By the Light of My Father's Smile (9 page)

It was at this point that I could have kissed the dwarf! Instead all I could manage was a gust of wind that blew over the fan. Cards scattered every which way. Susannah exclaimed, What was that!
And Irene shrugged, dragged on her cigarette, and said: The wind. Perhaps the wind is related to you.

I watched my daughter trudge home to her husband's family. Eat a quiet dinner with them. Her thoughtful eyes lingering on the faces of the old man and his wife. Her mother-in-law was not happy that she spent so much time with Irene. Knowing she visited the dwarf almost every day, she still asked not a single question about her. The old man was more curious. He'd heard rumors.

Is it true she keeps a black cat? he asked Susannah, as she toyed with a last sliver of tomato on her plate.

I haven't seen one, actually, she said.

And does she make a brew of bitter herbs that she tries to pass off as medicine?

No, said Susannah, laughing. She makes and serves tea.

And can she send her mind out traveling on the currents of the night vibrations?

No, said Susannah, she has television by satellite. She also has a computer.

My father was wealthy, said Irene the next time they talked. Not as wealthy as Onassis. But wealthy enough to buy this church for me to serve and to live in.

So you knew him, said Susannah.

An island so small, said Irene, her cigarette dangling as she gutted a fish, of course I would know him, eventually. He was a large, mean, glowering man. I can only imagine what he thought when he saw I was a dwarf. As you can see, dwarves are not common in these parts. Nor are they common any longer anywhere.

Oh, said Susannah, do you think that at one time there were more of you?

We were a tribe, of course, said Irene. Like the Pygmies of Africa. Irene stopped scraping the sides of the fish to look dreamily into the distance. Of all the people on earth, I feel most close to Pygmies, and of course to Gypsies.

Why to Gypsies? asked Susannah, beginning to eat a handful of pistachio nuts Irene had handed her.

Their life is so opposite to mine, said Irene. They go everywhere. Anywhere. They are still a tribe. Every attempt to box
them in has failed. I think they must love the earth more than anyone, they are always so willing to see more of it.

Not always willing, said Susannah, chewing. They suffer such terrible persecution for their staunch antibourgeois ways! What they most seem to love is music.

Ah, yes. Music. It is this also that makes me love them. And their worship of the Dark Mother, who is none other than the human symbol for the dark earth.

Or a distant memory of the Pygmy Earth Mother, said Susannah. Do you have Gypsy music, by any chance? she asked.

Irene made a face as if to say: Does a monkey like pistachios?

From underneath the bed Irene dragged an ancient Victrola and a stack of what appeared to be fifty-year-old records. Soon the small room was throbbing with the weeping of Gypsy violins and the deep, soulful laments of Gypsy women and men.

Sighing, Irene said, Why is it that we can love so much that which only makes us cry?

Susannah thought for only a moment, and then, with certainty, she said: Because it is that which calls us home to the heart.

Yes, said Irene, wiping the corner of her eye. I know you must go home very soon now, but I want you to know something.

What is that? asked Susannah.

You are a tourist I like.

When Petros and my daughter left Skidiza, he thought he had loved her back to himself. As they were leaving his parents' house, he gazed upon his childhood bed with fondness. He stood before his parents, his hand tucked underneath Susannah's elbow, and looked them calmly in the eye. He had gone to America with nothing, and had had the good fortune to marry Susannah, a woman of substance, and to find work he enjoyed, and to create a good life. All of the political, cultural, historical forces that had shaped his wife's life remained mysterious to his parents; they simply liked her for her courteous behavior, her deference to their age; they liked her appreciation of their landscape and their food. For her part, Susannah hadn't said anything about the Civil War or civil rights, just as, he realized, his mother had said nothing about the lack of women's rights, historically, in Greece, or about the stoning and stabbing of women she must remember quite vividly from her girlhood. The right of the males in the family to kill the females if they in any way “dishonored” them. They met on the surface of things, but also, in a way, heart to heart. He, Petros, was the place at which they joined.

His parents had been amazed by how well he looked. How handsome and fit. That he spoke English so effortlessly. Susannah was doing something very right, they felt.

And yet, Susannah had stood immobile, as he grasped her elbow. There had been no answering nudge, no shiver from her body to his body suggesting a giggle of solidarity, as his parents praised his good fortune, or even a hint of sadness that they were leaving. He felt that his home, his village, his country, was a sad place for her. That she was profoundly disappointed, and had become estranged from him because of that. He blamed the dwarf. No wonder they made her stay in back of the church, he thought, ungenerously.

I am very fat, it's true. And within a year I will be dead because my heart will simply buckle under the strain of pumping blood through so much weight. I teach at a large Eastern university, where I'm sure my students sometimes think of me as Aunt Jemima disguised as Punk Dyke as I come rolling into the lecture hall with my thrice-pierced nose, green hair, and jelly-plump arms filled with their papers, ablaze with my copious multicolored notes. It is because I teach at this particular university that I am considered a success, no matter what color my hair, how many piercings I have, or how fat I get. I was considered especially successful by my father, who, after my mother's death, used to startle me sometimes when I returned from class, by sitting on my stoop like a stray cat.

What do you want? I bluntly asked him, the first time I found him there.

June, June, he'd replied, with a bit of a twinkle in his sad eyes, have you no pity?

No, I said. And have you come to teach me some?

We did not converse, my father and I, we bantered.

Over time I came to expect his surprise visits. He would take me out to a restaurant, any restaurant I liked, and he would order anything I wanted. Whatever I did want, I wanted lots of it. And I ate and ate and ate, as he watched the plates and platters pile up on the table in front of us in an embarrassing heap. Watching me eat always seemed to take his own appetite away. And I came to believe that each time he visited me, he actually lost weight.

It particularly pained him to see me eat with both hands. And so I would sit before him, a drumstick in one hand, a pinch of roast pork in the other, and I would grunt responses to his inquiries of the day.

Am I responsible for this? he asked one day. But I pretended not to know what he meant, and instead asked for the morsel I had my eye on for dessert: a chocolate eclair.

We never talked about his distrust of me. His hawklike spying into my child's personality. We never talked about my fascination with zippers. He had forgotten how it started, if, in fact, he'd ever given it a thought. It was such a small, insignificant thing, and yet how it impacted my life! I said to him once, though: Do you remember that once, the year or so before we went to Mexico, you gave me a little change purse?

Oh, he said, did I? He brightened. Perhaps at my tone of civility.

Yes, I said, you did. It was small and round and black, or maybe dark brown. I don't remember the color, actually, I said, pausing. I was eating a banana split. Some of my students came into the ice cream parlor and I waved to them. My father looked over at them and smiled that courtly smile men of color of a certain age
have perfected. It crushed something in me sometimes to acknowledge how handsome my father was. To know that straight women adored him and gay men hopelessly drooled. From years of spying I knew he was a great lover; he had that incredibly sexy humbleness that had made my mother delight in turning him on. To change my mother's mind, he was never embarrassed to get down on his knees. To beg. Begging, I'd once overheard him tell another man, actually lit up the attractiveness of a desperate lover's face! For him, it worked. My parents were the kind of lovers who thought of making love in terms not of hours but of days.

My voice became bitter. It was a small round purse, I continued, as my father frowned, trying to recall it. And at first I couldn't figure out what it was. You laughed at the look on my face. And then I caught just a glimpse of something gold, something shiny. And I kept turning the little purse about, trying to get to the thing that glinted in the light. And at last you took it from me and you showed me that the little purse had a golden, hidden zipper!

My father smiled.

And you showed me how to open the little purse, and stayed with me while I introduced the wonder of the little purse to Mother and to Susannah. Who thought it was just as wonderful as I did.

My father smiled still. He did not remember his gift, however.

I sighed, into the last of my dessert.

And then, I said, we were off to Mexico. Everything seemed suddenly mad. There were all those boxes to pack and then the movers came and then we were all crammed into the car, and then there was that interminable drive, with you and Mother talking about being anthropologists but having to pretend to be
preacher folk. It was all very confusing. But the point was, for me, not simply that I was losing the only home I'd ever known, but that somehow, in the turmoil of leaving, I had lost the little round purse.

I waited to see if anything sank in. My father asked the waiter for coffee, decaffeinated. Nothing had.

Since that time, I said, I have been fascinated with zippers.

Really? he said, and smiled that charming smile.

In one of Susannah's novels, the one called
Going Homey
, she tells the story of a blond Scandinavian family who one day get into their Volvo and start driving south. They drive through Europe: Holland, Germany, France, and Spain, into North Africa. And as they drive, they note the darkening of the skins of the people, the changes in the landscape. Eventually they reach central Africa. They drive until they come to the middle of a rain forest, or perhaps the middle of a desert. They get out. There are dark-skinned relatives around a fire who rise to greet them. They inform these relatives that they would like to start over.

Moving to Mexico was, as far as my relationship with my father was concerned, a falling away from the home in myself that my father himself represented. Who was this man, masquerading as a priest? Who was this man, suddenly fixated on the evil in me? I did not know. Not knowing, I was always afraid.

Besides, if my father could not remember the beginning of our peculiar journey, how could I ask him to start over? I dreamed about our years in Mexico all the time.