Amor and Psycho: Stories (17 page)

Natalie did not complain about sleeping next to me; in fact, she warmed slightly. We sometimes whispered for a few minutes after we put aside our reading (mine: “Experiential Connections Between Zen Buddhism and the Grieving Process”; Natalie’s: Murakami) and turned out the lights. I asked Fenn if our whispering kept her awake, and she said, “The sound of your voices running together reminds me of my white-noise machine in St. Louis, which lulls me to sleep with the drumming of tropical rain.”

THE MEZIMA-WA
rarely drink spirits, although Sam and I went to some effort (williams-sonoma.com) to procure the specific seedpod, called
gamm
, grown on the northern plains of the peninsula and now threatened with extinction because of the loss of the
oruna
, a native songbird. One of the seedpods is ritually chewed by a matriarch (Fenn) and then spit into the calabash—the
sam
—to begin the fermenting process. The remaining pods are processed in the bathtub in the usual Mezima-Wa way, then added to the calabash, which is filled with water and held at room temperature for six days. (We used the bucket in which I brine our Thanksgiving turkey.) Some Mezima-Wa families stir the mash daily;
others allow the bubbles to rise to the surface undisturbed until the last day, when they whip it with a special spoon. (Fenn used a wire whisk.) The finished punch opens the voice of the Mezima-Wa, making possible the exchange of interfamilial information—medical and psychiatric secrets, for example—between the husbandmother and wifemother. (Mezima-Wa society is matrilineal.) These secrets are traditionally transmitted through song—actually a mimicking of the singsong cry of the
oruna
—under the heady influence of
gamm
. For the sake of clarity and more perfect communication, Fenn suggested that we speak in English, without attempting the specialized tones of the
oruna
—for which I felt grateful.

When the Mezima-Wa do imbibe, they do so intensely. We drank for the prescribed hours (seven) from one of my coffee mugs, the closest relic we could find to the traditional Mezima-Wa cup fired out of clay dredged from the Mezima Basin. Sam, of course, was exempted from the ritual. He used his free time to take care of a glitch in his student loan paperwork from his year among the Mezima-Wa (the bank had confused the University of Mezima-Wa with another accredited international university) and to watch old noir films in the den.

The
gamm
tasted yeasty and bitter, like the fermented oatmeal I once enjoyed at the wedding of my second cousin in Glasgow. I remember little of the night, except that the
gamm
kept returning. Among the Mezima-Wa, it’s considered rude to “pass,” or sip without gusto.

The alcoholic drink—the cup, the stickiness—reminded me unpleasantly of an uncle from my youth. But the experience advanced overall my relationship with Fenn and Mondal-Wa, who spoke of their courtship and early days together in the capital, and their affection for America—the International House of Pancakes, the Grand Canyon and the music of Cole Porter. They pressed gift after gift upon me—beautiful tunics in the traditional Mezima-Wa fabrics and colors (plant-based, mushroom-dyed), French-milled soaps, DVDs, a ninety-six-pack of toilet paper from Costco, a plastic hairbrush, a traditional tub-scraping shell and a large bottle of white vinegar. The couple told obliquely shocking stories of distant relatives, after which I revealed my own early struggles with dyslexia, and a discreet, partial narrative of Sam’s quasi-father: his dedication to magazine journalism, our enduring friendship, his qualities of character, much-admired in Oslo.

After the drinking ceremony, Natalie and her parents took a ritual walk into the forest, where they built a small fire to symbolize the kindling of their new life among the husband and the husbandmother. I slept alone, exceptionally deeply, waking with a
gamm
hangover—not a headache, but, rather, a dinging pang in the area near my heart, a rousing sensation that I dimly recognized as something akin to a stirred libido, as if unfamiliar states of desire or appetite had been suddenly spirited up with a wire whisk. In fact, all the symptoms I had come to associate with midlife were gone.

Fenn, I found, had occupied the kitchen. She’d used my
Moroccan tagine to bake eggs with the strong cheese that the Mezima-Wa favor (any blue-veined variety will approximate it) and with parsley and the spices I recognized from Natalie’s packets. She’d French-pressed coffee and sliced oranges. The CD player spun a trio in G minor by Schumann as Mondal-Wa read aloud the headlines from the
New York Times
. The crossword puzzle, folded into its quarter page, was almost complete.

Over breakfast, we discussed the plans for the wedding we’d agreed upon at the conclusion of the
gamm
ritual. The ceremony itself was to be held at the Mississippi River; the guests would form a receiving line leading up to the shore; any licensed person could officiate. Immediately following the vows (which Sam and Natalie had already written), the bride and groom would proceed through the gauntlet of their well-wishers directly into the river. They would swim in their wedding clothes, holding hands, some distance into the Mississippi, to symbolize the terminal depth of their union.

I realized only as it was ending how easily we’d slipped into a routine. Every day, Fenn borrowed a different pair of my shoes, “to walk in your way.” Natalie disapproved of her mother’s wearing the shoes of a divorcée. “But she is a child, very narrow,” Fenn told me, stepping into a pair of tall leather boots. Every morning, before attempting the crossword puzzle, Mondal-Wa went outside to greet the day, then jumped one hundred times on the trampoline in the yard, his face ablaze with pleasure, his perfect teeth gleaming.

The joy in Mondal-Wa’s face as he jumped on the trampoline where Sam had spent so many hours of his youth—how can I speak of it? On this morning after the
gamm
ceremony, I ran down and joined him. I climbed up over the metal rim and studied his rhythms until I’d calibrated the perfect counterpoint, so that Mondal-Wa’s landings on the trampoline lifted me higher, causing me to displace greater energy on landing and raise him higher still. We jounced dangerously, maniacally, until I lost my balance, and Mondal-Wa’s hand reached out and pulled me back into the black circumference. I saw in his face real panic, real family feeling. After we settled, as if by instinct, I put his thumb—manicured, smooth—into my mouth. It seemed in the moment the most natural gesture in the world.

SAM AND NATALIE STOOD
in the kitchen doorway together and announced that the wedding was off, due to an unbreachable rift between them. There was clearly no more to be said on the subject; Fenn and Natalie had both stopped speaking to me. I drove the family to the airport, leaving Sam in his room to process his grief. Mondal-Wa sat in the passenger seat beside me, shuffling through CDs and asking difficult, probing questions about the music of Amy Winehouse, until Fenn said, “Shh!” whereupon Mondal-Wa closed his beautiful eyes against me. Natalie and Fenn sat in back, Natalie’s thumb firmly placed inside her mother’s cheek. The curtain of formality hung between us, as if Fenn,
Mondal-Wa, Natalie, Sam and I had never shared those delightful intimacies made possible by the demands of family and strong tradition. I dropped them at the airport curb, with their Adrienne Vittadini luggage and couldn’t even say
thank you
.

Sam sulked in his room for the rest of July, from which gloomy precinct he applied—successfully, it turned out—for a cultural fellowship to Gurinda.

Thanks to the editors of
AGNI, Gargoyle
, Fifty-Two Stories and
The Idaho Review
, where some of these stories first appeared. Thanks too to Anita Amirrezvani, Catherine Armsden, Randall Babtkis, Callie Babtkis, Eli Brown, Dorothy Cooke, Laurie Fox, Charlotte Gordon, Tess Holthe, Herb Kohl, Edie Meidav, Jordan Pavlin, Heidi Pitlor, Sarah Stone and Kate Walbert, for their insights and encouragement.

Carolyn Cooke’s
Daughters of the Revolution
was listed among the best novels of 2011 by the
San Francisco Chronicle
and
The New Yorker
. Her short fiction, collected in
The Bostons
, won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and has appeared in
AGNI, The Paris Review
and two volumes each of
The Best American Short Stories
and
The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories
. She teaches in the MFA writing program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.

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