Temple of My Familiar (2 page)

Within their magic capes that her mother had made they were indeed birds of a feather.

“The food you eat makes a difference,” he advised her. Left to herself, she ate nothing but sweet cakes—chocolate cream puffs or Twinkies—and the inevitable rice and beans. She knew nothing of salads. She thought she hated fruit.

“You are young now,” he said, “and nature is carrying your good looks along. But one day she will grow tired of your atrocious eating habits and she will stop. Then where will you be?”

Carlotta thought about her mother. How old she looked. How tired her skin was; how lusterless her hair. Her back teeth were breaking off at the gum.

Arveyda lay on his side in a bed piled high with silken pillows. The room reeked of incense and there was a faint whiff of Indian food. The room was full of smoky shadows, only one blind adjusted to let in light from the park.

“You are rich,” she said. “You can eat whatever you like.” Then, contradicting herself, she said, “Diet—I don’t think diet has anything to do with looks. It is all in the genes. Some very poor people”—she no longer considered herself poor—“remain very beautiful even into old age.”

“The poor look their best when they are old,” Arveyda muttered, “because they have made it that far. A risk, anyway,” he continued, stroking her face, the wispy hair that plastered itself at the front of her ear. “Oh,” he said, “genes are part of it.” He admired his own slim body in the mirror that ran along the wall beside the bed. He tried to imagine his father’s body, the body he’d never seen. “But good food is most of the rest.”

When she went to visit him, he offered her fresh juices, platters piled high with cherimoya, guava, papaya. He was a glutton for mangoes. Only those, however, from Mexico. He could not enjoy the ones from Haiti. “The misery, you know.”

She grew trimmer still, eating what and how he ate. Nothing, ever, heavy in the morning. Fruit, fruit, even in the middle of the night.

He said eating cream puffs and meat turned people into murderers.

He jogged.

Jogging with him through Golden Gate Park she saw faces like hers that made her wonder if perhaps she had kinspeople, after all, in the Bay Area. She grew to recognize certain other “exotic” ethnic groups. She liked especially, for some reason, the Hmong people, who seemed particularly intense and ancient to her, as they carried their tiny babies on their backs dressed in bright multicolored clothing covered with mirrors, bells, shells, and beads. The fuzzy ball (how was it made?) atop their caps made her long to reach out and touch it. The babies and their mothers, locked in a language more foreign even than Zedé’s, shopped calmly in the local stores. Pointing to this American thing or that. Murmuring in puzzlement. Holding their money trustingly out to the clerks in the stores, who were invariably patient, respectful, curious. It was the obvious culture that had gone into the making of the babies’ clothes. No one in the Americas, except the Indians (called “Indians,” she learned, because an Italian explorer considered them, on first take, to be
in dios
, in God), had lived long enough as a culture to create such a powerful, routine aesthetic. You looked at a Hmong baby and grieved that it should wind up in the Tenderloin on some of the city’s least colorful or cultured streets. Carlotta loved, also, Samoan women. She loved their characteristic heaviness of body and their square jaws. Their seeming good nature and equanimity. Natural queens. And Balinese men; she could always recognize them because of the expression of horror in their faces as they looked about them at the glass and concrete of the city. They were not seduced, not at all.

“Exercise is to the body what thinking is to the mind,” said Arveyda, gasping.

She, who never exercised but was always in motion on errands for her mother, ran easily. Breathing and running and never thinking of them as separate events. She pulled ahead of him effortlessly, her shapely legs flashing. Later they would shower at his house and lie on his bed in the sun.

H
E HAD COME FROM
Terre Haute, Indiana, where his mother was one of three black women who had organized and founded their own church: the Church of Perpetual Involvement. His mother, whose name was Katherine Degos, was one of the most intrusive people he knew. She did not recognize limits, whether of body or mind. She could not stay out of other people’s business; all business was her own. The church was a front for this tendency to interfere, which would otherwise have gotten her into trouble. She was a woman of such high energy she always seemed to him to be whirling, and the first time Arveyda heard the expression “whirling dervish” he thought of it as a description of his mother.

But then, in mid-whirl one day, when he was ten, after having broken up innumerable fights, delivered innumerable babies, baked and given away innumerable cakes and turkey dinners—because “doing” for others was her way of winning a place in their affairs—she simply stopped and sat down and looked out a back window of the house for three years. Her church dissolved. The women whose babies she had delivered forgot what she looked like. The hungry eyed her well-fed body with scorn. She didn’t care. She began to play with her makeup, painting her face, dying her hair, doing her nails as if she were creating a work of art with her body, and with her mind she appeared to roam great empty distances.

She gave up trying to improve the world and, instead, declined to notice it. As a teenager, Arveyda had felt no strong connection to her. He was good in band, terrible in everything else. She did not seem to mind. Everyone on their block praised him for his music. He sang and played guitar and flute. She gave him no praise. She looked through him. One day the picture of his father—kept in a silver frame on the night table by his bed his whole life—disappeared.

“Nothing, No Thing, Can Replace Love.” That is what she’d wanted on her headstone, but one of her sisters, his aunt Frudier, to whom she’d left this directive, thought it too risqué. His mother was instead buried under a pale gray stone that carried only her name, and not even the year she was born. But he thought of it as a kind of key to her he might use later on, when he knew more. Who was she, this woman who was his mother? He didn’t know.

Lying with Carlotta on his spacious bed, the blue satin duvet cover smooth and cool beneath their legs, Arveyda told her odd bits and pieces of his life. Of the father figure he’d somehow found for his adolescent years, while his mother stared vacantly out the window. Simon Isaac. Or Uncle Isaac. Not that he would ever dare call Mr. Isaac “uncle” to his face, only in his heart; he understood he must never call anyone “uncle” except another black person.

Mr. Isaac was a greengrocer in the neighborhood where Arveyda and his mother lived. Tall and big-boned, with brooding brown eyes and a mane of wiry red hair, he sat in the doorway of his shop playing the violin.

All the children of the neighborhood crowded around, the nickels and dimes clutched in their palms for sweets temporarily forgotten. He mesmerized them with his perfectly lovely, improbable music—none of the children had seen a violin before. No one was more enchanted than Arveyda, whose fingers crept, all on their own, to rest on the box of the fiddle. “Fiddle” was the word for violin Arveyda had once heard at home. He inched ever closer, so that he could feel the sweetness of the vibrations down in the center of himself; the near orgasmic opening out in the base of his groin. It seemed natural, when he at last owned both a cheap guitar and a flute, that he would sit on a Coca-Cola crate near Mr. Isaac’s straight chair and play. Natural, also, that Mr. Isaac would encourage his efforts with quick flashes of delight from his suddenly friendly eyes; and that, frequently, as they played together more and more easily, he would seem to forget Arveyda’s presence and only at the end of a tune look across at him—brown, skinny, perched on the Coca-Cola crate—and, with a lopsided smile, ruffle his rough curls.

“And what happened?” asked Carlotta, imagining Isaac the Greengrocer playing his violin and never working.

“He had come from Palestine,” said Arveyda. “Everyone in his village not dead or too sick to move came here, to America. He used to tell me about what it was like on the boat coming over. How packed it was. How afraid everyone was of getting sick. There had been an epidemic, some kind of plague. And the people were all herded together and actually stank, he said, from fear. And when they got to Ellis Island, on the very day they arrived, he discovered a boil in his left ear—a big fat juicy boil, like a baseball sticking out of his ear, was how he described it. Or like a spider’s egg sack, when he was feeling more modest. He was sure he had ‘it.’ And right away the doctors ‘in their white coats’—he always said that—came aboard, and they lanced the boil while looking very nervous about possible contagion. He was not permitted off the ship for two weeks, while ‘those in authority’ discussed whether he should be sent right back to Palestine. After that, they took him to a quarantine barrack, and there, from day to day, he ‘politely rotted,’ as he liked to put it. His ear began to heal but the rest of him began to feel ‘not so terrific.’’

“Ellis Island?” Carlotta queried.

Arveyda explained how it was the same as Angel Island, only on the East Coast.

Angel Island, where mostly Asian immigrants were detained, sometimes for years, before being permitted into the country, was a place that, thanks to the aid of rich American friends, as Zedé once mysteriously mentioned, Carlotta and her mother had avoided.

“It was there, on Ellis Island,” Arveyda continued, “that Uncle Isaac saw his first native-grown colored man. He was pushing a broom. It wasn’t, he said to me once, that he’d never seen brown people; the Arabs in Palestine were brown, but their brownness seemed only skin-deep, whereas this man that he watched pushing the broom, with a little skiphop in his walk as he mumbled lyrics to songs and hummed under his breath, seemed to be colored all the way to, and past, his own bones. It was the first thing he understood about colored people—that it was probably the hopskip way the man pushed the broom, and seemed to be singing in his head, that annoyed white people, not just the color of his skin. In truth, he could not see how anyone could object to that. A more luminous, clean-brown anything was hard to imagine. ‘Even if you only liked calfskin gloves,’ said Uncle Isaac, ‘even if you only admired a nice pair of oxblood-colored loafers! Even if you only loved Hershey bars!’ And he would laugh.

“This man, as it turned out,” said Arveyda, “was a musician, who worked on Ellis Island as a janitor to support himself and his family.

“Soon everyone else in the barrack had been pronounced free of disease and left, and there were just the two of them. They talked, using their hands, eyes, strange sounds, and hops and skips, about music. The colored man’s name was Ulysses, and after Isaac left Ellis Island he never saw or heard of him again. But he always remembered that on his last day in that place, just when he thought he’d go mad from the isolation and boredom, Ulysses brought the news, long before there was any official announcement to him, of his impending release, and brought him also a news magazine full of pictures of the world he was about to enter, in which not a single face that looked like Ulysses’ appeared. Uncle Isaac said he searched each photograph carefully, a cold dread settling in his chest; what sort of world was this, in which his very present friend did not appear? And then, from the pocket of his baggy brown coat, with its frayed holes at the elbows, Ulysses had produced and offered to him a bright red apple. This gift was Ulysses’ handshake and hug. And it left Mr. Isaac hungry. For, unable to embrace a colored person—Ulysses warned him it was practically illegal to do so—what was he to offer? Nothing was yet his.”

Carlotta smoothed the hair that poufed above Arveyda’s ear. She kissed him on the eyes. No barrier like that for her, she thought, happily. Ever. Ever. None. None. It made her feel terribly free, and she laid herself full length against his comforting warmth, the sheen of his skin seeming to add a shimmer to her own. She nestled against all this
goodness
, which felt to her to be the very flesh of the earth. How foolish, how pitiful people were, she thought, not to know enough to try to get next to what could only do them good.

“It was a magic apple,” said Arveyda, smiling into her hair. “This was before the time of poisoned, drug-filled apples. Musicians used to carry only healthful things. Really.” He laughed. “There was even a time when musicians did not smoke reefer. Although probably never a time when they didn’t drink wine.”

Carlotta smiled with him.

“There was even a time”—Arveyda looked down mischievously into her face—“and I know you won’t believe this, when music was played softly, to be heard. Only dead people need loud music, you know. I call loud rock ‘Dracula music’ because you look out, and there are all those dead and deaf and soulless zombies clod-hopping across the floor. Even colored people are zombies these days. It’s enough to shrivel up your short hairs.”

“You were talking about fruit,” said Carlotta, giggling.

“So I was,” said Arveyda. “So, Uncle Isaac bit into the apple and thought about his future. In Palestine he’d peddled orchard fruit and garden vegetables with his father, a hirsute, pious man. He would try the same thing in America. His basket grew into a cart, his cart into a stand, his stand into a store. He became a success. But he was not happy, even after realizing his youthful ambition to study ‘in university’ and to learn to play the violin. He missed the heat and the peaches and the Arabs. For Arabs had lived all around him in Palestine, just as colored people lived all around him in Terre Haute. Many of the dead he’d left behind, his friends, were Arabs.

“When he learned there would be a Jewish state, he accepted it as an excuse to go back. But he was really going back to the sun, the dates, the almonds, the oranges, the grapes, the sound of the Arab language that had filled his head as a boy, though he had spoken it only in the phrases learned on the street. He would go back to help them all build, he said. And he closed up his shop one day and left.”