Nowhere Is a Place (2 page)

And then the tears came, and something with her mouth—not words but gurgling sounds that didn’t even move him.

“Leave, just leave.”

That’s what it came down to. Him throwing her out like he had been the one to walk in on her, down on her knees, face dug in deep between another woman’s—a white woman’s—thighs, accommodating her in a way he had always vehemently denied Sherry.

And right then Sherry knew that she herself had been picked, while the white woman he was cheating on her with had been chosen.

The woman was wrapped up tight in Sherry’s bedsheets, in her bed, her face serene, a sly silence settling around her as she looked down on Sherry with quiet amusement and outright contempt.

Edison had caught Sherry staring and kicked her again while he screamed, “Didn’t you hear me? Get the hell out!”

Sherry lifted herself up; Edison’s piano-playing fingers imprinted on her cheek and gathered esteem so ruined, it pained her more than the slap and the shoe toe.

Right there, in front of the woman and beneath the bad names he stoned her with, she packed and then left.

Just a slamming door and a neighbor watching from her window as Sherry struggled with the black plastic Hefty bags that were bursting at the seams, boxes of shoes, a duffel bag, and the one suitcase she’d owned since she was twenty-three.

Sherry piled it all into her rusting Mazda RX7, all that could fit, anyway, leaving some things behind, including that bit of herself that had ignored her mother’s warnings and concerns. Sherry had chosen instead to care, love, and believe in a perfect world.

* * *

She drove southwest for two days, stopping only to relieve herself and fill her gas tank; food not even a thought, just getting as far away from Chicago and Edison as she could.

Pushing the Mazda’s rebuilt engine harder than she should have and ignoring the coughing fits it fell into when she shifted into third to scale an incline, Sherry pushed until it spewed black smoke. But by then she was passing the familiar, weathered white sign with the black letters off to the right of the road that declared:

WELCOME TO SANTA REY OBIUS

A small fishing village just across the Mexican border, the place Sherry had spent two weeks every July since she was twenty-three years old. Two weeks of watching the ocean, listening to the seagulls sing, and musing on life so far and the tomorrows that were to come and always trying hard to figure out what had gone wrong.

It was the summer of 1993, and the green monkeys had somehow freed themselves from the village zoo and spent three days chattering and swinging from the branches of the emerald canopy the palm trees made, leaping and bouncing from branch to branch, tails curled at the tip, plucking the red mangoes that jutted from between shining broad leaves.

That summer, Nature was as vain as all get out and feeling every bit of herself; lusty even, spreading her legs and pushing forth the sea.

Summer’s smile released a breeze as gentle as a mother’s touch, setting the great palms to swaying. An outright laugh sent the clouds streaking across the sky. A thrust of her hip, and birds took flight.

In the heat of that summer Nature did not walk; she swaggered. And the earth writhed and rolled beneath her feet, volcanoes spat, cliffs broke away as the heavens wept with joy, and Sherry realized with horror that it had been two months since she’d last seen her period.

* * *

Two days later, the sky a mass of gray clouds and the sea as angry as Sherry was with herself with her stupidity, with her lack of cautiousness, she looked out the window of her tiny bungalow and watched as the tide reached in and snatched at sand and shells and tossed ragged bits of seaweed at the feet of flapping gulls that screamed and took flight.

The memory of the piano-playing fingers playing “Dixie” on her body, the clenching and unclenching jaw, the toss of the head, and his mouth that curled and flung “nigger” at her and had closed over that white woman’s cunt—all that danced in her mind even as she walked the three miles beneath a threatening sky to the killing place on Santa Clara Avenue and wept over the green-and-white forms as she scrawled her mother’s name and telephone number in the space that said,
CONTACT IN CASE OF AN EMERGENCY.

On the table, on her back, she spread her legs like Nature, but no laughter followed and the walk she walked afterward was far from a swagger, and no cliffs broke away that day, but the heavens did weep and she had to hail a cab in the downpour.

* * *

Days later, nothing left to cry about and at the beginning of that summer, Sherry was counting on at least three weeks of alone time, but got so much more.

Summer became a magician, extending herself—stretching from June to June and beyond, lifting her skirt and kicking up her heels even when the calendar said autumn and the sunsets turned orange, winter and the days grew shorter, spring and the rains came down . . . Through all those seasons Sherry would look back and swear she could always smell begonias.

Twenty pounds overweight and unable to fit into anything that did not have a tag that stated some percentage of Spandex, her heart broken and self-esteem running on empty, the memory of his slap and the other like it dug in like a malignancy beneath the skin of her cheek, pulsating on rainy days and burning on sunny ones. Sherry wondered how in the hell she could be feeling nothing but sad and still be able to offer her hand to the young man with the green eyes who would guide her gently past the chill of the surf and into the perfect blue sea beyond and the future beyond that.

* * *

Taken aback when he approached her, he’d looked down into her troubled face and greeted her by name.

The Mazda was up on a lift in the backyard of Miguel’s Fix-it Place even though she knew she would never reclaim it. The small efficiency cottage she rented every year from Annie Perau, the French expatriate who had started visiting Santa Rey back in the ’60s before the paved roads were laid and the pot-smoking, backpacking hippies had to navigate the rocky terrain by foot or hired mule.

Annie had come to Santa Rey Obius for the same reason Sherry had started to come: to forge and renew.

Now in her mid-sixties, Annie had a thriving business, toasted almond– colored skin, white wavy hair, and a clear mind.

It was a clear mind Sherry was meditating on when the young man approached.

She’d held her hand up, shielding her eyes from the sun, and was only able to make out the dark shades he wore, the duckbill of an orange cap, and a glint of gold about his neck.

“Please don’t tell me you’ve forgotten about me after knowing me for all these years.” A smile, broad and sunny backed by blindingly white teeth.

She’d asked him to take a step to the side. “The sun is blinding me; move a little to your left.”

“Aw, man. You’ll break my heart if you tell me you don’t know who I am,” he’d said as he moved left and blocked out the sun.

She looked up and into his face. Yes, yes, it was familiar, but—

She smiled then and he removed his shades. It was the eyes that caught her: catlike, green in color and flecked with gold.

His name had always escaped her. It was an odd one—Raven? Hawk? Something birdlike.

“Uhm?” She smiled and pointed a finger at him. He smiled back and waited for her to say his name.

Handsome was what came to mind first and then a slight thought to his age. High yellow in color, a bit of blond in his mustache.

He folded his hands across his chest. “Sherry, Sherry . . .” he muttered, shaking his head and trying to sound wounded.

His father’s name she could remember: Sam.

Sam, Sam the umbrella man. Everybody knew Sam. You needed to know Sam if you wanted shade from the sun and weren’t resourceful enough to have brought your own umbrella.

But the son—his name?

He was squatting now, kneecaps broad and flat. He was looking at her. She could see the tendons in his arms, in his neck. Straining, pulsating.

“I’m sorry,” she said, shrugging her shoulders in surrender.

Sam had children. Small ones: two boys, a girl sometimes—only when the mother was there, which was rare.

Sherry chewed her bottom lip . . .

Another boy, a teenager. Wiry, quiet, always polite.

Sparrow? Pigeon?

A reader, if she was remembering right:
The Catcher in the Rye
,
Native Son.

He was what? Sixteen, maybe seventeen years old when she first started coming down.

“Falcon,” he finally said, and Sherry felt something in her decompress.

“Yes, yes, that’s it,” she said, and found her hand gently swiping the back of his. “So how have you been?”

* * *

It had started that way and had evolved to him pulling her into the water, his hands brushing away wandering strands of seaweed from her shoulder and then finding her waist and settling there.

She had felt the sun on her teeth and was surprised at the sound of her own laughter ringing in her ears.

Her foot brushed the top of his, and even in the velvety wrap of the water he felt the roughness of her heel and commented on it. She’d blushed, ashamed that she’d forgotten about herself in some ways.

She’d managed to keep her nails clipped and square, but hadn’t paid much attention to her toes or the heels of her feet. Her hair was decent though, and she’d continued to floss after every meal, but her feet . . .

“Oh,” Sherry had muttered, turning her face toward the shore and feeling that block of blue ice that Edison had left inside of her rattle as Falcon, too young for her, forbidden even, bent and plucked a sea stone from the ocean bottom. He caught her by her arm, pulling her close to him, and then hoisted that big old leg of hers up and out of the water like it was feather light and brought her foot to rest on his shoulder. He began to work the stone against her heel as he hummed an old Bessie Smith tune that he couldn’t remember the name of.

Anyone watching saw dead flakes of skin drop off and into the water, but Sherry saw ice shavings.

* * *

By September she had smooth heels and a compilation CD of Bessie Smith and knew all the words to “Gulf Coast Blues,” but Falcon still preferred to hum the tune whenever he was in her small one-bedroom cottage that overlooked the Pacific, which was most times.

In the evening his sandals sat alongside her flip-flops at the door while they prepared meals together. She forgot the years that lay between them and began thinking of him as hers when they took turns reciting Rita Dove’s poetry to each other at night before making love.

In February, on his birthday, she tells him that she believes she knows his heart. Asks if he understands what that means, and he pulls her in to him, kisses her cheek where the piano-playing fingers once stroked then struck, and says, “Yes, I know yours too.”

Falcon, loving her, warming her insides along with the first bright sun of a new June, melting the ice block into candle wax and then water, making it easy for another baby to float there.

* * *

After Sherry had put the phone back down in its cradle and crawled into bed, she announced her plans to Falcon. All he could say was, “The family reunion is where?” Falcon’s tone carried more fear than surprise.

‘‘Georgia,” Sherry had whispered into his neck, and then threw one leg over his waist in a half straddle.

The bed creaked and Falcon tried to turn himself over, but she had him pinned and so he just breathed and asked, “What for?”

She didn’t want to see his face. There would be pain in his eyes to match the fear in his voice. He didn’t want her anywhere too far from him. He’d told her that a hundred times, and now that she was pregnant . . . well, he practically didn’t want her out of his eyesight.

“I’ve got to clear up some things. Learn some things,” she responded, and then moved herself closer in to him.

He knew about some of the things but, he suspected, not all of the things. The slap had come up in conversation a number of times. Sometimes accompanied by tears, other times a sheet of silence like black ice followed the utterance of it. “No way around it,” Sherry murmured.

“Got to go through it to get over it,” Falcon said, then sighed and reached his hand back, resting it on her thigh.

He wasn’t a selfish man, so he wouldn’t complain about her going to be with her people to handle her business, but he did say, “What about the baby?”

“Well, I’m going to take the baby with me, of course!” The humor of the statement wasn’t lost on him, and Falcon uttered a small laugh.

Paradise, Nevada

July 1995

Dumpling

Sherry call the first of the month. No other time. Always the first. So imagine my surprise when on the sixteenth, I picked up the phone and heard her “hello” coming from the other end.

What’s wrong?

She said, Nothing, Dumpling. Can’t a daughter call and say hello to her mama?

I look at the phone and then tap the receiver on the nightstand a few times before I put it back to my ear. What? I say.