By the Light of My Father's Smile Read online

  It’s not the same, I said.

  Of course it is, she said.

  I was a child.

  Maggie, please, just forgive the son of a bitch.

  This made me laugh.

  Memories Are So Heavy

  Ms. Robinson, said my youthful doctor, the important thing is that you must lose weight.

  But my memories are so heavy, Doctor, I said.

  It isn’t impossible, said my sister, sitting at the foot of my bed. I am coming home with you. We’ll start your new life together.

  Susannah, I said, it is your goodness that nauseates me.

  She smiled.

  Too bad, Sis. She turned to the doctor. How much weight should she lose?

  A couple of hundred pounds would make her feel a lot better, he said. Her furniture would be a lot happier too.

  Very amusing, I said. What neither of you realizes, I continued, is that fatness serves a purpose. When I am fat I feel powerful, as if I could not possibly need anything more.

  Yes, said Susannah, and you like to butt people out of your way on the street.

  What would I have to eat to lose two hundred pounds? I mused.

  Oh, lots of things, said the skinny young doctor. My wife cooks stuff for us that has almost no fat.

  What do you cook for her? I asked.

  I don’t cook, he said.

  Why’s she stuck with you?

  Don’t pay her any mind, Doctor, said Susannah, smiling her toothpaste-ad smile, showing her perfect little teeth. She was born to bitch.

  And bitch I did, the whole week she stayed with me, talking about carrots and colonics. As soon as she left I threw out the juicer she’d bought and hauled my first big marbled steak out of the freezer, mashed my first mound of buttery potatoes. Had my first alcoholic drink. It was as if my memories were lodged in my cells, and needed to be fed. If I lost weight perhaps my memories of Manuelito and my anger at my father would fade away. I felt so abandoned already, I did not want them to go.

  Bad Women Aren’t

  the Only Women

  My sister sleeps around, I said to her lover, Pauline.

  She looked surprised.

  She always has, I said, though when we were growing up I never would have suspected she even liked sex. But she does.

  Pauline shrugged. Bad women aren’t the only women who enjoy sex. Good women have been known to get down. But your sister is completely loyal to whoever she’s in love with. As monogamous as a priest.

  Being married to the church would suit her just about as well as it appears to suit those imposters, I said.

  I’m telling you, priests play around more than your sister does.

  My father considered me a whore, I said. But I have had only one man my whole life. I never cheated on him.

  I wouldn’t say that, said Pauline.

  What do you mean?

  I’d say you cheated, with food.

  I turned my face away.

  Your sister falls in love. Period. I think it is with courage, with guts, which she fears she lacks, that she falls in love. It could be with anyone. She does not appear to look first at the genital area. Loving comes before that, not after. She is faithful to the person she’s with. Utterly. If she were not, I would not be with her.

  How do you know? That she is faithful? I asked.

  Pauline chuckled. I have faith, she said.

  Our father loved her, I said; he never loved me.

  He must have been very confused, she said.

  Her hair was short, spiky, and silver. Her eyes candid and dark.

  Her slender, curvaceous body, in black jeans and a crimson shirt, ageless and attractive. I could see why my sister was in love with her.

  She was a woman who would not let you evade the issue. Nor would she evade it herself.

  I felt a familiar flash of envy for Susannah. Such a Goody Two-shoes all her life; to end up with this spunky creature!

  My own father was confused, Pauline said with a sigh. Almost with languor. My father was very tired and confused. He had to pretend he wanted all ten of the children who kept him chained to a table in a meatpacking plant.

  Why did he and your mother have so many? I asked.

  They thought it was the Christian thing to do, she said. They thought if they did anything to stop the births, God would judge them harshly. Though how much more harshly he could judge them than to make them live with ten children in a three-bedroom apartment, I can’t imagine.

  Is he still alive? Do you see him?

  Oh, yes, said Pauline. He is someone now whom I never knew before. Someone who grieves that his children grew up without knowing who he really was. Someone who wants to make amends. Someone who’s fun, actually. Old and cute. You know the type.

  Too well, I said. Bastards.

  You have to open your heart to them, eventually, she said. No matter what they’ve done.

  I’ll die first, I said.

  You might, she said, looking at me hard.

  Sticking Out to Here

  My mother died of bearing children, I said to Susannah.

  This is the part of my hard-luck story that is hardest for her to hear. It is exactly as it is with fairy tales. The saddest part is always when the mother dies, which she tends to do early in the story. We are always grateful that she goes early, because it is so hard to lose her; it is far better to have her death behind us rather than in front of us, as we trudge off to meet our destiny. But I had already tired of waiting for things to change in our house, and trudged off to meet my destiny before my mother died. I don’t know if she ever forgave me; my siblings have sworn she did not. I loved her with all my daughter’s heart; hearing that she died blaming me for abandoning her caused me to suffer.

  She began to hate her body, I said to Susannah. It was too fecund by half. Five children would have left her room to move around. She could eventually have caught her breath. With ten this was impossible.

  Hard to imagine, even, said Susannah.

  Yes. It was obvious that they still slept together, I said, because there was always a baby on the way. But the first time I had sex with a woman, the first time I enjoyed it or could even fathom what the big deal was about sex, I wondered if my mother had ever truly enjoyed herself. Was ever able to relax into it, so to speak, without the worry about another mouth to feed? It would kill me to know she never actually enjoyed it, I said.

  But that’s possible, said Susannah. Women all over the world have been brainwashed to think sex is not meant to be pleasurable to them, only to the men fucking them. You’re supposed to sort of steal your pleasure from theirs. Fucked, isn’t it?

  Susannah was so ladylike and proper, so elegantly dressed in just the right matching tones, the right fabrics for the season, the right shoes. She knew how to set a perfect table, knew where each knife and tiny spoon went. It was always a shock to hear her curse. Which she did with the same insouciance with which she asked the florist for a stunning fucking bouquet.

  That’s what Gena said. The woman who tried to help me find an abortionist. And who became my lover after the baby was born. She was disgusted that so many women thought sex was just for the man.

  Ah, Gena, said Susannah, pulling her silk scarf across her nose.

  She was my teacher. She thought I had potential. She tried to help me by letting me study at her house. Right away we talked a lot about sex, because I was almost completely ignorant, though pregnant as anything. Talking about it, hearing her tell why it mattered to her, why her children reminded her of two very special nights, got me interested.

  You really didn’t know, she said.

  How could I know? I knew the mechanics, sure, but not the wonderful blossoming that good loving means. The way you open, and flow, and feel joined to, and at peace with life. To Winston sex was a game he was playing, on me, and that was just fine with him.

  Ugh, said Susannah. Thank goodness I never had a lover like that. Male or female.

  You’re lucky, I said
. It leaves you feeling like shit.

  And Gena was not, how shall we say, a Sister of the Yam?

  No, I said, laughing. She was white. The daughter of Eastern European immigrants who were as racist as if they were homegrown. But she wasn’t like them. She was married and had children of her own; she wanted them to know that Gypsies, who were the niggers of the old country, and colored people were okay. She tried to prepare me for childbirth. It’s rough, she said, don’t underestimate it. It wasn’t that I underestimated it, I knew the damage childbearing had done to my mother’s body; I just couldn’t bear to think about it happening to me. I liked sports. I liked playing basketball and even football with the boys. I was still doing this in my eighth month. She said: Lily Pauline, you can’t keep doing this; your belly’s sticking out to here.

  I couldn’t see it, though. As far as I was concerned, I hadn’t put a baby in there, I kind of dared one to be coming out.

  Very logical, said Susannah, smiling.

  It wasn’t really, I know that now. Sometimes I see young pregnant women coming into the restaurant. They carry themselves just the way I did. As if their bodies are still under their control; as if nothing has changed in their world. I don’t know what I thought would happen. Gena’s husband, Richard, used to ask me questions about the baby: What will you name it? Where will it sleep? Do you have a bassinet? I had nothing, of course, only the bed I shared with two siblings. As for naming, there was no one I cared enough about to name a child after. In the event, I named my son Richard, since he was the only person, other than his wife, who’d inquired about him.

  And did Richard ever find out about you and his wife?

  I don’t know. He didn’t learn anything from me; that’s for sure. Maybe Gena told him. I can’t think why she would. She never left him, and always maintained he was a good man. I agreed. Besides, our affair wasn’t like any affair you’re likely to read about in Playboy. It had this incredible nurturing quality; it was the kind of affectionate sex that seemed designed to reconnect me to myself, to keep me alive. However, it was passionate enough so that I learned about orgasms. And once I learned that I could have them, and have them easily, I realized that in at least that one area I was free.

  Susannah was sympathetically stroking my knee. That’s a thought not often heard, she said.

  I know, I said, because the idea of a personal freedom for slaves (which I considered myself) has always been posited as spiritual. That’s the freedom my parents tried to sell me. When I tried to commit suicide by ineffectually slicing my wrists, they hauled me off to church. By then I didn’t trust them anymore. Nothing they could have proposed would have interested me. The piety of their religion least of all.

  I sat there in the second pew looking up at the minister and wondering what he knew about orgasms, whether he had them regularly. Whether he knew, in the biblical sense, the women who frequently moaned and groaned and fainted in front of him at church. I’m sure now that he did, I said.

  Orgasmic freedom has been a male right, said Susannah, with any woman they’ve wanted to fuck, since the beginning of patriarchy.

  It is a very great freedom, I said. Once I experienced it, I felt I had been reborn. Now, when Winston hammered away on top of me I thought of myself as a castle with a thick iron door against which his puny member was useless. And then, with Gena, one kiss, the slightest, most feathery breath, opened me like a rose. It was magic, and I was eager to discover if anyone I knew shared it.

  And did they? asked Susannah.

  For the most part, no, I said. Which puzzled me. Married women I haltingly queried didn’t have it. My older sisters didn’t have it. My neighbors’ daughters didn’t have it. And so on. They had the yearning for it, they ached for it, they pleaded and begged for it, they listened to songs that described and promised it, but generally speaking, orgasmic freedom was not something you could assume was had by every brightly painted, sensuously scented woman walking down the street. This was a revelation. That I, lowly me, somehow had this precious thing. I knew instantly what it meant. It meant I was not forgotten by Creation; it meant that I was passionately, immeasurably loved. I started right away to plan my escape.

  What kind of cakes did you first make? asked Susannah.

  Lemon, I said. The yellow of the lemon cheered me and made my customers think of sunshine and a better life. My door, you recall, was painted yellow also. After the lemon I made German chocolate and caramel, which is an old traditional favorite among people from the South.

  And your pies?

  Berries, I said. Yams. I learned everything I needed to know from having watched my mother, but also from Gena, who introduced me to cookbooks. In the beginning, when things were warm and electric between us, she helped me cook. My little brothers were my salesmen and each day fanned out across our neighborhood after school. This was before drugs were imported and sold that way. I paid them a dime for each cake they sold; I paid my mother for the use of her stove. I had to purchase all my ingredients out of baby-sitting money. Even so, my profits slowly mounted.

  Susannah laughed. A born capitalist!

  No, I said. A born survivalist. Gena found out about a program for college-bound slow learners that she recommended me for; it was in another part of town. I wasn’t a slow learner, but so far behind in my studies I might as well have been. The program was the only thing that stood between me and being on the street. I went to class at night. I made it to City College in a couple of years. In college I studied business. Eventually I graduated, joined the Navy, got out, worked in restaurants, bought my first restaurant. The rest, as they say, is herstory.

  In the Navy, I tell Susannah, I learned definitively that our country is doomed.

  Why is that? she asks, though we have discussed my military career many times.

  In the military there is no respect for women. No respect for the feminine, whatsoever. And no respect for anyone who is not white. It is as if the world were made entirely for the pleasure of white males, and that is how they behave. I felt completely unsafe among the men designated to protect our country. Some of their orgies and rapes have since become known, though many of their more despicable acts will never be made public. I was lucky to get out alive.

  And how did you? she asks.

  By reading novels, going to movies whenever I got the chance, and planning a future for my son. My son, who thought he was my brother, because that is what he was told after I left.

  Lily Paul

  My husband, Petros, was responsible for my first visit to Lily Paul’s, an upscale organic soul food restaurant that he’d discovered through friends.

  You’re not going to believe what I’ve found, he said to me.

  Is it bigger than a breadbox? I asked, laughing.

  Yes, he said. Much.

  It was.

  Lily Paul’s was all ferns and gilded mirrors, chandeliers and parquet floors. However, on each and every table there was the same cabbage-rose oilcloth that was on his parents’ table in Greece and framed, one tiny square, neatly on my wall.

  I laughed when we sat down.

  How’s that for a surprise! he said, turning pink with pleasure at my joy.

  It’s wonderful! I said, laughing into his eyes.

  Perhaps tonight would end the way our nights out used to end, I thought. We’d eat a good dinner, drink a bottle or two of wine. Ogle each other across the guttering candle, play footsie under the table with our stockinged feet. Embrace as we left the establishment. Make love all night long. We needed this to happen. We prayed it would. It did not.

  What’ll you have? asked a sexy woman with spiky silver hair.

  My wife, answered Petros.

  Not a bad choice, said the woman, grinning.

  The smile left Petros’s face immediately. But the woman and I maintained our merry mood.

  Halfway through a delicious dinner, I felt it only cultured to thank her for the food and to formally introduce myself. What is your name? I asked.
>
  I’m Lily Paul, she said. I own the joint.

  Oh, I said, impressed. I’m Susannah Robinson and this is my husband, Petros.

  How do you do, she said.

  He was not doing well. A pall seemed to have dropped over his head.

  What’s the matter? I asked, as Lily Paul went to tally our check.

  Dykes, he said. Their boldness takes my appetite away.

  Do you think she’s a dyke? I asked. What makes you think so?

  He rolled his eyes. Be serious, Susannah, he said. Look at how she carries herself.

  Lily Paul was sauntering back to our table, smiling and chatting with customers who stopped her along the way. Her silver hair radiant under the lights. She looks like she doesn’t give a damn what anyone thinks, I said, studying her. Is it that that makes her a dyke?

  Oh, be quiet, he said. Then, pleasantly, to Lily Paul, he said: A nice place you have here. With a big grin.

  She slipped me her card, and didn’t answer.

  Two weeks later, I called her.

  How are you? I asked.

  I’m suffering like hell from menopause, was her blunt response.

  Oh, I said, what are the symptoms? Hoping I was not to hear a sad tale about the demise of sexual desire.

  Just the usual, she said: hot flashes, migraines, mood swings, bodily aches and pains. Oh, she said, and my girlfriend doesn’t want to have sex as much as I do.

  I brightened. Shall I come over, I said, and massage your scalp? I’ve heard that helps.

  My scalp belongs to my girlfriend at the moment, just as I’m sure your fingers are in the keeping of your cute husband. He is cute, you know. Something of a phony, though, I thought.

  This was such an accurate reading of Petros it made me laugh.

  You’ve got a nice laugh, she said. And you’ve damn sure got a pretty throat.

  I like your silver hair, I said.

  We have two places to start, she said.

  What do you mean? I asked.