by Sharon Heath
I was still breathing very hard, and my words came out in little disconnected bursts. “That was a terrible thing. What Stanley said.” But the warring sides in my head weren’t very satisfied. They pushed past politeness. I was shouting now. And flapping, too. “But you hurt me, Assefa. How could you? You hurt me! I told you to stop, and you didn’t! You need to get out of here. Just go.”
As soon as he left the room, I could hear yelling from Stanley, but not a word from Assefa. The living room door slammed so hard that my bed actually shook. Footsteps up the hall and then Stanley knocking on the door. I cried out, “Stanley, I know you want to help, but please go away. I need to be alone.”
I went into my closet and fetched Nana’s cave scented robe, stuffing a piece of it up my nose. I slunk down into the narrow space behind my hanging clothes so that I was sitting with my back pressed hard against the wall, wishing this were Nana’s old closet, instead, with its handy old nail head sticking out. The air was close and thick with orange spice scent and something bitter that might have been my own B.O.
I tucked a hand between my thighs. What had just happened? Assefa had scared me. Really scared me. And hurt me. Who was he?
But who was I? The scientist in me knew that nothing ever happened in a vacuum. Really, it was my fault. I should never have behaved so seductively with him when things weren’t right with us. When my body was still sore. When my own doctor, for heaven’s sake, had warned me off sex!
As for Stanley, whatever had possessed him to say such a thing? Nonetheless, I felt grateful to him. Assefa had been hurting me, and he’d stopped him. I’d never been so confused. I wasn’t exactly a stranger to people’s peculiar feelings about race, but I was a latecomer to the territory. I suppose that was one of the few good things of having had so little adult guidance as a child. I hadn’t been taught how to hate. At least not in that way.
What came back to me then was an encounter I’d had the day after my engagement with a rather worn-looking woman working the deli counter at Ralph’s. Simply having to brag to anyone who’d listen, I’d flourished my ring as I reached for the package of turkey she’d sliced for me, announcing that my fiancé was ridiculously handsome, was training to become a doctor, and had actually been born across the globe in Ethiopia. She’d thrown me a confused look and sniffed, “Ethiopia? Isn’t that one of those Arab countries?” And when I’d patiently explained, “Actually, it’s on the Horn of Africa and shares borders with Eritrea, Kenya, Djibouti, Somalia, and Sudan,” she’d responded, her baggy brown eyes suddenly skinny little slits, “Do you mean he’s an African?”
It struck me then—as it did now—as an odd sort of question. It would have made so much more sense to ask, “Is he kind to you? Do you like his family? Can he carry on a stimulating conversation? Do you laugh at the same things?” Even, “I hope you feel perfectly comfortable with him the morning after you’ve had sex.” Or, “Do you feel he really sees you and do you trust that you know him?”
Know him? My thoughts grew dark wings. No matter where he lived, what soil he treaded, what sky rained down on his perfectly shaped head, he’d crossed into some universe completely unfamiliar to me. Did I imagine the whole thing? Was he actually ever here at all? I was at least slightly aware that I was banging the back of my head against the closet wall, but I didn’t care.
But as these things tended to go, the comforting blankness of mind that accompanied pain began filling itself up with memory. I saw the two of us on Assefa’s bed, laughing at some silliness that I couldn’t recall, our limbs twined around each other, me wanting to keep them that way forever. Had he wanted that, too?
I felt a gently insistent pushing against my leg, and Jillily leapt onto my lap, coming close enough to my face to touch noses with me. I hadn’t even realized she was in my room. Had she been under the bed the whole time? Poor thing, she must have been terrified. But at the very moment I wrapped my arms around her vibrating body, something uncanny happened. Stanley would kill me if I called it a ghost, so I will call it an accident, perhaps Jillily brushing against the iPod on her way to the closet. Nonetheless, it felt eerie when Tizita began to play again.
I pulled Jillily even closer to my breasts and swayed with her in our cramped space to the melody that had once seemed so exotic, so sensual, but was now filled with disquiet and dread.
Chapter Seventeen
Fleur
SAMMIE WAS HUGGING me so tightly I could feel her heartbeat. I could have sworn it was synchronized with my own. We were outside an office building so overbearingly top-heavy that it seemed intentionally designed to crush the human spirit. I really didn’t want to go in.
Having our hearts beat in tune didn’t surprise me. As best friends who lived right across the street from each other, our periods had been aligned for years. How astonished we’d both felt when she’d confessed to me that hers, too, had come late this month, and that she, too, had both dreaded and longed to hear of a pregnancy.
I’d turned down Mother’s offer to accompany me to court. I’d turned down Gwennie and Stanley, too. I knew it was Sammie’s bright chatter that would be the most comforting as soon as I learned that some mischief of misaligned cultures had made the deal between Mr. Kang and Fidel Marquetti fall through. The compassion of the older people in my life would only magnify my misery at having to recall the shooting of Chin-Hwa. Especially since I was already in a state of torment over what had happened with Assefa.
Speaking of which, here are some of the people I spoke to after the awful incident:
1. Sammie (whose disgust soon enough blended in with her anger with Jacob—I was getting ready to lay money she’d break up with him by the summer);
2. Sister Flatulencia (who might have been an ex-nun, but had become accustomed by now to sordid tales of my sex life);
3. Dhani (who shocked me by insisting Not-a-Baby-Anymore-Angelina be present so that she could learn what not to do with boys—which, as you can imagine, did nothing for any fantasies I may have had about being a role model for the baby I’d witnessed being born);
4. Gwennie (who didn’t know what to do with herself over the equal parts rage and gratitude she was feeling toward her brother).
Of course, I’d had multiple conversations with Stanley, who seemed as inclined toward jumping out of his skin as I’d felt after pinching Jillily as a child when my cat had suddenly struck me as downright pinchable. Shame is one of those emotions universally guaranteed to spiral us down the steepest whorls of the void. Having the most elegant brain on the planet evidently hadn’t spared Stanley one of the vilest variations of the human condition. He didn’t understand how he could possibly have said such a thing, and I didn’t, either, except that we humans will do almost anything to vanquish heartache, terror, and the void.
I came home one afternoon to find him going through the kitchen junk drawer, the kind just about everyone has—except Father, of course, who insisted on a place for everything and everything in its place, especially children and their unwelcome smells and noises. The one at the Fiskes’ was right below the tinfoil and paper bag drawer and contained at any one time approximately sixteen objects, including:
1. Tall kitchen matches;
2. A tangle of obsolete and current cellphone chargers;
3. Appliance touch-up paint;
4. A heavy steel tape measure that inexplicably terrified Jillily whenever I pulled out the tape;
5. An assortment of organic mints and chewing gum;
6. Felt surface protectors in graduating sizes;
7. Rose clippers;
8. An oven thermometer;
9. Packs of colored toothpicks;
10. Birthday candles.
I never found out what Stanley was looking for, because when he registered my presence he cried plaintively, “I don’t know why I said it.”
“You were angry,” I offered.
“I still am. The bastard was hurting you. But why throw in the ‘black’?”
“
Because you wanted to hurt him as much as he was hurting me?”
“Well. Maybe.” He sounded doubtful.
“Do you remember that when you yelled at Assefa, you said something about not letting it happen again?”
“Did I?”
“You did. Stanley, you know, don’t you, that it wasn’t your fault I got pregnant by Hector?”
“That’s how you might see it, but I was in loco parentis. I fooled myself that you were more aware than you were because of that mind of yours. But now—you nearly getting raped a second time. I can’t imagine what your mother thinks of me.”
“Oh, Stanley,” I said in a muffled voice as I buried my face in his brown pullover. Was what had happened with Hector really rape? Sammie thought so. At least date rape. I wasn’t so sure. And Assefa? I couldn’t possibly associate that word with him. Actually, I couldn’t bear to think of him at all right now. The sense of betrayal was simply too great. I brought myself back to the moment. “Mother always thinks of you with gratitude.”
Actually, Mother didn’t know anything about it yet. When I’d shared the whole thing with Sammie, she’d declared that Stanley needed to get into analysis to “become more aware of his shadow.” Gwennie had her own theories, mostly to do with him “needing to do some work” on his pain over having been left by his Afro-Cuban wife Doris ten years before. As for Stanley himself, he didn’t seem to know what he needed besides self-flagellation, but it was clear to us all that an apology was where he had to begin.
As it turned out, Assefa refused to meet with him or even speak directly by phone, but replied to Stanley’s abject cellphone message with one in return that consisted of a wooden, “I have received your message. Don’t worry—I will speak of this to no one. But I prefer never to see you or your ... family ever again.”
Stanley insisted on playing the message for us over and over, which was something I could happily have done without, but like Stanley himself, I was struggling to digest what had happened. When I told him I’d been subpoenaed to appear in court in the renewed case of Marquetti vs. Kang, his first response was a bitter, “I might as well join whatever Stupid Club Fidel Marquetti belongs to, with his pathetic chinks and ‘Buddha Hades’ bullshit.” I realized nothing I could say would comfort him.
The person who had the most unusual response to my heartache was Serena McKenna. I’d emailed her in the middle of one of my worst nights, and from Jane Goodall’s chimp reserve in Tanzania she’d responded almost immediately: “Fleur, dear, I’ve never known the love of a man, but if it’s anything like the attachment one forms to chimps, you must feel nearly destroyed. When I first went to work for Jane, she spoke of her profound sorrow when David Greybeard died of pneumonia. Since then, I’ve lost two chimps that meant the world to me, John Lennonheart and Flossie. Each time, Jane had to spoonfeed me oatmeal and honey to keep me from joining them on the other side.”
Not for the first time, I wondered whether the face-blindness that Jane Goodall and Serena shared applied to their perception of chimps, as well, and if so, how did they tell one from another?
But Serena evidently had more to say. My computer pinged and I found another email from her in my inbox. She wrote, “I’ve had a thought. Sometimes it helps to have a change of scenery. Would you care to come visit us at Gombe? Jane’s joining us here toward the end of the month, and she’d be thrilled to finally meet you. She’s always felt grateful that you’re working to make our world habitable for generations to come. And needless to say, it would do my own heart good. How many years since I saw you receive your award? I nearly burst my buttons with pride for you.”
Even at such long distance, I blushed. Pride? I myself felt nothing but shame for the speech I gave at the award ceremony. Who wouldn’t over something that began, “Maybe it all would have happened differently if the bird on the front lawn hadn’t given me my idea about my grandfather’s balls?”
But something about Serena’s openhearted acceptance soothed me, and I was able to sleep after that, roused only by the alarm clock that reminded me that today was Court Day. I was going to have to testify about the death of a dog.
A courthouse has to be one of the coldest, most mechanistic organizations of matter and energy known to humankind. With the power to preserve life or dictate death, it swerves far from the orbit of systems with similar capabilities, such as the human body, where warm and wet pulsing organs slosh around in their assigned areas to the beat of an equally wet and sloshy heart. Nor does it resemble the explosive tension of our solar system, where a sphere of red-hot plasma capable of annihilating anything too close to it makes life possible in a planet ninety-three million miles away.
Actually, anyone entering the unimaginative Stanley Mosk Courthouse, its cinderblockish ceramic veneer panels impervious to sun and wind, was pretty much on notice to leave all thought of body and spirit behind. Add to its imperturbable façade an improbable trio of terra cotta reliefs of an English knight, Thomas Jefferson, and Moses with his Ten Commandments (which took my thoughts you know where), and mouths are guaranteed to sag, shoulders to hunch, and feet to shuffle across the gray-floored hallways leading to mostly beige rooms absent of pictures (though I did spy a giant signed photograph of Harrison Ford on one of the larger courtroom’s walls).
That this world was fueled by an archaic notion of justice became apparent as soon as I was seated in an astonishingly uncomfortable chair in a much smaller room than had evidently once been occupied by Mr. Ford. My tailbone already objecting, my eyes sought Sammie, who had found a seat behind an unsmiling, beetle-eyed man in a shiny gray suit who officiously rustled a pile of papers. On the way into the courtroom, we’d passed the disputants on opposite benches. Fidel Marquetti’s habitual red face had transmuted into a shockingly Day-Glo vermillion, and Mr. and Mrs. Kang, who looked everywhere but at me, appeared several shades paler than usual. So I was happy to see now that Sammie’s skin had retained its bronze glow.
But my heart sank when the man I soon began to think of as Nouveau-Javert arose and approached a little too closely, throwing a question at me in a condescending tone about what I’d seen when we’d all piled out the door on Christmas.
“I saw the water sprinkler running,” I carefully replied. “It was making everyone wet. Had made everyone wet. The Kangs were standing to the right. I could see the outlines of their bodies under their wet clothes. Excuse me for saying so,”—I slid a look toward Sammie, as if for confirmation—“but it occurred to me that Mrs. Kang has a lovely body, with a—”
“Yes, well,” Nouveau-Javert interrupted. “I’m sure it’s very nice, but that’s not exactly what we’re here to do today, is it?”
“I’m not sure. What are we here to do?”
Nouveau-Javert waved a dismissive hand. “Actually, that’s not your concern. What you’re here to do is describe exactly what you saw on the night the Kangs’ negligence allowed their vicious dog to take a giant bite out of Mr. Marquetti’s posterior, causing him grievous bodily harm.”
The Kangs’ attorney popped up, but the judge forestalled her.
“Counselor.” The judge’s voice was as unpleasant as the dragging of a fingernail across a blackboard. But I knew I was biased; the fact that we’d all had to rise and stay risen until the judge sat down reminded me a little too much of Father, who habitually spoke to me and all the children he’d saved from the devil abortionists from his towering height, never considering it might be a little less intimidating if he’d only bend down just a little and refrain from complaining how much he hated having children underfoot.
But Nouveau-Javert was sending the judge a phony-granny grin, which he clipped into a tight little grimace when the judge instructed him, “Please resume examining the witness.”
Well, you can imagine where my mind went with that one. I couldn’t even comment on Mrs. Kang’s beautiful body, and now this creep was being given permission to examine me?
“Miss Robins, what did you see Mr. Marquetti doing when
you opened that door?”
“I saw him running around in circles, yelling. I also saw Chin-Hwa on the ground with blood running out of his—”
“Miss Robins! Please stay with the question. I only asked you about Mr. Marquetti.”
“But all truth is contextual, and in the world of quanta, further altered by the fact of being observed.”
Fidel Marquetti’s attorney reached into his pocket to retrieve a handkerchief to mop his face, and no wonder. The thermostat in this building must have been set years ago and never been changed. Hot air was pumping into the courtroom as if SoCal were experiencing normal February weather, rather than this heat wave that global warming hath wrought.
I sneaked another peek at Sammie. She looked like she was about to dissolve in laughter, and I managed a weak grin back. I was all too aware that the man before me was regarding me as if it had been I who’d pooped on Fidel Marquetti’s pansies. And the judge was eyeing me edgily as if I were about to let loose with a Sister Flatulencia-style wet one.
Eventually, Nouveau-Javert and I managed to bump our way to the end of our dance, and then the Kang’s slightly-less-shiny-suited attorney had her turn. I was relieved that they’d chosen a soft-spoken woman with an endearing lisp to represent them. Her questions were few, but (I thought, anyway) to the point. Here is a representative sampling of them:
1. “Miss Robins, before the unfortunate episode on Christmas, did you ever observe Mr. and Mrs. Kang institute measures to keep their dog away from Mr. Marquetti’s yard?”
2. “Miss Robins, did you ever see any public signs on Mr. Marquetti’s property that might have been aggressively directed toward Mr. and Mrs. Kang?”
3. “Miss Robins, given that Mr. Marquetti was obviously proud of his rather unusual garden, did you ever see any evidence—such as installing a hedge or a fence—that he’d tried to protect it from animals in general?”
I knew that the latter line of questioning wasn’t going to get too far. There was no way around it. The Kangs had been remiss in failing to effectively control Chin-Hwa. But the question remained: who became violent first—Fidel Marquetti with his gun or Chin-Hwa with his teeth?