Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun (4 page)

‘Okay, so the other day this black lady comes up to me. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. I’m just saying, she was black. And tall and old. Not old-old, but definitely older than me: old enough to be my mom, maybe even my grandma. So anyway, she sees that I’m carrying all this shit, plus I had the dog so I guess she kinda felt sorry for me and then she kinda like asked me if I was okay. But sometimes you get tired of people looking at you like you need pity and shit like that. Yeah, I’m homeless! But so what? Maybe that’s what I shoulda said, but the words don’t always come out when you want them to.

Homeless is just because we’re house challenged. We don’t have a roof over our heads, but we make it work. Thank God I’m in the food industry and we have food. And I feel like I’ve learned a lot from living like this because you never starve, you’re always clothed, you ground score everything, I mean basically. We help each other, you know. I go to
people’s parks a lot and I see a lot of it there. No one’s better or different than the other person. We’re all of one heart. We all care for each other. We have off days and on days just like everybody else does. I don’t drink or anything like that, and I don’t do drugs or anything like that anymore, and that’s my choice. It’s a perspective and a focus that I have to respect myself. And living like this, you can’t live like this if you’re high all the time. You can’t. Or you’d lose focus and you’d be tired all the time. I have my car, and my dog and my stuff, and I have a job so I’m okay. And I’ve been married, I lived in Portland, lived in Oakland and Berkeley and had a really good childhood and stuff. My father made a lot of money back in the day for living in the Bronx. What people make today, my father made back then. Those kind of figures, you know. So I come from good stock. My dad was a saver, while I’m not. I’m a free spirit, you know, an artist.

I come from a family of artists and piano playing and music and stuff like that. We had a piano growing up in our house, in my grandmother’s house when I was a kid. Ukuleles and mandolins and singing and dancing. You know, that’s where I come from. That kinda of background. So that’s how come the Grateful Dead really gave me that free spirit of danceability. I took modern dance. I had a recital at Carnegie Hall. I’m not saying that I’m a poor little rich girl or anything, but I come from good stock. And sure, I have a higher sight for myself, of course! But then I would wanna take everybody into my home, you know, and let them just have a good night’s sleep, you know. Cos I know what it’s like. And I haven’t slept in a bed for three years, you know. But that’s a journey in life, you know, it’s like a journalist going to another country.
Like on a mission, like a missionary. And it’s not that I don’t sleep. I have a pillow and a comforter, you know. Down comforter. I had a sleeping bag. I gave that away. It’s so good to give.

Giving! I’ve learned so much about just giving. Giving is such a good feeling. Buying someone a cup of coffee, or paying someone’s toll, or someone doing that for me, you know. That act of kindness is A-MAY-ZING. Amazing! Be kind. It’s very amazing. Sometimes we just don’t take the time to know people as people and maybe someone’s heart is broken in some way or another, you know.

So. Just to back-pedal back to that woman I was talking about earlier. Well, maybe her heart was broken, you know, and I shouldn’t have been so like, ‘I don’t wanna talk to you.’ You just never know. Be kind. Be kind. That’s my new motto.

So like the other day, I found all these books just dumped onto the sidewalk. So I picked them up and I gave some to friends, who like to read, you know. But I kept one for myself cos there was one about Africa and I’ve always had this theory that Africans were the first to come to the Americas and that maybe some of my foremothers were African. So that’s why I kept the book with Africa in its title, and I like the name on the inside page. Morayo Da Silva. I don’t know how you pronounce it, but I kinda like More-RAY-oh cos it sounds like a ray of sunlight, genderless and grounded, just like my chosen name. Born Sarah, now Sage. And I’m still imagining my African ancestors coming up through Europe, across the Bering Strait, then down to the West Coast into the land of my
other ancestors – the Cherokee tribe of the southeast and the Apache from the southwest. I also imagine that one day I’ll dump my crazy ass boyfriend, let him take the dog, and then I’ll go back to college and finish my degree, you know. That way I’ll make something better for myself. I’ll travel to Brazil. Maybe to Africa, cos when you think about it, really, with what I’m suffering now, my life isn’t that much better than what Africans are living through, you know. I mean my life is okay and stuff, but I’m not gonna lie to you. It’s tough out here, and sometimes when I read about Africa, I don’t see America being any better. It’s really a crying shame. A crying shame.

Sunshine tells me over the phone that it’s only been three days, but it feels like it’s been longer. I wonder if she’s rounding down the number, trying to make me feel better. I just want to be back home.

Nights are the hardest, when I hear the neighbours having nightmares and the nurses bustling in their loose cotton trousers and rubber-soled shoes. I try blocking my ears to the screams, but that doesn’t help much and I’m always startled when the pipes in my room begin to creak and wheeze. Sometimes I have nightmares of my own. I dream that someone’s attacking me, and when I scream for help, no sound comes out. I awake, suffocating and gasping for breath. They’ve given me a panic button, supposedly for things like this, but I don’t know who’ll come if I press it, so I don’t use it. I only wish they’d let me lock my door. Better still, that I were strong enough to push some heavy
furniture against it. I know I ought to be safe here but I also know that you can never be sure.

There’s a very nice woman called Bella and I wish she worked nights. It would make me feel safer if she did, but because she doesn’t, I stay alert through the darkness. I think of all my friends in the city and others around the world who don’t know I’m here. I don’t want people visiting me in this place. It feels too depressing, which is why I’ve only told Sunshine. So I wait for the blue of night to fade into dawn, and only then, when the warm smell of maple syrup slips through the gap at the bottom of my door, do I let myself rest.

To comfort myself and stop my mind going round and round in circles, I close my eyes and inhale deeply, summoning the smell of moin-moin and akara. ‘Or porridge might be nice,’ I whisper to myself, reimagining Goldilocks as Afrolocks, just before Bella arrives with the pancakes and their accompaniments – miniature packets of grape jelly and pats of butter so cold they sit, like hard-boiled sweets, refusing to melt on the hill of pancakes.

‘Mind the gap,’ I repeat, wishing for the doors to slide open.

I think sometimes that I’m losing my memory. I’m more forgetful these days, and lying in bed all day, I worry. Will I become just another old woman with Alzheimer’s? And who will look after me? As a child I only remember one mad person – man or woman, I forget. Was it a bare-breasted woman who removed her wrappa to reveal a torn and dirty petticoat? Did she shriek and scratch her head? Or does this memory come from the book of my
imagination? Or was it a man with thick, knotty, lice-infested hair? He was the only bearded man I saw in those days. I never dared to look too closely for fear that his curses might land on me. All the children knew that somewhere between this madman’s legs hung a large penis. Swinging. Menacingly.

At lunchtime and dinner, it’s the smell of boiled potatoes that first fills the air here. It reminds me of my boarding school days where cod and boiled potatoes were served on Fridays. Shepherd’s pie on Saturdays, and roast lamb and boiled potatoes on Sundays. All followed by wobbly Bird’s custard or Rowntree’s jelly. I don’t think mother ever cooked potatoes. She used to cook rice – sifting it carefully before she boiled it, letting me run my fingers through the tray of white pearls in search of small brown stones that needed to be discarded. I remember that the rice came from India and sat in a huge white sisal bag in a dark pantry with the serving calabash resting on top. It was only from boarding school then that I remembered the smell of boiling potatoes along with the forlorn cry of Eastbourne’s seagulls, and the matching greyness of its skies and pebble beaches. Now it feels not unlike those lonely evenings lying face up in my school bunk bed, crying because my mother had died and my father was so far away.

On my first night they wheeled me into the dining hall, but I haven’t been back since. I keep remembering the man who repeatedly lifted an empty fork from his plate to his toothless mouth. One of the aides would sometimes come to his rescue, but as soon as the aide left to help someone
else, he returned to shovelling air between his gums. I’ve named the poor man, Santiago. The one who tries not to think, only to endure. That’s why I find it better to stay in my room, in the company of my own thoughts with my one book of poetry, delighting in Satin-Legs Smith.

I had planned, after retiring from the university, to try my hand at writing, starting with a novel set in Nigeria. This doesn’t fall into my birthday bucket list of new and daring things to do. But perhaps it should do as I’ve found the writing to be much more challenging than expected. I named my main character, Joslyn: a reference to my home city of Jos, as well as to my closest childhood friend, Jocelyn, the houseboy’s daughter. I’d always hoped that Jocelyn would marry a kind man, give birth to healthy children, and lead a happy life; but we’d lost touch after I left for boarding school so I never knew what happened to her. The book would therefore be the story of a life imagined and hoped for. It would be a love letter, both to my friend and to Jos where the two of us had grown up. Though I’d returned to Lagos many times since my childhood, I’d only been back to Jos once and never since the troubles broke out between Christians and Muslims and never since
the arrival of Boko Haram. I’d always hoped to return with father, but when he died I couldn’t bring myself to go back. One morning, as I stood in my San Francisco kitchen drinking coffee, I opened my newspaper to find on the cover an aerial shot showing bodies in Jos, wrapped in brightly coloured Ankara prints. From a distance, they looked almost beautiful, scattered like crayons in a jumbo-sized box; until I read the headline and peered closer and saw that some of the bodies were splattered, and many soaked, in a deeper red not belonging to the original fabric. The accompanying text detailed the massacre. I doubted it was my Jocelyn, but what if it was? Her name was written right there in the article, bearing witness to how people fled in terror, climbing trees to get away. People ought to have been safe up in the mango trees behind the thick canopy of green leaves where we used to hide as children. But no, according to this Jocelyn, these mad people had chased them even there, before smoking them out – some burning, as they fell from the branches. The date was 11 September 2001.

I started sending money back home, to the orphans, even though I couldn’t always be sure whether the money would reach those most affected. It felt better to be doing something rather than nothing. For how was it possible that this had happened in my home city – the place where I’d grown up and that I’d once described as the warmest, most generous place on earth, where parents routinely took it upon themselves to look after everyone else’s children or discipline them if need be; the place where one always cooked for more than the number of people in one’s household in case others dropped by; the place
where old people were never relegated to stuffy barracks to sit for hours waiting for death; the place where vegetable sellers routinely gave their loyal customers a
dash
of several guavas or a small calabash of tomatoes for the evening stew, something small for free; the place where people said ‘sorry’ whenever someone tripped or fell or grazed themselves because that was the linguistic mirror of a culture based on empathy, having nothing to do with who was at fault; the place where Muslims celebrated Christmas and Christians broke the fast during Ramadan with their Muslim brothers and sisters; the place where grown men held hands and grown women walked arm in arm; the place where the term ‘cousin’ was never used because all cousins were brothers or sisters; the place where Sundays were spent visiting friends and relatives; the place where weddings and funerals and naming ceremonies and baptisms and graduations and independence celebrations and governor’s parties were lavish and celebratory; the place where everyone knew your family; the place where the type of atrocities you read about in history class concerning the Germans, the Russians, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Nicaraguans, the Boers and all those foreign people, was never supposed to happen to you, or to your loved ones. Ever. Until one day it did. And worse.

And because Joslyn no longer seemed fictitious, because the good life I’d dreamt of for Jocelyn and her children now felt so tenuous, I put the manuscript away on the highest shelf where I prayed that my character would be hidden, far from danger. I returned to the company of old literary friends and the characters that I had taught to so many students over the years. I went first to
Blindness
and
July’s People,
because if anyone could survive it would be the doctor’s wife and Maureen. And then I found myself sketching new chapters in my journal and changing the endings of stories so that some of those female characters not allowed to make it in their original version did in mine. Mrs Manstey didn’t die in a fire, Firdaus wasn’t executed, and Magda never went mad. Ophelia didn’t go mad. Diouna didn’t go mad. Tess didn’t go mad. Nor did Jane Eyre or Antoinette Cosway. And once I’d breathed new life into a story I was satisfied, until my next visit – at which point I might add a chapter or lift a character and take her to another book. It frustrated me though not to have finished Joslyn’s story. What I needed was a generous soul, a character that could transform things, really transform things. So now, lying in bed with nothing better to do, I find myself casting around for additional characters. I think of how I’d like to revisit those that I hadn’t read for some time. What if Magda had been able to pass her baby, safely, into the hands of a kind German woman? Thrust the baby into a stranger’s arms who would then raise the young girl with love as someone might have done for any of Joslyn’s children. Thinking of this makes me even more impatient to leave, to get back to those thick pencil marks made as a young student and the thin ticks added in later years to see what additional characters and plots I might weave into my story.

I wish I’d packed more than one book. I reach again for my earthquake bag, just to double check because it feels heavy enough to contain another book. Or two? If not, then what in the world was making this thing so heavy? Water. I’d have to remember next time not to bother with so much
water. And what else? I feel something bulky in the inside zip and, just as I pull it out, I remember. Hidden in the side pocket are two sanitary pads, extra long with wings, and tucked into these are my British passport and some hundred-dollar bills. ‘What luck,’ I laugh. ‘Remember this, Morayo. One passport. One thousand five hundred dollars.’ And if indeed there were any bleeding limbs, then what better thing to staunch the flow of blood than a woman’s sanitary pad?