Take One Candle Light a Room

by Susan Straight

  Somewhere in my mind I’d remembered the fleur-de-lis. The lily of France on Moinette Antoine’s shoulder. But I wanted something beautiful to mark me. And my sister. I brought one of my mother’s larger sewing needles and a Bic pen. I broke the pen, emptied the ink into a plastic lid, and poked holes in our wrists. I moved the needle around a little to widen the holes. Glorette’s face didn’t move. I let tiny droplets of ink fall into the holes. The center of the flower. The pollen. Then I made five little scratches in a star shape around the dot. Orange blossoms.

  Glorette. Glorette! Why hadn’t I ever called her again, gone to see her, just sat for a few hours until the ghost people came to smoke some fog with her, said, “Hey, check this out,” and laid our wrists aside each other to see if the indigo markings we’d made still matched perfectly?

  I knew how to cry without making a sound or moving my face, from years of being in quiet hotel rooms next to Tony or in my own small bedroom back home. I kept as much of the trembling inside me as possible, and even though I shook and shook, it was silent, and the tears ran down my temples and cheeks and into my ears until it felt as if I were underwater.

  Under water. Glorette and I had stared at the Mississippi River, on the levee, walking up with my father’s aunt Almoinette from her tiny wooden house that must have been from slavery. What she called Back Then.

  Dya. That the spirit of the water people. They live under there. Faro. That the wind. The wind have a god, too. Tell you secrets. Messages. Ni. That the spirit inside your hair.

  I got my ligion. What they told me, my maman and tante and them. I got that Bible when I tite like you. I know every verse in that Bible. Make my morning devotion and evening devotion.

  I let the priest say his piece. But we kept to ourselves. That how the gods stay with us. They right here. Dya and Faro. They came over in the first one mouth. Amina. She tell her girl Marie-Therese, and Marie-Therese tell Moinette. She tell her girls. She call her girl Marie-Therese, too, after the mama. And then they tell their girls. That not a story. That the verse for them gods. No Bible for that. The ones we keep.

  They talk about voodoo, say we tell voodoo. That ain’t no voodoo—we ain’t never hurt nobody.

  The first boy was Enrique. Your papa. The only son. He hear about them god, too. But the man don’t tell the story most the time. We do.

  ———

  I lay on the couch, holding the silver-framed photo of Glorette. How had her picture gotten onto that wall at Dimples? The only one to ask was Hattie, Grady’s sister. Would she still be working at the Golden Gopher? Did I even want to know about whatever took them to Dimples?

  I had to find out. At least I could tell Victor that.

  He smelled hot and sour and milky when they handed him to me that day, when we took the pictures. His screams rolled against my shoulder and he banged his forehead on my collarbone. He was so angry that he wasn’t in her arms. Eyes little black slits like watermelon seeds. He was not a human yet. That’s what I’d thought, holding him. He was a tiny animal. I didn’t want an animal. I’d never had one—no cat or hamster—and my mother’s chickens, my father’s dogs, meant nothing to me.

  I closed my eyes, just for a moment, to see the Aare again. The water was blue as Windex, as if magical colorants had been dumped inside the mountain spring. I sat in a riverside restaurant in Thun, near the castle which loomed over me.

  Two blond teenage boys had stealthily lowered themselves down the iron rungs of a ladder into the water, and another boy on the historic covered wooden bridge above them tossed down a line. They held the rope and suddenly stood up on surfboards, riding the current from the flume where the river made hydroelectric power. Like California. Everyone wanted to be from California. A small crowd of teenagers cheered from the opposite bank, and I shook my head and laughed. “Dude!” they called.

  I dreamed of us swimming in the old canal that brought water to my father’s orange groves. Cerise, Clarette, Bettina, Glorette, and me.

  Our legs were golden under the surface of the canal. We kept lifting our feet from the water grass that grew along the bottom. It tickled. Then boys called to us from the eucalyptus windbreak near the canal. Boys were always shouting at us, on the way to junior high, in the street, at school. We were all beautiful. The five of us. Let me just get a taste of that! Come on, baby. You so fine. When they shouted, everyone but me crossed their arms over their chests, over the bathing suit tops with little flowers. But I floated down the canal to the footbridge and hid in the darkness under the wooden boards. The current was strong because it was summer. My father told us not to get carried under the footbridge because a metal grate was there. If a surge of water was released from the big canal, we could get trapped. A boy had drowned, farther down in Agua Dulce. His body pressed into the grate all night. I held on to the rope my father had nailed there, at the wooden bridge, just in case.

  “FX? FX? You there?”

  A man’s voice startled me awake. The answering machine. I knocked it off the table near the front door when I stumbled to answer. He’d already hung up. Tony? I blinked at the reddish evening light in the window. The cool black canal water gone.

  The phone rang again when I was in the bath. I grabbed a towel. “Fantine,” the voice said. “Fantine. I know you there.”

  I said, “Hey, Clarette.”

  “You sleep?”

  “No.” I dried off and pulled on dark jeans. Indigo. Our legs had touched in my dream, under the water. Our knees had knocked hollow. “I’m coming tomorrow, but I have a breakfast meeting in the morning.”

  “A what?” Clarette snorted her breath through the phone so hard it was like I could feel it on my cheek. “So somebody gon cook and bring you a plate while you talk. Damn. Over here people just chomp on cereal and hide behind the box. So what time is this meeting?”

  I knew where she was heading. “Ten.” I buttoned a pleated white shirt, thin and gauzy, that I’d just bought in Luzern.

  She snorted again. “Girl, by ten a.m. I been called bitch twenty-five times and had to break up at least one fight.” Clarette worked at the prison in Chino. I waited for more. But then she sighed. “Five years.”

  “I dreamed about us just now. We were swimming in the canal. Those bathing suits we all got at Kmart.”

  Clarette was silent, and I could hear the kids murmuring near her. “I remember,” she said finally. “Our first two-piece suits.” She held her hand over the receiver and said something to the kids. “Unc Gustave stays over your maman’s most the day now. She’s makin gumbo. I got the sausage for her today at Andre’s.”

  Because even though I was my mother’s only daughter, I had not lived with her since I was eighteen. I visited about every six weeks or so, and I didn’t run to the store for her.

  Clarette said, “Your brother went and got all the shrimp.” She paused and moved the phone closer to her mouth. “He stays in them old box houses now.”

  “Back home?” There were three small stone houses in my father’s groves where the crate-makers had lived in the 1890s.

  “Yeah,” she said. Then she laughed. “Whatever. You ain’t met nobody in Paris or wherever? Girl, you giving up? We forty this year. All of us.”

  “Don’t start,” I said, and warmth bubbled up behind my breastbone. “You have no idea what it is to get a man in LA. This waitress told me she did the online dating thing and she met a fine brother, but his picture had big circles on it. Holographs. From his driver’s license.”

  When we laughed, it was like steel wool along my rib bones, scouring loose all the quiet of the last two days in the hotel room and on the plane.

  “You still crazy,” Clarette said. Then she told my niece and nephew, “You better get them shoes on now.” She said to me, “I gotta get them over to your maman.”

  Then her voice changed. “Hey, I heard Victor never came home last night. He best not be hangin out with Alfonso and them. You remember I had Alfonso inside for three years? He just got out las
t month. Victor ain’t called you?”

  “He was here earlier,” I said.

  “Why would he go up there to LA?” Like everyone in my family, she pronounced the letters with disdain, as if the place were an alien compound.

  “He won concert tickets,” I said. “He should be on his way home.”

  “Better be,” she said, distracted now. When we hung up, the laugh-glow was gone and I wanted it back.

  I turned the heat up high under my mother’s old roasting pan. I’d bought these coffee beans in Oaxaca. They wouldn’t taste like my mother’s coffee.

  At the hotel—yesterday?—I’d sat at the white-cloth-covered table and ordered tea, as I always did in hotels because hotel coffee poured from silver urns made me powerfully sad. Three things—coffee, city flowers for sale in metal buckets, and peppermint candy—made me miss my mother with a kind of spearlike fear in my lungs that I would never see her again.

  I shook the roasting pan, and the beans sent off a hiss of steam that went straight into my brain. When I was small, every morning meant coffee beans roasting black as anthracite, and the grits boiled in their white cloud. I was given one brown sugar lump by my mother, while I waited. I drank coffee turned golden with hot milk. When I was a teenager, I was handed the small cup of the adults, the coffee dark as oil inside.

  Now I roasted beans from another country, packets with fine lettering and beautiful pictures from my travels.

  In a hotel, I couldn’t stand the thought of my mother, because if something happened to her or to me, I would be too far away. But here in LA, I was safe missing her—missing her painfully and still not wanting to drive the hour to Rio Seco to see her.

  The beans were black and dimpled, and I put the pan on the piece of flagstone I’d found in an old quarry near Salem, New York. I felt my mother, the sound of her humming, the smells of coffee and smoke in her clothes, and her fingers in my hair.

  Her fingers, and those of Cerise and Cerise’s mother, Felonise. The thumbs tracing my skull, the wristbones twirling at my neck when someone braided, every weekend when we were young, getting ready for the night. But I knew what those hands in my hair meant. They were preparing me, with their own caresses, for a man. A boy, back then, who would become a man. My man. And I didn’t want one. No. Uh-uh. Not me.

  Because I’d seen what happened to Glorette. The teeth-bruise on the back of her neck. Then she fell in love with Sere Dakar, she got pregnant, he disappeared, and her life ended.

  No. Not her life. That had ended five years ago. Her life was reduced, like butter and wine and sugar cooked to thick sweet smears—her son, her particular streets, her fingers holding the pipe and her lips pulling in the smoke, and dreaming of Sere Dakar through the scrim of movement and rock.

  I’d been so afraid of a baby. When I went to her bedroom the first time, where she lay with Victor against her shoulder, his head was like a dark purple grapefruit, with black fur, and a depression in his skull. A pulsing there. I thought he was deformed. A hole in his head. Anjolie laid two fingers over the indentation and said something in French, and it scared me to death.

  I sorted through my CDs. Nancy Wilson, recorded in 1963. The Very Thought of You. Sarah Vaughan. April in Paris. I had been listening to those songs since I was seventeen, seeing myself an expatriate in Paris and Marseille, sitting in a café wearing a dark coat and pearl earrings, my long hair rolled tightly in a chignon—even that word, chignon, meant that I knew, I knew—and drinking coffee from a thick white cup while I waited, looking at the gargoyles on the soot-stained buildings nearby. Then I would feel the man’s fingers on the small of my back.

  The right man.

  I stood near the doorway, touching it. The small. Who had first called it that—the narrow portion below ribs and above hips?

  I put in Debussy’s La Mer, imagining the ocean off the coast of Italy or Spain. I lifted the perforated lid on the small roasting pan and poured the beans into the grinder, then put the powdery darkness into the French press and poured boiling water over it.

  Making the coffee that would never be my mother’s.

  Then I listened to Al Green. The first eight beats of “Love and Happiness” and then the guttural thrill of the organ. Three o’clock in the morning. Talkin bout how she can make it right. Marcus pressing me against the eucalyptus leaves and whispering, Please. Please. Just a taste.

  I wiped down the cast-iron pan my mother had brought with her in that Apache truck. Her mother had given it to her—told her she could make a living with one pan. That’s what my grandmother had done. She had sold coffee and gumbo out of her house to people when they came in from the cane fields. In the old Sarrat, the one where girls were spirited away to California to keep them safe, while my father planned to erase the evil that would have crushed those girls. Maybe killed them.

  The sun was still hovering in the haze of smog and amber evening. The restlessness surged through my thighs and ribs, as it always did when I needed to walk a long way. I wouldn’t sleep if I didn’t have movement and time.

  Downtown was about three miles from here. Easy for me. I was a walkin fool. Maybe Hattie still worked at the Golden Gopher. She could tell me about the photo.

  When I bent to pinch the dead geranium blossoms from the pots, Sherry called to me from the sidewalk. She carried a takeout bag from the Thai place. We’d been there a few times together—she told me about her work on women in World War I France.

  “Hey—you’re back! You had some visitors, huh?”

  “Yeah.” I dropped the blossoms. “I was interviewing them.” You a lie.

  “Oh. Yeah.” Then she frowned. Her forehead was flushed red, her eyes traced with veins. “I was typing all day. But I looked out the window, and one of them ran down the stairs carrying something. Are you missing a picture?”

  Victor. Shit. She thought he was a thief. I couldn’t have this conversation right now.

  I said, “No, I gave it to him. A gift.” The intricate silver pendant at her throat was from Nepal. “He’s a great kid.”

  I headed down Los Feliz Boulevard. I would tell her the rest tomorrow.

  Nobody walks in LA. A whole song about it.

  I walked past all the lovely buildings, the olive trees pruned like airborne poodles, the tiny rugs of lawn. No one looked out the window and said something about what I was wearing, or where I was going, or how thin I looked, because hardly anyone knew who I was, and I wanted to keep it that way.

  Last night, Clarette would have brought the sausage to my mother, and every other person on Sarrat’s single street would have checked to make sure the andouille was from Andre’s Market. Then they would have given her coffee and asked how she felt about Glorette, and about me, because we had both disappeared.

  I turned onto Vermont and passed the people sitting at sidewalk tables, dogs tethered to city trees, store windows with funky quilted jackets and sequined purses, and one of my favorite bookstores—Skylight—where Arthur Graves half smiled from a poster.

  On Sunset Boulevard, the smells changed to engine oil and the vague sweetness of blooming four-o’clocks planted in front of a botanica. Coming toward me was the homeless woman who lived somewhere nearby. Her shopping cart was full of her belongings and her small dog—a rat terrier—rode where her purse would have been. She pushed past me with her head down, and her scalp was pink as tinted pearls.

  The only walkin fools I knew in LA were homeless people, and they walked to pass the time or collect cans or find church people serving food or erase momentarily the demons talking in their heads. They needed air passing their ears like sharks needed water passing their gills—to survive.

  I was the same. I walked in that rhythm—my greatest oblivion and comfort—and saw every person who passed me: two women pushing strollers, their faces Mayan, plastic shopping bags like bulbous octopi tied to the handles. Everything in the store windows—Silver Lake hip gilded furniture next to blow-up dolls with fishnets, Echo Park panaderias with pink pan d
ulce and sugar skulls with eyebrows of icing.

  I walked faster now, heading down Sunset toward Beverly. My mother hadn’t been allowed to walk far as a girl, when she was prey. My father had walked hundreds of miles—when he was a homeless child, when he worked the cane fields, when he was in the army—and never mentioned joy in it.

  A walkin fool.

  My brothers and their friends named the fools, shouted them out, when I was young. Man, Detroit is one ballplayin fool. Don’t do nothin but dribble all day. I heard that. Cornelius tore up again—damn, that is a drinkin fool. Got to have him that Olde English every day.

  And the worst kind? Grady Jackson. Shit. Sprung fool. Ain’t no sense in gettin like that over a female. No female worth gettin that sprung. Not even Glorette.

  My first time in England, Shakespeare was read aloud. Fool, make us laugh. Go tell the fool he is needed. I saw it on the dessert menu. Raspberry fool. I tasted the cream and cake, and thought of Grady Jackson.

  The houses and apartments of Echo Park loomed above me, and beside me was a vacant lot tangled with morning glory blossoms closed up for the evening, like handfuls of silver-blue cigars. I walked past the sheared-off cliffs below an old apartment complex, where shopping carts huddled like ponies under a Grand Canyon.

  Glorette’s body had been in a shopping cart. When we were small, and someone had left a cart in the canal, the mud and grass covered the metal skeleton until it looked like a shaggy burro under the water.

  Through a gap in the hills, I could see downtown, buildings glittering like disco balls. No one knew I rarely drove. Everyone said, “Parking was a bitch today, huh?” and I nodded in agreement. I bet it was a bitch for them.

  My hip bones felt like someone had poured hot oil inside the sockets, and my thighs hummed when I stopped at the corner of Eighth and Olive. A veil of coolness began to dry at my shoulders. It was warm here, but not half as hot as it would be in Rio Seco.