The House of Discarded Dreams (9 page)

“Me too,” Felix agreed. He seemed quite eager to divert the conversation to a topic other than himself and his hair. Poor boy, dangled from some impossible hole like a piece of bait on a hook. “How do we make things happen?”

“I have no idea,” Vimbai said. “Think of them really hard?”

“Okay,” Felix said. “Here, or do you want to go somewhere else?”

“Somewhere else,” Vimbai said. “Let’s go to the porch.”

There, they sat cross-legged, their backs hunched, bracing against the cutting wind that rose from the ice-cold water, slashing their faces like steel cables. Vimbai crossed her arms in front of her chest and stuffed her hands, numb already, into her armpits. She closed her eyes, and for a moment concentrated on feeling Felix next to her, his warm breathing present, so touchingly and surprisingly human.

There was a creaking of the steps and a soft jangle of the screen door.

“What are you doing?” Maya asked. Her foxes sniffed at Vimbai and circumvented Felix in a wide arc. “Can I help?”

“Sure,” Felix said. “We’re trying to make the house do what we tell it.”

“What are you telling it?” Maya sat next to Vimbai, her warm elbow jostling against Vimbai’s.

“To make us a ShopRite. We decided that we’ve changed the house, so might as well try to direct it.”

Maya shrugged. “Makes sense.”

The three of them sat in silence. Vimbai squeezed her eyes shut and felt her forehead furrow as she imagined the cool aisles of a supermarket, shelves upon shelves, a solid white front of gallon milk jugs and white gleaming egg cartoons. Boxes of butter and cream cheese, bagels stuffed neatly into plastic bags. Thick slabs of meat in their little Styrofoam coffins, yellow cheese, red apples. All of it.

And she pictured her mother, frowning at the row of canned beans. “These are all the same thing,” she told Vimbai with irritation. “Same beans. All that’s different is a picture on the can.”

And Vimbai herself, scowling back, longing to go home. “Come on, mama. These are just brands—you know it.”

Her mother rolled her eyes and tossed a few cans into the cart, not even looking at which ones she picked. “Today at the department someone asked me about culture shock, and if I was overwhelmed with choices when I first came here. Americans, they always expect us to be overwhelmed with food.”

“I’m an American,” Vimbai mumbled and followed the cart and her mother’s receding back miserably.

“It’s not what I meant. You know that it makes no difference how many different pictures you put on green beans—they are still the same green beans inside. It’s an illusion of opulence they expect us to be impressed by and indulge in.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Vimbai had said. “People are just curious, you know? It wouldn’t hurt you to be nice once in a while.”

“After fifteen years of answering the same questions, my niceness and my patience are almost gone,” mother said.

“It’s not a big deal,” Vimbai said. She wanted to add, “Lighten up,” but thought better of it. Nothing brought quicker and more thunderous retribution upon her head than suggestions that her mother should lighten up or relax.

She opened her eyes to the sight of the leaden ocean. It was beginning to snow, and heavy viscous waves swallowed up the snowflakes as soon as they touched water. Why did her mother always have to insinuate herself into Vimbai’s daydreams? She did not want a replica of her—
Solaris
had scared her half to death when she first read it, and the thought of an intelligent needy fake with her mother’s personality was too terrifying to contemplate for any length of time. She just wanted a gallon of milk and some fresh fruit. And yet, her mother hovered on the inside of her eyelids, insubstantial but persistent, her narrow face wearing its habitual expression of grim readiness to pounce every time a perceived slight occurred.

Vimbai’s mother remained in her heart forever, her bitterness as familiar as the smell of coffee in the morning. She wasn’t always like this, Vimbai reminded herself—there were times when she was happy and carefree, and laughed easily. There were times when her parents whispered and giggled like guilty children, and no matter how old Vimbai was, these times always made her feel like the rift between her and her parents simply disappeared, leaving no trace, no scar.

But Vimbai had to make an effort to remember the happy times—she often wondered if this was a defect in her, or if it was something common to all people, this reflexive dwelling on the anger and the distance, on all the times where her mother and she squared off and argued in circles, as Vimbai’s gentle father sighed and tried to ask them be nice to each other; how desperately he tried to smooth the wrinkles that creased the surface of the life he would like to have, disfiguring it. Vimbai felt guilty for not thinking about him often enough, for focusing so much on her mother and the many ways in which she made Vimbai angry.

“Are you thinking about ShopRite?” Maya asked, jostling Vimbai back to the freezing porch and the cold waves, to the hidden horrors under the deep, deep water.

“Kind of,” Vimbai answered, and dutifully imagined the beading of condensation on the sides of milk jugs and the doors of walk-in freezers fogged by breath, hiding stacks of frozen pizza boxes and foil packets of cauliflower and chopped spinach.

“Should we check on how it’s going?” Felix said. “I’m cold.”

Maya stood and stretched, her dogs following her lead as one. “I suppose, I only wish we knew where to check.”

“Huh,” Felix said, and stood too, shivering. “This house is very big.”

“Can’t your dogs sniff it out?” Vimbai said. “They have to be good for something.”

Maya ignored the implied insult, and laughed. “A good idea, only they don’t know what a supermarket smells like. I guess we’ll just have to go look. Come along, Vimbai.” She grabbed Vimbai’s arm and pulled her to her feet. “You are just not content with hypothermia, are you? You want to add pneumonia to the list?”

“Or pleurisy,” Vimbai mumbled, and followed Maya and Felix inside. “Maybe I like the cold.”

They bade the
chipoko
and Peb to hold down the fort in the kitchen, and set out on a search for a supermarket, through the pantry and across a narrow jungle strip. Vimbai contemplated the mountains off in the distance, and did not bother to try and figure out how they fit inside the house.

Chapter 9

Vimbai had to admit that there was certain fun in discovering a new world and getting to name everything. Thankfully, Felix was content with his stub of a universe, and did not presume to offer names. But Vimbai and Maya, oh how they argued. Martin Luther King Forest was not a problem, and Malcolm X Mountains had a ring to it; Vimbai insisted that the lake with the catfish (which they wisely circumvented, not yet ready to deal with the cunning adversary) had to be named after Marechera, and the thin gurgling brook that flowed from the lake and then roared to magnificence somewhere down at the basement was fit to maintain a literary kick—Achebe River it was, even though it was no Niger. They argued about whether a plain covered in nettles and rusted bed frames was impressive enough to name, and if so—whom would it belong to.

“You can just call it the Bedframe Valley,” Felix suggested. “Or think about it later—now, I want to keep going.”

“Fine with me,” Maya said. “But the next thing will be named after Oprah.”

Vimbai snorted. “No way. Wangari Maathai is next. Surely, a Nobel laureate is more important than Oprah?”

“And I want more literary tributes,” Maya said. “How about Octavia Butler?”

“All right,” Vimbai agreed. “And after that—Tutuola and Fay King Chung.”

“Who’s that?” Maya asked, and whistled for her dogs to get back as they chased something up a steep pebbled ridge. “I mean, the second one.”

“Zimbabwe’s former minister of education and culture,” Vimbai said. “My mom says, she is Chinese, and in Rhodesia she could get an education and black people couldn’t. And she wrote children’s books.”

“Good enough for me,” Maya said.

Vimbai thought how happy would her mother be to visit the house—the only country in the world where not a single pebble was named after a white guy.

“Your mom misses Zimbabwe?” Maya asked.

“Yeah.” Vimbai thought a bit about how to put it into words. “It’s hard for her. She was a historian back home, she knew all there is to know about Zimbabwe folk traditions, and here she teaches Africana Studies.”

“It’s important,” Maya said.

“And yet it’s not the only thing she could do, but it is the only job they had for her. So it’s hard, you know? There’s tension between the faculty, who are all black, and the department chair who’s white.”

Maya rolled her eyes. “Figures.”

“And Africans and African-Americans.” Vimbai heaved a sigh. “The whole voluntary immigration thing.”

Maya nodded that she understood and they walked in silence, pebbles and dry leaves crunching underfoot. The whole experience did not quite feel real—Vimbai noticed the especially artificial quality of the landscapes inside the house. Sure, there was a sun and a semblance of sky—at least, if she did not look too closely; if she did, the light fixtures and the whitewash of the ceiling became apparent, as if peeking through the illusion of the natural phenomenon. No, it was something more fundamental, and it took her a while to puzzle out that this quality was due to the absence of smell. She could smell neither water nor knee-high grass, only indeterminate stale and warm odor, like a pillow freshly slept on.

She was about to share her observation with Maya, when Maya pointed to their right.

“Look!” Maya said.

Something gleamed at a distance, just over the spiny ridge made of some unfamiliar rock layered like slate, baby cribs, and a tangle of steel cables, and they hurried up the slope. Vimbai breathed deeply, trying to taste something in the air, anything but the dull stale smell of the old house. The gleaming behind the ridge grew brighter and higher, as if there was a sun hiding behind the jumble of rock and the discarded trash. It spilled over the ridge, casting a hazy halo, and reflecting off the metal guardrails of the broken cribs. Vimbai would’ve thought that they were in a landfill at sunset, if it weren’t for the cursed absence of smell.

Maya hurried ahead and stopped as she crested the ridge. She was cast in silhouette against the golden light, and Vimbai felt her breath catch—there was such beauty in the outline of her roommate, such elegant simplicity in the cast of her shoulders, the set of her chin. Such strength and confidence in her legs and feet planted slightly apart; she was an explorer surveying the new land opening in the water gap, a discoverer of unknown lands and landmarks, the namer of things. Her dogs crowded around her, their black shapes filled with a quiet dignity their usual selves woefully lacked. Vimbai, enchanted, wanted neither to move nor look away.

Maya turned, tossing her hair over her shoulder. “Coming, Vimbai?”

“Yeah,” Vimbai said, and reluctantly moved up the slope, into the bright light. “What is it?”

“See for yourself,” Maya said.

Vimbai hurried ahead, now that Felix also reached the crest and stood quietly staring down; Vimbai could not see whether he was impressed or awed, or merely waited for Vimbai to catch up to them and share in the view.

She stepped onto the crest, wobbly under her feet, shifting with all the inclusions of broken handles and rolled up spools of cable. She looked down and cried out in surprise and wonder.

The light they’d seen came from the second sun hovering over the rooftops, as if it were about to set, but it never quite dipped below the line of buildings. But it wasn’t the houses that drew Vimbai’s attention—it was a line of trees covered in blue and purple blooms, blue fire flickering around the branches but never consuming them, the pure ferocity of jacaranda trees in bloom. Even though Vimbai had not seen them for herself, the memory she shared with her grandmother and her mother’s stories left no doubt in her mind.

Yet, as she looked at the buildings, she decided that it was not Harare—at least, not the one she remembered. Town homes from the richer parts of the city mingled with traditional round huts one could still find in the provinces, and suburban New Jerseyan Cape Cods and bungalows. It was Harare of Vimbai’s dreams which jumbled things she did not quite remember with those she knew well. These were the streets she sometimes drove in her very first car, a Geo her parents got her, she suspected, as a joke; she drove along them in her dreams, frustrated that she was unable to find home and that all the streets led in random directions, never intersecting in any satisfactory way. The city where she and her mother never fought, and friends and relatives from New Jersey and Zimbabwe dropped by without any rhyme or reason, and dead grandparents were alive and spoke English and told Vimbai they loved her . . . just like the
vadzimu
did.

Vimbai rubbed her face.
Oh, my jacaranda trees,
she thought
. Oh how I missed you and yet I cannot smell your sweet blooms, I cannot feel your breath on my face
. The trees and the flowers and the buildings shifted and multiplied, and rotated and blurred, then swam into focus again like beautiful images in a kaleidoscope. She realized then it was tears that twisted and purified her vision.

Maya touched her shoulder—such a habitual gesture by now, the curve of Vimbai’s shoulder felt like it was shaped by Maya’s hand to fit into it, just like by her mother’s hand before. “What’s wrong?”

Vimbai looked up, into Maya’s worried face and Felix’s eye rotating away and then toward her, like a possessed bloodied apple. “It’s nothing,” she said. “This city . . . this is Harare, but not really. This is my dream Harare . . . in the Africa of the spirit.”

Maya smiled then. “This is it,” she said. “This house doesn’t become what we ask of it. It’s what we dream about—it’s our dreams that shape it, not us.”

Without saying a further word, Maya started the perilous descent down the crumbling precipitous slope. Felix and Vimbai followed, slipping and trotting awkwardly at times, sliding among the small avalanches of pebbles and refuse. Their feet left deep troughs as they descended, and already Vimbai was worrying about how they would get back up this steep slope.

She forgot all about it when she stood in the street, her heart sinking. From the distance, the place had seemed alive and real enough, but once inside she could not help but feel that she had wandered into a movie set—there were no people, and the houses seemed mere cardboard facades, and a single push would bring the entire street tumbling down. But the trees seemed real enough, and she reached up and touched a knotted branch, leaves like green spearheads, with bright stars of flowers clustered among them. With the slightest of pulls, the branch came off, and Vimbai cringed expecting this violation to dispel the mirage under the forever setting sun.

“It’s so pretty,” Maya said, and picked a branch too. “To bad I can’t smell anything.”

“It’s not you; it’s this place,” Vimbai said. “Listen, if this is where our dreams go . . . what’s with the dogs?”

“A Freudian nightmare,” Felix volunteered.

“Hush, silly boy,” Maya said. “I do dream of all sorts of creatures, you know. About being a queen of animals. I always wanted to work at the Philadelphia Zoo.” She said nothing else, but Vimbai could feel the sting in Maya’s words all the same—the acute hurt of someone who wanted to work in a zoo and instead served drinks at a casino. Life really had to work on having fewer discrepancies like this, Vimbai thought. And here they all were, surrounded by the ghosts of the dreams they gave up. Maya’s foxes-possums howled a bit and wagged their tails, and their beats resonated on the dry ground.

They did not find the supermarket or anything that would provide any variety in their menu. Instead, they collected great armfuls of blue flowers—Vimbai thought that the vadzimu would enjoy them, since she seemed as fond of these trees as Vimbai’s mother. And Vimbai herself felt deep gratitude that she was finally able to see them for herself, however distorted they were by her dream-memory, blue-purple, ice-cold. However devoid of scent.

The
chipoko
was pleased with the flowers, and as Vimbai told her about the dream Harare they had found, the ghost nodded along, her hooded eyes lowered to the opulence of flowers in her arms—so thin, so wrinkled. Vimbai piled the branches higher and the ghost held them like one would a child.

Peb hovered nearby, whispering of supernovas, but seemed drawn to the flowers. The ghost of Vimbai’s grandmother noticed too, and gave Peb a branch, which he immediately absorbed. His transparent hide grew suffused with the gentle purplish-blue color, and the twisted twigs of the branch poked out of his back like a grotesque fin. Vimbai did not question his need to incorporate everything that appealed to him, like she never questioned her grandmother’s attachment to jacaranda trees and her ability to possess Vimbai’s body.

“Maya thinks we’re dreaming this house,” Vimbai informed the
vadzimu
as soon as the old woman was able to tear her gaze away from the flowers. “Do you think we are dreaming it?”

“Some dreams you leave behind,” the
vadzimu
answered, her voice especially old and desiccated today. “Some dreams you discard along your way, like your baby clothes. They litter your past, like small corpses, like shed skins.”

Vimbai nodded, thinking, listening to the bubbling of the kettle on the stove—the
vadzimu
did not approve of the whistle, and wrenched it free from the kettle’s nozzle, like a pacifier from the lips of a recalcitrant infant. The dead air and the strange apparition, the taste of longing and dust settling over everything, testified to the veracity of the ghost’s words, and Vimbai felt like crying as she thought of the expanse the three of them had created and populated with sad little remnants of themselves. And it was so hard to decipher sometimes—was the man-fish Vimbai’s or Maya’s? Had the cribs comprising the ridge they named after Fay King Chung sifted out of Felix’s dead universe, or were they Maya’s forgotten memories? It was impossible to tell sometimes.

“Have something warm to drink,” grandmother said. “It’s getting chilly.”

Vimbai poured herself a cup of boiling water, sweetened it with a spoonful of sugar (there was still plenty), added a drop of lemon from a bright yellow squeeze bottle (getting low), and headed to the porch. She had no desire to see the undead horseshoe crabs or their underwater secrets, she just wanted to be away for a while, separate from the crushed hopes that sprawled everywhere and filled the house to near bursting.

She stared into the horizon, gray sky welded to gray ocean, with barely a shadow to separate the two. Vimbai imagined what it would be like, to see a passing ship in the distance; to notice a darkening of the horizon that would then grow into a humped shape, and to yell, “Land ahoy!” To see a bird—an albatross, perhaps, or a seagull—circling above. But the ocean remained as quiet and lifeless as the house, and Vimbai suspected (without verbalizing it, because it would be too painful) that it was not the real ocean but a product of the house, its sick effluvium. And yet, and yet . . . she smelled the salt in the air and the sharp sting of iodine, of crushed seaweed, and she hoped. She hoped that the horizon would split open and finally admit a welcome sight—a sandy beach with humped dunes in the background, boardwalks bleached by wind and salt into a gray weightlessness of driftwood, and a tall figure, her neck craning, her head tilted back to see better.
Come home, baby, come back home. We miss you and we forgive you and we promise that everything will be all right, we promise.