What Lies Between Us (25 page)

*   *   *

She is one and a half and we go to the zoo. We watch her eyes grow wide at these far-fetched creatures, the strutting emu, the plodding giant tortoise. She makes us consider the impossibility of the giraffe, its head teetering on that ridiculous neck; the painted symmetry of the zebra. We laugh at her clear consternation, the way her eyebrows rise, and you can see her thinking
What
are
those things? What are they?
She flaps her arms toward the animals and says, “Bow-wow, bow-wow,” the sound that dogs make in picture books. This is her word for all animals—some logic here, some rendering all creatures into a kingdom of their own.

We stop in front of the elephants and she won't let us leave. We must stay here and
look
at these creatures, their gray bulk, those strange flat feet with the familiar toenails, the intelligence in their small lashed eyes as they sway back and forth and back and forth with that slow, lumbering grace.

A lost afternoon blooms around me. Humidity and that scent of home, lush and green. I am small, watching the elephants walk up Kandy road, my hand tight in my father's. There are a line of them ambling up the mountain road, coming from all parts of the island for the annual procession, enormous loads of grass balanced on their backs. “They are carrying their lunch,” my father says. I can feel him tall and straight next to me, the rub of his fingers over mine. His presence true and unshakable, but some menace also there. I shake my head to clear him away; my adult body comes back to me, and I am again with him and her in the kingdom of animals.

*   *   *

He says, “Shouldn't she be talking more by now?”

I say, “She's fine. She'll talk when she's ready, won't you, sweetness?” kissing her, that sweet scent of baby girl, the perfect curve of forehead under my lips.

Thinking,
Maybe for me it is better that she doesn't talk.
Not yet at least; that it is strange, of course, but maybe also convenient. There are so many secrets we share. So much I don't want her telling her daddy.

*   *   *

When he's gone she watches me with those great brown eyes. Every bit of her attuned to my mood, my state. I am her deity. She knows how I feel and adjusts her mood to mine as if I am her weather. She knows my anxieties, my terrors, and my dangers, and she accommodates herself to them. This is something not noted or commented upon: the gentleness with which they approach us. We who are not gentle with their small, delicate selves. In this way they know us in a way that we do not ever know them.

She comes to me where I lie on the old gold couch, staring into the occluded sunlight that falls through the window. She puts one small hand on either side of my face, pulls my clouded face close to her own bright one, dispels the images, says, “Mama sad?”

And I, startled to be seen so clearly, say, “I'm not sad, baby. I'm fine … I'm good. I'm just very tired.” I flash the brightest smile in my repertoire, know that it comes off like a shark spotting something seal-shaped in the water above. Her face works as she assimilates this, the evidence of her own eyes at odds with my words. I see her coming to the inevitable conclusion that she must be wrong, that her reading is mistaken, that mommies can lie on the couch not talking, not moving, barely breathing, tears rolling silently over the planes of their faces, and still be happy. I see it as it happens, the first time she knows she can't trust her own feelings, that they are unreliable. It is perhaps the cruelest moment, but I can't do what was required, which is to say, “Yes, Mommy is very sad. But it's okay. I'll be okay soon.” She rests her forehead against mine, little and confused, wanting to understand.

*   *   *

I come to myself. I am in the shower, the water tepid, running to cold. He is banging a fist on the door, shouting. I turn off the water with trembling, wrinkled fingers. How long has it been? Where did I leave her? I grab a towel and open the door and he is there, huge and blocking the light, his hair in lifted tufts as if he has raked his fingers through it. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Where is she?”

“In her room. How long did you leave her?”

“Not long.” My voice like something coming from far underground.

He leans close, grabs my upper arms, his eyes slitted, glacial blue. “I don't believe you. I think you left her for a long, long time. Her diaper was filthy.” He pushes me from him so I smash into the basin with my hip, sink to the floor sobbing, the towel fallen around my feet.

He says, “Just don't infect her with your disease. Whatever that is.” He turns away and his footsteps are loud as drumbeats.

I nod into my hands. Yes, it is a disease. Yes, I am infected. Yes, I need to keep it away from her. She is too fragile to hold the weight. Even on perfect days, there is something under my skin. Some beast that moves below the surface. I can keep it at bay, mostly. But every now and then, it awakes and unfurls in jerky movements. It is the minotaur in the maze of my body. It wakes up and howls and wants to be seen, wants to show its broken face that is also mine. It asks for sympathy or perhaps for love. It screams that it too was a child once and it was hurt. It asks why it cannot have these things: love, belonging, ease. When it emerges, it has no pity, no mercy. His presence is the antidote. It keeps the beast away.

He's gone into her room, holding her to his chest, the one place I want to be. The place she has taken. I reach for the sink and pull myself up slowly. My hip feels disjointed, already a bruise rising like paint swirled on my skin from the inside. I limp into the bedroom, pull aside the covers, and sink into the bed. I'm still wet, so the sheets stick to me, sucking away moisture, my hair on the pillow like a mermaid's.

I remember that time before she came. I remember rolling around in Golden Gate Park, his body over mine, breathless for each other. I remember that a group of bicyclists had yelled and hollered, cheering on our passion. And we, shy but also ecstatic, had risen to look and wave at them. I remember when he wanted me so badly he ground his teeth at me in desire and groaned when he touched me. I remember when I wanted him so badly it felt like hunger, like thirst.

I burn alone until morning.

 

Twenty

My little girl never darkens. She is milk with the slightest splash of tea, golden headed as if birthed from him and a much paler woman. On the streets they stare at us, this dark woman and this fair little girl. They say, “Look at her. So pretty. So cute.” South Asian mothers come up to me and say, “My goodness, she's so fair. Your husband must be American, no?” Their eyes are covetous, appraising. They like these gifts of whiteness. Where am I in her blood? I had read somewhere that young children most often look like their fathers. It's a way to ensure that a man knows who his children are, that he will not kill them because he suspects they are not his. Here is biology in action, her pale skin and yellow curls. Only her staring, watchful eyes, darkening to chocolate, are like mine.

*   *   *

I take her to the city, a park in Noe Valley where her father used to live in those other fairy-tale days. I sit on a bench and watch her toddle around, drag her blanket behind her to the sandbox, stumble over the edge, sit down. She runs her fingers though the sand, holds her hands out to see the sand fall through her tiny fingers. I watch her like a hawk, always. You never know what could happen to a girl. A woman comes and sits next to me. There is a sort of peace. The day is bright and airy. Clouds speed high overhead so that we are in light, then shadow, and then bright sunlight again.

The woman next to me makes a gesture, her hand rising to shade her eyes. I can tell she wants to chat. I straighten my back, curve away from her so that she will know my solitude must not be breached. But she cannot abide this turning away. We are one tribe, after all, the community of mommy. She leans toward me, says, “Hola. Cómo estas?” I realize that we are not in fact one tribe. Instead, she has confused me with one of the Latina nannies that run around after white charges in this wealthy neighborhood. She has read me as one of those women who have abandoned their own children in some faraway place to look after these American offspring. It is an old role she has found for me, the children of this country for so long brought up by women with dark skin, black skin.

Now Bodhi comes up to me, clutches my knees, pushes between my legs, flings her head and arms out, and reaches up to me. I grab her and lift her into my arms, stand up and kiss her cheeks, my dark hand in her lit curls.

The woman says, “Wow. She's really attached to you, isn't she?”

I turn around and stare at her. My eyes are slitted; the blood is slow in my veins. “Why wouldn't she be?”

The color jumps into her cheeks, two spots like a painted doll's rouge. “Oh, I just meant that … you know…”

“Yes, I know what you mean. I'm not the nanny. I'm not the babysitter. This is
my
child.”

“Oh I'm so sorry. I didn't mean…”

I want to say, “Fuck you, you racist piece of shit.” The words slide down my throat, thick, unspeakable. Tears springing in my eyes, I turn on my heel and walk away with my girl draped over my shoulder, leaving behind us the woman's unslapped face.

*   *   *

She is always quiet, always meek, and it reminds me of my mother saying, “You used to sit so quietly. We would leave you sitting in a room by yourself, and if we came back much later you were still sitting there. You didn't move. You weren't rowdy like the other children. Our friends' children.”

Bodhi has inherited my childhood stillness. But unlike my mother, I am not fooled. This is not obedience. When a baby bird falls out of the nest, it does not chirp to alert the slinking cat. The kittens in their turn are silent when left by their mother. They are aware of the shadow of the owl. No matter how long she is gone, they will not call out. Only at the edge of starvation, weeks later, will they cry out, desperate for salvation.

My girl's stillness is likewise a certain careful gauging, a waiting to see how things will unfold. She is watching to see from which direction danger comes. My mother had thought it was some inherent goodness in me. Instead it was an act of survival.

*   *   *

At the playground I sit on a bench while Bodhi plays and smoke cigarettes to the bitter stub, trying to suck down enough nicotine to get me through the long evenings ahead, the sleepless nights. I sit on the edge of the bench, my knees jiggling high, and smoke and try not to slip into the bottomless pit.

Before Daniel came, my soul had been cloistered. I had been reconciled to isolation, and in this, there had been a kind of contentment. But I had let him inside and I had swallowed happiness. I had feasted on his flesh; I had dwelt within it. I had fallen into the arms of this country that was first his. Then she had come and my world had swelled with love, but had also shrunk down to the size of a pinhead. There is the sensation of a shroud dropped over my head, no more air to breathe. I don't like this, I realize. I don't like being the mommy. I love my child, but I don't like motherhood. Motherhood is the constancy of a pair of eyes seeking you out, wanting you, needing you. It is the feeling that there is no darkness, no private place, no escape from those small but piercing eyes. I had not thought that a child could intrude so completely into one's solitude. I see now that she does not share my serenity but rather disrupts and shatters it. Now wherever I go, her eyes track me like a hunter's.

I remember the trip Daniel and I had taken once, that deep mountain lake. All those corpses he had claimed lay at the bottom of the freezing depths. The sun is shining, but I can't feel it on my skin anymore. The water has reached out once again and dipped its pointed finger into my jugular. I feel what it would be like to fall through miles of dark water, the horror of coming to bed in the mud surrounded by smashed, water-torn bodies.

A sharp cry, and I look up to see that Bodhi has fallen, her knee skinned. She looks at me with tears trembling unshed from her eyes. We have an important and silent conversation then. Her asking for succor and my replying, “I am not the one to come to. I will not help you. This is the nature of my maternity.”

“Who should I go to, then?” her eyes ask, and mine reply, “No one. There is no one in the world to go to.” I look away, I take a drag, and when I look back she has brushed off the bruised place and already turned away. I don't think she will ask again. I'm teaching her to be tough, to be strong. No one else can teach her like I can. There are people in the world who can hurt her like they hurt me. But if she is as strong as iron, if she can lock up that inside place where no hands can reach, then she will survive the world of men as I have survived.

*   *   *

When he's gone, sometimes I'm wound so tight, so much is bursting under my skin, I can't stand it. I want to scream and rage and fight, and there is no one to do this with. There are no adults in my world. So instead I grasp the glasses in our kitchen one by one and throw them as hard as I can against the wall. The cataclysmic smash of each glass exploding, a necessary shattering. A crashing like sea surf against a cliff. I smash and smash until finally there is release.

In my skin is a buried chest that came forth on the tide with her birth. A chest I have lost the key to, and this crashing is the only way to break into it. Inside are unspoken names, bruises I cannot look at, flesh torn like a piece of paper. These things burst loose from between my bones, go crashing through the walls of our house, rise into the air, and are pulled into the sky, far away from us.

When I come back, the kitchen is like the inside of a glass cave, sparking ice on every surface, dancing prisms of light as in the aftermath of a storm. I sink to my knees, put my forehead on the floor, and sob in great gaping breaths, hair dredged over my face, shoulders shaking.