The ride workers moved forward to secure the safety bars and to wish everyone a good journey. As the cars rolled into the dark tunnel, Helena felt Jeremy’s hand brush against her leg. She shivered and moved closer to the edge of the car. Behind them she heard Louis whispering, “Do it, man, you have to do it.”
“I’m trying,” Jeremy said, under his breath.
Helena’s back stiffened as they began to ascend on a clicking track. They clicked higher and higher, and it was dark all around them except for the pinpricks of electric stars glowing high above. Screams and mechanical rumbles echoed far off, and Helena could see the headlights of other cars looping and shooting in the distance. Jeremy touched her thigh again. Margot giggled in the car ahead of them, and Nora laughed with her.
“Stop it,” Helena hissed. “Your mother’s right there.”
“So?” Jeremy said. His hand moved over her shorts, and she covered her lap with her own hands. He shoved his fingers beneath hers and squeezed her thigh. Helena wanted to scream. She pinched his hand, but he didn’t move it. There was the caramel pull of the last moment up, when she knew they were already hanging over the drop, and then the air slicked her hair back and she became weightless. The padded metal harness pressed hard against her shoulders and legs. Margot and Nora shrieked. Jeremy’s hand moved toward Helena’s crotch, and her body went rigid. They fell into the back-crunching pit of the drop, the car snaking right and left, and Helena flushed hot with anger and shame as Jeremy rubbed the denim between her legs. She curled her fingers and scratched his wrist as hard as she could. He yelped and pulled away, whispering “Fuck!” under his breath. Now they were clicking up another track. Their car slid over the top again, down into the crush of gravity, and then they looped upside down, suspended for one clacking moment over a sea of formless black. There was another loop and a series of sickening dips and rises. Helena let her hands relax for a moment, and just then Jeremy reached inside her shorts and ground his knuckles against her. An orange light loomed ahead, and they shot into a screaming tunnel of tangerine strobe light. At last the car slowed as they rolled up to a red-lit unloading dock. “Please step off to your left,” a disembodied female voice instructed. “Please step off to your left.”
Margot was crying as she climbed out of the car, holding a broken plastic ear from her Mickey Mouse hat. The other was still attached. “My glasses fell off,” she cried. “They’re gone, Helena!” She held the broken ear and stood there watching the cars move back into the tunnel.
“Shh, shh,” Nora said. “Your dad will buy you a new pair.”
“But I can’t see!” Margot wailed.
Nora took Margot’s hand and led her along the corridor. The twins walked just ahead of Helena, laughing. Jeremy whispered something, jabbing his hand forward rhythmically, and Louis clapped him on the shoulder. Helena felt as if she were burning or bleeding, as if her body were marked; everyone would see what had happened as soon as she stepped into the light. She wanted to take Margot and crouch inside the blue-lit tunnel forever. She never wanted to see the twins’ faces on the refrigerator again, or be told to stand up straight for their sake. She wanted to scratch their blue eyes out. The only thing that kept her feet moving and her arms still at her sides was the thought that she had to get back to her mother.
When Helena broke into the light, she had to squint and shield her eyes. Margot ran ahead of Nora and the twins, weaving a little, toward the restaurant. As Helena got closer, she could see Brian and her mother still sitting at the table. She went inside just behind Nora, ready to tell her mother what had happened, to show her who these people really were. But her mother’s expression stopped her. She was pushing something toward Brian—the black velvet box—and saying something Helena couldn’t make out. Her face was red and puffy, and a twisted Kleenex lay before her on the table. Brian shook his head, eyeing the box as if it frightened him, as if it contained something he wasn’t supposed to touch. But when he looked up and saw his family coming, he took the box and put it in his pocket.
“Something terrible happened,” Margot said, pulling the hat from her head.
Helena’s mother dried her own eyes and then reached forward to dry Margot’s. Her arm froze in the air. “Where are your glasses?” she asked.
Margot’s voice rose in a wail, and she balled a fist against one eye.
Helena stepped forward and laid the plastic ear on the table. “They’re in Space Mountain,” she said.
“Oh, no,” her mother said quietly. She looked from the disheveled Margot to Helena, who blushed as she tried to straighten her shorts.
“You’re still a beautiful mouse in my book,” Brian said to Margot, and set the hat back on her head. “We’ll just look at you from the one side.”
That made Helena’s mother smile. She touched Margot’s cheek. “Don’t cry, now,” she said.
As they moved through Fantasyland, Helena stayed close to her mother, taking in the faint ripe odor of her sweat. She still wanted to tell her what had happened in Space Mountain. But her mother seemed to be in another place now, untouchable. She wasn’t adjusting her wig anymore or pulling at her shirt to disguise her small false breasts. Helena could see the pride she carried in her narrow shoulders as she watched Brian Sewald walk with his sons and wife. There was a silence in the way she moved, almost as if she were floating. Helena imagined that if she glanced behind her, she might see a trail of things her mother had let fall: bits of iridescent fabric and glass, white petals, locks of hair. She seemed truer to herself, finished with trying to make things appear different from the way they were.
Helena knew that was supposed to be better. She’d heard it a hundred times in school, seen it on banners in the halls: Be true to yourself! Celebrate yourself! But what if you were dying, losing yourself piece by piece? Were you supposed to be true to that? Helena had done everything she could think of to hold on to what her mother had lost. She’d imagined her mother’s organs going through a kind of re-forging, a kind of mystical cleansing, after which they’d start their lives again in Helena’s body—her mother’s sick breasts becoming Helena’s new healthy ones; her mother’s ovaries, reborn, shooting estrogen into Helena’s bloodstream. She’d seen herself as the woman on the right side of her collage, the outline into which her mother’s organs were being transplaced. She’d saved strands of her mother’s hair, fingernail parings, eyelashes, things she’d be able to touch six months or two years from now. She hadn’t been able to say what it was she was dreading—not her mother’s death, because that was beyond imagining. But as she watched her mother walk through the Magic Kingdom, eyes half focused, arms limp at her sides, past six-foot-tall mice and cotton-candy vendors and pink benches, in the shadow of Brian Sewald and his family, Helena knew that this was what she’d feared: her mother’s decision to let go, to shrug off the things she’d saved. She wanted to throw herself down in front of her mother, hold on to her feet and scream. But her mother walked on, and Helena followed her.
After a while, Margot paused at a bench to tie her shoe. “Can you help me, Mom?” she asked. “I can’t see the laces.”
“I think we should go back to the hotel soon,” her mother said, bending to tie Margot’s shoe. “I’m getting tired.” She finished the knot, then drew a hand across her forehead and closed her eyes.
“We can go back right now, if you want,” Helena said, touching her mother’s arm.
“No,” Margot said. “I want to ride the teacups.”
“Mom said she’s getting tired. We can ride them tomorrow.”
Brian and Nora turned around to see what was going on. But Jeremy and Louis were still headed for the teacup ride, and Margot pulled on her mother’s hand. “One more ride,” she said.
“Well,” her mother said, “maybe just one more.”
They went on toward the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, a huge pavilion beneath which pink and yellow teacups twirled on a rotating platform. It was late afternoon and the lines had thinned as people went to early dinners. By the time they reached the ride, the previous turn had ended and people were leaving through an exit on the other side of the pavilion. The ride supervisor opened the gate, and people ran to board the teacups. Jeremy and Louis scrambled into a yellow one with Nora, and Margot and her mother took a pink one.
“Look at us!” Margot yelled. “We’re in a cup!” She waved to Helena and Brian, who stood near the rail.
Helena’s mother took a kerchief from her yellow straw bag and tied it around her head, securing it under her chin so her wig wouldn’t blow away. As the music started and the platform began to rotate, she took the metal disk at the center of her teacup and turned it, tentatively at first, then faster. Margot shrieked with pleasure as they whirled away.
“Those things make me sick,” Brian said, leaning against the railing. “They make my head spin.” He twirled a finger to demonstrate.
“Me too,” Helena said.
The pink teacup came back toward them, close enough for Helena to see the thin muscles of her mother’s arms straining as she turned the silver disk. She was laughing, her eyes closed against the wind as she spun herself away. Then Nora and the twins passed, hair whipping, mouths open with laughter.
“We’re all tired,” Brian said. “It’s been a long day.” He smiled at Helena, a weary, kind smile that made her feel the heaviness in her own arms and legs. She wanted to go back to the hotel and lie down.
“I’m going to sit in the shade,” she said, motioning toward some benches.
He nodded. “Meet us when the ride’s done.”
She moved away from the railing and went toward the bank of benches, a little way behind Brian, next to a hot pretzel stand. The yeasty scent of the pretzels made her hungry, and as she squinted against the afternoon sun, a dull pain pressed at her temples. After a moment she saw Brian take the small velvet box out of his pocket, open it, and examine the contents. When his family whizzed by again, he closed the box and concealed it in his hand. Then, looking over his shoulder as if to make sure no one was watching, he knelt next to the railing and slid the box under a flattened paper cup.
The ride began to slow, and Brian looked up as Nora called his name. He went around to the far side of the pavilion to meet her. Helena moved forward to the railing, nudged the paper cup aside with her toe, and picked up the box. She felt its worn plush, the resistance of its hinges. Inside, on black velvet, lay three wrinkled and yellowed hulls, and Helena recognized them as the gardenias her mother had worn in her hair nineteen years before. There was an odd pain in her chest, a sharp constriction. She closed the box, feeling as if she’d seen something too personal, a kind of private leave-taking, and when she looked up she was almost surprised to see her mother coming toward her, blue eyes glazed with sun, laughing and tired and alive.
Stations of the Cross
Three weeks into our stay in Mexico, my mother sent the article from the
Times:
a photograph of Dale Fortunot and a brief note about his life. He’d been killed by a suicide bomber in Nablus, where he’d been working on a story for a political magazine. Dear L, my mother wrote. Can this be the
same Dale Fortunot? Don’t want to upset you, but this caught
my eye. Much lv always, Mother. She’d written P.S. and then scratched it out, as if there were something more she’d meant to say but couldn’t. I read the letter on the patio of the house we were renting, my husband and I, during the second trimester of my pregnancy. The trip was a kind of farewell to travel and to being alone together. I loved being pregnant and speaking Spanish all the time and waking up in the morning with nothing to do. The rest of the world and its coil of problems had come to seem like a dull, distant ache. The only newspaper we’d been reading was the local daily,
El Mensaje.
The
Times
photo showed a fine-featured man in his late thirties, with small round glasses and light brown skin, smiling gravely, as if he already suspected his fate. The article described how he’d been interviewing Jewish settlers and Palestinian leaders for a feature that was to coincide with the fifty-fourth anniversary of Israel’s independence. He’d been waiting at a checkpoint when a young Palestinian jumped out of a van and detonated a bomb strapped to his chest. Two Israeli soldiers had also been killed. According to the article, Dale had been writing about the Middle East for nearly a decade. He’d been married to an Israeli journalist, and they had a three-year-old son named Samuel.
Unmistakably, this was the same Dale Fortunot I’d known in south Louisiana. It must have been 1973 when we’d met, the year my mother and I had lived in Iberville Parish. Though my mother’s note had made no mention of that time or of the incident that linked Dale Fortunot and me, I sensed in her scratched-out P.S. a kind of silent reproach. There I was, a grown woman, a professor of American Studies at Cornell, almost a mother, but suddenly I felt an old, fierce shame. I’d never forgotten Dale Fortunot or what had happened the day of his cousin’s First Communion. My mother hadn’t forgotten either. I wished she’d never seen the photograph, but there it was in my hand.
The first time I heard his name, Carney and I were sitting in her room rehearsing her saints. I remember some of them still—Saint Agnes, the patron saint of girls; Anthony the Abbot, saint of pets; Jude, the saint of hopeless cases— those mysterious holy men and women to whom you could turn with achingly specific needs, an opportunity Judaism did not afford me. I’d been taught to believe in a God who was everywhere and nowhere, a still small voice. That God seemed at once too grand and insubstantial to understand my problems. My parents had separated, and it looked like they weren’t getting back together; soon afterward my mother had exiled us to Iberville Parish, where she had taken a job teaching high school drama. I was nine years old then, toward the end of third grade, and Carney was the same age. This must have been a few weeks before her Communion. We knelt on cushions in Carney’s pink-wallpapered room, near her little shrine: prayer cards and images of the Virgin and rosary beads and a white Bible with Carney’s name engraved in gold, set up on a carved footstool in the corner. Downstairs, her mother was making her a white tea-length organza dress with a satin sash. We could hear the thrum of the sewing machine and the groan of floorboards as Carney’s mother moved from machine to cutting table. She was tall and queenly, probably the fattest woman I’d ever known. She smelled of lilac soap and wore tiny pastel house slippers and spoke with a deep Iberville Parish accent. Even when she wasn’t home I could feel her presence in every room of the house.
“My godparents gave me a Saint Veronica prayer card,” Carney said. “Look.” She handed me a gilt-edged card that showed Jesus in rags, carrying the cross on his shoulder. A beautiful woman next to him held a cloth printed with a ghostly image of his face. Saint Veronica was Carney’s saint. In a few days she’d take Veronica as her middle name.
“You should wear your hair like hers,” I said. “Your mother could make two braids and join them in back.”
“I’m not supposed to
look
like her,” Carney said, “I’m supposed to
be
like her.”
“How?”
“I’m supposed to be selfless and kind and full of compassion.” She frowned, leaning the prayer card against a white candle. “She’s an okay saint. I wish I’d gotten a martyr, though.”
“I like the name Veronica,” I said.
“I know, but still,” Carney said. “A martyr would have been so perfect.”
Carney was the kind of girl who craved drama—a girl, in other words, after my own heart. She made up games in which we got to be people like Marie Antoinette or Joan of Arc, people who died in flames or battle or terrible pain. In other games we were mistreated orphans who became suddenly, gloriously rich and exacted revenge upon our oppressors. Girls at school respected Carney and wanted to be chosen for her games. People who’d angered her might come to school and find themselves shunned, invisible to everyone but the teacher. I considered myself lucky to be her best friend. She seemed a little awed by the fact that I’d come from New Orleans, a city she’d heard to be full of sinners and mansions and fancy restaurants. I pretended bored familiarity with all of the above, and faux-reluctantly devised games in which we went to Mardi Gras balls and dined at Galatoire’s. Lately, though, Carney hadn’t been interested in playing those kinds of games. She’d been sunk in the serious business of Communion preparation, a business that had required her to learn such things as the order of the Sacraments, the Stations of the Cross, the Holy Year and Fast Days, the Hail Mary and the Our Father.
Watching her, I was weak with jealousy. I wanted godparents and prayer cards and a shrine in my room. I wanted to carry a candle and wear a wreath. I wanted a white organza dress with a satin sash, and I wanted a new name, the name of an ancient and virtuous woman who’d protect me. I felt in need of protection. My mother and I didn’t even go to synagogue anymore, because there was no synagogue in Iberville Parish. We must have been the only Jews within a fifty-mile radius.
I heard the sewing machine go silent downstairs, and the familiar creak and groan as Carney’s mother crossed the living room. Her pink house slippers clicked as she made her way up the stairs. By the time she came through the doorway of Carney’s room she was out of breath. The Communion dress was draped over one arm, and in her hand she held a box of pins.
“Time to pin your hem,” she said to Carney. “Out of those clothes.”
Turning her back to me, Carney shucked off her gingham shirt and jeans. Her mother lifted the Communion dress over her head and buttoned the ten pearlized buttons. When Carney’s mother knelt to pin the hem, her hair fell forward to reveal the creamy sweep of her neck. I loved watching her work. Her nails were lacquered pink, and her hair was done in hot-rollered curls that hung over her shoulders like ripe plums. Her deep, rocking accent always lulled me into an admiring trance. My own mother spoke with a sharp accent from New York. I’d heard her students making fun of her in Pearson’s Dairy, after school.
“Your Aunt Marian called this morning,” Carney’s mother said, pulling a length of hem between her fingers. “I never thought she’d come, but she says she will. She’s bringing Dale, too, and you’d better be cordial.”
“My
cousin
Dale?” Carney said. “The love child?”
“Your cousin Dale,” Carney’s mother said, her mouth going small and stern. “Your blood cousin, whom you will respect.”
“I’ll respect him, but I won’t play with him,” Carney said.
Carney’s mother sat back on her heels. “I’ll not tolerate that tone,” she said.
“It’s my Communion party,” Carney said. “I shouldn’t have to play with him if I don’t want to.”
Her mother took her by the shoulders and looked square into her eyes. “That is
quite enough,
” she said, her voice low and full of warning. “Now, I can finish this dress, or you can take Communion in your underdrawers.”
Carney dropped her chin, chastened, but I experienced a frisson of private pleasure. In the presence of Carney’s mother, I was often rewarded with antique-sounding words like
underdrawers.
“And I’ll not tolerate talk about Aunt Marian either,” she said. “I suppose she’s not the best Catholic, but may the Lord strike me down before I judge her. I can’t say what I would have done in her position.” She released Carney’s shoulders, her forehead creased, as if considering what she would have done. I glanced at Carney for a clue as to what this was all about, but she shook her head and gave me a look that suggested she’d explain later.
Carney’s mother finished pinning the hem and stepped back to check her work. Stiff little organza sleeves rose from Carney’s shoulders like wings. The bell of her skirt floated around her legs, and the white satin sash trailed its streamers to below her knees. She looked ready to ascend to heaven. Her mother picked up a brush from the dresser and smoothed Carney’s hair.
“You’ll pass for a good child, anyway,” she said. “I suppose that’s the best we can do for now.”
“She knows all her saints,” I said, wanting her mother to believe I wasn’t a bad influence. I’d gotten the sense that she didn’t quite approve of the fact that I was Jewish. It was important to remain in her good graces, though. I’d been coming to Carney’s every day after school, an arrangement that seemed precarious.
Carney’s mother gave me a skeptical look. “
All
her saints?”
“All of them,” I said. “Backwards and forwards.”
“Well, that’s something, at least,” she said, but her tone was less than reassuring. She untied Carney’s sash and unbuttoned the pearlized buttons. Carney stepped out of the dress and stood on the rug in her underdrawers. Her mother draped the dress over her arm and gathered her pins, but at the door frame she turned back and glanced around the room—at the dark rolltop desk, the carved bureau, the tall windows. She seemed to be remembering something. I knew this had been Aunt Marian’s room, the room she’d had when she and Carney’s mother lived here as little girls. Carney had shown me where she’d written her name in crayon on the wall behind the bureau:
Marian Beatrice Fortunot.
I wondered if Carney’s mother would say something more about her sister, but she just turned and rustled out into the hall, muttering something to herself. We heard the click of her pink house slippers all the way down the stairs.
“So Dale’s a love child,” I said, once the thrum of the sewing machine had started up again. I tried to sound as if I knew what I was talking about, though I had only the vaguest idea of what a love child might be.
Carney finished buttoning her gingham blouse. She leaned close to me and whispered, “That’s right. He’s an actual dictionary-definition bastard. And half black. His daddy got my Aunt Marian in trouble and then went off to college up north.”
“Your cousin’s black?” I said. It hardly seemed possible.
“Black as night.”
“Not if he’s only half black.”
“I don’t know, actually,” she admitted. “I’ve never met him. My grandfather didn’t want him around. He didn’t even want to see Aunt Marian. They hated each other, him and her. He tried to make her go to a Home, where she’d have her baby and then someone would adopt it. But she ran off to Biloxi and had it on her own. My grandfather just wanted to kill her. He wouldn’t let her back in the house. He’s dead now, though. He died in December. My mother said he had a drinking man’s liver.”
“Why didn’t your mom ever take you to visit Dale?” I asked. “Wouldn’t she want you to meet him?”
“I don’t think she approves of him either. No one ever talks about it.”
“Well, they’ll talk about it now, with him coming and all.”
Carney narrowed her eyes. “I don’t see why he has to come,” she said. “I don’t want everyone looking at him and talking about him the whole time. It’s my party.”
“They’ll still pay attention to you,” I said, though I could see where they might be distracted. White people in Iberville Parish, particularly Carney’s parents and their friends, had old-fashioned ideas about black people, ideas that seemed ignorant and provincial to me. My own parents had black professor friends from Manhattan, men with names like Ishaq and Lumumba, women who wore African head wraps and wrote poetry. Some of these people had come from New York to give guest lectures in my father’s history classes at the university. But here in Iberville Parish, I’d heard white men call grown-up black men “boy.” The black kids at our school didn’t play with the white kids, and there were no black teachers at all. Close by, there were actual plantations that slaves had built with their own hands. And in town there was a restaurant with two separate entrance doors, one on either side of its brick façade. The words WHITE and COLORED were painted over now, but you could still see the red letters like ghosts beneath the paint. That restaurant was much closer to our house than Pearson’s, but we never went there for dinner. When I walked by and saw people eating there I couldn’t help feeling as if they must hate my mother and me as well. We were Jewish, not black, but we were outsiders all the same. They found little ways to remind us. At school last week we’d had to go around and tell how our families were celebrating Easter, and when we got to me the teacher had said, “Oh, y’all don’t even celebrate Easter, do you?” The other kids stared. I was relieved to be able to say I was celebrating it at Carney’s house, an answer that seemed to satisfy everyone.
The rest of that afternoon, as Carney and I finished up the saints and then played out back with her little brother and sisters, I kept thinking about Dale. For Carney’s sake I wanted to be indignant about his daring to show up at her Communion, but for Dale’s sake I was worried about how the guests would act. What I felt most, though, was a thrilling sense of dread. It was the way I used to feel in New Orleans when a hurricane warning had been issued. After we’d taped the windows and brought the garden furniture inside, I’d sit in my room and look out at the darkening street, willing the storm to come.