Suicide's Girlfriend (3 page)

I unbuttoned Krystal's little suit. She wiggled away from me, laughing. She had bruises from times when I didn't get between her and Dad and Anndean fast enough, and a burn scar on her thigh that nobody ever explained to my satisfaction, but she was, like Tommy, like all babies, perfect, perfection.

Maybe Anndean and Dad never felt sad about another person's pain in their life. Maybe they never felt bad enough themselves. Maybe they'd suffered too much and that was why they were the way they were, and God could look at the big picture and say, “A life's a short time, they'll rest with me in eternity.” I didn't care. I didn't make them. I didn't have to ask their forgiveness for what I was about to do.

After I got Krystal suited up again and into her jacket, I checked the address for Mr. Rappenhoe's motel. It turned out it sat on the same stretch as the diner. Since I'd already stole the peanut butter and crackers, for which I guessed I'd be forgiven, I took the change on the windowsill, too. Three quarters and one dime. Enough for a cup of coffee at the truck stop, afterward.

Afterward.

At the thought—even though I held that wiggling little bundle of girl—my arms felt empty and strange, like when you stand in a doorway and press your hands against the frame, and then you step away, and up go your hands without your even willing.

In order to get myself through the Zenors' back door, I had to put the other children out of my head, and erase every thought of myself, too. Once I did that—even though it was bitter cold outside—I realized it was also clear and bright with fuzzy strands of stars high above.

The Amish houses I'd seen in the books at school were all big and white with clean yards. I imagined Chuck Rappenhoe's place like that.
I imagined myself stepping from such a house. Yes. I'm big and I'm solid and I pull on a cardigan as my husband, Chuck, pulls in the drive.

“Chuck,” I call out, “welcome home!” Like my husband, I'm scarcely aware I radiate goodness, I'm just good, always work to be good, assume that's how it goes.

Chuck gets out of the car, grinning his old jack-o'-lantern grin. “Come here,” he says. Excited, but almost whispering, like he doesn't want to wake somebody, “Come here!” So I laugh and come to the car, where he's pointing in the window at something I can't yet see, and he says, “Come see my little passenger!”

Then a big red car turns down the Zenors' street and in its bright headlights I become Marie again. Marie sticks out her thumb. The red car stops. The driver rolls down his window. “Hi, there,” he says. He must not have a ceiling light but he strikes a match so I can see he's just a regular guy: ear muffs, freckles, an empty infant seat perched on his red vinyl upholstery, and somehow all of these things become the background for the burning message I now receive and the message is that by leaving behind my family, I do precisely what Jesus demanded of all true believers.

The man in the red car ducks his head down and forward, and he looks out at me and Krystal and he smiles like he knows something special is happening in our lives while he's just on his way to the store for diapers or beer or maybe a new clock radio. Do you see him? His earmuffs are rabbit fur. Do you see the way the red furnace of his car goes black and gray when his match dies? Answer yes or no, it hardly matters. What matters is the way I reply to his question, which is, “So, you need a ride?”

A trumpet blast. That's my reply. That's what matters, me as both trumpet and musician, servant and master, and the way my words—“I do”—just sail through the night, a bridal vow to the world.

L
EFT HAND HOLDING
open the pages of the strong, green journal lying on his desk, Oyekan wrote: “apple of my eye.”

Mrs. Scotty Hillis had given Oyekan the journal not long after his arrival in the U.S. A sweet lady. Right to this very room she brought the green journal and three baked yams in a yellow dish. “I hope you'll be happy here,” she had said.

Apple of my eye.

The blond-haired girl who sat next to Oyekan in Statistical Methods once told him he was “the apple of the teacher's eye.” Oyekan did not know the expression, but felt it made easy sense, quite unlike Mr. Scotty Hillis's “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride,” or, yesterday, the remark of Oyekan's friend Joe, at the barbershop: “Oyekan's got the Hillises eating out of his hand.”
Eating out of his hand
. When Joe said this, the barber had made a smile, but still the words had not sounded nice.

Oyekan reached across his open journal to the chart hanging on the wall above his desk. “Border Changes in Nigeria.” He slid a finger between the chart's colored transparencies. The top transparency—yellow—made his finger appear varnished; the second and third, dark as the back of a turtle.

Truly, Oyekan thought, his friend Joe was not himself lately. Truly, Joe was a good man. One day a month Joe did not eat so that money saved might be sent to poor peoples of the world. Soon he would go to Micronesia with the U.S. Peace Corps. Already, he volunteered at the medical center each Wednesday evening. And, too, Joe and his sweetheart, Peggy Dixon, had kindly taken Oyekan to lectures, films, parties, museums. This was America, all right! Peggy Dixon, herself a black girl, living in the U.S. just as comfy as a white boy like Joe! And no one even staring when they held hands.

“Peggy is the apple of my eye,” wrote Oyekan. Then turned from his terrible, iridescent sentence—from where had it come?—and using his burnt sienna marker added quotation marks and, beneath the sentiment, the words “says Joe Hart.”

Better. Yes. Soon Joe and Peggy would come to take Oyekan to the Internationals' Barbecue. Joe had hair of the marker's color, the color of the slim copper pipes running along the ceiling of Oyekan's basement bedroom in the fine, brick home of Mr. and Mrs. Scotty Hillis. Over Oyekan's head went the pipes, then straight into tidy holes in the paneled east wall, and beyond, to the shadowy, sweet bathroom where, since April, small mushrooms occasionally erupted at the toilet's base.

Our son this, our son that
, Mr. and Mrs. Scotty Hillis had said the day Oyekan toured the big house and the son's bedroom that Oyekan was to use during his stay in the U.S. There were photographs of the son in the adjoining recreation room: golden Lee Hillis throws himself into a swimming pool whose surface appears dangerously white, a bath of mercury; handsome Lee on a motorcycle, still just long enough for the photographer to get the shot. During that little tour, Oyekan was still reeling from the long flight from Lagos, the fact of Minnesota. At least a week had passed before he understood the son to be not away, but dead, killed while engaged in an act which Mr. Scotty—face blotched red and white with grief—accorded the ominous, giddy name of “hang gliding.”

A world away all of that seemed now, days when Oyekan did not yet know Mr. and Mrs. Scotty, or Joe and Peggy.

Oyekan laid down the burnt sienna marker, peered through his
open door into the recreation room's dark. Only the blond shafts of the pool cues showed distinctly, but Oyekan knew the location of everything: the mini-tramp; the TV; the low table called, mysteriously, “the coffee table”; the photos. On the north wall was the photo that always struck Oyekan as most extraordinary, for it contained not only Lee Hillis but Oyekan's friend Joe, and Peggy Dixon, also. This made sense, of course. It was the Hillises who first introduced Oyekan to the couple. Many times he was told that Joe Hart had been best friend to Lee. Still. Visible proof. The dead son, Joe, Peggy. Whenever one wanted to examine:

All wore swimming suits and Lee Hillis appeared to laugh, perhaps at sunburned Joe, who, it seemed, had just kissed Peggy Dixon. Joe and beautiful Peggy smiled at each other with secret, impenetrable happiness. A smear of the white ointment on Joe's nose streaked Peggy's cheek—which made the picture not quite so nice, as it gave Peggy the look of a lost tribeswoman, and caused a heaviness in Oyekan's heart—

But stop! Soon his friends would arrive. He would tell them his good news.

At first, Oyekan had misunderstood Mrs. Scotty's tears at breakfast. Both he and Scotty Hillis had handed her their napkins, and, in her considerate way, Mrs. Scotty dabbed at her sweet, moon-round face with each in turn. Oyekan supposed that she cried at memory of the dead Lee. The old wife of Oyekan's father still cried at memory of one baby who died of measles some eighteen years before and, unlike Mrs. Scotty, the old wife had six children who lived.

Mrs. Scotty was too old for more children. Her hair was white as rice. Her hands lay motionless on the shiny tabletop, as if choked by their own thick, violet veins.

Oyekan looked across the breakfast table to Mr. Scotty. Was he glum, also? Mr. Scotty favored the word “pep.” “I think a brisk walk would pep us up,” he often said after dinner. Or, “Let's all go to the club for a swim! That'll get the sleep out of our eyes!” But this morning Mr. Scotty had sat quiet while Mrs. Scotty wept. Mr. Scotty chewed
his bite of the English muffin. He wiped the crumbs off the breakfast nook table into one palm with the meaty side of the other.

Oyekan rose from his chair in the big blue and white kitchen. “What is it, please?” he pleaded. “May I help, then?”

“Oh, these are happy tears, sweetie,” Mrs. Scotty said, “aren't they, Scotty?”

Mr. Scotty made the noises of a man digging heavy soil. “We'd like you to stay on with us, Oy,” he said finally. “Like family. We thought Lee . . . the plant's growing every year.”

The plant meant Hillis Carton, an impressively large and dusty concern that made wastepaper into boxes of cardboard.

Mr. Scotty continued: “You're a bright fellow, Oy. We know you've got opportunities back home, but we're awful fond of you, and there's a place in management for you right now, and more, you can bet on that.”

Mrs. Scotty removed from her hair the single metal clip she inserted each night before bed. Absentmindedly, she worked its hinge: opened, closed, a hungry, long-beaked bird. “I can't imagine what it would be like around here without you now, Oy,” she said.

“No.” Mr. Scotty lifted his hands into the air. “No pressure, Edie. You don't have to answer right off, Oyekan. You sleep on it, see?”

As if he should need to “sleep on it”! Tears started to fill Oyekan's eyes. Did Mr. Scotty see this? Had he, too, felt as if he would begin to weep, or had shame at Oyekan's tears caused Mr. Scotty to carry his breakfast dishes over to the sink just then? His back to Oyekan and Mrs. Scotty, Mr. Scotty had said, “I know Peg and Joe would be happy if you stayed, Oy. I'd be willing to bet on that.”

Yes! In a fit of high spirits, Oyekan now performed a series of pull-ups off the top of his bedroom door frame, dropped to the floor for sit-ups. Twenty-five, fifty, seventy-five.

“Hey, Oy, do twenty-five for me.” So his friend Joe would tease if he were here. And then return to the reading of books of social injustices.
And Peggy Dixon? Smiling, she would sit on the handsome red and gold bedspread, once Lee Hillis's, now Oyekan's.

One hundred! Happy in his brief exhaustion, Oyekan lay back on the carpet, fingered the bright loops of orange and brown and red. Everything about Minneapolis—its astonishing latitude and longitude, Mr. and Mrs. Scotty's generosity, the garage doors that went up and down at the touch of a button, clear lakes where handsome citizens canoed past homes gray and solid as fairy-tale castles—everything here affected him like the whiffs of Parsons' ammonia received when cleaning his bathroom: fascinating, purifying, liable to bring tears to his eyes. Bundles of energy thrilled the air! He stretched out a hand, laughing. He could grab a fistful of that energy, compress it—like the Minnesota snow, weightless flakes that, shaped into balls, became hard, might crack the windshield of an automobile.

A knot of poem forming in his belly pushed him upright:

He would give this poem to Joe. To give to Peggy. But that made no sense! The excitement of the day had made him foolish; Joe's hair was neither dark nor kinked—

Gingerly, Oyekan lifted his fingertips to his new haircut. A terrible mistake. The day before he had accompanied Joe to the barbershop, where Joe—who always wore his hair in a battered left-hand parting—told the barber he wanted something “different.” And when the man finished? Rusty curls rose out of the top of Joe's narrow, shaved head like froth on a glass of beer, so painfully awful that, as a comrade, Oyekan had felt the only thing he could do was to climb up in the chair and say, “Me, also.”

He rose from the bedroom's bright carpet. Shyly, as if going to meet a stranger, he examined his reflection in the mirror that hung over the little bathroom sink.

How did he appear? When the barber had stopped his clipping, whisked away the silky apron, Oyekan had made a little joke: “And now I believe I am Frankenstein's monster!”

But the barber said, “Hey, Joseph, look at your handsome buddy, here. He looks like that Carl Lewis guy, doesn't he?”

Oyekan did not know any Carl Lewis.

“He was a celebrity,” Joe had said. “Come on, I'll buy you a beer and you can sign my napkin.”

Oyekan squinted at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. At home, they did not have a mirror, but a neighbor let them look in hers before town meetings and such. Americans were forever telling each other they resembled celebrities. Since arrival in the U.S., Oyekan had been told, also, he resembled the actor Harry Belafonte and a boxing star. At home, he resembled only his mother.

Suppose Peggy Dixon thought him a fool, an imitator of Joe's drastic gesture. Suppose, also, that on the way to the Internationals' Barbecue, in the confines of Joe's Datsun F10, he smelled of Mrs. Scotty's sauerkraut dish of last night.

Twice he brushed his teeth. The guide prepared by the Rotary Club stated that sometimes foreign students were “unfamiliar with accepted practices of hygiene.” Oyekan and the other Internationals laughed about this at orientation, but it was not so funny the time a lady at the student union cafeteria backed away from Khabir with a show of disgust. “My friend does not want to be in your nose!” Oyekan told her. Scandalous! But she had not understood. Khabir had not understood. Oyekan had forgotten to use his English.

“Oy?”

Mrs. Scotty stood in the doorway, so cheerful in her bright skirt with black dogs following one another about the hem.

“I believe you are already to the barbecue, Mrs. Scotty?”

“On our way, sweetie. I just wanted to tell you”—she shifted a green lunch bucket decorated with flowers and birds and such from one hand to the other—“if you
do
decide to stay, Oy, I could write your mother for you. If you like . . .”

Oyekan's face grew hot. People would gather in the sunshine outside his mother's little house, chewing on cane, trying to hear the conversation inside, between his mother and brother. Biki, too, and at her side the old gray and yellow dog that followed her always, to the fields and the pump and the market. Biki might understand; before his departure she teased that he would be like Daniel Ojay, who went to USC to study chemical engineering and never returned, broke his betrothal. Oyekan's mother, however, would not understand. His mother would pull on the clothes and hands of Oyekan's brother. She would plead: “How can this be? Is he in trouble there? Is he in jail? Is he sick?”

“I thank you, Mrs. Scotty,” said Oyekan. “But I would have to write—”

“Of course. Of course, you would, dear.” She lowered her head after that, as if afraid; the exact gesture of his mother when she learned of the scholarship to the U.S.

“Mrs. Scotty . . .” Oyekan began, but, outside, Mr. Scotty began to honk the horn of his auto impatiently, and Mrs. Scotty hurried toward the door.

“I know you'll make the right decision,” she said. “I just know it.”