Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) (3 page)

Of course, I didn’t make such a distinction then. I couldn’t have. And so it seemed to me that God, who cared enough to nudge children to share with one another and who kept an eye out for danger lurking unseen, was the kind of person (for He did seem to me a person, someone to call on by name—a father with a son, no less, though it wasn’t lost on me that He was certain to be much more than that, too) I wanted to have by my side.

As my mother read, I’d sometimes let my eyes drift across her face, taking her in out of habit, memorizing her, breathing in her smell, the way she held herself, the lilting cadence of her voice. Her eyes were wide-set and large, so large and clear they were the first thing anyone saw about her. When she smiled, which she did often, it started in those wide, clear, impossibly large eyes before spreading to span her entire face. I’d count her beauty marks: one near her nose, one on the cheek, the ones on the back of her arm and peeking out from the deep V of her nightgown’s neckline (adding in the one near the bottom of her thigh, which I couldn’t see because it sat beneath the blanket). Then I’d study her hair. Short hair she was always complaining wouldn’t grow. Hair that had to be coaxed and coddled and conditioned and primped and permed or tucked up underneath a shiny wig before it would act right. Considering her body, I’d hear the echo of all the things she’d found to bemoan: she was full-hipped, dieting incessantly; her feet were too big; her nails were brittle, always fighting a losing battle to remain intact. But watching her warmed me. I was calm and safe beside her, right at home. I didn’t think to call it beauty,
but beside her, I felt what the presence of beauty makes a person feel. It smelled like her Mary Kay night cream and the Oil of Olay she’d let me smooth onto my face before bed. And it was warm and solid, like her sleeping back, which I’d burrow into when she flicked off the light and the room went black.

Did I ever wonder who my mother used to be, before she belonged to me? I have the recollection of her struggling once or twice to describe her younger self to me, and finding that girl unrecognizable. The phrase she used, that so much seemed to hang upon, was “I was searching.”
What were you searching for?
I would ask, confused, eager to understand. Why couldn’t she explain? “I was lonely,” she offered. “I was looking for an answer.”
Why? An answer to what?
My questions sought hard definites, when what it sounds like to me now is that she didn’t know. Did it just make for an easy story to tell, or was what she found at the end of that search really the same voice the children in
Little Visits
learned to discern and obey? Having lived beside her, with the voice of God as close and as discernible, I was urged to believe, as that of my father, I had no idea what it could have meant to be “searching.” What could have possibly been lost?

I grew up in Northern California, one town over from Travis Air Force Base, where my father was stationed. The town was Fairfield, a spot on the map smack in the middle between San Francisco and Sacramento, and for a long time, it seems now, I was still small enough to believe our house was enormous. My father filled the outside with trees, shrubs, flowers, and other plants he tended with devotion more scientific than aesthetic. He liked to watch how things grew, transformed, survived—the logical, natural world backed and set in motion by something that resisted explanation. My mother decorated the inside with antiques obtained and refinished
over the years and drapes and pillows she sewed herself. It was a physical space that began to take on the features of her inner world: pleasing, tidy, functional, with slight nods to fantasy, like an ornate fireplace mantel my father built at her behest or a family of pewter quails that made a perpetual slow march across the living room coffee table. It was the life she assembled for us, I see now. A life that would tell us, and the world, if it cared to notice, that we bothered with ourselves, that we understood dignity, that we were worthy of everything that mattered. No matter what the world thought it knew about blacks, no matter what it tried to teach us to believe about ourselves, the home we returned to each night assured us that, no matter who was setting the bar, we could remain certain we measured up. When our teachers came for lunch, as they all eventually did, this is what she wanted them to see.

There were seven of us: Mom, Dad, Wanda, Jean, Conrad, Michael, and, after a lapse of about eight and a half years, me. “Seven is God’s perfect number,” my mother said sometimes, dragging one of the kitchen chairs to the dining room table before dinner. We might have been eight. They would have called the other child Ian if it had been a boy. “I guess it wasn’t meant to be,” my mother would offer whenever I’d ask why there was such a large gap between my older siblings and me. The doctor had wanted to use the minuscule body for research, but my mother refused. It would have seemed cruel to poke and prod and slice into the child who wasn’t meant to be. Would that have been me, or was I always me, waiting to bring up the rear, to fall into place as the youngest, the baby, the kitten of the clan? (That was even what they called me,
Kitten
.) Seven meant that, for a long time, I always had someone willing to look away from the real action of what was happening
in our house and with whom to exchange a significant glance:
Did you catch that?
or
Shhh
—
don’t say a thing
. Seven meant that, for a long time, I could always hear the murmur of voices from my bedroom at night; I’d fall asleep in the knowledge that we were many, that we were all still here, that the world as we understood it to be was still on track.

Seven is God’s favorite number, but in time our nuclear unit, like every other, would disband. In the now I’m remembering, however, we are steady, steadfast, happy, and whole. No one has yet left home and in so doing tripped the wire on a progression leading us all further into the future waiting to claim us. In the now I’m remembering, it is still only this: Michael and Conrad together in the room upstairs on the left, Wanda filling the big pitcher with water while Jean helps bring the food to the dining room. My father putting aside his book and calling us all to stand around the table with our heads bowed and then to sit down to hot rolls with butter and a meal promising that nothing bad would come for us for a long time.

WILD KINGDOM

I
t was a Sunday afternoon and I was four, riding between my parents in the front seat of the wood-paneled Chevy station wagon as my father guided us westward along Interstate 80. The world outside the windows was hot and bright, caught up in a gasoline shortage and a hostage crisis; on TV each night, we watched the angry bearded faces chanting in faraway streets, shouting things against Americans like us. Everything was suddenly costlier, more precious, cause to put on the brakes, to creep along at a measly 55 mph. My two sisters shared the backseat and seemed to be mirror opposites of one another in every way: they both had bobbed hair, but Wanda’s was curled so that the ends flipped up exuberantly, while Jean’s tucked shyly underneath. My brothers, Michael, who wore a string of puka shells that accentuated the big permanent teeth he’d still not quite fully grown into, and Conrad, with his large, wise eyes and his afro that always, despite his efforts, came to a slight point on the top of his head, shared the space we referred to as the “far-far-back.”

It must have been late summer, because we were on our way to the Gustafssons’ ranch to pick up ripe fruit for my mother’s homemade preserves. Mr. and Mrs. Gus were friends from a place called the Hospitality House, where military families spent occasional evenings together in a thing called
fellowship
, which meant people arrived near sundown to hold hands in a circle and pray. Afterward, everyone ate lemon cream sandwich cookies, and the kids drank
punch out of the same small paper cups I used when I brushed my teeth at home. The adults would stand around with coffee, paid out like slot machine winnings from the giant percolator on the table. There must have been a lot of gatherings like this over the years, because the whole room had taken on the smell of stale coffee—a smell I’d forever associate with Jesus.

We were heading to Mr. Gus’s ranch, because my father loved to eat two pieces of toast with his breakfast and to fold each slice around pears cooked to an impossible sweetness and spiced with cinnamon and cloves or two figs swimming in thick amber syrup. My father’s love of breakfast had turned the morning meal, for all of us, into a ritual, a rite we enacted with joy every single day. To that end, every summer, I helped my mother stir vast pots of the summer’s harvest into the thick magic we’d later ladle into the glass canning jars. And every morning, practically, I’d spoon some of the stuff from summers past onto my own toast or biscuit, hardly thinking that so much of what the jams and preserves were made of was her.

The Gustafssons lived in a modest red ranch house just over the hill on the other side of the interstate, but they had a whole hillside’s worth of fig trees and orchards of pears, peaches, apricots (which we called “ape-ricots,” though just about everyone I met later in life would say “app”), and bitter black walnuts, along with a few old work mules and some chickens and cows. And there were cats and dogs that wandered the acres in obedience to their own sense of purpose, barely interested in stopping to let you pat their thistle-ridden fur. When they got to be a little older, my brothers helped out at the Gustafssons’ place to earn spending money in the summer months. Once, they watched in anxious disbelief as a bull scratched the dirt with his front legs and blew out a cloud of hot steam before charging straight for where they stood filling his
water trough. They hopped the fence to safety in time, but even when they told the story years later, there remained the shadow of terror just beneath their laughter.

At the top of the Gustafssons’ drive, there were bags of picked fruit waiting for us on the porch, but Mr. Gus took us on a tour of the ranch before packing them into our car. We’d just come from church. I was wearing one of my favorite outfits, a blue-and-white dress with a white cardigan and socks and brown Buster Brown shoes. Our ankles and feet got dusty following Mr. Gus through the parched grass and sun-baked dirt, but no one seemed bothered by it. Even my sisters and mother walking in high heels and pantyhose didn’t seem to mind.

As we came to each different variety of tree, Mr. Gus would pull down a bough and offer everyone a piece of fruit. My mother split open an apricot with her thumbs and handed it to me. The flesh was warm and sweet, with a bright tang that reminded me of sunlight. Later, she gave me a bite of a small peach and bits of a walnut Mr. Gus had cracked between his bare hands. Mischief flashed on her face as she tore a fig in two and put half of it into my father’s mouth. When she offered some to me, I said, “No, thank you,” and shook my head, repulsed by the white pith and the pulpy flesh. It looked like a venomous sea creature, but when she lifted the fruit to her own lips, she practically swooned, like a woman on television who had just lowered herself into a bathtub full of bubbles.

When we approached a hen and her cluster of chicks, I instinctively began to reach out toward the downy babies, but Mr. Gus stopped me. Without speaking, he placed his hand near the chicks and held it there a moment. Immediately, the mother began to flap her wings in agitation and moved in angrily to peck him. She bobbed up and down, driving her beak into his bare hand like the
needle in my mother’s sewing machine. He didn’t recoil right away, but when he finally did and gave me his hand to examine, there was a purpled and bloody patch of skin the diameter of a gobstopper. I pulled the sleeves of my cardigan down over my own hands and walked on.

We came to a clearing where a few cows and one calf stood grazing. The cows were unbothered and slow, larger than any other living thing I’d seen up close. Mr. Gus laid a hand on one, who didn’t stop her jaws from their slow grind of a clump of grass, though her head swung around to face him. Her eyes were deep and kindly, rimmed in black and shaded by thick long lashes, like a lady’s. I couldn’t help it; her placid femininity backed by quiet strength—not like the frantic hen whose love had made her nervous but rather calm, grounded in a steadfast, sturdy certainty—reminded me of my mother. Instantly, I trusted her, would have lifted my own hand to the thick mottled wall of fur were it not for her calf, which was watching us from farther away. Small and brown, with new fur I could already imagine the plush of against my cheek, the calf saw me, too, and she (I decided it was a she) stood still, having also just grasped our shared affinity (at least it seemed that she had), eyeing me in a way I took to mean that my own feelings were mirrored in hers. I forgot all about the wicked chicken as I ran toward the calf, who took a few lively steps away, but coyly, as if to suggest we play a game of tag.

This is for me
, I remember telling myself, meaning the sweet young calf and the strong, serene mother. I knew that I knew them, understood their bond, and that they knew me, too. I knew that I could slip in among them for a moment and revel in the love that spread out around them. It was all I knew, and so I dashed after the calf, laughing, wanting to show her, to step into their version
of the language my mother and I spoke, and to carry that joy, that giddy out-of-breath knowing, back over into the human.