By the Light of My Father's Smile Page 9

  Tell me again about how you got pregnant, she would ask, just as a child might ask for a fairy tale.

  It was in the spring, I would begin.

  Wait, wait, she would say. If it was spring, we must open the windows. Or, if it was wintertime where we were, she’d say, Oh, if it was spring, we have to light a candle or make a fire. Ritual mattered to her, more than to anyone I’d ever known. I would wait while she raised the window, lit a candle, laid a fire, or whatever.

  It was spring, I would begin again. I was fifteen.

  Fifteen, she would echo.

  Fifteen, I would say.

  Do bad things always happen to young girls of fifteen? she would ask.

  Don’t interrupt, I’d say.

  I believe they do, she’d say, breathlessly.

  There was a nice man who was a friend of my family. I did not think he was all that nice. I mean, he was okay but if he’d never come to dinner at all I would have been happy.

  You mean you wouldn’t have missed him?

  Right.

  Go on.

  I’m trying to.

  Sorry.

  Aren’t you going to ask me again how poor we were? I’d ask.

  Oh, she’d say. I’d forgotten that part.

  Even before the nice man came to dinner and started to stare at me across the dinner table, we were poor. My father worked all day processing and packing meat. He smelled like meat. He brought meat home for us to eat, hidden in his clothes. Actually, the clothes he worked in he left at the packing plant. I never even saw those. He said that at the end of the day they were so greasy and pukey and bloody they could stand up by themselves. At night all the workingmen’s clothes were collected and boiled.

  Ew, said Susannah.

  In winter he wore a big coat; inside it, my mother had made lots of pockets. We would run to him when we heard his key in the door and pull meat from each of his pockets. If he wasn’t too drunk and evil, this made him laugh.

  How many were you? she’d ask, her brown eyes darkening in anticipation.

  Twelve, I said.

  Twelve, she’d reply, as if stunned.

  Ten children, I’d say hastily.

  She would remain silenced by the thought.

  Ten children, all with mouths, my mother used to say.

  And were you the eldest? she’d ask.

  I was near the middle, I’d say. Number four.

  How did you avoid being lost there? she wanted to know.

  For some reason, this always made me laugh uneasily. In therapy I discovered I had felt lost, but while I was at home I’d considered myself very important. The older children had my parents for parents, I said. The younger ones had me.

  Oh, she’d say, puzzled.

  I was a mother from the age of five, I said. It happened gradually. Lily Paul, hand me the diaper; Lily Paul, hand me the baby’s bottle. Lily Paul, hold Joey. By the time I was eight I could cook dinner while holding one baby and watching over two more.

  No, said Susannah, eyes wide.

  Your eyes are wide as saucers, I’d say.

  Because she was a writer, this description of herself always made her laugh.

  But if you were so important, I don’t understand why they wanted to marry you off. You were the perfect hired help, except you weren’t even hired.

  I only really cared about school, I said. It was a passion with me. I would sneak off to school in the morning after I’d gotten the other children out of the house. I’d leave my mother’s babies there for her to tend to. Which she was by then too sick to do.

  My God, said Susannah, shivering.

  The nice man who smiled at me was penniless. A ne’er-do-well. Charming, though. He loved to sit around and drink and play cards with them. There was no way he could support me. He could only impregnate me, and help them keep me at home.

  No, said Susannah.

  Oh, yes, I said.

  When did you figure all this out?

  Years later, I said.

  The Grimms have nothing on you, she said.

  What do you mean? I asked.

  This is worse than Hansel and Gretel, she replied. Worse than being cooked and eaten by the witch. Worse than being Little Red Riding Hood.

  Even worse than what happened to Psyche or Persephone, I said, drily.

  And Psyche’s story ended well, said Susannah, a thoughtful furrow across her brow. Eros came to his senses. Their child was conceived in bliss and they named it Joy.

  Right, I said. That didn’t exactly happen to me.

  You’re more like Persephone, my sweet, she said, leaning over to stroke my locks. You were destined to be happy at least half the time.

  I loved her sweet breath, as if she’d never devoured anything foul. I kissed her. She was everything I wasn’t. Tall, graceful, sleek. Beloved by her parents. Well-traveled. She drove an ancient black Jaguar convertible with the top down even when it drizzled. She waxed her legs.

  I did not like him, I said. I did not like boys. I had no boyfriend. I was too matronly, really, by the age of fourteen, for any of the boys at school to be attracted to me.

  This man was older?

  Much older, I said. Twenty-five if he was a day.

  What did he look like? she said.

  He was handsome, I said. That much I could agree with my parents about. He had a nice build. His color was nice. Brown, like rich wood. The kind of skin that never had a pimple. He smelled good, too. He tried to talk to me about what I was learning at school. His breath was fresh. I just didn’t like him, I said, shrugging. My parents liked him. They enjoyed his company. They saw a use to which he could be put.

  But all those children already, said Susannah. You’d think they’d run out of room.

  There was no more room, I said. But the older children were leaving, being squeezed out of the apartment, really. But you’re missing the point. If I could be forced to stay put, no matter how many children my mother and I had, I would be there to take care of them.

  I don’t think I can even imagine it, breathed Susannah, as she sipped from her glass of iced Campari.

  No, you can’t imagine it, I said. That is why I have this hangup with you.

  Oh, darling, she said, you’re so blunt.

  Anyhow. He grinned and grinned at me across the table. Babies dropped out of my mother’s body every year, like apples falling to the ground. I was there to pick them up as they fell. She got out of the apartment by going almost daily to watch a movie. She had to wear a tight band around her lower body to hold her uterus in place. It was the most amazing thing, I said, that it was only when I looked back, after years of therapy, that I recognized how shocking it must have been for me to see this old, graying, bent woman, hobbling about the apartment, pregnant every year.

  Was there no word of birth control? breathed Susannah, urgently.

  Not one, I said. My parents were devout. They thought birth control meant murder.

  And abortion was illegal, she said. Imagine.

  More workers for the meat packing plant, I said. They could be paid almost nothing. All my brothers worked there.

  And did they steal meat?

  Mostly to sell, I said. Or to give to the prostitutes they dated.

  What about to the women they married?

  They refused to marry. Until they were almost old. They’d much rather pay a women for sex, straight up, as they liked to say, and pretend her children looked like the mailman.

  No, said Susannah.

  Marriage didn’t really appeal to any of us, except for the last three children. By the time they came along there were more jobs. They’d gone to school, become educated. Learned from their classmates and television that not all households had to be like ours.

  The nice man kept grinning across the table at you, said Susannah, bringing me back to my tale.

  Right, I said. By now I was weary of thinking about my life. I wanted to hurry the story along. A frame of mind that exasperated Susannah, my spellbound a
udience. I sighed. They kept saying to me: Look at this nice bag of sweet potatoes Winston has brought you. Look at the sheet of cinnamon buns. He’s sweet on you. Why don’t you treat him a little better? How much better could I treat him? Whatever I cooked, he ate his share. I didn’t curse at him or throw rocks when I saw him coming. I was damn polite. Too polite. Some people think politeness is an invitation to invade.

  Humm, said Susannah.

  He helped me baby-sit the children, so that my mother and father could get out once in a while. They’d go to a movie, to the church basement for bingo, or over to a friend’s place. We’d sit on the couch and listen to music while the kids played. Or we’d all sit around watching television. He put his arm along the back of the couch. I admit that sometimes I felt like he was some kind of refuge, some kind of shelter. He’d get up and give a kid a glass of water or a piece of bread and I wouldn’t have to do it. I was always anemic, I think from birth, and always tired.

  How many little kiddies are we talking about? asked Susannah.

  Five, I said, that had to be actively cared for.

  However did you do that and keep going to school?

  School suffered. I kept going, though. I loved my little brothers and sisters, but somewhere in me I realized they weren’t my kids. I wanted to learn about geography, where different places were. I wanted to learn how to draw and use a typewriter.

  I didn’t even know how you got pregnant. Nobody ever told young girls anything. I just knew I didn’t like him closer to me than just to sit beside me and lay his arm along the back of the couch. But one day they got fed up with how uninterested I was. My father, my mother, and one of my brothers, whose best friend Winston was, got me drunk. I’d never even tasted liquor before. And they left me alone with him.

  I can’t believe it! said Susannah. How could they do that. How did they?

  You don’t remember? I asked.

  Tell me again, she said.

  It was really like some kind of bogus initiation ritual, I said. For the first time in my life they remembered my birthday, August twelfth, and they had a birthday party for me. My father brought a cake. Winston brought a present. My brother brought tequila. My mother fried a chicken.

  The present he bought me was wonderful. It was a harmonica. I’d always wanted one. I couldn’t wait to learn how to play it. I left the table the minute we’d finished eating the cake, and started to practice blowing it. I was already dizzy, and a little sick, from the tequila, but I was really, really happy. They were all looking at me in a funny way, but I paid it no mind.

  In short, I said, he took advantage of me while I was passed out.

  Ah, Persephone! said Susannah, drawing me closer to her side.

  Persephone’s mother didn’t betray her, I said, burrowing my nose in her neck. Persephone’s mother missed her daughter. She turned the earth to winter when Persephone couldn’t be found. My mother didn’t even ask me what had happened. I didn’t really know, anyway. When I turned up pregnant she said how lucky I was Winston was around and that he was someone who wanted me.

  She Rode Horses

  I could never find my tears, when Pauline told me this story. Partly because she was so unlike the Pauline of her tale. At fifty-five she was a powerful, bold, opinionated woman who wore snug jeans, silk shirts, fringed leather vests, and cowboy boots. She had hair like a wild gray fountain. At the women’s club she chewed on a fake cigar and played pool with her butt to the door. She looked women up and down with such a shamelessly speculative glance that white women blushed immediately, black women discreetly touched the back of their necks, and children who’d thought they were grown turned around and went home.

  You’re always on the make, I said to her, a short while after we met.

  She laughed. I enjoy the hell out of it, she said. Why should men have all the fun?

  But we’re trying to change the way women are viewed, I said. Aren’t you a feminist?

  I guess, she said. But there’s nothing wrong with the way I view women. If they look good I view them a little longer. She shrugged. I could look at you all day.

  My girlfriend won’t like it, I said. Inventing a girlfriend on the spot and surprising myself.

  How cute is your girlfriend? she replied.

  This was a woman who’d been raped at fifteen?

  You don’t have to stay raped, she reminded me. In a way it was a step on the path to liberation for me, she declared, but I didn’t know that then.

  What did you think? I asked.

  That my life was finished, of course. There I was, sick as a dog, big as a house. Having to fuck Winston every night.

  The life of the most ordinary woman you see on the street is frightening, I said to her.

  Men are trapped, too, she said. I couldn’t see it at first, she said. They don’t see it. Sometimes it takes a lifetime. But I knew nothing would ever happen for me with Winston. I felt nothing hot, warm, or fuzzy when he touched me. I was repelled. He was addicted to me, though; he’d sit looking across the table at me like a dog eyeing a bone. My parents thought this was wonderful. I told my mother I didn’t like it. She said a married woman had to do what her husband wanted. And be thankful he wanted it from you and not from some whore on the street.

  I was trapped.

  She was not a woman it was easy to think of as trappable. She rode horses, drove fast, spoke her mind. She’d taught herself to make cakes while she still lived at home, and sold them in her apartment building and on the street. After that success, she learned to make pies; these sold just as quickly. By the time her son, Richard, was three, she’d saved enough money to run away. Which she did, leaving him with her family while she went off to night school, finishing which she enrolled in and eventually graduated from college and then enlisted in the Navy. Where she learned aerospace engineering and how to track satellites and the stars. All before buying her first restaurant.

  How many lives does a poor woman have? I would ask, laughing, as we sipped margaritas in Cuernavaca or ate ice cream in Rome.

  As many as Moll Flanders, she’d say. And a black poor woman has at least three more than she did!

  Pauline was well-read—literary, one could almost say. Easily stitching her own story to that of women of earlier times. She cared only for the bold, the brave, the brazen. The women who knew they were trapped and resolved to fly out of one trap after the other, full of anger and heightened libido. She didn’t know why she liked me, she said. I was no kind of adequate bitch.

  But you don’t like me, I said to her. You like to fuck me, but you don’t like me.

  Of course I like you, Suz, she’d say.

  Why does it feel sometimes when you make love to me that you’d like to kick my teeth in?

  You’ve had it all, she said. I try not to be jealous of your life. I try not to envy it. But damn it, I want it. I want trips to Mexico when I was little; discussions about culture and primitive art. I want parents who’d never betray me, she said. When I make love to you I’m trying to take your life. Yes.

  That’s what it feels like, I said.

  And why do I feel like you’re sometimes handing it over to charity?

  We can’t help it that you were raised poor and I was not, I said. Besides, my family wasn’t rich, we just had enough, and my parents had only my sister and me. But every parent betrays the child, I said. They can’t help it.

  Is that why you’ve opted not to have children?

  Frankly, yes.

  Pauline laughed. My son is wonderful, she said. He grew up to be the most amazing being who ever lived. How about that!

  I’m sure it wasn’t anticipated.

  Hell no, she said. I thought he’d grow up to run guns and do drugs. Instead, he’s this gifted mathematician who was snatched up by M.I.T. He lives in a neat, spacious old house in Cambridge and is a great father to my two wonderful grandsons.

  He has a wife, too, I said. You always seem to forget.

  She’s an uptight little b
itch, but I give him that. Whenever I visit them I offer her a joint right away, just to encourage her to mellow out while I’m there. Otherwise every time I look at a woman she gets anxious. She’s the kind of woman who worries about being sexually attractive to other women. You know the type. She wears these saggy print dresses decked out with a string of her grandmother’s rusty pearls. Every hair clipped neatly to its place. The mystery is that my son is attracted to her. But there you have it. Love is mysterious.

  But do you think she’d like you if you were different?

  Not gay, you mean.

  Yes. And not so goddamn rough.

  But I am gay. I am rough, said Pauline. It’s what got me out of that bedroom with Winston. Would you ask Tina Turner to tone down her wildness onstage just because she made her daughter-in-law uncomfortable? No, not after she found the tits to kick Ike’s bony ass out of her life, you wouldn’t. She can be just as wild as she fucking well pleases. And so, goddammit, can I. She paused. What are the motherfuckers going to do about it anyway, the ones who run things so fucking badly in this world—take away your Gold Card? Give you cancer? They’re likely to do that anyway, no matter how you act.

  When you are being made love to by a woman who expresses such thoughts it is as if you are sitting butt naked on the earth. There is no illusion about anything. You don’t fantasize and you don’t have time to daydream. It’s all right up close and personal. If she even thinks you’re trying to evade reality, she fucks you so one-pointedly she brings you right back. Puts her knuckles places you didn’t even know you could wash. Kisses you so hard you think about Sunday school. Jesus might love you, this you might know, but being made love to by a woman like Pauline puts the love you fantasized about then in new perspective. Obviously Pauline is doing loving like Jesus couldn’t and wouldn’t. At least not in the version handed down to the adoring and gullible. After being made love to by Pauline you didn’t say, as the hot Christian ladies do, Amen; no, you said what the wild Indians say after a powerful prayer: Ho!

  The First Thing

  That Happens When

  You Die

  The first thing that happens when you die, is that you have a burning desire to urinate. You have nothing to pee with, you understand, just the desire to do so. Among my people, we are told this is what happens, and so I was not very surprised. It is understood that spirituality resides in the groin, in the sexual organs. Not in the mind, and not in the heart. It is while fucking that you normally feel closer to God. The other time you feel close to the Creator, of course, is when you create something.