The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart (8 page)

They had moved to Florida years ago, looking for a better life “somewhere else in the South that wasn’t so full of Southerners.” Finding “good white people” to work for had seemed Aunt Lily’s talent. Though looking at her now, Rosa thought her aunt, by her imperial bearing, directness of speech and great height, had probably made them so. She could not imagine anyone having
the nerve to condescend to Aunt Lily, or, worse, attempt to cheat her. And so, once again she was amazed at the white man’s arrogance and racist laws. Ten years earlier this sweet-smelling, squeaky-clean aunt of hers would not have been permitted to try on a dress in local department stores. She could not have drunk at certain fountains. The main restaurants of the city would have been closed to her. The public library. The vast majority of the city’s toilets.

Aunt Lily had an enormous brown station wagon into which Rosa and Barbara flung their light travel bags. Barbara, older than Rosa and closer to Aunt Lily, sat beside her on the front seat. Rosa sat behind them, looking out the window at the passing scenery, admiring the numerous canals—she was passionately fond of water—and yet wondering about the city’s sewerage problems, of which she had heard.

How like them, really, she thought, to build around their pretty segregated houses canals that are so polluted that to fall into one was to risk disease.

When they arrived at Aunt Lily’s squat green house with its orange and lemon trees in the yard, far from canals and even streetlights, they were met in the narrow hall by five of her aunt’s seven foster children and a young woman who had been a foster child herself but was now sharing the house and helping to look after the children with Aunt Lily. Her name was Raymyna Ann.

Aunt Lily had, a long time ago, a baby son who died. For years she had not seemed to care for children; Rosa had never felt particularly valued by her whenever she’d come to visit. Aunt Lily acknowledged her brother’s children by bringing them oranges
and grapefruit packed in orange net bags. She rarely hugged or kissed them. Well, she rarely touched these foster children, either, Rosa noticed. There were so many of them, so dark (all as black, precisely, as her aunt) and so woundedly silent. But at dinner the table was piled high with food, the little ones were encouraged to have seconds, and when they all trooped off to bed they did so in a cloud of soapy smells and dazzling linen.

Rosa lay in the tiny guest room, which had been her grandfather’s room, and smoked a cigarette. Aunt Lily’s face appeared at the door.

“Now, Rosa, I don’t allow smoking or drinking in my house.”

Rosa rose from the bed to put her cigarette out. Her aunt watching her as if she were a child.

“
You
used to smoke and drink,” she said, piqued at her aunt’s self-righteous tone.

“Your mama told you that lie,” said Aunt Lily, unsmiling. “She was always trying to say I was fast. But I never did drink. I tried to, and it made me sick. Every time she said she didn’t want me laying on her freshly made-up bed drunk, I wasn’t drunk, I was sick.”

“Oh,” said Rosa, who had the unfortunate tendency of studying people very closely when they spoke. It occurred to her for the first time that Aunt Lily didn’t like her mother.

By
why
didn’t Aunt Lily like her mother? The question nagged at her that night as she tried to sleep. Then became lost in the many other questions that presented themselves, well into the dawn.

Why, for instance, did Ivan no longer like her? And how could
you live with someone for over a decade and “love” them, then, as soon as you were no longer married, you didn’t even like them?

Her marriage had been wonderful, she felt. Only the divorce was horrible.

The most horrible thing of all was losing Ivan’s friendship and comradely support, which he yanked out of her reach with a vengeance that sent her reeling. Two weeks after the divorce became final she was in the hospital for surgery that proved to have been minor only after the fact. He neither called nor sent a note.

Sheila, now his wife, wouldn’t have liked it, he later (years later) explained.

And she had said, by then:

“Who?
Who
wouldn’t have liked it?”

And he had had to remind her who Sheila was. This was not because her memory was so poor—it actually was poor—but because he no longer called his wife by name but by some more generic “mother/housefrau” appellation made up after their babies started to come.

The next day all the children were in school and Barbara stood behind Aunt Lily’s chair combing and braiding her long silver hair. Rosa sat on the couch looking at them. Raymyna busily vacuumed the bedroom floors, popping in occasionally to bring the mail or a glass of water. She was getting married in a couple of weeks and would be moving out to start her own family. Rosa had of course not said anything when she heard this, but her inner response was surprise. She could not easily comprehend anyone getting married, now that she no longer was, but it was impossible for her to feel happy at the prospect
of yet another poor black woman marrying God knows who and starting a family. She would have thought Raymyna had already had enough.

But who was she to talk. Miss Cynical. She had married. And enjoyed it. She had had a child, and adored it.

In the afternoon her aunt and Raymyna took them sight-seeing. As she understood matters from the local newspapers, all the water she saw—whether canal, river or ocean—was polluted beyond recall, so that it was hard even to look at it, much less to look at it admiringly. She could only gaze at it in sympathy. The beach she also found pitiable. In their attempt to hog it away from the poor, the black and the local in general, the beachfront “developers” had erected massive boxlike hotels that blocked the view of the water for all except those rich enough to pay for rooms on the beach side of the hotels. Through the cracks between hotels Rosa saw the mostly elderly sunworshipers walking along what seemed to be a pebbly, eroded beach, stretching out their poor white necks to the sun.

Of course they cruised through “Little Havana,” which stretched for miles. Rosa looked at the new Cuban immigrants (
gusanos
, Fidel called them, worms) with interest. Startled that already they seemed as a group to live better and to have more material goods than the black people. Like many Americans who supported the Cuban revolution she found the Cubans who left Cuba somewhat less noble than the ones who’d stayed. Clearly the ones who’d left were the ones with money. Hardly anyone in Cuba could afford the houses, the cars, the clothes, the television sets and lawn mowers she saw.

At dinner she tried to explain why and how she had missed her grandfather’s funeral. The telegram had come the evening before she left for Cyprus. As she left her stoop next morning she had felt herself heading in the wrong direction. But she could not stop. It had taken all her meager energy to plan the trip to Cyprus, with a friend who claimed it was beautiful, and she simply could not think to change her plans. Nor could she, still bearing the wounds of her separation from Ivan, face her family, so many, perhaps all, of whom had been uncomfortable with him anyway.

Barbara and Aunt Lily listened to her patiently. It didn’t surprise her that neither knew where Cyprus was, or what its politics and history were. She told them about the man whose son was killed and how he seemed to hate his “worthless” daughter for being alive.

“Women are not valued in their culture,” she explained. “In fact, the Greeks, the Turks and the Cyprians have this one thing in common, though they fight over everything else. The father kept saying ‘A man should have many sons.’ His wife flinched guiltily when he said it.”

“After Ma died, I went and got my father,” Aunt Lily was saying. “And I told him, no smoking and drinking in my house.”

But her grandfather had always smoked. He smoked a pipe. She’d liked the smell of it.

“And no cardplaying and no noise and no complaining because I don’t want to hear it.”

Others of her brothers and sisters had come to see him. She had been afraid to. On the pictures she saw, he always looked
happy. But when he was not dead tired or drunk, happy was how he’d looked. A deeply silent man with those odd peaceful eyes—she did not know, and she was confident her aunt didn’t, what he really thought about anything. So he had stopped smoking, her aunt thought, but her brothers had always slipped him tobacco. He had stopped drinking. That was possible. Even before his wife, Rosa’s grandmother, had died he had given up liquor. Or, as he said “it had given him up.” So, no noise. Little company. No complaining. But he wasn’t the complaining type, was he? He liked best of all, Rosa thought, to be left alone. And he liked baseball. She felt he had liked her, too. She hoped he did. But never did he say so. And he was so stingy! In her whole life he’d only given her fifteen cents. On the other hand, he’d financed her sister Barbara’s trade-school education, which her father, his son, had refused to do.

Was that what she held against him on the flight away from the South, toward the Middle East? There was no excuse, she’d known it all the time. She needed to be there, to say good-bye to the spiritcase. For wasn’t she beginning to understand the appearance of his spiritcase as her own spirit struggled and suffered?

At night, massaging Barbara’s thin shoulders before turning in, she looked into her own face reflected in the bureau mirror. She was beginning to have the look her grandfather had when he was very, very tired. The look he got just before something broke in him and he went on a mind-killing drunk. It was there in her eyes. So clearly. The look of abandonment. Of having no support. Of loneliness so severe every minute was a chant against self-destruction.

She massaged Barbara but she knew her touch was that of a stranger. At what point, she wondered, did you lose connection with people you loved? And she remembered going to visit Barbara when she was in college and Barbara lived a short bus ride away. And she was present when Barbara’s husband beat her and called her names and once he had locked both of them out of the house overnight. And her sister called the police and they seemed nice to Rosa, so recently up from the South, but in fact they were bored and cynical as they listened to Barbara’s familiar complaint. Rosa was embarrassed and couldn’t believe anything so sordid could be happening to them, so respected was their family in the small town they were from. But, in any event, Barbara continued to live with her husband many more years, and Rosa was so hurt and angry she wanted to kill. But most of all, she was disappointed in Barbara, who threw herself into the inevitable weekend battles with passionately vulgar language that Rosa had never heard any woman, not to mention her gentle sister, use before. Her sister’s spirit seemed polluted to her, so much so that the sister she had known as a child seemed gone altogether. And once gone, she had never come back.

Was disappointment, then, the hardest thing to bear? Or was it the consciousness of being powerless to change things, to help? And certainly she had been very conscious of that. As he punched out her sister, Rosa had almost felt the blows on her body. But she had not flung herself between them wielding a butcher knife as she had done once when Barbara was being attacked by their father, another raving madman.

Barbara had wanted to go to their brother’s grammar school graduation. Their father had insisted that she go to the funeral of an elderly church mother instead. Barbara had tried to refuse.
But
crack
, he had slapped her across the face. She was sixteen, plump and lovely. Rosa adored her. She ran immediately to get the knife, but she was so small no one seemed to notice her, wedging herself between them. But had she been larger and stronger she might have killed him; for even as a child she was serious in all she did—and then what would her life, the life of a murderer, have been like? Thinking of that day she wept. At her love, her sister’s anguish. Barbara had been forced to go to the funeral, the print of her father’s fingers hidden by powder and rouge.

She was little and weak and she did not understand what was going on anyway between father and sister. To her, her father acted like he was jealous. And in college, after such a long struggle to get there, how could she stab her brother-in-law to death without killing her future, herself? And so she had lain on her narrow foldaway cot in the tiny kitchen in the stuffy apartment over the laundromat and had listened to the cries and whispers, the pummelings, the screams and pleas. And then, still awake, she listened to the silibant sounds of “making up,” harder to bear and to understand than the fights.