All about Skin (19 page)

“Do you want a hit?” she might ask.

But she would smile as she said this and the children more often than not would reply “yes” and pretend to run away, hoping that she would run after them. But never in her entire life had she raised her hand in anger and meant it. This was what shamed her the most, the knowledge that she had been prepared to hit Trish, had wanted to strike a two-year-old baby.

Although Reshma had resolved during the night to tell Gilda what had happened, the next morning, she found that she could not. She felt too ashamed. Trish whimpered when she saw Reshma now and Gilda, apparently suspecting that something had happened, had turned icy. With a hard glint in her eyes, she told Reshma that she herself had had “a what do you call them—an Ah-yah” from Argentina when she was growing up.

“The Ah-yah never brought us water at night, even though we children begged and cried for it,” she said, and Reshma cringed guiltily as if it were she, and not the other long-ago Ah-yah, who had failed to bring the small and thirsty Gilda water in the middle of the night.

Gilda had been watching Reshma's reaction closely and now added that she had talked to her daughter and son-in-law the previous evening. Reshma's heart immediately began to race. What had Gilda said? That Reshma had willfully deprived their only child of drinking water? Would they shout at her when they got back? Would they refuse to pay her? Her thoughts collapsed in turmoil but she tried to appear calm on the outside.

She spoke to her husband that evening but could not bear to tell him what had happened. Instead, she directed the shame she felt toward him.

“You don't know the things I have had to go through here,” she whispered vehemently. “You should be ashamed, putting your wife through this.”

He asked her to tell him what had happened but she just said that she was “scarred” for the rest of her life and that she would always blame him. Then she hung up the phone with satisfying violence.

Her last morning in Rhode Island dawned blue and clear. Frances and her husband returned in their silver car and claimed that they were in a hurry to get back to Boston. The bags were put in the car and it was time for Reshma to say her good-byes.

“Thank you,” said Gilda stiffly.

“My cousin,” said Gilda's husband with great merriment.

It was a quiet ride back to Boston. Trish fell instantly asleep and Frances's head bobbed up and down as she dozed. Frances's husband drove silently and swiftly, and Reshma stared out of the window and worried. What if they refused to pay her? Her poor husband. She imagined his disappointment when she told him. But did she really deserve the money? After all, Trish had disliked the very sight of her and there had been that horrible moment when Reshma had raised her hand in anger and meant it. She twisted in her seat in shame just thinking about it.

Reshma was prepared for the worst when they finally came to a stop in front of the apartment. Frances turned sleepily around.

“It was nice meeting you,” she said.

Reshma began to open the car door. It had all ended in failure after all. She was to go home to her husband empty-handed.

“Don't forget this.” Frances handed her an envelope. “And there's ten dollars extra inside.”

Reshma hopped out of the car then and transferred her bag to her other shoulder. She stood and watched as the silver car snaked away down the road.

“Bye, baby Trish,” she thought.

She discovered later that she had been pregnant with her own child all the time that she had been in Rhode Island. She told her husband what had happened there and he claimed that her pregnancy explained that burst of irrational anger.

“All the changes taking place in your body, nah?” he had said.

She had nodded, not wanting to argue, but knew that he was wrong.

Her husband began to read Emerson's
Nature
out loud to her. “Babies hear things even when they're in there and it's never too early to learn about Beauty.”

He was, as ever, a modern man, but no longer insisted that she go outside to work, now that she was pregnant. He was, instead, on the hunt for a job that would better support the growing family and had begun to talk about New York City, where he said there were better opportunities for men like him. In the meantime, they continued to share the two-bedroom apartment and wake up to the sound of snoring that emanated from the other room.

Sometimes when Reshma is alone, she puts her hand on her belly and speaks to the person who is growing there. “Will I be able to be a good mother to you,” she asks it silently, “my little American child?”

She waits.

Hope Wabuke

I
am the only son.

One sister ahead, one sister after—still yet to become—and my ghost brother, dead before my forming in our mother's womb. Here we sit, bowing to our father's God. His cries press upward into heaven, but we are mute. In my thirteen years as Father's son, I have learned that this is one of the many languages we do not know. One of the many questions we must not ask to understand.

Older Sister's eyes are opening. She sits watching us from the corner; I know she is thinking of our mother. I do not want to think of Mother—or of Sister, thinking of Mother—so I close my eyes and listen to the sounding of Father's voice calling out to the thing he believes has saved him from the anger of the men with guns, their steel-plated black boots crushing green growth underfoot in the loud night marching to move through still darkness until, in the sudden silence of the arrival, the press of cold iron barrels sharp against weak wooden doors would have been the sounding of the cold stillness of the morning after when the village had become burnt ash, embering flame. When, in line with another and the next, the rest of his body family would have been disappeared.

He has never told us anything about them, at all.

This is the little we know from Mother: It is 1976. It is the year of Amin and his purges. They sneak across the border to Kenya: Mother, Father, Sister.

They are free.

The soft sounding of Mother's voice as she would say this, and the words would become light, funny, cocktail entertainment. But beyond this, nothing. For, from the body family, he has been taught to understand that the seeing of the nakedness of the father—by the son, by the daughter—is anathema.

So we believed, my older sister and I, every time we heard this story as we would move between the groups of our parent's friends inside the prayer rooms of Father's church after his sermon up until the still white light of the finding: that cold morning when my sister walked into the kitchen and saw our mother—her mouth shallow, eyes closed, red blood becoming faded red lines marking the cold white tile.

How Older Sister had said only that this does not fit, with the story we know; how I had told her she was right, she should find out.

How Older Sister had only laughed, hearing my words. How she had said that I was the son, Father would only listen to me—and I was reminded yet again of what I am never allowed to forget by any of them: I am the only son, the chosen one, the fragment kept secret and safe to raise up the family in this place, strange and alien, and begin again.

It has been three months since then.

I see the tiredness with waiting growing darker in Older Sister's eyes, but I know that Older Sister will not speak of this again until I do. She waits. She watches. She does not understand that I am not the firstborn son. She cannot understand how First Son, Ghost Brother, changes everything between Father and me, after all.

I know how the worlds blur and collide in my culture, never separate—spirits and earth one. How I can feel them and my ancestors pressing in, but I do not know enough of the home I have never been to, to understand. Are they the messages I hear? The understanding I receive in dreams when I wake, each night, clinging to ghostly blurs of disappearing memories I have never lived?

I want them to stay; unlike Father, I am not scared of the ancestors and essences because I am not scared of who I am, what I may be called upon to do by this world or the demands of others. I am American. I think I will have the chance to say no, to become my own individual person with my own choice, not a collective tribe knowing they have none but the weight of other's actions made right and permanent in history and culture, in ritual.

I think I am allowed to question—to be anything I can desire. I think I am allowed to speak.

I have waited until the morning, when Father is driving me to school—an old and favorite tactic of mine when wanting information or conversation. Here he is my captive audience. For the ten-minute ride to Foothills Middle School he cannot hide or evade; he cannot tell me he will answer my questions later and then later still, hoping that eventually I will forget and no longer need to know anything at all about the place that I am from and have never been.

There is too much to know, and not enough time to tell, he says. How well I know this stratagem; it has been practiced upon me before.

After the fumbling for something specific, I tell him, alright then, that he can start with the story of the names.

But still he escapes. He wants to listen to this bit of news about the crisis in the Middle East, he says, increasing the radio volume.

After it has ended, I ask again and he brings up the fact that the car is too cold, concentrating with utmost attention on the car heater.

Dad.

But now we are pulling up in front of the school. Time to go.

I do not move.

He sighs, putting the car in park. He does not look at me, and it is only one thing, but still, it is more than my sisters will ever hear, from him—this soft sounding of his voice as he tells me the ritual of the naming—in the understanding of our body family.

Tonight, Ghost Brother has come again to see me.

He is quiet. I know that he is angry because of how his ghost frame vibrates, shimmering in the white moon's light pressing through half-open window blinds. I have seen him angry before, but rarely. I ask what is wrong, and he says Grandfather has come with him to see me.

I have never seen Grandfather before. I had not known I could; I do not know his name. But now, understanding the story of how his name came to be found, I know who Grandfather is; I know to see him now.

He stands beside Ghost Brother, his smile shining arms spread wide, eyes bright, and I see my naming ritual: the sounding of words made into shapes—how Grandfather's ghost frame would have pressed closer to my mother dreaming of the lost village at lake edge under green trees, green mountains, his ghost lips sounding the name I was to be given into her ears.

Somehow, I do not stop to wonder how I can understand the sounding of his voice until I see Ghost Brother, shimmering even brighter in the anger of being the thing that must translate between us. For even here I am mute—in Father's denial of our language I cannot speak directly. And if I could, I would not know what to ask. There is so much, too much, and already Ghost Brother is telling Grandfather that they must leave. That Grandfather must have realized I am not of them. What is Grandfather playing at? He, Ghost Brother, is still the son—the first-born of the first-born of the first-born since the beginning of our village—not me, this remnant, this American shadow.

Come on now.

And so, even as Grandfather is leaning over me to whisper his name—my true name—before leaving, I understand that to Ghost Brother, maybe even to Grandfather, I am a different kind of fragment—not wanted but a shameful thing fragile and easily broken, pressed into the space between what once was and what has not yet been made manifest to be understood.

Sometimes, I dream of how it must have been day.

They are stopped.

Here are the soldiers, insecure in their power, blocking the way with barely working guns and mismatched fatigues. In the fumbling of their fingers against their cold steel gun barrels, the white identification papers fall softly through hands onto ground, pressed underneath the heavy treads of black steel-toed boots as the soldiers' wide hands grasp Older Sister's tiny body to see what is being smuggled out inside her diapers.

But Older Sister is crying. She is leaking wet spit and wet shit, they mutter to each other, pushing Older Sister's tiny baby body back into my mother's hands.

The barricade is raised. They are let pass.

I sit in school.

Here, we are all still becoming, we are all new to this place.

Here, too, we all have black hair. The strands move softly in the soft sounding of Spanish rising up into the spaces of soft notes descending downward; Chinese, Japanese, underneath teacher's clipped American English, his accent as cold and light as the people who, because of our coming, have fled this tiny Southern California town called Arcadia where we are all still becoming.

How I used to envy, so much, their knowing of the language to understand their body family—how, too, I used to envy that their light skin made their black hair not matter so much to the others in this place who had been here before us all, now absent because we have come.

But today, this morning, the coldness that fills the air around me after the sounding of teacher's voice is pushed away with the shimmering of Grandfather's ghost frame, dancing around me. In the press of white light through window fractured through his ghost body the sounding of his voice calling my name is spreading like summer love to warm everything inside me and I am become sunlit; I am become light.

I am so happy I tell Father.

In the watching of his hearing the sound of my voice, I am nervous. I concentrate on his ink-smudged hands and speak, and, after my words have run and babbled over each other until I am dry, I wait, nervousness increasing, but he says nothing.

And when I chance looking up from the ground and back at him, he is standing up to open the door for me to leave and saying that we will speak no more of this; there will be no devil worship in his house.