Paradise

by Toni Morrison

  Gigi was not the crying type; even now, when she realized she had not approved of herself in a long, long time, her eyes were desert-skull dry.

  Consolata is peeling and quartering small brown potatoes. She simmers them in water seasoned with pan juices, bay leaf and sage before arranging them in a skillet where they turn darkly gold. She sprinkles paprika and seeds of blackest pepper over them. “Oh, yes,” she says. “Oh, yes.”

  Best goddamn thing on wheels was how he put it, and Mavis hoped his affection for the ten-year-old Cadillac meant he’d give her a break. She would never know if he did, but just before his shop closed for the day, the mechanic finished and took fifty labor, thirty-two parts, oil and gas thirteen, so almost all of the cornfield rent money was gone. Not another payment due from Mr. Person for three months. Still, there was enough for regular shopping, plus the paint Connie wanted (for the red chair, she guessed; but white too, so maybe the chicken coop), as well as the ice cream sticks. The twins were fond of them and ate them right away. But the Christmas toys had been untouched, so Mavis had spent the five-hour wait for the tuneup and repairs exchanging the Fisher-Price truck for a Tonka and the Tiny Tina doll for one that spoke. Soon Pearl would be old enough for a Barbie. It was amazing how they changed and grew. They could not hold their heads up when they departed, but when she first heard them in the mansion, they were already toddlers, two years old. Based on their laughter, she could tell precisely. And based on how well integrated they were with the other children who chased about the rooms, she knew how they grew. Now they were school age, six and a half, and Mavis had to think of age-appropriate birthday and Christmas presents.

  She had been so lonely for them when she’d traveled back to Maryland in 1970. Watching recess at the school where she had enrolled Sal, Frankie and Billy James, she realized with a shock that Sal would be in junior high now, Billy James in third grade and Frankie in fifth. Still, there was no question in her mind that she would recognize them, although she wasn’t sure she would identify herself. It may have been her fingers clawed into the playground fencing or something awry in her face; whatever it was it must have frightened the students because a man came over and asked her questions—none of which she could answer. She hurried away trying to hide and look at the same time. She wanted to get to Peg’s house but not be seen by Frank or next-door neighbors. When she found it—the bonneted girl still led the ducks—she wept. The rose of Sharon, so strong and wild and beautiful, had been chopped completely down. Only fear of being recognized kept her from running through the street. With swift and brilliant clarity, she understood that she was not safe out there or any place where Merle and Pearl were not. And that was before she telephoned Birdie and learned of the warrant.

  Mavis had pushed her hair into a dark green tam, bought a pair of dime-store glasses and taken a bus to Washington, D.C., and on to Chicago. There she made the purchases Connie wanted for Mother, took another bus, another and arrived at the bus depot parking lot in Middleton, where she had left the Cadillac. Rushing to get the supplies to Connie and be in the company of her twins, she sped all the way. Nervous, shallow of breath, Mavis skidded up the driveway and braked near a nude Gigi who had already taken up residence in her shelter. For three years they bickered and fought and managed, for Connie’s sake, to avoid murder. Mavis believed that it was Gigi’s distraction with the man from Ruby that kept either one from picking up a knife. For Mavis would have done it, fought to the end anybody, including that street-tough bitch, who threatened to take her life and leave her children unprotected. So it was with sincere, even extravagant, welcome that she had greeted sweet Seneca. A welcome Gigi shared completely, for when Seneca arrived, she spit out that K.D. person like a grape seed. In the new configuration, Mavis’ pride of place was secure. Even the sad little rich girl with the hurt but pretty face had not disturbed it. The twins were happy, and Mavis was still closer to Connie than any of the others. And it was because they were so close, understood each other so well, that Mavis had begun to worry. Not about Connie’s nocturnal habits, or her drinking—or her not drinking, in fact, for the familiar fumes had disappeared recently. Something else. The way Connie nodded as though listening to someone near; how she said Uh huh or If you say so, answering questions no one had asked. Also she not only had stopped using sunglasses but was dressed up, sort of, every day, in one of the dresses Soane Morgan used to give her when she was through with them. And on her feet were the shiny nun shoes that once sat on her dresser. But with merry laughter ringing in her own ears, ice cream sticks melting in the dead of winter, she was in a weak position to judge such things. Connie never questioned the reality of the twins and for Mavis, who had no intention of explaining or defending what she knew to be true, that acceptance was central. The night visitor was making fewer and fewer appearances, and while that concerned her, what preoccupied her was how fast Merle and Pearl were growing. And whether she could keep up.

  Six yellow apples, wrinkled from winter storage, are cored and floating in water. Raisins are heating in a saucepan of wine. Consolata fills the hollow of each apple with a creamy mixture of egg yolks, honey, pecans and butter, to which she adds, one by one, the wine-swollen raisins. She pours the flavored wine into a pan and plops the apples down in. The sweet, warm fluid moves.

  The little streets were narrow and straight, but as soon as she made them they flooded. Sometimes she held toilet tissue to catch the blood, but she liked to let it run too. The trick was to slice at just the right depth. Not too light, or the cut yielded too faint a line of red. Not so deep it rose and gushed over so fast you couldn’t see the street. Although she had moved the map from her arms to her thighs, she recognized with pleasure the traces of old roads, avenues that even Norma had been repelled by. One was sometimes enough for months. Then there were times when she did two a day, hardly giving a street time to close before she opened another one. But she was not reckless. Her instruments were clean, her iodine (better than Mercurochrome) plentiful. And she had added aloe cream to her kit.

  The habit, begun in one of the foster homes, started as an accident. Before her foster brother—another kid in Mama Greer’s house—got her underwear off the first time, a safety pin holding the waist of her jeans together where a metal button used to be opened and scratched her stomach as Harry yanked on them. Once the jeans were tossed away and he got to her panties, the line of blood excited him even more. She did not cry. It did not hurt. When Mama Greer bathed her, she clucked, “Poor baby. Why didn’t you tell me?” and Mercurochromed the jagged cut. She was not sure what she should have told: the safety pin scratch or Harry’s behavior. So she pin-scratched herself on purpose and showed it to Mama Greer. Because the sympathy she got was diluted, she told her about Harry. “Don’t you ever say that again. Do you hear me? Do you? Nothing like that happens here.” After a meal of her favorite things, she was placed in another home. Nothing happened for years. Until junior high school, then the eleventh grade. By then she knew that there was something inside her that made boys snatch her and men flash her. If she was drinking Coke with five girls at a dime store counter, she was the one whose nipple got tweaked by a boy on a dare from his sniggering friends. Four girls, or just one, might walk down the street, but when she passed the man sitting with his baby daughter on a park bench, it was then he lifted his penis out and made kissing noises. Refuge with boyfriends was no better. They took her devotion for granted, but if she complained to them about being fondled by friends or strangers their fury was directed at her, so she knew it was something inside that was the matter.

  She entered the vice like a censored poet whose suspect lexicon was too supple, too shocking to publish. It thrilled her. It steadied her. Access to this under garment life kept her own eyes dry, inducing a serenity rocked only by crying women, the sight of which touched off a pain so wildly triumphant she would do anything to kill it. She was ten and not cutting sidewalks when Kennedy was killed and the whole world wept in public. But she was fiftee
n when King was killed one spring and another Kennedy that summer. She called in sick to her baby-sitting job each time and stayed indoors to cut short streets, lanes, alleys into her arms. Her blood work was fairly easy to hide. Like Eddie Turtle, most of her boyfriends did it in the dark. For those who insisted on answers she invented a disease. Sympathy was instant for the scars did look surgical.

  The safety available in Connie’s house had become less intact when Pallas arrived. She had spent a lot of time trying to cheer and feed her, for when Pallas wasn’t eating she was crying or trying not to. The relief that descended when the girl left last August disappeared when she returned in December—prettier, fatter, pretending she had just stopped by for a visit. In a limousine, no less. With three suitcases. It was January now, and her night sniffling could be heard all over the house.

  Seneca did another street. An intersection, in fact, for it crossed the one she’d done a moment ago.

  The table is set; the food placed. Consolata takes off her apron. With the aristocratic gaze of the blind she sweeps the women’s faces and says, “I call myself Consolata Sosa. If you want to be here you do what I say. Eat how I say. Sleep when I say. And I will teach you what you are hungry for.”

  The women look at each other and then at a person they do not recognize. She has the features of dear Connie, but they are sculpted somehow—higher cheekbones, stronger chin. Had her eyebrows always been that thick, her teeth that pearly white? Her hair shows no gray. Her skin is smooth as a peach. Why is she talking that way? And what is she talking about? they wonder. This sweet, unthreatening old lady who seemed to love each one of them best; who never criticized, who shared everything but needed little or no care; required no emotional investment; who listened; who locked no doors and accepted each as she was. What is she talking about, this ideal parent, friend, companion in whose company they were safe from harm? What is she thinking, this perfect landlord who charged nothing and welcomed anybody; this granny goose who could be confided in or ignored, lied to or suborned; this play mother who could be hugged or walked out on, depending on the whim of the child?

  “If you have a place,” she continued, “that you should be in and somebody who loves you waiting there, then go. If not stay here and follow me. Someone could want to meet you.”

  No one left. There were nervous questions, a single burst of frightened giggling, a bit of pouting and simulated outrage, but in no time at all they came to see that they could not leave the one place they were free to leave.

  Gradually they lost the days.

  In the beginning the most important thing was the template. First they had to scrub the cellar floor until its stones were as clean as rocks on a shore. Then they ringed the place with candles. Consolata told each to undress and lie down. In flattering light under Consolata’s soft vision they did as they were told. How should we lie? However you feel. They tried arms at the sides, outstretched above the head, crossed over breasts or stomach. Seneca lay on her stomach at first, then changed to her back, hands clasping her shoulders. Pallas lay on her side, knees drawn up. Gigi flung her legs and arms apart, while Mavis struck a floater’s pose, arms angled, knees pointing in. When each found the position she could tolerate on the cold, uncompromising floor, Consolata walked around her and painted the body’s silhouette. Once the outlines were complete, each was instructed to remain there. Unspeaking. Naked in candlelight.

  They wriggled in acute distress but were reluctant to move outside the mold they had chosen. Many times they thought they could not endure another second, but none wished to be the first to give in before those pale watching eyes. Consolata spoke first.

  “My child body, hurt and soil, leaps into the arms of a woman who teach me my body is nothing my spirit everything. I agreed her until I met another. My flesh is so hungry for itself it ate him. When he fell away the woman rescue me from my body again. Twice she saves it. When her body sickens I care for it in every way flesh works. I hold it in my arms and between my legs. Clean it, rock it, enter it to keep it breath. After she is dead I can not get past that. My bones on hers the only good thing. Not spirit. Bones. No different from the man. My bones on his the only true thing. So I wondering where is the spirit lost in this? It is true, like bones. It is good, like bones. One sweet, one bitter. Where is it lost? Hear me, listen. Never break them in two. Never put one over the other. Eve is Mary’s mother. Mary is the daughter of Eve.”

  Then, in words clearer than her introductory speech (which none of them understood), she told them of a place where white sidewalks met the sea and fish the color of plums swam alongside children. She spoke of fruit that tasted the way sapphires look and boys using rubies for dice. Of scented cathedrals made of gold where gods and goddesses sat in the pews with the congregation. Of carnations tall as trees. Dwarfs with diamonds for teeth. Snakes aroused by poetry and bells. Then she told them of a woman named Piedade, who sang but never said a word.

  That is how the loud dreaming began. How the stories rose in that place. Half-tales and the never-dreamed escaped from their lips to soar high above guttering candles, shifting dust from crates and bottles. And it was never important to know who said the dream or whether it had meaning. In spite of or because their bodies ache, they step easily into the dreamer’s tale. They enter the heat in the Cadillac, feel the smack of cold air in the Higgledy Piggledy. They know their tennis shoes are unlaced and that a bra strap annoys each time it slips from the shoulder. The Armour package is sticky. They inhale the perfume of sleeping infants and feel parent-cozy although they notice one’s head is turned awkwardly. They adjust the sleeping baby head then refuse, outright refuse, what they know and drive away home. They climb porch stairs carrying frankfurters and babies and purse in their arms. Saying, “They don’t seem to want to wake up, Sal. Sal? Look here. They don’t seem to want to.” They kick their legs underwater, but not too hard for fear of waking fins or scales also down below. The male voices saying saying forever saying push their own down their throats. Saying, saying until there is no breath to scream or contradict. Each one blinks and gags from tear gas, moves her hand slowly to the scraped shin, the torn ligament. Runs up and down the halls by day, sleeps in a ball with the lights on at night. Folds the five hundred dollars in the foot of her sock. Yelps with pain from a stranger’s penis and a mother’s rivalry—alluring and corrosive as cocaine.

  In loud dreaming, monologue is no different from a shriek; accusations directed to the dead and long gone are undone by murmurs of love. So, exhausted and enraged, they rise and go to their beds vowing never to submit to that again but knowing full well they will. And they do.

  Life, real and intense, shifted to down there in limited pools of light, in air smoky from kerosene lamps and candle wax. The templates drew them like magnets. It was Pallas who insisted they shop for tubes of paint, sticks of colored chalk. Paint thinner and chamois cloth. They understood and began to begin. First with natural features: breasts and pudenda, toes, ears and head hair. Seneca duplicated in robin’s egg blue one of her more elegant scars, one drop of red at its tip. Later on, when she had the hunger to slice her inner thigh, she chose instead to mark the open body lying on the cellar floor. They spoke to each other about what had been dreamed and what had been drawn. Are you sure she was your sister? Maybe she was your mother. Why? Because a mother might, but no sister would do such a thing. Seneca capped her tube. Gigi drew a heart locket around her body’s throat, and when Mavis asked her about it, she said it was a gift from her father which she had thrown into the Gulf of Mexico. Were there pictures inside? asked Pallas. Yeah. Two. Whose? Gigi didn’t answer; she simply reinforced the dots marking the locket’s chain. Pallas had put a baby in her template’s stomach. When asked who the father was, she said nothing but drew next to the baby a woman’s face with long eyelashes and a crooked fluffy mouth. They pressed her, but gently, without joking or scorn. Carlos? The boys who drove her into the water? Pallas gave the crooked mouth two long fangs.

  Janu
ary folded. February too. By March, days passed uncut from night as careful etchings of body parts and memorabilia occupied them. Yellow barrettes, red peonies, a green cross on a field of white. A majestic penis pierced with a Cupid’s bow. Rose of Sharon petals, Lorna Doones. A bright orange couple making steady love under a childish sun.

  With Consolata in charge, like a new and revised Reverend Mother, feeding them bloodless food and water alone to quench their thirst, they altered. They had to be reminded of the moving bodies they wore, so seductive were the alive ones below.

  A customer stopping by would have noticed little change. May have wondered why the garden was as yet untilled, or who had scratched SORROW on the Cadillac’s trunk. May even have wondered why the old woman who answered the knock did not cover her awful eyes with dark glasses; or what on earth the younger ones had done with their hair. A neighbor would notice more—a sense of surfeit; the charged air of the house, its foreign feel and a markedly different look in the tenants’ eyes—sociable and connecting when they spoke to you, otherwise they were still and appraising. But if a friend came by, her initial alarm at the sight of the young women might be muted by their adult manner; how calmly themselves they seemed. And Connie—how straight-backed and handsome she looked. How well that familiar dress became her. As she slid into the driver’s seat, a basket with a parcel on top beside her, it would annoy her at first being unable to say exactly what was absent. As she drew closer to home and drove down Central Avenue, her gaze might fall on Sweetie Fleetwood’s house, Pat Best’s house, or she might notice one of the Poole boys or Menus on his way to Ace’s. Then she might realize what was missing: unlike some people in Ruby, the Convent women were no longer haunted. Or hunted either, she might have added. But there she would have been wrong.