The Mistress of Spices (19 page)

He stands on the threshold for a long moment. What he is deciding I do not know. My held breath scrapes my chest, dry like claws.

In one angry motion he pulls the door shut. The thunderclap sound shakes me.

My American, what is it that angers you so.

“What name shall I tell you? I have had so many.”

His voice is harsh and hurting, like rock on rock. He does not look at me.

Still, relief runs through me like a river. When I breathe in, the air is sweet as honey in my throat.
He did not leave he did not leave
.

“I too have had more than one,” I say. “But only one of them is my true-name.”

“A true-name.” He chews on his lip for a moment. Flicks back a sheet of black satin hair. “I’m not sure I can tell which one it is. Perhaps you’ll know.”

And that is how he begins.

“I’m not surprised you thought I was white,” says the American. “For a long time, growing up, I thought so myself. Rather, I didn’t think of it at all, like most kids. Just accepted.

“My father was a quiet man, big and slow moving. The kind that when you’re with them you feel yourself slowing down
too, calmness covering you like a cool blanket, even your heartbeat. Later I would wonder if that was why my mother married him, hoping.

“Of all things about him I remember his hands best. Large and callused from the work he did up at the refinery in Richmond, the knuckles skinned raw. Half-moons of oily dirt under the nails no matter how often he scrubbed them with the brush Mother had bought for him. He was self-conscious about them, I think. How they looked next to my mother’s quick, manicured fingers, the nail polish always gleaming perfect no matter what she’d been doing around house or garden. The rare times when company came around, mostly people Mother had met at church, he’d jam his hands in his pockets, where they sat knotted like roots until the visitors left.

“But around me his hands were easy. He’d lay one on my head when I told him about school or a new game I’d made up, and it was the stillest thing I’d ever known. I could feel the listening in it. When I was hurt or upset or sometimes late at night for no reason at all, he would come sit by my bed and rub my back, his callused thumb making little circles over my shoulder blades until I fell asleep. I loved the smell his hands left, on my body, in my hair. An old, wild, patient smell, like a forest swamp.”

My American’s voice is glazed and heavy like medicine honey, the words catching in its bitter sweetness, the memory of things lost. They wrench open in me chambers I thought I’d shut for always.

“I guess I idolized him,” he says, “the way kids do their parents, you know.”

No, American. I do not know. As you speak a memory rises
out of my childhood, my parents scolding me—or trying to—for something I’d done. Perhaps a dish I’d thrown to the ground because I did not like its taste, perhaps a fight I’d had with a sister, scratching her face, tearing her hair. I see my father’s finger pointed accusing, my mother shaking her head as though I were beyond remedy. And I—how angry I was that they dared criticize me, I who was responsible for all their wealth, for how people looked at them with awe in the marketplace. How I fixed my scornful gaze on them until they lowered their eyes and backed away.

But today as I listen to my American’s voice I see them newly. I see bafflement and fear in the slumped lines of their shoulders. In their lowered eyes, the desire to be good parents, the desire, even, to love. But not knowing how. I see now that they are the eyes of lost children, and seeing, I want to weep.

Perhaps one day American I will be able to tell you of it. I Tilo who has until now been the patient listener, the solver of everyone else’s problems.

But he is speaking, and I must push back my own sorrows to give my attention over to his words which scour the skin of the evening with their sudden harshness. And that is how I know I have come to a hurting place.

“My mother, she was—different.”

I hold my body still as wood earth stone, even my breathing, until he begins again. Now I find his voice has taken on smoothness, his phrases grown full and formal as though this is a long-ago tale of someone else. Perhaps it is the only way he can bring himself to tell it.

“What I remember most about her was how she was always cleaning, with an angry kind of energy. Dirt on anything—Dad or
me included—she took as a personal affront. She spent hours at the washboard battling Dad’s stained overalls, and every night when he took a bath she scrubbed his back until it was red. We lived in a small house on the edge of a run-down neighborhood, mostly factory workers and dockhands, men who sat out on the porch in the evenings in undershirts, staring out at the yellowed lawns, nursing bottles of beer. But inside our home you’d never have known this. Everything had a shine to it, the lemon linoleum kitchen floor, the TV in its fake-walnut console, the curtains clean and sweet-smelling from something Mother put in the wash water. Matching silverware on the table, and her watching to make sure I used it right.

“She didn’t like the neighborhood kids, with their loud laughter and curse words and shirts with too-short sleeves on which they wiped their noses. Still, she was a good mother, she knew a boy needed friends. She let me play with them and on occasion bring them into the house. She served them juice and cookies which they ate uneasily, sitting on the edges of chairs that gleamed with furniture polish. But when they left she would make me wash—face, arms, legs, everything—over and over as though to make sure all traces of
them
were removed. She would sit at the dinner table with me as I did my homework, and when I glanced up there would be a look on her face, an intent, pained love I didn’t quite know what to make of.

“She had a ritual every night before bed. When I had changed into my pajamas she would slick my hair down with water and comb it back neatly. So I could go meet my dreams looking good, she said, planting a kiss in the middle of my forehead when she was done. Other boys might have been impatient with such things, but I wasn’t. I loved the strong, supple way she
moved the comb through my hair, the way she would hum under her breath. Sometimes as she combed she would say she wished my hair was more like Dad’s and not so coarse and coalblack, falling all over my forehead no matter how much she worked on it. Secretly, though, I was pleased. I loved Dad, but his hair was a thin, brittle red with bald patches already showing through. I was glad my hair took after mother’s, except that where mine was straight as string hers curled around her face in the prettiest way.”

In the opaque evening air of the store, shapes take form. Old desires. A woman, her whole body tensed to lift herself out of her life, a boy looking at his mother with all the world in his eyes.

Is he still speaking, my American, or am I dreaming his dream inside my heart?

Understand this, says the boy-shape. Don’t dismiss it as adolescent fancy. I thought my mother the most beautiful woman in creation. Because she was.

I see for a moment the other women that graze the edges of his life, hanging up clothes in the backyards next to his. Mouths full of pins, swollen bellies, the fallen flesh of their arms and throats, their breasts. The sweat that made their shifts stick to their backs. Or at school, the teachers with their thin mouths, their tired red-rimmed eyes, their fingers curving hard around pointers, chalk, dusters. Dry dead things.

But her. The lacy wrists of her nightdresses, the way she would do sit-ups in the morning, her spine curving cleanly, the smell of the cologne she splashed extravagantly over her throat. Her clothes were few, but always from good stores. Her shoes, high on pointy heels which made her dresses sway around her legs as she moved around the house as if she were in a movie.
Even her name, not Sue or Molly or Edith like the neighbor women but Celestina, which she spoke liltingly and never allowed anyone to shorten.

Her hair was always fresh-washed, a halo of wavy black that gave her a radiance which the boy thought was not unlike that of the saints in the holy pictures the nuns handed him in Sunday school. Sometimes she’d pin the curls back with barrettes. Gold, silver, pearl. She kept them in a small carved wooden box and let him play with them and pick out a pair for her to wear.

“She took such good care of them I didn’t know until years later that they were fake,” says the American. The word is a hard, hitting sound in his mouth. “Or that her hair wasn’t naturally curly. The day I found the bottle of perming chemicals in the garage behind a stack of old magazines, I was too mad to even speak to her.” His voice shakes again, remembering, then changes to a harsh laugh. “Except it didn’t matter, because by then we weren’t talking much anyway.”

“Wait,” I say, puzzled by his vehemence. “Why did it upset you so much? In America it is common that women curl their hair. Even I know this.”

“Because by then I knew why she’d done it. Why she did everything I’d admired. The lie of it all.”

“Growing up,” says the American, “I thought of my father as a rock. And my mother like a river falling onto it from a great height. Or perhaps it was only later I remembered them as such. The silent power of him, her restless beauty. And I—I was the sound of water on stone, which sounds like nothing else, which
needs to be related to nothing else. And so I never thought of who my people were, or where I came from.

“My father had been an orphan, brought up in the hard homes of relatives who didn’t want him there. Perhaps that was why he so readily believed my mother, a waitress at the roadside diner where he ate his breakfast, when she told him her folks were dead. Kinlessness seemed to him a natural condition, and a terrible one. Perhaps that was what gave him the courage to propose to this startling young woman with hair like wild horses and a look in her eyes like wild horses also. And after a while of being married to him, she began to believe it too.

“But maybe she’d believed it even before. Maybe when she’d left them, run away, not even a note,
Don’t look for me
, when she’d cut and styled her hair, when she’d changed the shape of her eyebrows with tweezers and painted on a new mouth, when she’d given herself a name pretty and proper like she’d always wanted to have, it had been the same as dying.”

The store is dark now. A total dark. It is the night of no-moon, and someone has shattered the streetlamp outside, so no dusty lines of light seep through the closed slats. I listen to my American’s words and think how darkness changes the timbre of voices, deepens them, cuts them from the body’s confines to float free.

American, into what design shall I weave your floating words, with what color of spice shall I dye them.

“One day when I was about ten, maybe younger,” he says, “a man came to our house. It was a weekday, Dad was at work. The man wore an old coat torn under one arm and jeans that
smelled of animals. His hair, straight and black, fell to his shoulder, and looked vaguely familiar.

“When Mother opened the door and saw him her face turned gray like old rubber. Then a look came over it, hard as the concrete step on which he stood in boots crusted with mud and manure. She started to close the door but he said, Evvie, Evvie, and when I saw her eyes I realized he was calling her by her real name.”

The American’s voice takes on the high, wondering tones of someone dreaming again an old childhood dream.

“She sent me in the other room but I could hear her voice, like fork prongs scraping a tin plate: Why you come here to ruin my life? My mother who always spoke perfect grammar, who washed out my mouth with soap if I ever said
ain’t
. His voice rumbling louder and louder. You ought a be shamed, Evvie, turning your back on your own people. Look at you, imitating whitefolks, thinking yourself so fine and grand, and your little boy that don’t even know who he is. She hissing furious at him to keep it
down
, you no-good bastard.

“After that I heard snatches only. He’s dying. So what he’s dying, I don’t owe him nothing. Words in a language I didn’t understand. And finally, Shit Evvie, I promised him I’d find you and tell you. I done my bit. Now you do what you want. The front door slammed and everything went quiet. A long time later I heard her moving slow and shaky, fixing dinner, stumbling like an old woman in her high shoes. I went in the kitchen and she let me peel potatoes. From time to time I shot her a covert glance, trying to read her expression, wishing she would say something about the man who’d come to our door. But she didn’t. And
before Dad came home she went and washed her face and put on lipstick and a fresh smile.

“That was the first time I realized that there was a place inside of my mother that she kept away from everyone, even me, whom she loved more than anyone.

“Early next morning after Dad left she went into the bedroom, and when she came out I saw she was wearing her best dress, navy blue with a matching jacket and little pearl buttons all the way down the front, and her pearl necklace, which she kept in a little velvet case and didn’t like me to touch. Come on, she said, we’re going somewhere. What about school, I asked, and my mother, who had never let me skip classes before, said, It’s okay, let’s go. All the way in the car she was silent, not scolding me for fiddling with the radio or having the music on too loud. Once or twice I started to ask her where we were going, but she had on a small, absorbed frown, like she was listening to something inside her head, so I didn’t. We drove for a couple of hours this way. And when we turned onto a narrow street with paint-peeled houses and junk cars in the yards and clumps of dandelion grass and garbage spilled from Dumpsters, she made a small sound like something was stuck in her chest, maybe the hook that had pulled her back all the way to that place.