Temple of My Familiar (41 page)

“I didn’t feel particularly betrayed as an individual by your affairs with other women; or with Carlotta in particular. You and I are constructing our own lives; other people are bound to be important in them. I do not believe in marriage... . However, I did feel betrayed, as a woman.”

“Betrayed as a woman? But I told you,” said Suwelo, “Carlotta meant very little to me. She ...”

“I know,” said Fanny. “What you said was, she meant nothing
whatever
to you; and, furthermore, she had no substance. It was when you said that, that I hated you. I hated you as a man.”

“But why?” cried Suwelo. “I was trying not to hurt you. Trying to make you see that no woman mattered to me more than you.” He paused, and continued with some bitterness, “I suppose I forgot I was talking to a womanist.”

“No,” said Fanny, “you forgot you were talking to Carlotta’s masseuse.”

“What?” he asked.

“I tried to uncramp her legs, untangle her knee joints, flatten out the knots in her back, unclench her jaw, straighten out the curve in her neck, restore free movement to her toes. Clear up a migraine that lasted for a year. She was small, but as dense and as heavy as lead. I knew the body of the woman you said had no substance. Carlotta’s very substance was pain. And that you did not know this, or, if you knew it, did not care, that is what made me despise you.

“I didn’t know what had happened in her life. I sometimes wondered whether you knew anything about her life at all. But each time I worked on her I was amazed to feel the pain, like waves of ice meeting my hands, the pain of a body recently and repeatedly struck. A body cringing.”

Fanny had started to weep, and she swiped at her nose angrily with her sleeve. Suwelo knew how she hated to cry when she was angry.

“Men must have mercy on women, Suwelo,” she said coldly. “They must feel women’s bodies as a masseuse feels them; not just caress them superficially and use them as if they’re calendar pinups, centerfolds, or paper dolls. What woman could trust a man who came back from another woman’s arms with a story such as yours? I simply couldn’t.”

“I hated you for leaving me,” said Suwelo, handing her his handkerchief. “Why didn’t you explain?”

“I was sick of explaining everything,” said Fanny, with great weariness. “In my women’s studies class and in the administration office at the college I had to explain about blacks; to you and other men I had to explain about women. None of you seemed capable of using your own eyes and feelings to try to comprehend things and people for yourselves. Anyway, you wouldn’t have understood.”

“Right,” said Suwelo, “all men are imbeciles. Of course. How do you
know
I wouldn’t have understood? Are women the only half of the species that has a brain?”

“I’d tried so often before,” she said, “when we still lived together. I tried with books,” she said. “With records. You wouldn’t read, you wouldn’t listen. You seemed traumatized by the new. It seemed pointless.”

“
Pointless
,” he cried, and he suddenly felt as if all of himself was awake; and that his mind was not in the fog it was usually in when he argued with Fanny, “after all we’ve been through? Hell, we survived kidnapping together, we survived the middle passage, we survived the slave trade. For all you know,” he tossed at her, “I was once your mother.”

“Once my
what
?” said Fanny, shocked. “Negro, I
beg
your pardon.”

“Or at least mother’s milk for you. Shit,” he said, thinking of Miss Lissie and Mr. Hal and all he’d learned from them that he couldn’t wait for Fanny to share, “we survived living in New York. Fight with me,” he said. “Scream. You have nice big teeth;
bite me
.” Fanny’s lovely mouth was shaping the words, in horror,
“Bite me?”
“But don’t just go off inside yourself and assume I’m too dense to follow. Who do you think I am anyway?” How he loved feeling indignant! And as if he had a right, which up to now it had seemed to him only women had, to fight back. To make his self-expression even more satisfying, he got to his feet with a bounce and paced about the small room. Something hot and passionate was opening in him, and it wasn’t in his trousers; it was ... in his chest. “I’m flesh, I’m blood,” he said with decision. And for the first time truly felt he
was
flesh and blood.
Human,
the same as women. “No, I’m not some perfect old outlaw that lived a hundred years ago that you can love without being required sometimes to contradict yourself. But I’m up for the damn struggle any damn day of the week that you are.”

Fanny was looking at him as if he’d lost his mind. “Why are you so angry?” she asked.

“I’m not angry,” said Suwelo. “I’m mad. I’m mad about the waste that happens when people who love each other can’t even bring themselves to talk.

“Talking,” he said, reminding Fanny very much of Ola, “is the very
afro
-disiac of love.”

She laughed and put her hand on his arm. Usually when Suwelo became angry he stuttered and muttered and made not a grain of sense. If an argument started when they were in the car and he was driving, they were likely to run off the road.

“And am I to assume by this ... um ...
declaration
,” said Fanny, “that what we have here is an Afro who would like to come home to roost?”

“Yes,” he said, joining her laughter. “Here’s my hand in strugglehood. Let’s shake on it.”

“I
WAS AT AN
exhibit of Frida Kahlo’s paintings at the Mexican Museum,” said Fanny. “Like so many others, I’m in love with Frida. The museum that day was thronged with women, and they each had a lot to say about every one of the paintings, but they were even more voluble in front of the photographs of Frida and Diego that were hung with the paintings. After viewing the exhibit for the first time, I sat on a bench in the middle of the floor, simply allowing the exquisiteness of Frida’s paintings to wash over me.

“‘Oh,’ ‘Ugh,’ ‘Blech’ came the sounds from the group clustered around the picture of Frida and Diego taken on their wedding day. ‘He is so huge!’ said one. ‘And so gross.’ ‘And she so tiny,’ said another. ‘I hate to think ...’ began still another. ‘Don’t!’ said her partner. ‘So much pain!’ moaned a short, dark-haired woman, who reminded me, actually, of you, Robin.”

“I’m flattered you think of me after you leave here,” said Robin.

“Oh,” said Fanny, “I think of you a lot.”

“I saw the exhibit,” said Robin. “I, too, am a Kahlo fanatic. I stood muttering and musing in front of that photograph myself. Did you know what her father called the couple? ‘The elephant and the dove.’”

“How could her parents let her marry him?” said Fanny. “They knew the condition of her fractured pelvis. But no one, I suppose, not even her parents, could withstand Frida’s determination to have whatever she wanted, and she wanted Diego. And just why did she want Diego? I think it is because she herself wanted to paint.”

“Want to paint? Marry a painter,” said Robin. “Yes, I think there’s something in that. And his grossness wasn’t all she saw in him, even when he wasn’t painting. She was charmed by his childlike expressiveness. He was direct in his expressions, whether in a confrontation with the Mexican Communist Party, with the Rockefellers, or with his innumerable lovers. Of course, like many husbands, he wasn’t capable of being direct with his wife. Women have a hard time understanding this. It hurts them deeply. Frida never recovered from having been hurt. At the same time, she thought her disability may have been the reason Diego felt a sexual necessity to stray.”

“Well, anyway,” said Fanny, “there I sat in the museum, letting Frida’s genius wash over me. It was as if the sun were streaming in on me through so many stained-glass windows—what little I could see of it as the throngs of women, and a few men, slowly revolved around the walls. I heard a voice speaking, from in front of one of the paintings. The one in which Frida has her own face but the body of a deer, and her deer’s body is shot full of arrows. I drifted over, drawn again by the painting, the horror in Frida’s eyes, but also drawn by the voice. It was coming from a white woman with a Southern accent. It was a soft, good-humored voice. Incessant. She was with her mother, who’d obviously come from someplace other than San Francisco. She was dressed in one of those pastel pink polyester pantsuits and wore white sandals with stockings and carried an enormous white plastic handbag. She had graying hair, wore glasses, and was squinting at segments of the painting as if she had difficulty taking in the whole.

“‘Now I don’t know what to tell you about this one,’ said the daughter.

“‘Why, you don’t have to tell me anything, Brenda,’ the mother said. ‘Look at those tears on her face. I’ve felt like that.’

“So I went right home,” said Fanny, “and I called my mother and asked her to find out from Tanya’s mother where Tanya lived. She called me back next day. She lived in Oakland.”

“Really?” said Robin.

“Yes. When I called her up I said, ‘Is this
Tonya
Rucker, from Hartwell?’ And she said, ‘Well, this is
Tan
ya.’ A total reverse.

“I was very nervous, going to her house. The woman she lives with, a Japanese-American who introduced herself as Marie, let me in. I sat on the sofa, in front of which was a table full of framed photographs. Mostly of two brownskin babies, a boy and a girl, followed from infancy through their teen years, with a smiling college-graduation picture of the two of them, grown.

“To make a long story short, Tanya looked exactly like her mother. The little child who’d been my playmate was gone. Her eyes were even different. They had become dark gray, not blue, as I remembered. Her hair was brown, and streaked with gray. She was plump and motherly, offering me tea or ‘something to knosh on’ every few minutes.

“I picked up a photograph and peered at it.

“‘Their father was black,’ she said, as if she’d said it many times. ‘They’re both in grad school now. I don’t know where Joe is. I think he’s probably still in Atlanta.’

“I wasn’t too interested in the whereabouts of Joe.

“‘I always wondered what became of you,’ said Tanya. ‘How you were. My mother used to ask your mother, and sometimes my mother would tell me what yours said. I knew you’d gone on to college and then become a teacher. I work in a company that makes computers,’ she said. ‘I get to test them at the final stage, before the customer gets them. It’s hell on my eyes, but the company’s gotten so many complaints from workers like me I hope they’ll soon do something about it; make screens or something to put in front of the computers, or design special eyewear.’

“I was so sick of my own work I couldn’t bring myself to speak of it. I told her bluntly that I was in therapy, trying to get to the roots of my anger against white people. I didn’t tell her it was particularly against whites who were blond. I guess I was afraid she’d say, like so many people do: Well, everybody hates Nazis. That’s what they think I mean. They think of Hitler’s Aryan race as played by bleached-blond actors on TV. That image is, I know, only a small part of it.

“‘You’ve got every right to be angry at white people,’ she said. ‘I’m angry at them myself. I never knew just how angry until I saw what they did to my children. Not to mention what they’d already done to Joe.’

“‘Joe,’ I said. ‘Your parents must have had a fit.’

“‘A conniption fit,’ she said. ‘But it was too late for them to do anything about it by the time they found out. After about five years, after I’d married Joe and moved to California and had the kids and seemed to be doing okay, my daddy just up and died, he was so frustrated. After he died, Momma came around. She loved the kids and was eventually able to be cordial to Joe. Then Joe left, and I got a divorce. And then I had to tell her I was queer.’

“Tanya paused. ‘She’s still out on that one.’

“‘But how did all this happen?’ I asked. ‘You were programed to be Miss Lily White.’

“‘I know it,’ said Tanya. ‘But you know what happened. The Civil Rights Movement happened. Selma happened. The University of Georgia happened. Dr. King happened. It just hit me one night, watching television coverage of one of the Civil Rights marches, that the order of the world as I’d always known it, and imagined it would be forevermore, was
wrong
. I felt it was wrong down to its tiniest, white man-made construction. Anybody who couldn’t honor those black people I saw on television and those pitifully few white people with them had to be fucked up.

“‘But,’ said Tanya, ‘I didn’t dare speak up about it. Like so many young Southerners at the time, I did nothing. And then Joe came along—I met him on a trip I made out here with my mother’s church group. We met at Fisherman’s Wharf!’ She laughed. ‘And I was determined to marry him. He didn’t have a chance. Our children would be my protest. Of course, he was bound to find out about this. Joe was, I mean. That marrying him was a kind of political shortcut I’d chosen to take, because as a Southerner I didn’t know how to get connected up for any of the long marches. Joe’s realization of my motive cast a pall over our marriage, and though I did love Joe as an individual, I wasn’t crazy about his culture, which wasn’t black Southern culture at all, but black urban street culture, for the most part, though Joe’s parents were staunch members of the urban, really
suburban
, black middle class. They lived in the El Cerrito hills, for God’s sake! The most pretentious people I ever saw. They liked Nixon. They hated hippies. They voted for Gerald Ford.

“‘I thought all black people lived more or less like the people did in your house.’ Tanya laughed. ‘Where there was always something lively going on. Music or parties or sun worship or something. Lots of sweet-natured people coming by from time to time. Even real interesting crazy people, so often with amazing creative skills. The best food in the world. And folks at your house were always kissing.’

“‘You used to come to our house?’ I asked.

“‘Sure I did,’ she said. ‘Don’t you remember? I’d sneak off from home to visit your house. My folks, especially my grandmother, would have to come and drag me back. I used to hide under Miss Shug’s bed! How can you not remember that?