My husband comes into the back room and sets his teacherâs bag down on the floor. It is swollen and bulky with essays and his uneaten lunch. He watches me for a moment, looking half-impressed and, in his mild, forbearing way, half-amused by me. It is an expression I can never quite find a good reason for. I never know what heâs thinking, and I feel slighted by this, somehow, stung by the unfairness of that knowing look in his eyes.
âLet me help with that,â he says, but I purse my mouth at him.
âIf I had the time to rewrap half of the bouquets, I wouldâve asked for your help when you walked in,â I tell him flatly.
He had expected that response, of course, and he smiles without hurt or anything less than his usual exhaustless quantity of saintly tolerance. âYouâre a pitiless woman, Dina.â
âBetter than having too much pity,â I say, and I canât help but glance over his shoulder as I say it.
He lets out a sigh and settles down in the chair beside me. âI think that girl has just the right amount of it.â He leans forward, resting his forearms against his knees and turning his head to me. âYouâre too hard on her.â
âIâm not hard on her; itâs you whoâve made her too soft.â I try not to sound petulant. I love them both more than myself, and I love their soft-heartedness, too, but his words make me grit my teeth. âFaye just canât afford it,â I say. âNot if she wants to get anything out of life. She is a girl, moreover she is a young black girl, and softness just wonât do. It has to be hidden, no matter what. The moment anyone sees a soft edge on her, theyâll take advantage. Theyâll take away the things that she deserves. Do you want that, Joel?â
âOf course not.â He isnât angry, but there is something tense and accused in his voice, barely perceptible. I wish he would get angry. If not at them, then at me. âBut Faye isnât helpless. Sheâs not a childââ
âOh, yes she is, Joel.â I drop the bouquet Iâm holding at my feet and I look sharply at him. He flinches from that look and rubs his scalp. His fingers are long, tapered, finely-boned. Â In the silence that has ballooned up in the space between us, I continue, âShe is a child. Sheâs fifteen. Practically an infant. But you know what? They canât tell the difference, either, between girls who are grown and girls who arenât.â
âDonât you lump me in with âthem,ââ he says, sitting quickly upright. There is a new note of warning in his tone, and despite everything I am thrilled by it, very nearly delighted at the sound of it. âDonât make me a part of that âtheyâ youâre always talking about. Thatâs the last thing I want to hear out of your mouth. The last thing.â
That silenceâI feel it swell up once more between his chair and mine, his body and my body. I struggle to find words keen enough to pierce it. âJoelââ
His voice overlaps mine, but it is no longer taut with any resentment. It is as cool and gentle as water. âDina, what is this about? Whatâs been going on with Faye that youâre like this?â
Yes, there Joel is again. Enduring everything, forgiving anything. Overly-tolerant. Truly angelic. I sigh and begin to wrap another bouquet, collecting the stems together, rolling them tightly in the plastic, tight enough so that nothing slips out. Iâve misplaced the ribbon, and after a moment Joel finds it on the floor and hands it to me wordlessly.
âFaye can never hurt anyone, you know that?â I say. âSheâll never think about it. Sheâll live her whole life being hurt over and over again and never hurting anyone.â
Joel stands and goes over to the door. He looks at Faye, who is still meticulously sweeping and not looking back at him, and he smiles in his forbearing way and asks, âYou think sheâs as careless as that?â
âItâs not about being careless,â I say. I thumb the frayed edge of the ribbon heâs just handed me. âItâs about having a limit. Youâve got to set limits, or people will walk all over you.â
âWell, itâs as you said. Sheâs a child.â He turns around to face me, shutting the door behind him with a soft click. âShe still has plenty of time. To get hurt or to keep herself from getting hurt. To get what she wants or to not get it.â There is something in his face now that seems to be telling me something else, but it is his consideration for me that keeps him from saying it aloud.
I set the bouquets aside, nudging them to the corner of the room with my foot. âThatâs right,â I say, and for some reason there is a bad taste in my mouth when I speak, like Iâve just bitten down on a shorn end of a flower stem. âI suppose itâs just like that, isnât it? Just as I said.â
Iâm clipping stems off the flowers in the back room, and through the half-open door I can see Faye standing behind the counter. She surprises me with her exchanges; she is all at once affable and responsive and self-assured with the customers. Her postureâs good. Her back faces me; it reminds me of my motherâs, somehow. Admittedly, she looks a little unfamiliar behind that counter, all her soft edges neatly tucked away, and if the mask chafes her she doesnât show it.
In the back room, I align the stems perfectly, cut them cleanly, kick them under the chair. There is a strange catharsis in clipping, the sense that anything could happen and I could still cut them just like this, just as always. There is a sharp, green, acrimonious smell in the air, a smell that clings to my hands, gets underneath my nails. Itâs not a smell that comes off easily. I wish my husband would complain about it once in a while.
I glance back up at Faye and see, with some surpriseâfrustration strikes me a bit laterâ that the hard line has gone out of her posture. She is leaning an elbow against the countertop in such a way that I think to myself, No thatâs too casual. You canât convince anyone with that. Youâll just give yourself away. There is a girl I recognize at the counterâbut of course I recognize her, because up until very recently I wouldâve considered her to be someone âcloseâ with Faye. Inseparably close, close since the second grade, that kind of friend you stay up late with and walk to school with and confide in indiscriminately. She is that kind of close friend who one day inexplicably canât stand to be near you. They exchange very few words at all, and I wish Faye would at least tell this girl what she really thinks. The hardness has returned to her posture but it is a brittle hardness, trembling with some feeling she wonât express.
A ceramic flower pot slips from the girlâs hands and shatters, and almost on impulse I move to the doorway. Faye turns quickly toward me, sensing me there. âSorry, itâs my fault,â she says. âI was being careless.â Â Behind her, the girl takes a startled step backward and a piece of ceramic crunches under her heel. Thereâs dirt in the cracks of the floor. It flecks the toes of her shoes.
I look at Faye a moment, but she canât seem to bring herself to meet that look directly. âYou know where the broom is,â I say at last.
The girl leaves and Faye returns a moment later from the supply closet with the broom and dustpan under her arm. She probably isnât aware that sheâs gnawing at the corner of her lip, and for a moment I wonder if sheâll chew a hole straight through her cheek. There is something compulsive and agitated in the way that she moves the broom back and forth across the tiles of the floor, as if she couldnât forgive herself for missing even the smallest piece of the broken ceramic pot.
I go to the back room again and keep the door half-open. I have finished my clipping and can now begin wrapping, instead. Wrapping isnât without its own charms, I think to myself, though not quite as satisfying as clipping. Still, there is a finality in gathering the flowers up and rolling them in crinkling, clear plastic sheets, tying them with ribbons tight enough so that nothing comes loose.
My husband comes into the back room and sets his teacherâs bag down on the floor. It is swollen and bulky with essays and his uneaten lunch. He watches me for a moment, looking half-impressed and, in his mild, forbearing way, half-amused by me. It is an expression I can never quite find a good reason for. I never know what heâs thinking, and I feel slighted by this, somehow, stung by the unfairness of that knowing look in his eyes.
âLet me help with that,â he says, but I purse my mouth at him.
âIf I had the time to rewrap half of the bouquets, I wouldâve asked for your help when you walked in,â I tell him flatly.
He had expected that response, of course, and he smiles without hurt or anything less than his usual exhaustless quantity of saintly tolerance. âYouâre a pitiless woman, Dina."
When I think about a person, yeah, just that word: person, I think of a woman. She is standing right in front of me. Her short black hair falls down to about the base of her neck. Itâs straight and sleek, slightly messy. She has an amazing smile, a few crooked teeth here and there. Theyâre white, though slightly stained. Sheâs wearing a necklace. Itâs silver and it looks expensive. She has thin lips coated lightly with fulvous lipstick. Her right arm is curved oddly around a child. Sheâs holding him. Her fingers are curled under the boyâs thigh. Her shirt is striped. Black then white and repeating. So are her pants. They kind of go together with the lip of her shoes, which are navy. Sheâs wearing an oxford slip. Theyâre easy to put on, walk in, or run, if it comes to that. Theyâre practical.
The sun sits in the upper right. It looks very hot. The scene behind her is simple, large towers bubbling over with black smoke. It must be an industrial sort of place. Sometimes I change the background. I flip between Venice or Madrid. Every now and then, I like to see her in a starry night in Paris or in a messy favela. The streets of Buenos Aires seem to work too. Iâve never seen what she looks like from behind. All there is, is that smile and the boy.
Except for the people. Thereâs a crowd behind her. They are smiling, although some grins look fake. I guess these are the people I think of when I think of people. Eclectic scores of diversity, though most are white. But the woman is in front of them. My woman. My person. Her smile. Her boy. A simple toast to euphoria.
Is this how God sees me?
Her hand is outstretched, as if waving. Why does she say hi? In fact, theyâre all waving. All of them, amongst their black and white garb, are rattling their hands in the sky. The boy sheâs holding, doesnât wave. He is pointing. One hand is in his mouth and the other is pointing straight.
Some days I donât pay any attention to the woman. The people around her can be much more fascinating. Most of them are thin. I think one of them is asleep, though, only one of his eyes are closed. Itâs sort of frightening. His mouth is open too. And I think, maybe, an insect has emerged. I canât be sure. This image isnât clear. All I can make out is an array dots hovering a  couple of inches away from his mouth. And I can see these dots because behind them is a background - the white stripes of another manâs pants.
This man is intriguing as well. His child is, at least. His hand is on the childâs head, with his fingers sort of intermeshed with his hair. Iâd say his boy is about five. I can only see the left side of him and his face, the cute little thing. He looks confused. His eyes are wide. The tip of his left index finger is tugging at his bottom lip. Wait. Now I see something different. The fatherâs hand, his right one - the one on the childâs head. I can see his index, middle, and ring fingers poking through the childâs hair. Nothing new, but, and I hadnât bothered to look for the rest, now, I can see his thumb and pinky. Theyâre on either side of his kidâs head, squeezing. And is that a tear on the childâs cheek?
And when I think of the word, word, well, first, it ceases to be a word at all, but word makes me think of propaganda, which is a word that makes use of lots other little words. Like prop. Was the boy that manâs prop? Or Ganda. G-A-N-D-A. A member of an African people. I wonder to whom did these people belong?
My mother used to say the word a lot: propaganda. Thatâs all it is, sheâd say. Theyâre making us into a propaganda piece. Iâll smile. Iâll wave. But Iâm not happy.
But I like to think that my mother was happy. She had always wanted to be a model and when that camera flashed, she lit up. She made the dismal exciting - and the drab she was covered in, comforting.
She was slender - and getting thinner. But that didnât worry her. I needed this, she preached. I needed to eat less. I needed less water. A good model is thin, blue-eyed. She winked after that. That was a sort of signature of hers. Of course everyone winks, but she would use it ten times more.
Those winks could get her things, especially from the men. Sheâd wink, smile, follow them to some different place, and come back with bread. Sheâd feed it to me in gobs, rolling it around in her hands and then placing it in my mouth to chew on. Iâd say I was the fattest kid there! The other moms would look at me and grimace. Iâd always just wave back. It looked to me like they were trying to hold in a sneeze when they looked at me that way.
They were furious with me and my mother, but they werenât allowed to touch us. The men wouldnât have it. Instead, they made us sleep on the floor, although their arrangements werenât much better than ours. The living quarters often carried a strong stench. Especially in the day. The heat would bake whatever grimy evil resided there, producing this abhorrent smell.
These were not fun times, though good memories do stick out. Even the bad, I must say, are laced with a brilliant amount of love - my motherâs love. And my love for her.
These memories, well, I donât know if Iâd use that word because theyâre not quite that anymore. They feel more like synapses written into my psychology. These words, to me, are characteristic, more than articles of speech or squiggly characters on a page. All of these are labeled. Like a filing unit. One word for each memory. And from each word, a hoard of synesthetic feelings emerge. Unfolding from the last sensation, a dictionary, this unalphabetized litany, comes to life. Â
Thereâs one day I can picture vividly, or more, I can feel vividly: White. The soldiers called us out of the barracks early in the morning. It had started getting colder around that time so my mother put a blanket over me. They had us to all line up. Children would be by their parents. Mothers would hold the kids and fathers would stand next to them, lovingly. There wasnât much film so the soldiers were very particular about getting the shot they wanted the first time around.
My mother was the prettiest. Theyâd put her in front of the rest. Quickly, theyâd give her an expensive silver necklace and nice shoes to put on. They also made her put on a bit of lipstick. She usually chose bright colors, reds and lightly hued blues. On that day, she mixed red with orange. The lipsticks werenât hers, no. All of it belonged to the soldiers, or their wives, I suppose, who they couldnât have cared for. The way they took to my mother was not conducive to any marital values.
They placed her in front. She held me, using her hip and right arm. One hand had to remain free. And we stood there, waiting until they got the camera set up. They fiddled with the thing every time weâd have to take a picture.
There was a boy in the line of people behind us yelling up to his father. Bread Papa. Bread. His father kept trying to console him, fearing what the soldiers might do if he didnât calm down.
Look straight, his father begged. Thereâs no bread now. Papa has bread for after the picture. He smiled softly at his son, but the poor kid probably hadnât eaten in a day now. He started crying then quickly broke into screams.
Iâm hungry Papa! The boy alerted one of the soldiers by the camera.
Get that child under control. You will be fed after.
You see! Food will come. Be patient. Be patient my son. Your food will come. The child stopped crying. His father picked him up.
Down! One of the soldiers called over. Fathers stand with their sons!
His father reluctantly let him back down. His son continued to pout. Let me up Papa!
His father responded discreetly this time. The soldiers would not accept a third interruption. He placed his hand on the boyâs head and turned it towards the camera. You will smile, he whispered. The boy was defeated. And I could hear him whimpering quietly.
A soldier lifted his gun and pointed it at the group. I could feel my motherâs fingers tighten under my thigh. Everyone smile and wave! The camera flashed.
And with that, one of the men in the line fell to the ground. Flies scattered from his mouth. This happened sometimes. Flies would lay eggs in open wounds and maggots would gnaw at their flesh. Iâd seen this man before. Iâm not sure why the soldiers let him come out for the picture.
A soldier went up to the man and prodded him with his gun, checking to see if he was dead. The soldier chuckled a little and then reached down for the manâs ear, dragging him away by the lobe. His head and body crept along effortlessly. His legs and arms were so apparently gangly. My mother covered my eyes. Â
This sent the other soldiers into a fit of laughter. HAAA, one soldier laughed. What large ears they have!!
Once they calmed down, we regrouped and they took the picture. I have the first copy, the one with the dead man, and the second, where we looked happy. As a boy, I didnât know what great danger we were actually in. My mother had a way, with her winks and toothy smile, to shroud my consciousness from the dismal reality of it all. Even on that day, when I pointed instead of waving, I was fascinated by how the snow mixed with the ash from the towers. White and black falling together. Salt and pepper at the same time. That didnât happen often.
Now that sheâs gone, I tell people what it was like and what she did for me. The pictures are a critical point of my testimony, though most donât understand the photos at all. In fact, my daughter said it best when I showed it to her here at the hospital.
Well, Dad, she said confused. Her face was scrunched questioningly. She was still that cute little inquisitive girl I had raised. These are just lists of words.
Nan sat in the armchair by the window, as usual. A certain look was there on her face, carving out any emotion I could identify. It was not lost on me that, at any moment, she could be out of my reach entirely.
She had loved him too much; that was the simple fact of the matter. People liked to say that loving someone else with no end to it, no limits at all, was the only way to love someone, and Nan was exactly the kind of person who would believe something like that. Even after he left her for someone else, she still loved him. Waited for him to come back. He was so much a part of herself that when he left he took that part of her right along with him. And when he died, that same part went quietly to the grave, as well.
These visits kept me sane, probably, though I couldnât put into words exactly why that was. Maybe I thought I could avoid falling into the same pitfalls that she had if I studied her closely enough. Ever since my grandfatherâs death, little by little Nan had corroded away to expose an unpleasant stranger. Then again, it wasnât like other people were any different. Everyone was built on those feelings, those ugly, unpleasant feelings that no one knew quite what to do with. For most, it took everything they had not to betray those feelings to other people.
Finally noticing me there beside her, Nan half-turned her face to me. âLana, go and get the photo album, please. Itâs on the top shelf of the bookcase.â
I already knew where it was, of course. She asked for it almost every time I was here, and each time I would feign interest or surprise whenever she pointed to a picture of my grandfather and told me some story about him Iâd heard twenty or thirty times before.
She opened the album in her lap, thumbing through brown-edged pages that crackled with age when she turned them. She stopped on the picture she always stopped on: her wedding photo, creased straight through the middle and again down the center as if itâd been folded often that way. Nan was on the leftâa radiant bride, glowing with pleasureâclutching a bouquet in one hand, the other hand tight around the crook of my grandfatherâs arm. He was on the right, thin-browed and unsmiling, the gleam of sweat on his forehead. She was nineteen and he was twenty-five. Her body bent toward his like a plant bent toward sunlight. Even now, as she stared down at the photograph and touched it lightly, reverently, with the tips of her fingers, she still had the expression of a nineteen-year-old bride who was deliriously in love.
âLana⌠Lana, put this back, please.â With some unease I noticed that her hand had begun to tremble slightly against the page, and I took it in both of my own. She pulled her hand free a moment laterânot in an unkind way, but in the manner of someone beyond shallow gestures of comfort. Yes, she was edging closer now, closer to that place just out of my reach. I stood, taking the photo album from her lap and returning it to its place on the shelf.
My back was still to her when she spoke again. âHydrangeasâŚâ
Turning, I saw her hand outstretched toward the flowers Iâd placed on the windowsill earlier. âYou didnât like the marigolds, so I replaced them,â I said, trying not to sound petulant.
Nan rose slowly from her seat and moved over to the open window, rubbing a few petals between her fingers. âWell, theyâll have to do for now, I supposeâ she said.
I suppressed a sigh, taking a seat again in one of the chairs near the window. It was cloudy today, and the air was humid and still, stifling to a point where it would be more comfortable with the window closed. Though I didnât think Nan noticed that. She was still rubbing the blue petals between her forefinger and thumb like some cheap luck-charm.
They were usually just crystal blue waters, but every day, for one hour alone, the sun would change into a young, unblossomed tulip's bulb, hang on the horizon at the perfect degree, and change them into a sight more thrilling than any wonder of this world. And at this hour, after his family had finished daily chores of fishing and gathering, you could always find young Malin on the little dock his father had built, staring at the ripples in the water that mirrored sparkling diamond, wishing he could be out there amongst them.
He and his father would go against the tide every noon, their boat eternally tethered to the sand-washed wood used to form the dock, fishing for sustenance for their family. The wood had always floated in from the deep sea, remnants of ships downed and crews lost to the hidden danger that lurked.
His mother knew.
She had told Malin several times to never set out on the sea without the tether fastened tightly to the dock, for when she was a child she grew too curious of the sun projecting its beauty upon the water. And one day she cut the tether her father had built, immediately seeing what fate awaited. She tried to paddle back with her hands, but a current she had never felt for all the years she fished there, now pulled her in swiftly, without wane. But if it weren't for her father who had heard her cry and pulled her back in, she would have suffered the kismet that so many seafarers had.
The tether was but so long, letting Malin and his father fish safely, but just short enough that Malin could only partially see what waited if the tether hadn't been there. He asked his mother daily to tell him of what dwelt out there, what fear bounded them to their humble house and a life of simple beach people. But his mother would not tell, caring too much for the innocence and young blood that coursed through Malin's veins. She wanted him to know, of course, but would that excite him more? Would it quelch the dreams she too had about the waters before she realized its danger? She settled within herself that there would never come a time appropriate to tell Malin. He must realize it for himself, she reasoned, so the curse of their life could be broken.
So, every day she would go and collect hay weed, wetting it then braiding it so that there would be a new tether, long enough so that Malin could see what hid behind the horizon, but short enough that Malin couldn't drift away from her love.
But Malin had his plans too. He walked along the beach one morning before his parents awoke and found a piece of driftwood that was partially sharp, but the dull blade wouldn't have enough strength to cut through the tether. And so everyday, instead of sitting at the dock staring at the scene he wanted to venture, he planned to be a part of it, sharpening the blade against any rough surface he could find.
It was months before either of them finished the task they had set for each other, but it was a special day when they did. Instead of only one hour where the sun transformed the waters, it now hung at that angle for hours on end, altering the waters for an entire day, dastardly luring young Malin to come and voyage the seas of heaven. In fact, when he and his father went out to fish at noon, his dad said to him, "What a beautiful day it is. I wish there was some way to capture it."
Malin didn't respond because he knew the only way to capture this beauty was to reach up, bottle it and put it in his memory. And such was his plan tonight, with an open mind as his bottle and a sharpened blade as his hand.
His mother was almost finished with the new tether, she just needed to braid a couple more strands of hay weed to complete the knot at the end. She set out later in the day to where she usually gathered the hay weed, but she noticed something different. All the hay weed had been cut right down to the root with a precise, strong blade. Immediately she knew that Malin had done this and what he was planning tonight. She ran back to the house but she saw that the tether had already been cut. She looked out to the sea and Malin was drifting away into the open danger.
"Malin!" She called to him, crying. "My baby. What have you done?"
Malin didn't struggle or try to paddle back. He stared at the danger he could fully see now, preparing for the evil that awaited. He looked back to shore. His mother sat crying in the sand with the long tether she had been working on laid in her lap. The wind carried her hair and the hanging tulip sun dyed her face a beautiful yellow. He said to himself that this would be how he would remember his mother, a beautiful and loving woman who tried to give him his dreams.
He looked at his mother now and she was pointing down, dipping her outstretched finger in the open air. Malin was confused at first but then he understood what she was telling him. He looked around the little skiff and saw that there was a note. It read:
My Malin. If you're reading this letter you beat me to the open sea.
Well done.
As you know, I was preparing a tether for you, long enough so you could see the danger I told you about, the danger you face now. Be strong. Don't let the evil destroy you. Let it make you invincible. Stay the fearless Malin that cut the tether. Be the Malin that destroyed the hay weed.
You probably didn't know this, but I actually made two tethers for you: the hay weed rope you see me holding now, and this very note. It would be unfair for me not to give you a choice and I love you enough to let you make the wrong one. Malin you are all that I am. I love you with every breath and every heart beat.
Go and prove me wrong.
Malin looked up from the note and his mother was much farther away now. And as for the danger that awaited him, he turned around to face it now. It was the glassy water projecting a perfect image of himself.
This is a writing blog that my friends and I have come together to create. Here youâll find Noelleâs wonderful poetry, Josiahâs beautiful stories, and my own project, Seven Hundred (in which I will attempt to churn out a story of exactly 700 words every week.) And, of course, little snippets here and there will be posted, as well, to give everyone a sample of whatâs to come.
I hope everyone enjoys our blog! Thank you for visiting.
