Paradise

by Toni Morrison

  Norma Fox’s cashmere serape came in handy once more. Seneca wrapped it around Pallas and asked if she wanted anything. Water? Something to eat? Pallas signaled no. She can’t cry yet, thought Seneca. The pain was down too far. When it came up, tears would follow, and Seneca wanted Connie to be there when it happened. So she warmed the girl up as best she could, tried to smooth the heavy hair and, carrying a candle, led her down to Connie.

  Part of the cellar, a huge cold room with a domed ceiling, was lined with racks of bottles. Wine as old as Connie. The nuns seldom touched it, Connie told her, only when they could get a priest out there to say the mass they were starved for. And on some Christmases they made a moist cake soaked in a 1915 Veuve Clicquot instead of rum. All around in shadow lurked the shapes of trunks, wooden boxes, furniture, disused and broken. Nude women in polished marble; men in rough stone. At the farthest end was the door to Connie’s room. Although it was not built for a maid, as Mavis said, its original purpose was unclear. Connie used it, liked it, for its darkness. Sunlight was not a menace to her there.

  Seneca knocked, got no answer and pushed open the door. Connie was sitting in a wicker rocking chair snoring lightly. When Seneca entered she woke instantly.

  “Who’s carrying that light?”

  “It’s me—Seneca. And a friend.”

  “Set it down over there.” She motioned to a chest of drawers behind her.

  “This is Pallas. She came a couple days ago. She said she wants to meet you.”

  “Did she?” asked Connie.

  Candle flame made it difficult to see, but Seneca recognized the Virgin Mary, the pair of shiny nun shoes, the rosary and, on the dresser, something taking root in a jar of water.

  “Who hurt you, little one?” asked Connie.

  Seneca sat down on the floor. She had scant hope that Pallas would say much if anything at all. But Connie was magic. She just stretched out her hand and Pallas went to her, sat on her lap, talk-crying at first, then just crying, while Connie said, “Drink a little of this,” and “What pretty earrings,” and “Poor little one, poor, poor little one. They hurt my poor little one.”

  It was wine-soaked and took an hour; it was backward and punctured and incomplete, but it came out—little one’s story of who had hurt her.

  She lost her shoes, she said, so at first nobody would stop for her. Then, she said, the Indian woman in a fedora. Or rather a truckful of Indians stopped for her at dawn as she limped barefoot in shorts by the side of the road. A man drove. Next to him the woman, with a child on her lap. Pallas couldn’t tell if it was a boy child or a girl. Six young men sat in the back. It was the woman who made it possible to accept the offer of a lift. Under the brim of her hat the sleet-gray eyes were expressionless but her presence among the men civilized them—as did the child in her lap.

  “Where you headed?” she asked.

  That was when Pallas discovered that her vocal cords didn’t work. That for soundmaking power she couldn’t rival the solitary windmill creaking in the field behind her. So she pointed in the direction the truck was going.

  “Get in back, then,” said the woman.

  Pallas climbed among the males—her age mostly—and sat as far away from them as she could, praying that the woman was their mother sister aunt—or any restraining influence.

  The Indian boys stared at her but said nothing at all. Arms on knees, they looked without a smile at her pink shorts, Day-Glo T-shirt. After a while, they opened paper bags and began to eat. They offered her a thick baloney sandwich and one of the onions they ate like apples. Afraid a refusal would insult them, Pallas accepted, then found herself eating all of it like a dog, gulping, surprised by her hunger. The truck’s sway and rock put her to sleep for a few minutes off and on; each time it happened she woke fighting out of a dream of black water seeping into her mouth, her nose. They passed places with scattered houses, Agways, a gas station, but did not stop until they reached a sizable town. By then it was late afternoon. The truck moved down an empty street, slowing in front of a Baptist church that had “Primitive” in its sign.

  “You wait there,” the woman said. “Somebody’ll come and take care of you.”

  The boys helped her climb down, and the truck drove off.

  Pallas waited on the church steps. There were no houses that she could see and no one was in the street. As the sun dipped, the air turned chilly. Only the soles of her feet, raw and burning, distracted her from the cold overtaking her marrow. Finally she heard an engine and looked up to see the Indian woman again—but alone this time—driving the same truck.

  “Get in,” she said, and drove Pallas several blocks to a low building with a corrugated roof. “Go in there,” she said. “It’s a clinic. I don’t know if you was bothered or what. You look like it to me. Like a bothered girl. But don’t tell them in there. I don’t know if it’s true, but don’t mention it, you hear? Better not to. Just say you was beat up or throwed out or something.”

  She smiled then, though her eyes were very grave. “Your hair’s full of algae.” She took off her hat and placed it on Pallas’ head. “Go on,” she said.

  Pallas sat in the reception room along with patients as silent as she. Two elderly women with head scarves, a feverish baby in the arms of its sleeping mother. The receptionist looked at her with unwholesome curiosity but didn’t say anything. It was threatening to get dark when two men came in, one with a partially severed hand. Pallas and the sleeping mother were yet to be attended to, but the man seeping blood into a towel took precedence. As the receptionist led him away, Pallas ran out of the entrance and around to the side of the building, where she lost every bit of the onion and baloney. Retching violently, she heard, before she saw, two women approach. Both wore shower caps and blue uniforms.

  “Look at that,” one said.

  They came toward Pallas and stood, heads cocked, watching her heave.

  “You on your way in or out?”

  “Must be pregnant.”

  “You trying to see the nurse, honey?”

  “She better hurry up.”

  “Let’s take her to Rita.”

  “You take her, Billie. I got to go.”

  “She got a hat on but no shoes. Okay, go ’head. See you tomorrow.”

  Pallas straightened up, clutching her stomach, breathing hard through her mouth.

  “Listen to me. Clinic’s closing less you an emergency. You sure you ain’t pregnant?”

  Pallas, trying to control another retch, shuddered.

  Billie turned to watch her friend’s car leave the lot then looked down at the vomit. Without making a face she kicked dirt until it was out of sight.

  “Where your pocketbook?” she asked, moving Pallas away from the buried sick. “Where you live? What they call you?”

  Pallas touched her throat and made a sound like a key trying to turn in the wrong lock. All she could do was shake her head. Then, like a child alone in a deserted playground, she drew her name in the dirt with her toe. Then slowly, imitating the girl’s earlier erasure with the vomit, she kicked her name away, covering it completely with red dirt.

  Billie took off her shower cap. She was much taller than Pallas and had to bend to see into the downcast eyes.

  “You come with me, girl,” said Billie. “You a pitiful case if ever I see one. And I’ve seen some.”

  She drove through blue evening air speaking quietly, reassuringly. “This is a place where you can stay for a while. No questions. I did it once and they were nice to me. Nicer than—well, very nice. Don’t be afraid. I used to be. Afraid of them, I mean. Don’t see many girls like them out here.” She laughed then. “A little nuts, maybe, but loose, relaxed, kind of. Don’t be surprised if they don’t have on any clothes. I was, at first, but then it was, I don’t know, nothing. My mother would have knocked me into next week if I walked around like that. Anyway you can collect yourself there, think things through, with nothing or nobody bothering you all the time. They’ll take care of you or lea
ve you alone—whichever way you want it.”

  The blue darkened around them except for a trim of silver in the distance. The fields rippled in a warm wind but Pallas was shivering by the time they reached the Convent.

  After handing her over to Mavis, the girl said, “I’ll come back to check on you, okay? Name’s Billie Cato.”

  The candle had burned down to an inch but its flame was high. Pallas wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. The rocking chair rocked. Connie’s breathing was so deep Pallas thought she was sleeping. She could see Seneca, hand on chin, elbow on knee, looking up at her, but candle flame, like moonlight in Mehita, distorted faces.

  Connie stirred.

  “I asked who hurt you. You telling me who helped you. Want to keep that other part secret for a little longer?”

  Pallas said nothing.

  “How old are you?”

  Eighteen, she started to answer, but then chose the truth. “Sixteen,” she said. “I would have been a senior next year.”

  She would have cried again for her lost junior year, but Connie nudged her roughly. “Get up. You breaking my lap.” Then, in a softer voice, “Go on and get some sleep now. Stay as long as you like and tell me the rest when you want to.”

  Pallas stood and wobbled a bit from the rocking and the wine.

  “Thanks. But. I better call my father. I guess.”

  “We’ll take you,” said Seneca. “I know where there’s a telephone. But you have to stop crying, hear?”

  They left then, stepping carefully through the darkness, eyes trained on the low light the candle flame shed. Pallas, bred in the overlight of Los Angeles, in houses without basements, associated them with movie evil or trash or crawly things. She gripped Seneca’s hand and breathed through her mouth. But the gestures were expressions of anticipated, not genuine, alarm. In fact, as they climbed the stairs, images of a grandmother rocking peacefully, of arms, a lap, a singing voice soothed her. The whole house felt permeated with a blessed malelessness, like a protected domain, free of hunters but exciting too. As though she might meet herself here—an unbridled, authentic self, but which she thought of as a “cool” self—in one of this house’s many rooms.

  A platter of tortilla-looking things sat on the table. Gigi, spruced up and quiet, with only a lopsided lip to mar her makeup, was fooling with her wide-band radio, trying to find the one station that played what she wanted to hear—not the agricultural news; country music or Bible stuff. Mavis, muttering cooking instructions to herself, was at the stove.

  “Connie okay?” Mavis asked when she saw them enter.

  “Sure. She was good for Pallas. Right, Pallas?”

  “Yes. She’s nice. I feel better now.”

  “Wow. It talks,” said Gigi.

  Pallas smiled.

  “But is it going to puke some more? That’s the question.”

  “Gigi. Shut the hell up.” Mavis looked eagerly at Pallas. “You like crepes?”

  “Um. Starved,” Pallas answered.

  “There’s plenty. I put Connie’s aside, and I can make even more if you want.”

  “It needs some clothes.” Gigi was scanning Pallas closely. “Nothing I got will fit.”

  “Stop calling her ‘it.’”

  “All it’s got worth having is a hat. Where’d you put it?”

  “I’ve got jeans she can have,” said Seneca.

  Gigi snorted. “Make sure you wash them first.”

  “Sure.”

  “Sure? Why you say ‘sure’? I haven’t seen you wash one thing since you came here, including yourself.”

  “Cut it out, Gigi!” Mavis spoke from behind closed teeth.

  “Well, I haven’t!” Gigi leaned over the table toward Seneca. “We don’t have much, but soap we do have.”

  “I said I’d wash them, didn’t I?” Seneca wiped perspiration from under her chin.

  “Why don’t you roll up your sleeves? You look like a junkie,” said Gigi.

  “Look who’s talking.” Mavis chuckled.

  “I’m talking junk, girl. Not a little boo.”

  Seneca looked at Gigi. “I don’t put chemicals in my body.”

  “But you used to, didn’t you?”

  “No, I didn’t used to.”

  “Let me see your arms, then.”

  “Get off!”

  “Gigi!” Mavis shouted. Seneca looked hurt.

  “Okay, okay,” said Gigi.

  “Why are you like that?” asked Seneca.

  “I’m sorry. Okay?” It was a rare admission, but apparently sincere.

  “I never took drugs. Never!”

  “Said I was sorry. Christ, Seneca.”

  “She’s a needler, Sen. Always sticking it in.” Mavis cleaned her plate. “Don’t let her get under your skin. That’s where the blood is.”

  “Shut the fuck up!”

  Mavis laughed. “There she goes again. So much for ‘sorry.’”

  “I apologized to Seneca, not you.”

  “Let’s just drop it.” Seneca sighed. “Is it okay to open the bottle, Mavis?”

  “Not just okay; it’s an order. We got to celebrate Pallas, don’t we?”

  “And her voice.” Seneca smiled.

  “And her appetite. Look at her.”

  Carlos had killed Pallas’ appetite. While he loved her (or seemed to), food, other than that first chili dog, was a nuisance to her, an excuse to drink Cokes or a reason to go out. The pounds she had struggled with since elementary school melted away. Carlos had never commented on her weight, but the fact that from the first, when she was a butterball, he liked her anyway—chose her, made love to her—sealed her confidence in him. His betrayal when she was at her thinnest sharpened her shame. The nightmare event that forced her to hide in a lake had displaced for a while the betrayal, the hurt, that had driven her from her mother’s house. She had not been able even to whisper it in the darkness of a candlelit room. Her voice had returned, but the words to say her shame clung like polyps in her throat.

  The melted cheese covering the crepe-tortilla thing was tangy; the pieces of chicken had real flavor, like meat; the pale, almost white butter dripping from early corn was nothing like what she was accustomed to; it had a creamy, sweetish taste. There was a warm sugary sauce poured over the bread pudding. And glass after glass of wine. The fear, the bickering, the nausea, the awful dirt fight, the tears in the dark—all of the day’s unruly drama dissipated in the pleasure of chewing food. When Mavis returned from taking Connie her supper, Gigi had found her station and was dancing the radio over to the open back door for better reception. She danced back to the table then and poured herself more wine. Eyes closed, hips grinding, she circled her arms to enclose the neck of a magic dancer. The other women watched her as they finished the meal. When last year’s top tune, “Killing Me Softly,” came on, it was not long before they all followed suit. Even Mavis. First apart, imagining partners. Then partnered, imagining each other.

  Wine-soothed, they slept deep as death that night. Gigi and Seneca in one bedroom. Mavis alone in another. So it was Pallas, asleep on the sofa in the office/game room who heard the knocking.

  The girl was wearing white silk shoes and a cotton sundress. She carried a piece of wedding cake on a brand-new china plate. And her smile was regal.

  “I’m married now,” she said. “Where is he? Or was it a she?”

  Later that night, Mavis said, “We should have given her one of those dolls. Something.”

  “She’s crazy,” said Gigi. “I know everything about her. K.D. told me everything about her, and she’s the whole nuthouse. Boy, is his ass in trouble.”

  “Why’d she come here on her wedding night?” asked Pallas.

  “Long story.” Mavis dabbed alcohol on her arm, comparing the bloody scratches to the ones Gigi had put there earlier. “Came here years back. Connie delivered her baby for her. She didn’t want it, though.”

  “So where is it?”

  “With Merle and Pearl, I think.”<
br />
  “Who?”

  Gigi cut her eyes at Mavis. “It died.”

  “Doesn’t she know that?” asked Seneca. “She said you all killed it.”

  “I told you she’s the whole house of nuts.”

  “She left right after,” Mavis said. “I don’t know what she knows. She wouldn’t even look at it.”

  They paused then, seeing it: the turned-away face, hands covering ears so as not to hear that fresh but mournful cry. There would be no nipple, then. Nothing to put in the little mouth. No mother shoulder to snuggle against. None of them wanted to remember or know what had taken place afterward.

  “Maybe it wasn’t his. K.D.’s,” said Gigi. “Maybe she was cutting out on him.”

  “So? So what if it wasn’t his? It was hers.” Seneca sounded hurt.

  “I don’t understand.” Pallas moved toward the stove, where the leftover bread pudding sat.

  “I do. In a way.” Mavis sighed. “I’ll make us some coffee.”

  “Not for me. I’m going back to bed.” Gigi yawned.

  “She was really mad. You think she’ll get back all right?”

  “Saint Seneca. Please.”

  “She was screaming,” Seneca said, staring at Gigi.

  “So were we.” Mavis measured coffee into the percolator basket.

  “Yeah, but we didn’t call her names.”

  Gigi sucked her teeth. “How do you know what to call a psycho who’s got nothing better to do on her wedding night but hunt down a dead baby?”

  “Call her sorry?”

  “Sorry, my ass,” Gigi answered. “She just wants to hang on to that little dick she married.”

  “Didn’t you say you were going to bed?”

  “I am. Come on, Seneca.”

  Seneca ignored her roommate. “Should we tell Connie?”

  “What for?” snapped Mavis. “Look. I don’t want that girl anywhere near Connie.”

  “I think she bit me.” Pallas appeared surprised. “Look. Is that teeth marks?”

  “What do you want, a rabies shot?” Gigi yawned. “Come on, Sen. Hey, Pallas. Lighten up.”

  Pallas stared. “I don’t want to sleep down here by myself.”