By the Light of My Father's Smile Page 2

  She listens to the woman softly snoring beside her, and then, switching off her mind, she begins to stroke her awake. The woman is responsive instantly, as if she’d never really been asleep. She permits my daughter free-roaming access to her heavy breasts, hot to the touch, and to her furry belly from which the scent of sandalwood floats upward through the sheet. My daughter places her nose in the crease of the woman’s neck, which, like her breasts, is incredibly warm. The woman rolls over and is suddenly the aggressor, on top of my daughter, straddling her. My daughter has wanted this. She widens her body on the bed and slips off the thin chemise she is wearing in order to permit full contact. The woman flings off her strip of a garment, something barely gathered around her loins, and begins to ride my daughter, hard, as if she would drive her into the mattress that sits on a delicate frame of bamboo.

  Her tryst with the Kalimasan boy has left her savage. That, and Susannah’s apparent indifference to it. Now she sucks her fiercely, Susannah’s breasts full and brown and somehow pleading against Pauline’s white teeth and insistent mouth. Between Susannah’s breasts sweat flows, which Pauline laps like a dog. Between her legs where Pauline has insinuated her hand there is, already, a stream of wetness. She feels Pauline’s fingers, first one, then two, then three, enter her with an authoritative firmness. She is embarrassed to hear herself moan and shamed to hear Pauline’s grunt of conquest. Susannah’s body starts to move against the woman’s hand. Oh, she says. And oh, and oh, and oh. Pauline bites her ears. She laps her body everywhere there is sweat. She keeps her pinned and will not let her rise. When my daughter raises her neck from the bed so that the cords of her neck stand out, Pauline thrusts her long whining tongue into her mouth with such force she pushes Susannah’s head almost underneath the pillow. Only her gorged mouth is visible, and Pauline’s forehead rests on the pillow that obscures Susannah’s face.

  Pauline is conscious of the slightest tremor of my daughter’s body but she is also venting her “lust” for the Kalimasan boy. She imagines him coming through the bamboo curtain at the foot of the bed, penis—a smooth and heavy one, she is happy to find out—erect, dripping in hope and shy anticipation. She imagines ordering him to the bed, to her backside. Imagines he is in her, driving her, as she drives herself against Susannah, as if she would kill her for distancing from her, slaughter her for her indifference. Bruise her for the days spent indifferent to Pauline, with her head under the covers in bed.

  When she retrieves her tongue from my daughter’s throat, she laps her armpits, her sides; she claims my daughter’s body as she wriggles expertly backward, toward the slippery penis of the boy, whose heat she feels in her cunt, in her ass, in her ovaries and womb. This is not the moment to recall her own grandsons, half the age of the Kalimasan boy. But she does. Sex is like a stew for her, everyone in it at once. She imagines the thrust of the penis of the Kalimasan boy. She feels her own clitoris huge against the body of the woman with whom she is so angry. She wants her grandsons to know this kind of power over a woman, or over a boy. It is the only power over others she wants them to have. The power to give pleasure, ruthlessly, and to leisurely take it.

  She is ready to burst. But refuses to do so. She lifts her body off Susannah. Rests on her knees, her hand busy between my daughter’s legs. Legs that, though wide, are not wide enough. She pushes them wider. My daughter moans. Feels a wimp. How could she be like this with this woman who so often irritates her? It is a mystery she will not entertain tonight. She feels Pauline’s fist, each knuckle distinct, raking her labia, sending heat waves to her womb. She feels fingers and then full warm lips on her breast. But there is a lessening of intensity, a flagging of energy. She peeks through her tangled hair to see what is happening with Pauline. It is as she suspects. Pauline is waiting for her to ask for it. To beg and plead for it. To thrash against her hand and moan. Oh please, please, go down on me.

  This is the moment Pauline loves. In fact, if she thinks about how much she loves it before it happens she will go off and miss what is for her the crowning moment. That moment when all her terrible beauty is acknowledged, her awesome power bowed to, the sensuality of her daring to wear a bathing suit while riding motorcycles driven by Hindu boys in a country run by Muslims, forgiven.

  The Kalimasan boy has her breasts now, as she waits, in what seems a royal, even imperial squat, for the plea she knows will come. She has given Susannah deeper orgasms than she has ever known; she feels she controls them. Pauline has the same breasts that she had at thirty. Strong, upright breasts whose slight sag only makes them more supple in the hand. Breasts that have never known a bra. The boy’s mouth on her breasts is cool as a melon seed. Waiting for my daughter’s surrender she rocks; my daughter’s shudder against her clitoris almost sets her off. She moves slightly back from her. It will not do to come now and give up the moment my daughter bares herself.

  Please, my daughter says.

  Please what? says the woman, stopping the movement of her hand altogether.

  My daughter whispers something.

  Pauline says, loudly: Speak up!

  Lick me, my daughter says, and looks her in the eye.

  My daughter hears the sharp intake of the woman’s breath. Still looking deep into her eyes, witnessing the lust and the victory, acknowledging it, she reaches up to touch Pauline’s clitoris. It is swollen and tremulous, her cunt dripping. Her hand is a dancer in the woman’s wet flames. Intoxicated, she raises her hand to her nose. The scent of a woman’s sex is like nothing in the world. It is a scent she would crawl for, though Pauline, ever practical, has reminded her it is a scent she already owns.

  Pauline pumps her hand slowly up and out of Susannah’s body, which grieves its leaving by shivering and shuddering. Every fiber of her body is alert to what is coming to her clit.

  Pauline would like to make her beg some more. She is in an arrogant, nearly hostile place few of her friends, colleagues, children, and grandchildren ever see. It is powerful there. She loves it. But if she doesn’t get on with it, the sight of Susannah, laid out like a feast, will bring her to climax—and she is not ready for that yet. In truth, she can barely believe she has restrained herself for so long, and denied herself the taste of my daughter’s core.

  Now she is all gentleness, easing her sweaty body between my daughter’s legs, ever so gently pressing them wider with the broad width of her own thick shoulders. She flings her lead-colored locks out of her eyes, and slithers down, and sinks.

  It is her warm breath my daughter feels. Immediately she is calmed. She settles her body into the bed. Cradles her head exactly in the middle of the pillow. Sighs. At last. Touches briefly, gratefully, masterfully, almost negligently, the woman’s shoulders and her wild hair. Surrendering, she is all but consumed by her own feelings of power.

  Pauline flicks her clitoris with a tongue that seems made of suede, and Susannah begins to moan anew. It is a moan so animallike and guttural, so abandoned and shameless, so full of self-witness, a moan so unlike her day-to-day self, when a certain fastidious haughtiness is often commented on in her character, that it is comical. Leaving passion for just a moment, they both laugh. The bed shakes, as they giggle; a slender bamboo leg cracks. Shit, says Susannah. Pauline raises her head: Next time, she mutters, I’ll have you on the floor.

  Pauline’s mouth captures the whole of Susannah’s vulva. There is no little corner of it that at first escapes. It is as if she would suck out the womb and, indeed, she appears to dive for it with her long whining tongue. Only now, at this, the whining tongue sings, and Susannah feels herself mounting to the clouds, and tries to slow herself down from arriving there. Unbidden, in that moment, she thinks of me and of her mother, so often fighting, when she was a child. Only to emerge from our bedroom after a fight completely peaceful, tranquil, with each other. Our every movement one of indolence, our every utterance marked by an unfathomable calm.

  MacDoc

  Of course Pauline’s behavior reminds me of Magdalena’s. Of Magg
ie. MacDoc.

  When Susannah was four, my church sent me as spiritual advisor to Mexico to work among the Mundo Indians. In reality her mother and I were both anthropologists, but in the early Forties no one would fund us on any serious expedition. We threw ourselves on the mercy of our church, as black people always do when all other sources of sustenance fail. We explained what we had heard about the Mundo: that they were a tiny band of mixed-race Blacks and Indians who’d fled across the border during the Civil War; that by now the people, like others of their mixture near Veracruz, Costa Chica, and elsewhere, thought of themselves not as Africans or as Indians, but as dark-skinned Mexicans. Isolated, however, as they were, they were said to retain distinct tribal ways that they honored and had never repudiated. This was mysterious to earlier anthropologists who had attempted to study them, because they were continually being, it was thought, killed off. They were truly dying out this time, though, according to the information we had, and it was urgent that we witness their way of life before their demise.

  We drove, my wife Langley and I, the entire way, though since the Mundo live in such splendid isolation in the Sierra Madre, where their closest neighbors, the Tarahumara, are still two hundred miles away, we were forced to leave the car at the last hard-scrabble mission, its church crumbling, we encountered. The Mundo sent donkeys down for us, and we arrived to find a gathering of friendly, curious villagers preparing barbecued mutton and broiled corn.

  Maggie was six. Not a six, however, of innocent cheerfulness. Not a six of languid indolence. Not a six driven merely by the dictates of a playful curiosity. No. She was a six that already stared boldly at anything that interested her. And what interested her, it seemed to me, even at that early age, was men, and what was concealed by their trousers.

  My wife did not see this as a problem. Leave the child alone, she advised as we prepared for bed at night, children are curious! I complained that Maggie embarrassed us by her boldness. Her staring and her sidling up to boys three times her age. She is curious, my sweet daughter, said my wife. She laughed. And the young men here are magnetic. She shrugged. Come to bed yourself, and don’t forget the nightly rubber.

  Langley made me laugh. Almost each and every night she made me laugh, as she had done the very first night we met; at a society ball thrown by upper-class Blacks for their grown-up Jack and Jill offspring in a sleek and prosperous enclave of Harlem. Her parents had inherited what was referred to at the time, with envy, as “musical money,” from a famous uncle who was a jazz composer and performer. After Jack and Jill, which was considered by most black people as a kindergarten for the rich, and after boarding school, she’d gone to college in Maine. I, on the other hand, had worked my way through Hampton Institute in the South, and in fact was so poor that I owned only one suit, the one I was wearing when she asked me to dance.

  I was so astonished by this breach of propriety, especially as I noticed her parents looking on, and yet so thrilled by the playful recklessness in her eyes, that I spilled the pink punch I was drinking, all over myself.

  You look good in pink, she’d said brusquely, cracking nary a smile and coolly using a dainty, heavenly-scented hanky to dab at my tie. I laughed because it was certainly not what I’d expected her to say.

  In Mexico she was a woman split in two. During the day, as the “pastor’s” wife, she wore dark colors, even in the midday heat. Or snowy white on feast days, as some of the Indians did. At night she wore nothing at all. Oh, what does God care about what I wear? she had asked the first night we slept together and I was stunned by her beauty, naked, but also profoundly shocked. God gets to wear everything, including us. I suppose I could have forced the issue. But she did not even own a nightgown. Although she did find something, and hold it up. It looked serviceable and was the color of poached salmon, “flesh colored,” it claimed on the label. There were stays. Shall I sleep in this slip your mother gave me? she asked. Frowning, draping the ugly color against her peachy skin.

  Susannah was fascinated by the gigantic pots that the women made in heaps. Some were so big she could put her whole head inside. The Mundo women used only three colors: the red of earth, which was the pot itself and came from the local clay; the black of charcoal; and the white of lime, used as decoration, which after baking in the fire was not white but gray. There were few designs on Mundo pots: their beauty was in the burnished smoothness, the rich symmetry of their form. Their usefulness. The rough, unpolished pots which they also made were bound with strips of goatskin; these were filled with grain and strapped to the backs of donkeys that took them down to the market for sale.

  We were there when the railroad came within a day’s journey of their mountainous territory, almost a century after it was begun in Mexico; and there to see the beginning of the end of the long line of donkeys snaking down the mountain in the blinding sun.

  Langley studied pottery making with the women. She learned to dig the clay, clean it, wedge it, roll the long coils that formed the sides of each pot, and then to kneel before the growing pot as it magically rose from her shallow grass basket, her tongue often poking out the corner of her mouth in rapt concentration, as the other women’s did. There was in building a pot a distinct feeling of prayer, she said. Especially in the first, beginner’s lessons, when she did pray that her slippery, wobbly construction would not slump to the ground. Of course, she said, from watching their mothers make pots, primitive man would assume God made men from clay. Though why, seeing their mothers’ work, they’d think God male, she could not grasp.

  From the window of my study in the small house we were given I watched them. Susannah and her mother intent on learning a skill. Enthralled by the women’s serene mastery of their life-sustaining craft. For it was in their pots that the tribe’s food and drink were stored. And Maggie, off in the arroyos with the wild Indian boys who were already teaching her such feminine skills as how to leap from one formidable boulder to another without breaking a leg. And to run, as they did, like the wind.

  I did not understand her spirit. I yearned for guidance. It seemed to be necessary to tame her, though no one among the Indians or in my own family showed any signs of thinking so. The Indians, I think, admired her. By the age of ten she was like, and even resembled, one of their sons. Their own daughters, however, were, like Susannah, demure, interested in women’s things. There was not one as wild as MacDoc, as Maggie by now was called. She had wanted to be known as Mad Dog, but I drew the line there.

  MacDoc. My daughter MacDoc. At puberty I began to keep her from her friends, the wild boys who were now, some of them, beginning to notice her femaleness, and to attempt to protect her. They did not think she should jump over boulders as recklessly as before, or run about the village with quite the same abandon. Magdalena flaunted a transformation they could not match. Did they have buds forming on their chests like hers? No! Did they have hair beginning to grow on their lower bodies, as she did? No! Well then, they were still children. And not women. Only green little boys!

  She would weep and rage over her homework in the room she shared with Susannah. When the wild boys came to look for her, a hurt puzzlement in their eyes, I sent them away. I insisted that she be called Magdalena.

  This was one of the reasons Langley and I fought. She did not agree that Magdalena did anything wrong in expressing her own nature.

  But what if she gets pregnant? I said. Imagining the expense of supplying rubbers to every young man in the village.

  My wife was quiet. My thinking this way about our daughter disappointed her. It was one of those silences I’d come to read. It meant: Really, why am I with you? Finally she said: But it does not seem to me that Mad Dog wishes to sleep with anyone, other than with her sister.

  This was so like Langley. To be blind to the obvious and to be subversive about it too.

  Magdalena, I said.

  Oh, sure, she said. Don’t you understand there is no more Magdalena? There is no Maggie either. Both Magdalena and Maggie are finished.r />
  But that is what we named her, I said.

  Yes, said Langley, and obviously before we knew who she was.

  Well, she cannot be called Mad Dog, I said. She is the daughter of a minister!

  But mad dogs here are considered wise, said my wife. Perhaps you should not have brought us here. She sighed, and took my hand.

  You must talk to Mad Dog, she said, and explain to her why she cannot be both Mad Dog and your sane daughter.

  I tried.

  By now Maggie, Magdalena, Mad Dog, MacDoc was fifteen. And taller than I. Except for summers, which she and Susannah often spent with their grandparents on Long Island, she had grown up in the Sierra Madre. She was a silent, brooding young woman whose pleasure lay, almost exclusively, in reading. I liked this. Not the silence, or the brooding, but the calm. Reading at her desk or under a tree or in the shade of a boulder in the yard, she seemed, especially from a distance, quite ladylike, demure. Because she was less active she began to gain weight, and to acquire a lumbering tilt to her gait; a condition that worried Langley but did not particularly bother me.