A Simple Distance
Authors: K. E. Silva
Tags: #Fiction, #Sagas, #Literary, #Family Life, #Cultural Heritage, #Social Science, #Ethnic Studies, #African American Studies
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover photograph of woman © Getty Images. The woman in the photograph is a model who is in no way connected with this work.
Published by Akashic Books
©2006 K.E. Silva
ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-11-8
eISBN: 978-1-61775-269-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2006923121
All rights reserved
First printing
Akashic Books
PO Box 1456
New York, NY 10009
[email protected]
www.akashicbooks.com
There’s something about an island … It gets in your blood.
—George Pascal
Contents
I was born with quick-growing roots that snuck between my parents and split my family into pieces. As a child I often crept to the top of the staircase that ended just outside my mother’s bedroom. I would curl up against its stained picket railing on the last step before our second-floor landing with a blanket and my copy of
The Little Prince
, so I could both read and watch her door.
Whenever I got to the scary part—the chapter on the baobabs—I’d tell myself
it’s just a story, the words aren’t real
. I’d bend the pages, tear off a small triangle from the corner to assure myself I was in control.
But by then I knew well I’d been born a bad seed, and I’d get stuck, like a scratched record, on particular pages that, no matter what I said, snuck inside and haunted:
Now there were some terrible seeds on the planet that was the home of the little prince; and these were the seeds of the baobab.
The year I started law school, my mom moved back to Baobique. After thirty years in North America, she never stopped calling Baobique home. She’d say it with an air of pride, even superiority, when I was growing up, like having it in her back pocket made her present circumstances bearable. Somewhere else, she was important, had a place more in line with her own image of herself.
It made me feel like she was better than me because she had that other place I barely knew about, when all I ever had was right where I was.
When I was little and she didn’t have enough money for groceries, my mom would send me to the market with a list of things to buy and a five-dollar bill. She’d tell me if it wasn’t enough money to let the cashier know she’d pay him next time. Then I’d get to the checkout counter and wouldn’t have enough money. Everyone in line would stare at me and the cashier would stare at me and none of us knew what to do. Sometimes he’d say it was okay and sometimes he’d make me put things back, but it always felt exactly the same no matter what he did.
Then once I went to the store and only bought the things on the list I knew I could pay for right then. And when I got back to the house and walked up the front steps, the wood exposed under big flakes of paint, white and red; the steps I packed with snow in the winter and made a hill to slide down on my friends’ sleds or on those thick “lawn and garden” brown plastic garbage bags; when I got back, I put the groceries on the table and my mom asked where were the rest, and I just looked right back at her. From then on, she only ever sent me with the five-dollar bill. Told me to just get what we needed.
She collects $300 every month from Social Security for working three decades in the States, mostly selling men’s clothes at the local department store to our upper-middleclass neighbors, the ones with the sleds and houses whose paint never seemed to flake off like ours, the ones whose parents laid down rules like no building snow ramps on the front steps.
I tried to cover her once through my medical insurance at work, but my firm said she’d have to be a full dependent. So I only got her supplemental.
Mostly, I live here detached from my mom and my relatives in Baobique. To this day, I keep them curtained off behind a distance as personal as it is geographical. It was Uncle George who first reached through, grabbed me by the ear, and tugged me back; reminded me I could run but never completely hide from who I really was. A Pascal.
My Uncle George was sick an entire year before he died. He was only given a few weeks, but he ended up living with his illness much longer than expected. Leave it to him to break one last bell curve on his way out. The extra time took its toll on the people around him—the ones caring for him up at Granny’s those long months. But it gave me a chance to visit him in Baobique—to confront the ghost the island had become to me those years
not visiting
since college, keeping Baobique tucked away at the back of my closet, not admitting how scared I was to reopen its door.
When Uncle George got sick, I had to go. And then Baobique just kept happening.
* * *
Nearly a year after my visit to see my sick uncle, I got the call from my mom telling me he’d passed. She’d been with George when he died.
All she spoke of were plums and coconuts. Six a.m. She shouted into the receiver just days after the death of her younger brother:
My plums ripen so slowly. Then, bam! Just like that, they’re ready. Have to be picked quick, quick. Otherwise, they’ll fall and go to waste. Only good for compost
.
I held the phone a safe few inches from my ear. Or so I’d thought.
She worried, I suppose, that like my late uncle, her voice could no longer be heard by the people around her, and she asked me if, after his funeral, I would fly her to Oakland to recuperate from the loss.
George is dead! George is dead!
That’s how people told it to each other on Baobique. There, news travels fast. Here, I found out days later when my mom remembered. A forgotten extension of the family tree.
I’d tried to call my grandmother the morning I found out. But she was at the Bato courthouse, freshly whitewashed, just across the narrow street from the sea—a wall of gray brick, built when Britain ran regular ships in and out of the deepwater port, the only thing standing between man and nature. The Chief Justice of the Caribbean held a special session to offer her his condolences about Uncle George. I got through to her that evening as she was watching it on television.
It’s a pity you can’t be here to see how important your uncle was to this island. Every one else is flying in. They’re giving him a state funeral. Just as big as the Prime Minister’s last year.
Her tone, more formal than ever; she could have been the Chief Justice himself.
My uncle, a conservative who had served as the island’s Chief Minister, was buried by the state that week next to his father in our family’s plot behind my mother’s house.
My mom had hoped the government would offer portable toilets and keep the cars away from her crotons. You never knew where people would walk, or stand, to see such an important man lowered into the earth. She wanted to buy torches, lace them between the small palms lining her drive for my Uncle George, who’d died in her arms. But—what with the plums ripening and everything—it’d slipped her mind.
Just after the funeral, I bought my mom her ticket, free on American Airlines for using my credit card so much. Eating out.
I told her point blank when I gave it to her:
Now that you’ve got this ticket, you can’t change it. You’ll have to stick to the plan.
I was stern because I knew being nice would come back to me down the road in the form of a problem, a tightly jumbled knot of changed dates and destinations that only I would be able to unravel.
I cannot think of a single thing I hate more in this world than unraveling my mother’s knots. She’s never been very gentle with mine. When I was little and we lived outside Chicago, in our rundown Victorian, the one the town kept telling us to paint because my mom and I were bringing down the property values in the neighborhood, she would take the comb to my hair in her unyielding hands as if it wasn’t like hers at all, all kinky and twisted and riddled with tangles that yanked at my scalp if not treated with just the tiniest bit of care. So I learned how to braid on my own.
I was supposed to call her the day before she left. Instead I slept, read a book, rifled through a stack of old letters marked with a stamp by the post office: CHANGE OF ADDRESS REQUESTED. It was overcast in Oakland; a good day to rest.
The ring from her call burst in my apartment.
Jean! I’m so glad I caught you. I’ve been trying to reach you since yesterday.
I lied.
Sorry, Mom. I had to buy an air mattress. It took me awhile to find the right type.
That’s what I want to talk to you about. I need you to change my tickets. I’ve got to visit Aunt Lillian in England.
Mom, I can’t do that. Your flight leaves tomorrow. It’s too late. I told you when I booked the tickets, they’re non-refundable.
Well, that’s ridiculous. I’ve got to see Lil. She has a heart condition. Just tell them. I’m sure they’ll make an exception.
Fine,
I lied again,
I’ll call the airline.
Crisis is never convenient. My mom’s need to leave Baobique after Uncle George’s funeral, to rest from all the care he’d needed—the special food, the midnight cleanings, the patience—coincided almost to the day with what was to be the biggest hearing of my yet undistinguished legal career.
I think my boss felt he owed me when he assigned me Cynthia’s case. The last case we had worked on together had a number of plaintiffs out of state, entailed a lot of traveling in the rural South, a place with which neither of us had much experience. He was a sort of rising star at our firm: sandyblond hair, Yale law. Just a few years my senior.
The only advice we got was to make sure,
make damn sure,
everyone knew we were
not
a couple. He should expose his wedding band, talk about his wife back home often enough to alleviate any threat of our possible union.
We played along, let people assume I was his secretary, his helper, not co-counsel; didn’t correct their natural assumptions of what a brown-skinned woman and a white-skinned man should, rightly, have been doing together. It put them at ease, got us the information we wanted, when I pretended to be something I wasn’t.
Sometimes he’d slip: refer to me as co-counsel. Sometimes I’d slip: stand erect, head high, shoulders relaxed, and walk next to him, instead of the choreographed few steps behind. In the car, rented in his name, he behind the wheel driving to the next destination on our list, I’d take my frustration out on him, snap at him for a wrong turn, a disagreement in strategy, a smoke break; tell him he was slowing us down, imply he was pampered, lazy.
For stretches of time we’d say nothing, apologizing to each other for things we couldn’t help with small silences. Back at the hotel, I’d slam my feet into my sneakers, yank on my shorts, grab my room key, and run on the treadmill until my legs felt like rubber, until my gasps for breath disrupted the boy at the counter watching MTV.
It’s fitting, really, when you think about it—me, so grudgingly coming to the aid of my own mother, flying her in after the death of her younger brother—being assigned to represent Cynthia in her child custody case. Cynthia’s ex-lover, Linda, was suing her for joint custody of their daughter. Sadie was four and Linda, her other mother.