A Simple Distance (6 page)

Only recently had Granny conceded to allow piped-in water, the rainwater basin on the roof always providing enough for her. Out front she just sat and stared, ignoring everyone until she needed some tea, or toast, or to explain to someone exactly how what they were doing was completely wrong, staring all the while off Tours’ cliff, at its cove and the gentle Caribbean. At night, the moon.

As my mom and Auntie Clara drove me home from the airport, away from the throng of dignitaries in for the Hill funeral, Granny was waiting for us, expecting us to stay at least a night or two before even stopping by Godwyn to drop off our bags or for my mom to check on her dogs and their new puppies.

The jeep took us right up to Granny’s front porch, where she was sitting in her lawn chair; Uncle George, also sitting, in a similar chair at his mother’s side, propped up by pillows and blankets, wearing a powder-blue polo shirt. He smiled at me, and half his face remained stationary from the mass effect earlier that week, after which he didn’t get medical treatment for two days; his doctor, we realized, was just waiting for him to die. Uncle George did not comply. Granny hired a new physician. Later, as the paralysis lessened a bit, Uncle George entertained us with jokes about the fired doctor, his favorite, seemingly:
Dr. Munce is a dunce.

Although he was sitting up when I arrived, he had not gotten there by himself and was not able to stay there long. Mostly, he had to lie down, being turned from side to side every few hours to keep the blood flowing. Mostly, he snored, whether awake or asleep, because his larynx was paralyzed and he couldn’t clear the mucus properly from the back of his throat.

CHAPTER 8

On Piedmont Avenue, I sat and stared out the window of the coffee shop at the yuppie women with babies, women whose husbands were at work. Every now and then, a stay-at-home dad.

I started thinking thoughts I’m ashamed to own, like how much easier my life would be if I were straight. Sitting there in the coffee shop, cold hands curled around my latte as I hid from my mother, it was clear I wasn’t. It had been nearly a year since I’d last seen Susan. Yet my body remembered immediately. My tongue against hers as we kissed and I protested the rain, she assuring me it wasn’t raining, it was
just the sun washing himself
. My fingers warming to the touch of the mug.

My fingers remembered. They remembered their trembling, shaky glide up and down the slick opening between her legs; the sides of her soft like the lips covering her mouth. My fingers remembered her tongue; they remembered its trembling, shaky glide up and down the inside of my palm. They remembered pushing inside her; remembered her warm and closing in, closing out the footsteps coming up from behind, until it was too late, the voices, the din of my family. They remembered, my fingers, the rhythms to which she responded, the rhythms that matched her breaths the closer she got, the louder she got, giving us away; my fingers remembered their rhythm inside her, they remembered her breath matching their pulse.

It was Susan’s sounds that masked their footsteps, at first her breath coming quicker and quicker, her short cries, and finally, her low moan.

We had gone as far away from the house, as far into the gardens at Godwyn, as possible. Not out in the open, under the neon of the Flamboyant tree. Bright orange. We’d sought somewhere muted. Through the bush to the far end of the estate. Next to the cliff, its rocks and steep drop. Underneath a baobab. Above the constant shifting of the gray-black waves just before the storm coming in, we took turns leading each other there.

It was Uncle Martin who found us, followed us is more like it. He and Mr. Williams. They’d waited. Watched. Susan’s shaky touch, fingers first, circling curls at the back of my neck; her increasingly confident bottom lip; teeth—pulling skin. And when they’d had their fill, they started up with their indignant shouts.
Jesus Christ, girls! This is no way for you two to get along. Get up out of the dirt. Get up this instant!

Mr. Williams’s eyes just about to pop out of their sockets. Their jaws on the ground. Both men bulging, big as bananas, in their pants.

* * *

Susan was a Hill. Unless one of those letters that had finally stopped coming to me in Oakland carried an unwritten announcement and her family had managed to marry her off—or some other such nonsense. She’d been a resident physician on one of the Virgin Islands, come home for the funeral of her uncle. Baobique is such a small place, everyone is someone. My first time back in ten years, since I was scared away after college by Uncle George and his strong feelings against gay Americans. She’d been on my plane from San Juan. I remembered her green eyes against her coffee-brown skin and, as it turned out, she, mine.

Susan stopped by to check in on Uncle George after hearing about his mass effect when everyone was still calling it a stroke. She was the one to correct us, explained to my family that his paralysis was due to the swelling of the tumor pressing against parts of his brain, inhibiting voluntary movement.

She stopped by Tours my second morning, I was helping in the kitchen.

The novelty of my arrival had worn off and I had become simply one of the team of women that worked to keep Uncle George fed, dry, and away from any possibility of slipping into a depression.

Nights were heavy work, literally, when the need for sandwiches and juice temporarily gave way to carrying Uncle George to the toilet two or three times, in the dark. The first night of the paralysis, before Uncle Charles arrived, Uncle Martin got stuck in Bato, leaving only my mom, Auntie Clara, and Granny at the house; Granny in her thin cotton nightshirt worn nearly through from the years, barking directions from her bed across the dining room. Mom and Auntie Clara able to move their brother—his entire left side dead weight—to the bathroom and onto the commode, but unable, for hours after, to move him back. Uncle George, all the while, sitting soiled and naked, pulling into sadness. It took the arrival of Uncle Charles and me, both flying in from North America, to get him into a clean shirt and out next to Granny on the porch, joking about his negligent physician, saying things like,
Dr. Munce is a dunce,
through heavy, heavy lips.

Not one to support the usual division of labor by gender at Tours, but not being strong enough to help lift my increasingly small uncle even to arrange his pillows, during the day I did whatever I could for the men who’d had night duty.

I am normally considered a relatively capable person, not one to shy away from things that require a little grit. But my relatives are not privy to my capable side and, admittedly, I do not shine in a kitchen.

I was raised in suburban Illinois and for the last fifteen years or so have lived in Northern California, the populated parts, mostly urban. I have always lived in places where, if I wanted fresh juice, I could pick it up at the corner store. Likewise, my fish and chicken always came to me pre-packaged, scaled, plucked, and unbloody. Additionally, I rarely have to cook for ten or twelve people at a time.

The first obstacle I encountered that morning, during my attempt at preparing a lunch of ham sandwiches for the ten of us, was a dull carving knife, a knife I had to share with Valerie, my grandmother’s maid, as she chopped the chicken for dinner. The bread, thank God, was pre-sliced. There was mayonnaise and mustard, Dijon, in the fridge. The ham itself, my second obstacle, a giant thigh of pig, and I was a vegetarian. The fridge at Tours was probably older than I was and had decided to be weak along with Uncle George. Its main section wasn’t cold enough to keep the meat from going bad overnight, so the ham had been put in the freezer. It was frozen. Solid. There was nothing else for lunch. My healthy uncles had been up all night carrying their brother’s body to and from the toilet, cleaning his soiled skin and night clothes as they laughed with him about almost anything they could think of, so he wouldn’t feel sad, or humiliated. And I, in the kitchen in the middle of the day, couldn’t figure out how to make a ham sandwich. I got them coffee to hold them over, that alone taking me thirty minutes because I had to share the outlet with Valerie.

I’ll just eat bread and mayonnaise if it takes much longer, Jean,
said Uncle Charles, the physician from Canada, who suggested only then that I employ the microwave under the towel in the corner to defrost the meat once the electric socket was free.

I was able, with the dull knife I told Valerie she could not have back until I finished the sandwiches, to hack off chunks of pig thigh and heat out the ice in the microwave. I had no trouble at all with the microwave, thank you very much. Two by two, I got them sandwiches. The men went first because they were up all night. Susan second, because she was a guest. Then Granny. Then my aunts. It took me an hour and a half. But I had succeeded in giving Uncle George something else to laugh about. And I had succeeded in making a friend of Susan.

Later, I sat on Uncle George’s good side. He asked me whether I thought he was ready to walk as yet. I told him, maybe soon, maybe just then it was a little too ambitious.

What evidence do you have for that statement?
asked the barrister.

Well, none. It was a political statement, rather than one based on evidence
. I was just trying to make everyone happy.

And I’d succeeded. Smiling back, he reminded me,
You are talking to someone who has been an excellent politician.
As he sipped the grapefruit juice I squeezed and strained special for him out of his spill-proof children’s cup, Uncle George told me it was the
best juice
he’d ever had, and thanked me. He said I would make someone a wonderful wife some day. I was not to listen to the others.

Susan returned several hours later. We piled into Uncle Martin’s Four-Runner at a quarter past 6:00, just the five of us: Susan, my mom, Uncle Charles, Uncle Martin, and myself. Still time for a quick sea bath before dark, Tours Beach so close, its red clay path just across the street and down a couple hundred feet from Granny’s.

Uncle Martin climbed into the driver’s seat wearing slacks, said he’d swim in his briefs. It would give the women a much-awaited chance to laugh at him, he said. A pleasure far exceeding any embarrassment he could possibly experience.

He was joking. A trial lawyer, Uncle Martin had long been untroubled by personal feelings of embarrassment, his daily subjugation to the wrath and ridicule of judges having dulled the most unnecessary layers of his self-respect, leaving him with only those closest to the nerve.

Martin! Don’t drive through Mama’s garden!
Uncle Martin drove out Granny’s yard, crossing against some imaginary boundary between driveway and garden Granny thought proper, but which was really just a big space, plenty wide enough for a truck to drive through and leave no trace of its passage.

On the street, tall palms blocked our view of the ocean, parting magically at the entrance to the road that led to the family beach. Uncle Martin let out a war cry. Shifted down.

The ruts in the clay road swallowed the tires halfway, rain water splashing out of them as we plunged forward.
You have to keep moving not to get stuck in the holes.

To tarish the road with gravel would have made the beach too accessible to others, who would certainly damage this family tradition, Tours Beach, if invited by the paving. But Uncle Martin had already dug the drainage paths along each side, so when the time came, he could pave the road in a single day by bringing in the tarish at dawn. They would only pave this road when they developed the area for tourists.

Uncle Martin had recently sold a portion of the family’s land—to pay off some of Uncle George’s mounting medical bills—to the Socialist government, just before Archibald Hill, Susan’s uncle, passed away. The government promptly discovered a rich tarish reserve on the property and began a multimillion-dollar excavating operation to benefit the people of Baobique. But no sense in second guessing one’s self. When the time had come to make the decision, Uncle Martin had made it. He had pulled the family out of a hole and was satisfied with that.

Grampy used to say a good sea bath would heal any wound. But Granny was frightened of our going to the beach, because some squatters had threatened to chop us up into tiny bits if we went there after Uncle Martin had the police tear down their thatched leaf shelters. The squatters had tried to reason; they told Uncle Martin, if he made them leave, they’d tell everyone he was not a nice man. My uncle was perplexed, asked them,
Why would I want anyone to think I was a nice man?!

When we reached the water, Uncle Martin and Uncle Charles stripped: Uncle Martin down to his briefs; Uncle Charles, prepared, to his Speedo. We entered with varying degrees of tolerance. Uncle Martin’s briefs turned translucent and we all began to float. On our backs in the warm sea, eyes on the changing shades of blue as the sun receded from the rest of our day, a few half-erased clouds here and there, Uncle Martin explained things to us. He explained that the dark areas in the water were schools of small silverfish, good to eat but hard to catch enough for a meal. When the moon was right, whenever that was, people came down with white sheets and scooped the silverfish up by the sheetfull and they twinkled like stars in the night. He explained why it was necessary to send his brother, Uncle George, to Martinique one last time for an MRI, to check the progression of his tumors. Certain family members could then be shown the true extent of the cancer, begin to let go of their denial. He explained that George’s law practice, the best on the island, was in jeopardy of being out-balanced by the other partner’s family, since Gerald’s son had just joined the firm. He explained it would only take a year or two for me, already an attorney under the U.S. system, to gain my license in the West Indies and promised me, if I worked hard, a respectable living should I ever choose to move to Baobique. I should think about it. Consider it.

Shifting, Uncle Martin explained to us the difficulties he was having with his wife, how his desire to slow down his work pace was incompatible with her desire for more and more money. He explained to us we should
never marry a woman
, grinning widely at his joke, explaining to my shocked mother that
woman
and
man
are the same thing in law.