The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart (14 page)

He dragged her to the bed the first time by the hair, because he had raised her for it; only she didn’t know what “it” was. She was yelling and screaming and calling for her mama. He would get her in the bed and he’d order her around just like he did when she was doing work in the house: Lay down. Spread. Put your arms around my waist. Open your mouth. Suck on my tongue. He was a big hairy white man whose people had come from Ireland; he weighed about two hundred pounds and looked just like a hog wearing clothes. And she was still a child. She would be crying and gagging, and he would say: Act natural. Act like it’s real good. And she would have to try to do it, or he would beat her. She was part Seminole stock, and had that thick, bushed-out hair, full lips and a high, copper-black color, like a kind of plum or maybe a peach you sometimes see, but dark, too, and she had eyes that looked like she was waiting for somebody to die. Not sad, but resigned and impatient
at the same time. She outlived his ass, of course; she and the mistress buried him together.

The mistress hated him too, but she hated everybody. She was out there in the middle of nowhere with nobody to talk to but slaves and chickens, and then only when she started the conversation. The slaves would stand and look at the ground, and the men slaves knew it was dangerous to let their eyeballs rise up as high as the hem of her long skirt. They didn’t like her, and she knew it. And she couldn’t talk to him because he hadn’t married her to talk to her. He just married her. I think it was because the other white men said it was bad for their little community to have him sowing so many wild oats among the black women, and in general just running around crazy drunk and wild. This is where whiskey drinking came into the family, and stupid behavior.

After he died of a rotted liver, the two women got along a bit better because the mistress turned out to really like children. And all these children by Grandmama were handsome. And she would play with them, teach them to read and write—which was against the law, but nobody ever came way out where they were to check on her—and she let them stay in the big house with her. A big white gloomy thing that looked and felt less like a real house than like some dead house’s ghost. Her plan was to steal the children away from their mama, who wasn’t allowed in the big house and never knew reading and writing. And never knew how to act outside of her “place” as a slave. But the children would steal stuff from the big house and take it home to their mother, who had to sneak into the back door of the house when the mistress wasn’t looking, and put it back. She didn’t love those children much, herself. She’d have died for them, but she just kept looking at them like they were strangers until they got grown and then after Freedom they took care of her and she didn’t seem to mind knowing them. But she always kept her distance from them,
too. You had a feeling of her thinking she’d somehow given birth to snakes.

Every time I look at them, she would say, I hear him say: Lay down. Spread. Suck on my tongue. I will tell any woman old enough to know what I say, that I have spent years of my precious life, gagging.

When my mother was nearly thirty she married my papa. And they proceeded to have all of us children. But she had inherited that standoffish quality from her mother, who thought laying down with a man was worse than laying under the wheels of a cart. I don’t think she ever would have gone to bed at night if Papa hadn’t come up to her, taken her by the arm, and dragged her off. She dreaded going to bed and wouldn’t go, until forced, though she’d married Papa of her own free will and seemed to really care for him in her own cool, don’t touch me right now way.

—Gossip Herstory, by
   Auntie Putt-Putt

As Big Sister came to the close of this tale, Little Sister groaned. Auntie Putt-Putt had had dozens of stories like this one, and, like the Ancient Mariner, she would grab you by the shoulder, sit you down over a mound of peas to be shelled, and force you to hear them. They’d been the bane of Little Sister’s childhood; she had felt instinctively that they wounded something in her, and had avoided Auntie Putt-Putt in favor of books and long walks and the tossing of pebbles into streams. But Big Sister had been hooked, a willing captive. As an adult she compulsively reiterated the stories, much as Auntie Putt-Putt had done. It gave her life a quality of moroseness and easily triggered resentment.

They were now sipping brandy before the fire, in the small
cabin that existed on the last tiny remnant of land their family still owned on what had been at one time, a hundred years before, a sizable plantation, whose overseers had been, indeed, invariably Irish or Scottish. Or, over time, a mixture of both. The white descendants of these people were still around, and were seen often on the country roads or on the small town’s streets. There was never direct eye contact between them and the Irish-Scottish descendants, mixed with Indian and African, of darker hue. The black people had traditionally been so profoundly oppressed by the brutality of the white ones that any connection to them, past or present, was stolidly ignored. In fact, sometimes denied. It was a chilly July evening that made Little Sister think of the Southern expression “It’ll be a cold day in July … before such and such will happen.” Obviously no one twenty years ago could imagine a day in July being cold. But this one was. And so she sipped the brandy gratefully. It was from a homemade batch she’d discovered in a large churn on the hearth; a young cousin had followed the recipe given him by one of the uncles or aunts, and had produced excellent results. The brandy was thick with peach threads, but luscious too and sweet. It warmed Little Sister’s body all the way through with a peaceful and a mellow flame. She loved being this way, and didn’t, personally, think the old Irish rapist had anything to do with it.

Left alone in the cabin, while Big Sister swayed out the door on her way to visit a neighbor, Little Sister sat reading in a chair beside the fire. Her lover was coming. He had flown across the country to visit his parents in Covington, a town not far away, and was now, even now, on the road, on his way to see her. She was reading
Wide Sargasso Sea
by Jean Rhys. The freakish cold was hanging on and now it was raining as well. She immersed herself as much as she could in Rhys’ sun-drenched foliage, her
warm decadent gardens, the magic of the Caribbean! But her mind would stray. Several times she thought she heard the car, and jumped up, a hand flying to her hair, only to sit down in equal parts relief and anxiety. He had brought his wife with him to Covington, and the child. She imagined them all, the wife, the child, the mother, the father, relatives and friends, all happily
en famille
, and felt she should not want to see him. How boring to be in love with someone else’s wandering husband! she thought. Yet she did want to see him, desperately. She wanted him with her whole self. Body and, as they say, soul.

And at last it was unmistakably his car (his father’s car, actually, dark, stylish) and then his long legs walking across the yard, head ducked against the rain. And then he was inside, and holding her, and she was nearly sobbing with joy and relief.

He had only a couple of hours, and after the briefest period on the sofa before the fire—a fire he praised, being a great builder of fires himself—they climbed into bed, still smoking the last of a shared joint, and lay for several moments listening to the rain. Lying shameless underneath a large picture of her assembled clan: uncles, aunts, grandparents; her mother and father were there. Oh well, she thought. Now you see me in all my truth.

They were always ravenous for each other. An amazing state of hunger for her who had always relegated sex to a place near the end of her needs—the influence of Auntie Putt-Putt’s stories? she sometimes wondered—and they covered with hands and tongues nearly every inch of each other’s bodies. The joint taking effect at just the right moment to ease her coming—at which she cried out dramatically to God, then laughed—and in time to hold him to her as he concluded his own quest. And then, in that time she liked best, the time of rest and stroking, and calming
down; the time of looking into each other’s eyes; the time of snuggling up and falling into blissful sleep, he departed. Rose—after first glancing at his watch, a habit that frequently annoyed her, but which now actually hurt—and drew on his clothes. Kissed her on the forehead. And left. She felt as if she’d been robbed.

But by the time Big Sister returned, and she had napped, she could hardly believe anything had happened. Semen dripped from her, when she stood, but her body did not remember the orgasm. Luckily she had written it down before she slept.

Big Sister said, next morning: If we can find Uncle Loaf’s house, I will be happy. She meant: I will be liberated somehow from the sad stories Auntie Putt-Putt used to tell. If I revisit the place where my unconscious was trained to fixate on the dark, I will become well.

Little Sister knew this was quite a big step for Big Sister, and, though lovesick through and through, roused herself.

Their brother, who was an outlaw of some sort, who always kept a yard filled with confiscated cars, lent them a car for their excursion, a confiscated taxi—with “Rapid Taxi,” in bold black letters, printed on its sides. In this they rolled off down the recently paved road in the direction they remembered the house to be. Within minutes it seemed they had reached what had been the turn. They had always walked this road, as children. It had been dirt. It had seemed to take them hours to get anywhere. Yet, here was the turn. They got out, and stared in amazement. Twenty years’ uninterrupted growth had closed the road with trees: pines and poplars, scrub oak. They had thoughtfully provided themselves with large sticks which they lifted out of the trunk, and set out.

“I remember all the times I ran away from home,” said Big Sister. “And I would come to Uncle Loaf and Auntie Putt-Putt’s house. And Mama would send Roy or Gail after me. And I would hide behind Uncle Loaf’s chair, chewing on some of his tobacco!”

Little Sister also recalled the house, but more vaguely. A three- or four-room cabin, made of pine weathered a soft gray, a kitchen separate from the house, in a clearing surrounded by trees. A lovely spot: quiet, clean, green. It was a time and place where litter did not exist. No one would even have known what you meant. What, trash just laying out on the ground? Who could possibly make sense of that? A cat named First had lived there with the old people. Perhaps there’d been a hound. But her mind attached to none of these thoughts, but was partly, always, on her lover. What is he doing now, she thought, at just this moment?

“Always running away to enjoy life,” Big Sister was saying, hitting at a bush with her stick, to scare off, possibly, snakes, “and always sent for, caught and brought back.”

“You were adventuresome,” said Little Sister, supportively. But underneath this comment she thought: You always ran to the same place (yet, where else was there to go?) and you always let them find you, catch you and bring you back.

“Not as adventuresome as you. You got clean away, from the beginning.”

The path was rocky, hilly, branches of trees struck them in the face. They learned quickly to raise their hands and sticks.

“Ah, my adventures are killing me,” she said glumly. But Big Sister did not wish to hear. As far as she was concerned, Little Sister had no serious problems. Though she admitted she looked haggard and tired, as if she had not been sleeping well. Still, she
felt an overwhelming need to have what attention there was focused on herself.

Little Sister thought: Love is the hook. I simply did not love them enough to let them hook me. I created a critical distance between us. You could be called upon to cook, to clean house, to care for all the children that came after you, including me. You were deliberately conditioned to put yourself last. They used your love for them to make you comply with their every wish. But I watched what they did to you—and decided not to love them more than myself.

Big Sister thought: It is her selfishness even now that is butting in. “My adventures are killing me!” Indeed! A gorgeous husband, a gorgeous child, a gorgeous house, a gorgeous career! Even the luxury to be moaning and groaning over a lover! And what have I got? An ex-husband I should have divorced before I married him. Children who neither call nor write. A house so unstable it would blow away if my gimme this, gimme that sisters’ and brothers’ children didn’t hold it down by their sorry, no’count weight.

They had now reached an impasse. Over the remains of a barbed-wire fence a thicket of vines, trees and bushes had grown. The vines connected to and extended themselves by covering the large oak tree that, years ago, had fallen across the path. If they went around it they were fearful of losing the faint path they’d discovered. They could not go over it.

They stood, the two sisters, looking about them.

Little Sister realized that finding the house was not important to her. Big Sister herself was. But would Big Sister now say: It is impossible, this effort to go back and be released from the past. Useless. Let’s go back, before the rattlesnakes smell us? Her
shoulders were slumped. Her face, so happy and confident when they started out, dejected.