By the Light of My Father's Smile Page 6

Why don’t you ever leave? she asked.

  In the old days, when I was young, it was forbidden. I was beaten if I left. Dragged back. There was no place to go, either. My mother was dead. Nobody wanted me.

  It is difficult to sit across from anyone and to imagine that they were not wanted. The truth of what Irene said, proved by the life she led, pained Susannah, who still could not quite fathom it. She had been born into a family that wanted her, loved her. But she had somehow discovered a rejecting power in herself, even in childhood, and had used it to shut her father out.

  As Irene smoked, and worked on her embroidery, which was a tablecloth that would be sold to tourists, Susannah’s mind drifted. She saw her father coming toward her, smiling, and holding out a handful of green-apple jellybeans. He’d carefully removed all the other flavors, because he knew green apple was her favorite. There the candy lay, glossy and fresh, in his large tan palm. They had stopped at a country store as they drove across Texas on their way home from Mexico. He must have bought the candy then.

  She felt her hand begin reaching for the candy, and felt her eyes responding to his smile. And then, just then, before she actually reached, she heard June, Mad Dog, Magdalena, clear her throat. She heard her say, though their father had not yet asked her: I do not care for any. And Susannah’s hand had remained in her lap, and her eyes had lowered themselves. She heard her father’s disappointed Okay, then. And heard him turn away, go around the front of the car, and get in. She’d longed for the taste of those jellybeans! Yet June’s cough had made it impossible for her to accept them. Once again she was drawn back to the keyhole. Once again she saw her father turn into a man she did not know.

  From the backseat, while her mother and June slept, she had studied the back of her father’s head. The way his hair waved, just above his neck, even though it was cut very short. The way his ears stuck out. Theirs had always been a relationship that thrived on touching. In the old days, before she saw him punish June, she would have reached up and run her fingers across the wavy ridges of his hair, and played with the comical stuck-out ears. Now she felt unable to lift her hand. Even though he sat just in front of her, it felt as if he were far away. Only now, as a middle-aged woman, sipping tea with an elderly Greek dwarf during a warm evening on a small island in the middle of a maroon sea, did she wonder what her father must have thought.

  Relatives

  That night, in bed with Petros, Susannah tossed and turned. Petros thought her restlessness could be calmed by lovemaking, but she did not desire him. The next day she asked if he would accompany her on a stroll that would bring them to the cliffs overlooking the beach. Agreeable, as he almost always was, he said yes instantly. They set out as the air was cooling, and soon reached the stoning pillar that Irene could see from her room. It was made of marble, and leaned to one side. A large metal sign advertising Coca-Cola was propped against its base. There was Greek graffiti scrawled the length of one side.

  They used to stone women here, she said to Petros.

  I’m sure they did not! he said, looking at her with alarm. Whatever makes you say such a thing?

  Women are stoned, you know. Even today. She said this calmly, though she felt herself distancing from the reality of what she described.

  Her husband’s face had darkened. She felt him draw away from her. Why must you always think of things like that? he said to her. And is this what you brought me all this way to see? He was angry, not because he disbelieved Susannah, but because he knew there would be no sex now for at least a couple of nights, maybe none for the rest of their stay. And he so liked making love to her in his childhood bed. The child that he had been seemed to still be there in the room, somehow. Looking down upon them making love, a fantasy come true.

  She did not tell him that Irene had told her about the stoning post. She did not tell him anything that transpired between Irene and herself. Each day she simply walked to the church, went around to the back, and knocked on Irene’s black door.

  The next day, as she approached the church, she wondered if Irene had missed her. She thought she probably had not: Irene would be used to tourists showing up, perhaps for several days or even a week or more, but then abruptly disappearing as their boat or plane pulled out. The door was slightly ajar to admit a tiny breeze, sucked in by an electric fan that rotated slowly, and as if searching the corners of the room.

  Come in, said Irene.

  She was sitting on the green cushion, studying the cards she’d laid out on the floor. Susannah stood over her for a moment, looking down at the spread. It was a tarot deck unknown to her. All red and blue and white.

  The colors of our flag, she said, as she settled onto the maroon cushion across from Irene.

  Yes, said Irene. Odd, isn’t it? It was given to me by a woman from Turkey, who picked it up I believe she said in Spain. It’s a Gypsy deck. I don’t imagine the cards were so plain in the old days. She slapped down a card whose image was a woman frowning and carrying two huge swords. Oops, she said, time to cut the illusions.

  Is that what you think it means? asked Susannah, with the eagerness of her childhood. She loved anything mysterious, not figured out, not yet nailed to the wall.

  Irene looked across at her and smiled as she fumbled behind her to grab a package of Camels.

  That’s what it always means, she said flatly. I will do a spread for you, if you like.

  Oh, good, said Susannah, drawing her cushion closer as Irene shuffled the cards. This was awkward for her because the cards were large, and her hands quite small. Still, from years of shuffling them she was expert. They were soon spread in a pattern that resembled a cross. The “time to cut the illusions” card was prominently dead center.

  You are on a journey to your own body, said Irene. Not so much your own mind, at least not at the moment; or your heart. But to your own skin, the way it shines, the way it glows, smells, absorbs the light. It is now as if you are embracing a vapor, a cloud, a mist. You are actually someone who left her body long ago, when you were quite young; that is why you walk with such grace and stateliness. You are a statue, really.

  Oh, God, said Susannah, who’d always been praised for her walk. You don’t stoop over like most tall girls, she’d been told. You walk like a queen.

  Irene took up a card with a woman and a man entering an ancient carriage. The man’s hand under the woman’s elbow. She placed the card alongside her nose and closed her eyes, it seemed to Susannah, carefully. She rested a moment, deep in thought.

  Do you know why there is this concept of “ladies first”? asked Irene. It is because, in the early days, if we were permitted to walk behind the man, we would run away. If we were kept in front, they could keep an eye on us. Later on, as we became more tame, they hated to think a woman they desired would only think of running away, and so they invented chivalry. Gallantry. The lifting over puddles, the handing into carriages.

  Yes, said Susannah, but what does the card mean aside from that?

  There is a man inside you, your own inner man, so to speak, and he is dedicated to helping you. He is lifting you into the carriage of your own body, in which you can begin to take charge of your own life.

  Who could that be? thought Susannah. Not Petros?

  It is not someone of whom you would think, said Irene, as if overhearing her thoughts. Besides, it is an inner man. Part of yourself. But there is an outer man as well, who calls this inner helper forth.

  No kidding, said Susannah.

  No kidding, said Irene, mocking her.

  I see here, said Irene, holding a card of a woman riding the moon, that you have been far away. You have been lost, really. You have enjoyed being lost, in a way. Being lost means no one knows where to find you. If no one knows where to find you, then you are safe from expectations. In a word, free. That is what being lost sometimes means. But now, it is as if you are calling to yourself. Susannah, Susannah, come back; come home. Irene chuckled. And a little child-woman, far away, sitting I think in a large t
ree, hears the calling and thinks: Maybe it is time to go back.

  It was at this point that I could have kissed the dwarf! Instead all I could manage was a gust of wind that blew over the fan. Cards scattered every which way. Susannah exclaimed, What was that! And Irene shrugged, dragged on her cigarette, and said: The wind. Perhaps the wind is related to you.

  I watched my daughter trudge home to her husband’s family. Eat a quiet dinner with them. Her thoughtful eyes lingering on the faces of the old man and his wife. Her mother-in-law was not happy that she spent so much time with Irene. Knowing she visited the dwarf almost every day, she still asked not a single question about her. The old man was more curious. He’d heard rumors.

  Is it true she keeps a black cat? he asked Susannah, as she toyed with a last sliver of tomato on her plate.

  I haven’t seen one, actually, she said.

  And does she make a brew of bitter herbs that she tries to pass off as medicine?

  No, said Susannah, laughing. She makes and serves tea.

  And can she send her mind out traveling on the currents of the night vibrations?

  No, said Susannah, she has television by satellite. She also has a computer.

  Wealth

  My father was wealthy, said Irene the next time they talked. Not as wealthy as Onassis. But wealthy enough to buy this church for me to serve and to live in.

  So you knew him, said Susannah.

  An island so small, said Irene, her cigarette dangling as she gutted a fish, of course I would know him, eventually. He was a large, mean, glowering man. I can only imagine what he thought when he saw I was a dwarf. As you can see, dwarves are not common in these parts. Nor are they common any longer anywhere.

  Oh, said Susannah, do you think that at one time there were more of you?

  We were a tribe, of course, said Irene. Like the Pygmies of Africa. Irene stopped scraping the sides of the fish to look dreamily into the distance. Of all the people on earth, I feel most close to Pygmies, and of course to Gypsies.

  Why to Gypsies? asked Susannah, beginning to eat a handful of pistachio nuts Irene had handed her.

  Their life is so opposite to mine, said Irene. They go everywhere. Anywhere. They are still a tribe. Every attempt to box them in has failed. I think they must love the earth more than anyone, they are always so willing to see more of it.

  Not always willing, said Susannah, chewing. They suffer such terrible persecution for their staunch antibourgeois ways! What they most seem to love is music.

  Ah, yes. Music. It is this also that makes me love them. And their worship of the Dark Mother, who is none other than the human symbol for the dark earth.

  Or a distant memory of the Pygmy Earth Mother, said Susannah. Do you have Gypsy music, by any chance? she asked.

  Irene made a face as if to say: Does a monkey like pistachios?

  From underneath the bed Irene dragged an ancient Victrola and a stack of what appeared to be fifty-year-old records. Soon the small room was throbbing with the weeping of Gypsy violins and the deep, soulful laments of Gypsy women and men.

  Sighing, Irene said, Why is it that we can love so much that which only makes us cry?

  Susannah thought for only a moment, and then, with certainty, she said: Because it is that which calls us home to the heart.

  Yes, said Irene, wiping the corner of her eye. I know you must go home very soon now, but I want you to know something.

  What is that? asked Susannah.

  You are a tourist I like.

  Doing Well

  When Petros and my daughter left Skidiza, he thought he had loved her back to himself. As they were leaving his parents’ house, he gazed upon his childhood bed with fondness. He stood before his parents, his hand tucked underneath Susannah’s elbow, and looked them calmly in the eye. He had gone to America with nothing, and had had the good fortune to marry Susannah, a woman of substance, and to find work he enjoyed, and to create a good life. All of the political, cultural, historical forces that had shaped his wife’s life remained mysterious to his parents; they simply liked her for her courteous behavior, her deference to their age; they liked her appreciation of their landscape and their food. For her part, Susannah hadn’t said anything about the Civil War or civil rights, just as, he realized, his mother had said nothing about the lack of women’s rights, historically, in Greece, or about the stoning and stabbing of women she must remember quite vividly from her girlhood. The right of the males in the family to kill the females if they in any way “dishonored” them. They met on the surface of things, but also, in a way, heart to heart. He, Petros, was the place at which they joined.

  His parents had been amazed by how well he looked. How handsome and fit. That he spoke English so effortlessly. Susannah was doing something very right, they felt.

  And yet, Susannah had stood immobile, as he grasped her elbow. There had been no answering nudge, no shiver from her body to his body suggesting a giggle of solidarity, as his parents praised his good fortune, or even a hint of sadness that they were leaving. He felt that his home, his village, his country, was a sad place for her. That she was profoundly disappointed, and had become estranged from him because of that. He blamed the dwarf. No wonder they made her stay in back of the church, he thought, ungenerously.

  Piercings

  I am very fat, it’s true. And within a year I will be dead because my heart will simply buckle under the strain of pumping blood through so much weight. I teach at a large Eastern university, where I’m sure my students sometimes think of me as Aunt Jemima disguised as Punk Dyke as I come rolling into the lecture hall with my thrice-pierced nose, green hair, and jelly-plump arms filled with their papers, ablaze with my copious multicolored notes. It is because I teach at this particular university that I am considered a success, no matter what color my hair, how many piercings I have, or how fat I get. I was considered especially successful by my father, who, after my mother’s death, used to startle me sometimes when I returned from class, by sitting on my stoop like a stray cat.

  What do you want? I bluntly asked him, the first time I found him there.

  June, June, he’d replied, with a bit of a twinkle in his sad eyes, have you no pity?

  No, I said. And have you come to teach me some?

  We did not converse, my father and I, we bantered.

  Over time I came to expect his surprise visits. He would take me out to a restaurant, any restaurant I liked, and he would order anything I wanted. Whatever I did want, I wanted lots of it. And I ate and ate and ate, as he watched the plates and platters pile up on the table in front of us in an embarrassing heap. Watching me eat always seemed to take his own appetite away. And I came to believe that each time he visited me, he actually lost weight.

  It particularly pained him to see me eat with both hands. And so I would sit before him, a drumstick in one hand, a pinch of roast pork in the other, and I would grunt responses to his inquiries of the day.

  Am I responsible for this? he asked one day. But I pretended not to know what he meant, and instead asked for the morsel I had my eye on for dessert: a chocolate eclair.

  We never talked about his distrust of me. His hawklike spying into my child’s personality. We never talked about my fascination with zippers. He had forgotten how it started, if, in fact, he’d ever given it a thought. It was such a small, insignificant thing, and yet how it impacted my life! I said to him once, though: Do you remember that once, the year or so before we went to Mexico, you gave me a little change purse?

  Oh, he said, did I? He brightened. Perhaps at my tone of civility.

  Yes, I said, you did. It was small and round and black, or maybe dark brown. I don’t remember the color, actually, I said, pausing. I was eating a banana split. Some of my students came into the ice cream parlor and I waved to them. My father looked over at them and smiled that courtly smile men of color of a certain age have perfected. It crushed something in me sometimes to acknowledge how handsome my father was. To know that strai
ght women adored him and gay men hopelessly drooled. From years of spying I knew he was a great lover; he had that incredibly sexy humbleness that had made my mother delight in turning him on. To change my mother’s mind, he was never embarrassed to get down on his knees. To beg. Begging, I’d once overheard him tell another man, actually lit up the attractiveness of a desperate lover’s face! For him, it worked. My parents were the kind of lovers who thought of making love in terms not of hours but of days.

  My voice became bitter. It was a small round purse, I continued, as my father frowned, trying to recall it. And at first I couldn’t figure out what it was. You laughed at the look on my face. And then I caught just a glimpse of something gold, something shiny. And I kept turning the little purse about, trying to get to the thing that glinted in the light. And at last you took it from me and you showed me that the little purse had a golden, hidden zipper!

  My father smiled.

  And you showed me how to open the little purse, and stayed with me while I introduced the wonder of the little purse to Mother and to Susannah. Who thought it was just as wonderful as I did.

  My father smiled still. He did not remember his gift, however.

  I sighed, into the last of my dessert.

  And then, I said, we were off to Mexico. Everything seemed suddenly mad. There were all those boxes to pack and then the movers came and then we were all crammed into the car, and then there was that interminable drive, with you and Mother talking about being anthropologists but having to pretend to be preacher folk. It was all very confusing. But the point was, for me, not simply that I was losing the only home I’d ever known, but that somehow, in the turmoil of leaving, I had lost the little round purse.

  I waited to see if anything sank in. My father asked the waiter for coffee, decaffeinated. Nothing had.