Come Sunday: A Novel (9 page)

It seems impossible that this golden-child brother of mine, guilty of nothing, has assumed someone else’s load. “So he got off scot-free when he was the most to blame.”

“You think that he didn’t end up paying in some way?”

“I think he got to do exactly what he wanted, whether it was disowning you or beating up on Mom or ignoring me. I think he fractured our family and blew us all in different directions. Maybe it’s just me, but I think he should have had to pay a price for that.”

“Maybe he did.”

“He up and died is what he did.”

“Well, you are the religious one—maybe he got to pay his price after that.”

“I’m not so sure.”

Rhiaan lifts his eyebrows at the ambiguity. “Come on, let’s go in.”

THE BOOK with its red cover had lain on the coffee table in front of my father for three hours, from the time my mother had set it down next to his coffee cup when he came home from work, right through the eight o’clock South African newscast of the bombings along the country’s railways, to when my mother announced my bedtime. “Aren’t you going to read Rhiaan’s poem, Dad?” These might have been the only words anyone had spoken all evening, and a response to
them did not seem likely. But I did not want to go to my room, close the door, and spend the rest of the night pinned to the other side of it, waiting for his reaction. I could be like that, standing between him and his TV, braving his wrath.

“Dad?”

“Louise!” my father barked, leaning left to look past me. “Your daughter has learned to nag almost as goddamn good as you!” Again I stepped in his line of sight. Snatching up the book as though it were a puff adder, he glared at my mother, who had come to collect his dinner tray, dish towel draped over her shoulder. “This is your fault!”

It took a long time for him to read it although the poem was only thirty-six lines long. I allowed for the fact that my father had never completed the eighth grade. Perhaps he had to read it several times to understand it, being a newspaper reader who liked things spelled out in who-what-where-when-how fashion. Perhaps he was letting it sink in: that this son, despite his father’s prophecies, had made something of himself. Most certainly he could not deny that it was good; “brilliant,” some bigwig professor of literature at the Wit-watersrand University had called it. You can hope such things, as you might hope goldfish will fly in gilded flocks, even when you know better.

My father’s reaction did come finally. As the book took on a trajectory headed for the wall, he issued not a review but a verdict: “I’ll kill that little shit!”

All over the country white kids were popping up, overnight like mushrooms on a compost heap, with their protesting questions. Questions quickly turned to demands, demands to action. “Power to the People!”
“Amandla!”
“One Man, One Vote!”—taunts that the old folk said warranted tear gas. “You go to university to get an education!” they said. But then they called the military in to teach them a different kind of lesson. Fathers watched their sons trade in their loyalty to the
Vaderland
for a rebellion that spilled like gasoline on a slope of matches. Our father watched Rhiaan pick up his pen as though it were an AK-47, as though it were aimed at him.

It was too late for my mother to call Rhiaan, to warn him, to suggest
he delay his visit to us—the train carrying our guerrilla-poet had already left the station and was bound for the tiny town of Paarl, for the fist my father had in mind for him. The year was 1981, and it was the day the Commies inadvertently saved my brother’s life. A group of apartheid dissidents blew up a section of the railway tracks Rhiaan’s train needed to complete its journey. So grateful was I that I vowed to become a Red myself. Had Rhiaan arrived as scheduled, in the middle of the night, and not as he did a few days later via car, he would have certainly been greeted with my father’s murderous mood. On the other hand, with all the fists flying, there might not have been room for my father’s words. Perhaps my dad’s arm would have swung and delivered its message, and Rhiaan—knocked out cold—would have awoken to my father’s remorse. Instead, as it turned out, Rhiaan came home three days later, in broad daylight, to something worse.

My mother was the first to greet him, having kept vigil at the living room window for much of the afternoon. When Rhiaan’s roommate’s car pulled into the driveway, she let out a yip and ran out while I followed close on her heels. He was different somehow, and although he hugged me just the same, I felt shy around this grown-up brother. “What’s the matter,” he asked me. “Cat got your tongue?”

The All-Blacks, having ignored the Gleneagles Agreement, which preached an international sports sanction against South Africa, were giving the Springboks a thorough beating in the first test match. It could not have had a worse effect on my father if he had been the captain of the rugby team himself. When the three of us tumbled into the house, he was standing at attention in front of the tube, shouting directions at the referee, who had apparently just awarded another penalty to the New Zealand side.

“Hello, Dad,” Rhiaan said.

I had not noticed, until he raised his arm in our direction, that clasped in my father’s grip was the red book.

“What the bloody hell do you call this?” he demanded, a scrum of one. Didn’t
we
need a referee?

Rhiaan looked at the floor and rubbed the back of his head, but did not answer.

“I’ll tell you what it is,” my father continued. “It’s Commie bullshit, that’s what! You think I’m stupid?”

Rhiaan was quiet.

“I said, do you think I’m fucking stupid?”

“No, I never said—”

“Don’t interrupt me! This is
my
house; I do the talking around here!” My mother came to get my hand and guided me into the hallway, where we still had a view of the muddy rugby field and the battlefield in front of it. For weeks I had been waiting for that duffel bag to come home, to be opened, to be handed from it a treasure my brother had picked out just for me. But now it sat zipped up like my mother’s mouth, ready to leave, at Rhiaan’s side.

“It’s a poem, Dad. It’s just a poem.”

“It’s a bloody disgrace—that’s what it is! Let me tell you something,
boetie
, I have put up with your attitude and your superior ways for years, but the thanks I get is this piece of shit! It mocks me and everything I stand for, do you hear me?”

“It has nothing to do with you, it’s about—”

“It has
everything
to do with me! You fuck with my country, my boy, you fuck with me.” I was beginning to wonder whether our neighbors could hear, whether they had turned down the volume on their TV sets for a better earful of the match going on in our house. My father opened the book to the page where Rhiaan’s poem was printed, ripped it out, and crumpled it. “That’s what I think of your poem and that’s what I think of you. Now clean out any other Commie bullshit from your room and get the hell out of my house! You aren’t any son of mine.” Wiping the spittle from his mouth with the back of his hand, my father sat down in his recliner and picked up his beer just as the Springbok running back scored a try.

“Harry,” my mother gasped.

“Don’t start, Louise, or by God you can leave with him.”

My mother didn’t leave—not in any physical sense, at least. Instead, after Rhiaan had left, she picked up the page from the floor and taped it back in the book. Later that day she picked up something else—a very tall glass of gin. When Rhiaan left the country a year later
along with a phalanx of political refugees just after his twenty-first birthday, it was a long season before I saw the glass empty.

INSIDE, JENNY IS cleaning out uneaten food from the refrigerator while Greg paces in the kitchen with the phone to his ear.

“Greg’s mother apparently can’t make it to the funeral,” Jenny warns. “Something about the old man.”

Greg is chewing on his thumbnail, a dead giveaway that his mother is bulldozing her will through yet another conversation. On one of his about-turns, Greg sees me staring at him, waiting for him to stand up to her. This is the moment. You can do it! Tell her: tell her that her granddaughter is dead and if she had a kind bone in her body she’d get it on a plane and fly it over here.

I wait.

Greg turns from my scowl and mumbles, “I know, Mother. It’s okay.”

I head upstairs, walk into Cleo’s room, reach up to the shelf for the teddy bear box, and throw it in the trash. In my bedroom I retrieve from my purse the envelope with Cleo’s curl. The lone curl in my hand, weightless as a dandelion tuft, is so unlike my dark, heavy hair. Hair that used to fall to my waist when it wasn’t tied up in a ponytail, hair that now lies in a Ziploc bag in the bottom of Greg’s sock drawer. From it, I get a strand and put it in the envelope with Cleo’s.

I wonder if there are other reasons why women cut their hair themselves. Reasons that are different from the one that compelled me that last morning of our summer vacation. Waking up to the great divide that had come to characterize our marriage, I felt an androgynous desperation that morning. Invisible and undesirable, I was far from the happily-ever-after ending into which bridal couples are supposed to step. While Greg and Cleo were peering into rock pools outside our hotel room, I peered at my aging face and wilting hairdo. I was beginning to look like my mother. Something had to be done. I found the craft scissors Cleo and I had used to make collages the day before and
returned to my post in front of the mirror. Pulling my disheveled ponytail to one side for a clearer view, I hacked and hacked until the whole thing came off in one butchered bushel. Look at me now, I wanted to shout. You can’t ignore me now!

There was a feeling of exhilaration the moment those two feet of matted hair fell to the floor, as though I had shed the deadweight of a decade. “Oh, babe,” Greg said sadly when he and Cleo returned from the beach. “What have you done?”

I couldn’t help but grin. “I like it,” I said, insolent and panicky both.

“What did you do that for?” His frown was mixed with concern.

I could not remember my rehearsed answer. It had something to do with wanting to make a change, not just to myself but to us. My steady argument, the calm voice of reason, was suddenly mist on a cool morning, and all I could picture was a portrait of me and Greg with the faces of Louise and Harry Spenser. Greg wasn’t the vengeful, brutal Harry, to be sure, but I could not shake the sense that I was morphing into my mother, right down to her neglected fingernails and low expectations. I had cut my hair to put up a fight. It seemed silly to say I was fighting for my mother, that I was fighting from becoming her too. I just could not think, when my husband was asking me about hair, how I was supposed to answer him about marriage and how, without any intention on anyone’s behalf, it had become so disappointing.

“I like it!” Cleo declared. “Cut mine, Mommy,” she said, reaching round for that tiny curl.

“Darling,” I told her, “princesses have hair like yours; it’s too perfect to cut.”

I set the envelope in my treasure chest where I stashed yesterday’s card so Greg would not inadvertently read it, thinking it a message of condolence only to find another man’s profession of love to the preacher’s wife. Instead of rereading it, I reach for my mother’s old airmail letters, bundled together with an elastic band. From the stack I pull the top one, her last one, and scan it for clues. There are twenty letters, one written every week from the time I left South Africa till the time she died, and ever since, I have always wondered if she knew she was dying, if she knew this was to be her last goodbye.

She writes of the irises blooming, the apricot tree outside my bedroom window covered with silky buds, the neighborhood gleaming from spring cleaning. She mentions how her old friend Muriel came by to help her spruce up the house the week after my father’s funeral (
It was good that you didn’t come
). They rearranged furniture, hung new curtains in the kitchen, put up some new pictures. There is a wish for a happy Thanksgiving—what was to be my first (
I never could get you to eat turkey at Christmas—maybe American turkeys taste better
). And then two paragraphs—one of regret, the other of advice—with barely a space between them.
I wish there had been more happy times in our family
, she penned.
I wish more than anything that this last year had turned out different. However, things do all turn out for the best, my girl. I never used to believe that, but I do now. Don’t ever let life get the better of you. Sometimes it dishes out bitter stuff, but as they say, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” I hope you will remember that
. She ends by writing she is proud of me and she loves me (
with all my heart
).