt the passages of the ghost stories and, through their wailing, rattling, and floating, defy the grave and impart sweet terror! Sublime. The romance brings the sister and her true kin, the fearless harpooneers, together on the roiling seas. At last! The library has a limit of 11 books and the sister walks home each week testing her strength and her balance with three adventures, five ghosts, myriad friends and foes, and immeasurable wonder in her arms.

  wind/unwind

  Everyday, the girls feel the wind/unwind of the coiled universe. They are one moment child, one moment aged: a result of too much growth while tender. The sisters, unnatural, share in common: a much quickened metabolism, a ravenous appetite for things living and dead; nails and hair that pay no heed to clippers or scissors; a history that holds fast to their small bodies to pillage the present of peace and security, great and small. The sisters were not born old but age was fast at their heels and with it wisdom unnatural to children, a wisdom that marked them, shaped them, aged them. When the sisters are simply girls, the other self is forgotten, and literally behind them. They are human chimera, split in half, a child on one side, an aged woman on the other. Each faces her own direction, but somewhere within, at the meeting place of the two, perhaps at the heart, the gut, where time is irrelevant, each is
aware of the other. When the child is tired, the old woman bends further forward to carry her on her back, to put her to bed, and lay her down to a child’s dream. When the old woman is disheartened, the girl makes her a cup of tea, sits her down on the softest chair in the house, tells her a child’s story about the earthworm or the helicopter, and plays her a song in the second tongue, which the old woman’s mind cannot decipher, but which nonetheless tickles her ear and makes her smile. The one climbs trees and skips rope; the other waits and watches, counts the days and the dead, and prays to the heedless male god. This wind/unwind between innocence and burden pierces the surface of the earth where it is soft, leaving many holes in the neat and manicured grass in the yard. And Father treats the lawn with gopher poison, unaware of his daughters’ drilling, thinking the past is his alone, shouldered by his thin frame alone, thinking he has sheltered his girls sufficiently. This turning of faces, girl-to-hag-to-girl, exhausts the old woman and electrifies the small child. The withered hag, she is ready for the grave, her feet drill in, kick dirt up. The child darts up the tree’s trunk to drape her limbs around those of the tree, singing nonsense with her child’s mouth, a mouth still new and discovering. She whistles and chirps. She attempts the finch’s song. She dangles her limbs, releases her hair. She suctions her cheeks to suspend a long string of saliva out into space. In these moments, her disregard for gravity, blatant and wild, slows time, rebalancing the ratio between the two rulers. She alone exists, she, her saliva, and the grass below, all suspended.

  J

  J      o      y      . And we had it in abundance! It made the brightest scenes more vivid, and bloomed even in the darkest corners. It was something to cultivate while we turned our eyes away from what besieged us. We were never without the war; its long tendrils traveled smartly, using shortcuts to find us at work or school, singing over a birthday cake, or delivering a new plant into the garden soil. Joy, a precious thing, a thing to procure at every turn, to draw from the most modest of sources, to raise with gentle caresses and soft encouragements. We were adept at finding and cultivating joy. And well aware of its worth and its power.

  confetti

  The girls spent hours and took turns making confetti out of old homework, colorful drawings, or mail catalogues using the hole puncher. For occasions special or nonexistent, they spent entire afternoons after school cooking great feasts, plastering the walls of the living room with garlands and bows, and setting up a restaurant using the sofa cushions, cardboard boxes, Mother’s linens and china, and roses picked from Father’s garden. They wrote up menus and dressed as waiters, cooks, and musicians, covering their faces with black ink to fashion mustaches and beards, or applying Mother’s lipstick to color cheeks and lips. They drew the curtains and blinds and lit candles to transform day into night. And when they heard the key in the front door, they all ran to it to toss confetti over Mother and Father, to take their bags, jackets, and shoes from them, to lead them to their table in the middle of the living room floor. And Father enjoyed ordering items not on the menu. And Mother said of everything, “delicious!” And the two youngest sisters stepped out in the traditional dress of the first country, in costumes over or undersized and loosely authentic, made up of items gathered from every family member’s closet. While the older sisters, the tired and perspiring cooks and waiters, looked on from the kitchen, the youngest took the stage to sing, dance, and play the two traditional instruments the family owned, but which none could play with the least skill. And Father clapped to the music and Mother showered the girls with confetti and praise.

  Mother, Father

  The girls admired Mother in the bathroom mirror as she unwrapped rollers from her hair, or ran mascara over her lashes, or plucked her eyebrows, or applied color to her lips, and did these things without fuss, expertly, and often without looking. They marveled at how, leaning into the sink, in high heels, she zipped up her skirt with one hand and simultaneously put on an earring with the other. Or how with hairpins between her teeth and a hair dryer held over her head, she gossiped with the older girls about the previous weekend’s party and mused about the coming evening’s attendees. While they were girls, Mother was a woman and something else entirely. Mother wore a slip and stockings. She fastened and unfastened jewelry and her bra with long, shaped fingernails, elegantly painted. When she left the bathroom, she left it smelling of perfume and hair spray. And the sensitive sister coughed and gagged and returned to the living room. And the sister accompanying her parents to the party stayed behind to absorb Mother’s scent and to study her own lips in the mirror.

  Father, in front of the mirror, as elsewhere, was unhurried and meticulous. He drew out his razor, shaving cream, brush, and cup—articles pristine though used a thousand times and transported from the first land—and neatly laid them in order on a hand towel beside the sink. The sisters lingering in the door watched him lather cream with tepid water in the tin cup and spread it over his face, from one to the other ear, over his lip, and under his chin, using the soft round brush. And the helpful sister learned to lather the shaving cream for him, and the curious sister was allowed to brush it over her own cheeks and used her fingers to clear paths and make patterns across her face in the white foam. The girls watching squinted and braced themselves as he drew the shiny razor over his tautly held chin and along the corners of his mouth. The sister who thought she might grow up to be like Father recorded his gestures as he made the knot in his tie or combed his hair close to his head.

  the valley

  In summer, by day, the valley is scorched and the girls run from freezer to sprinkler to fan. The doing of homework, packing of lunches, wrapping-about of sweaters and scarves, raking of leaves, cooking of stews, tucking of blankets all cease and are replaced by the refilling of ice cube trays, donning of shorts, lifting higher of t-shirts and hair, fanning of necks, chasing of musical trucks, unwrapping of sticky-sweet treats, licking of pink or blue dye off wrists and kneecaps.

  In summer, at night, the greedy valley clutches its heat and the girls leave their bedrooms to lie five across on the living room floor. And the industrious sister pulls the sheets off their beds, moistens and wrings them in the tub, and spreads them over the hot bellies and legs of the not-sleeping sisters. And the fidgety sister rises to open all windows and doors and tramples on shins and knuckles as she steps over the sprawled, sweltering bodies in the dark. And the thirsty sister alternately sucks and rubs ice cubes over her face, her shoulders, her arms, and finally lets them melt in the pool that is her bellybutton. And the sisters curse the sun, long set, and though they beseech, the wind sends not a breeze.

  two

  The sisters were five and divided down the middle into two groups of three. The first group consisted of: the first-born, the second-born, and the middle child. Mother and Father called them the Girls. Girls, because they were not yet women, though they carried laundry and the younger sisters on their narrow hips with ease. Girls, because their strength and their wisdom had earned them the title. The second group—made up of the baby, the fourth-born, and again the middle child—were called the Children by the parents and by the Girls. Though the youngest three, in their few short years on earth, had seen and heard nearly as much as the oldest three, they were still children and allowances were made them for childish things.

  This classification was not arbitrary: it was born in the minds of, and placed upon the sisters by, Mother and Father, who believed that while offspring are all born equal, they should not be treated so in a large family. To their eldest three daughters, they gave the many and various responsibilities of housekeeping and childrearing. When Mother and Father left home for work, to attend a funeral, to purchase an electronic appliance for the kitchen, or to look for another house with a larger yard in a different neighborhood for the family, they left with their minds at ease, confident that the Girls would take care of all. When they returned home, they came bearing gifts, offerings of sweets or modest
playthings for the Children, with the singular hope of extending the dream of childhood in the ever-widening eyes of their youngest three. The Girls were often treated as adults, but the Children could get away with: running wild and barefooted in the yard; wearing a short skirt or a sleeveless top; feigning a sore throat and a runny nose after a meal to avoid sweeping the kitchen floor; furtively feeding the cat or reading a book beneath the dinner table. And the Girls, in turn: went on long, meandering walks through the neighborhood with girlfriends; sat and conversed with guests as adults, balancing teacup and saucer on knee; were taken into the confidences and conspiracies of Mother, who shared with them secrets kept from Father or gossip ripened on the boughs of the community tree.

  And because the middle child fit into the two groups simultaneously, she was cut off from both. Because she held the designation of both Child and Girl, she was neither. A line ran down the middle of the family, who had chosen odd numbers over even. This line ran through her as well. A clean rip, a tear traveled from the pit of her neck down to her navel. She was one and the same sister: the middle child. But filling two posts simultaneously, she became two and spoke in the playful and nonsensical tongue of the child and in the authoritative voice of the adult, alternately. She benefited from the two roles, giving orders to her younger sisters when Mother and Father were away, receiving gifts alongside them when the adults returned home. This double nature allowed her to be in two places at once: up in the tree’s canopy and at her school desk; at a wedding reception and crossing a mountain pass on the back of a mule; rummaging in her sister’s closet and laying her head across Mother’s lap. The line that ran through her occasionally pulled her completely in two and left a void in her place. She was forgotten and: left out of conversations and unseen around the house, though she sat next to and laughed along with the others; left behind when the car pulled out of the driveway; uncounted when Father paid for tickets at the amusement park. She enjoyed her invisibility and suffered by it. The middle child was not a whole number; she was one divided into two = 0.5. This left her searching for: ten missing digits, her other ear. She was five divided by six = 0.8333333333333333. She sensed that she ran on, was one of those numbers that futilely resists infinity: a number that is but is not because it fails all attempts at wholeness.