Temple of My Familiar (49 page)

“You did seem pretty oblivious, actually,” says Fanny, bracing for another hill. This one is so steep that, instead of sidewalks, there are steps. It isn’t just the hills themselves, but the way Carlotta drives. She charges the hills. Fanny looks at her. Carlotta is dressed in a fuchsia jumpsuit and seems to enjoy the challenge of driving. She handles the jeep as if it is a pony.

“I love driving around San Francisco,” she says. “The Laguna Street hill”—which they have just come down—“is such a killer thrill.”

“You were on automatic pilot, I thought,” says Fanny, thankful she’s on more than automatic pilot now. “Sometimes I was amazed you made it to my door and didn’t just wander into the cottage in the next yard.” Fanny says this slowly and with gratitude that they’ve come at last to Union Street, which is nice and flat.

“I needed those massages,” says Carlotta. “In a funny kind of way, I couldn’t bear to touch my own body, myself. Not to really feel it. I just washed it, perfumed it—loudly, with tons of Joy—and dressed it. It wasn’t alive to me anymore. Maybe the perfume was supposed to act as embalming fluid.”

They both laugh.

Fanny thinks of the years during which her sexuality was dead to her. How, once she began to understand men’s oppression of women, and to let herself feel it in her own life, she ceased to be aroused by men. By Suwelo in particular, addicted as he was to pornography. And then, the women in her consciousness-raising group had taught her how to masturbate. Suddenly she’d found herself free. Sexually free, for the first time in her life. At the same time, she was learning to meditate, and was throwing off the last clinging vestiges of organized religion. She was soon meditating and masturbating and finding herself dissolved into the cosmic All. Delicious.

But when she tried to share this new spaciousness with Suwelo, he’d almost destroyed it. “Think of me! Me! My body, my cock!” he was always crying. At least this is what she felt, even when he didn’t say anything. She’d accused him of trying to colonize her orgasms.

He had laughed and pretended he didn’t understand.

His own sexuality was colonized, in Fanny’s opinion, by the movies he saw and the books he read. The magazines he thumbed through on street corners.

“I don’t see how you couldn’t be angry with me when you found out,” says Carlotta.

They are in her little guest house, which reminds Fanny of her massage parlor. It is small but has a spacious feeling. There is very little furniture: pillows and mats on the floor, a couple of round tables made of wood. Candles. Incense holders. Fresh flowers in vases attached to the walls. Each room is a different color: blue, green. olive, gold. There is a peacockish feeling somehow.

“I only found out when it was over,” says Fanny. “I was informed you had been dropped, for me. I knew there had been other women, but I never knew them. Suwelo told me about you because he was afraid I’d find out from you or from one of the women in my consciousness-raising group. ‘Those bitches know everything!’ he used to say.

“
They did too!
” Fanny laughs. “I feel sorry for any woman who missed that phase of women’s collective growth. There we all were, speculums shining, labyrises dangling from everybody’s neck, colossal dykes blooming suddenly on motorcycles, whisking one away! Oh”—she smiles, remembering—“the anxiety all this used to cause poor Suwelo!”

“I was angry,” says Carlotta, “to be dropped. He didn’t even say good-bye. He just stopped showing up. Suddenly you were back, and everywhere I looked, there you were together. I could have murdered him; and, as Frida Kahlo might have said, ‘eat it afterward.’” She pauses. “And all along he was just a figment of my imagination. A distraction from my misery. He was just ‘something’ to hold on to; to be seen with; to wrestle with on the kitchen floor.”

“Oh, my,” says Fanny, dryly. She thinks how Suwelo believes he took advantage of Carlotta and how this is what she herself had thought. They were both wrong. There had not been a victim and an oppressor; there’d really been two victims, both of them carting around lonely, needy bodies that were essentially blind flesh.

“It’s harder for me to get angry these days,” says Fanny, as they walk to Arveyda’s house. “I don’t know why.” She waits beside the bedroom door as Carlotta finishes tucking a nodding Angelita into bed. Angelita looks like a very tired, amber-colored miniature Madonna, and her chopped-off punkish hair, dyed, apparently, with black shoe polish, clashes with the frilly pastel-pink pillow on which her weary head rests.

“Maybe,” she continues, “I’ve used it all up. I get sad, instead.”

“Of course,” says Carlotta. “Repressed anger leads straight to depression. Depression leads straight to suicide.” She turns off Angelita’s light and gently closes the door.

“No,” says Fanny. “I don’t feel depressed. It’s a different kind of sadness. It’s more like ...” She thinks; turns the feeling over in her mind. “More like sorrow. People just seem insane to me, more than anything. Everyone seems to have been tortured by the world in which we live into a perfect state of madness. Besides, I don’t consider that anger, expressed against people, as opposed to conditions, is necessarily a good thing.” She thinks of white feminists she knows who are happy that they can at last express their anger. In their opinion, this is something white women have never done. They think the ability to express anger is something the white woman has to reclaim. But this seems like a delusion to Fanny. For she knows the white woman has always expressed her anger, or at least vented it, as some of her friends liked to say—and usually it was against people, often men, but primarily women, of color. And what did that get her? Well, today it made it hard for black women to talk to her, because they not only remember the white woman’s ability to express anger, but they expect a replay of this anger any minute.

These same women, interestingly, thinks Fanny, always claim they fear the black woman’s anger, and for that reason say they are afraid to struggle seriously with her.

“Maybe the problem is too large for anger,” says Carlotta. They are standing between the dining room and the kitchen, and over Arveyda’s and Suwelo’s heads they can see the TV. An Israeli soldier, aided by a fat civilian, who, when he opens his mouth, reveals he is from Brooklyn, is pounding senseless, with a large stick, a young and terrified, bloody-faced Arab boy who looks like Cedrico.

“They’ve lost it,” says Arveyda sadly, with a sigh.

F
ANNY FINDS TALKING TO
Arveyda is very easy. It is like talking to one of her women friends. He is always right there, present, emotional, sometimes barely fumbling along, mumbling and muttering his thoughts; but he does not use his mind as something to hide behind. She likes the way he often says, “I think so ... but then again, maybe not.”

For some reason, this simple uncertainty and hesitation is moving to her.

She discovers he falls in love with people dead long ago, usually musicians, just as she does; he tells her that one of these “old buddies,” as he calls them, is helping him write a new song, the first line of which is “Sex is the language that leaves so much unsaid.” He loves this line and hums it and shows Fanny how he thinks the lyrics will sound, when he sings them accompanied by the piano.

Fanny sits beside him on the piano bench and shares his excitement. He is so happy to have this one little line to begin a new song that he bounces up and down like a child. He tells her he is trying to still his impatience (“the assassin of art”) as he waits for the rest of the song to come.

But they are both confident the rest of the song will come; and they share this sense of connectedness with other worlds as if it is a marvelous secret between them.

Fanny tells him about the play she is writing with her sister, Nzingha. Immediately he says he will write music for her sister’s name. “Nzingha,” he says, “how
beautiful!
” Fanny says it is also her name. Then she must tell him all about Ola and his “wives” and the coincidence of being given the same name as her sister. “Well,” she says, “it proves my parents were never very far apart, either politically or culturally.”

“But the name itself has such power,” says Arveyda, already familiarizing his mind with its melodic possibilities.

Arveyda wants to know about the play. Fanny shows him a page. The play is titled “Our Father’s Business,” and on the page she shows him, Ola, whose name has been changed to Waruma, is seen sitting on a mat on the floor of his cell and scribbling on the margins of an old newspaper.

Fanny tells Arveyda how she and Nzingha plan to present this play, which will include sections from three of the most controversial of her father’s plays, at the next anniversary of his death, which is fast approaching.

Arveyda is curious about Africa. His music is well known there. He tells Fanny that if she and her sister are arrested for presenting their play, he will come to Olinka, in the spirit of Bob Marley, and chant down the walls of their cells.

“There is a good chance we will be arrested,” says Fanny. “But if Africa is ever to belong to all its people, the women as well as the men ...” She does not finish, but looks sad.

Arveyda feels very American. Too American to ever think of Africa as something that has to be rewon. Only a part of him came from there, after all.

He tells Fanny about his mother, Katherine Degos, and how little he knew her. And how this ignorance caused him to stumble blindly in the world.

“Katherine Degos wasn’t even her real name!” he says, still incredulous. There is residual pain around the old wound caused by her indifference to him as a child, some emotional awkwardness. But he is healing.

“Carlotta and I went back there, to Terre Haute,” he says, “and went out, with my aunt Frudier, to see my mother’s grave. The stone says, big as life, ‘Katherine Degos.’ But my aunt says to us, with a sniff of her big nose, ‘Her real name was Georgia Smith.”

“Georgia
Smith
!”

Fanny flashes on her own mother, who isn’t well these days. She is back in Big Mama Celie’s old house in Georgia. She reads, watches TV, gardens, talks to Fanny on the phone. There is, Fanny believes, a gentleman caller, or callers.

“‘I never liked her,’ says my aunt, ‘even though she was my baby sister.’” Arveyda stretches his eyes very wide to express his astonishment at this news. “‘No, never could stand her phony, filthy ways.’”

“Wow,” says Fanny. “No tongue biter, she.”

“But wait,” says Arveyda. “Carlotta says to her: ‘Aunt Frudier, you didn’t like Arveyda’s mother? But why?’ She asked this gently, as you would ask a question of someone who’s ill. ‘She was a fake, she was a phony,’ says my aunt, ‘she was never satisfied to be herself.’

“Back at my aunt’s house she showed us some old photographs of my mother. Carlotta looked at them first, and I thought she grew pale. Then Aunt Frudier brought out an old silver-framed photo of my father. Carlotta grew paler still. And thoughtful. With a gentle hand on my arm, she passed the pictures to me. The one of my father had stood on a table beside my bed for a long time when I was growing up. But I’d forgotten it. Now I looked at my parents’ faces, and I can’t imagine how I must have looked myself. Because my mother and father looked nothing at all like Aunt Frudier—a dark brown, heavyset woman with scowling features—but looked instead like members of Carlotta’s family—if, of course, she had had any, other than her mother, that is.

“‘Our family,’ says old Aunt Frudier, ‘was part African/Scots and part Blackfoot. Your mother got the Blackfoot part. And your father, who came through here to work on the road-construction gangs, was black Mexican mixed with Filipino and Chinese.’ He was by far,” says Arveyda, in wonder, “the best-looking man I’d ever seen. ‘But yet and still,’ says Aunt Frudier, ‘your mother was just plain Georgia Smith, because that’s the name our parents gave her. But would she have it? No. “The damn thang don’t fit for shit,” she’d say. Likewise, the colored men that were always hanging around her. She said they bored her silly. No dash, no flash, no money, either. After all, by that time she was Katherine Degos from Santa Fe, nineteen and with a wasp waist. Tan legs under dresses that never hid much ...’

“As she talked,” says Arveyda, “I could feel, after all those years since they were in their teens, the hatred Aunt Frudier still felt for my mother. It gave me chills to think of my mother growing up the object of such contempt. I felt almost sick.

“The trip back to Terre Haute had been possible for me largely because of Carlotta’s support, and as we endured the envy and spite, the repressed hatred of over fifty years, that Aunt Frudier spewed over us, I was glad she was there to help prop me up. Even though I am a grown man, with children of my own, each of her words against my mother struck me as a blow; as if I myself were still a child. But, oddly enough, as she raved, I felt closer and closer to my mother.

“Aunt Frudier had married a plumber; and, strange to say, he was still alive!” Here Arveyda suddenly laughs, that pealing, gut-deep laugh of his; throwing back his head to let the sound come freely out.

“He was alive!” he almost shouts. “The old survivor, God bless his pitiful soul! After God only knows how many years of suffering under Aunt Frudier’s acid tongue.

“He just stayed as close as possible to that TV, though,” Arveyda says, soberly. “I think he was watching ‘Soul Train’ when Aunt Frudier announced dinner was ready, and she simply passed in front of him and switched it off.”

Fanny feels sad at this picture of Aunt Frudier’s husband.

She tells Arveyda about her grandmother Celie’s former husband, Albert, and about how, all the time she knew him, his favorite activity, there being no TV, had been to stare off into space. “Maybe these old, old men just have to sit down after a while and compress life to the straight and narrow view.”

“Well, but listen to this,” says Arveyda. They have left the piano bench, the studio, and the house and are walking slowly up the road from Arveyda’s house to Inspiration Point. “So I am feeling pretty timid by then, you know, and I’m afraid to hear anything else. But Carlotta means to hear it all, and so flings herself into the breach. ‘We heard about her church,’ she says, as if this is some recent gossip that just happened to come our way. We are at dinner by then, and Aunt Frudier is about to toss a wide chunk of pot roast into her spacious mouth. She drops the fork, pot roast and all. ‘Humph,’ she snorts, ‘some church.’ She looks at me with the same expression she must have looked at my mother: cold, cruel, contemptuous. ‘The church the rest of us went to wasn’t good enough for her. She said from what she’d heard, everybody ought to stop going to church at once and use that time instead to do for the poor. She run around for a few years after you were born “doing” for the poor. But by then your daddy had gone away on a job in the next state, and never did come back. And she soon run out of steam. Later on we heard he was killed; fell off a bridge that his gang was constructing. There was no body, nothing. We only heard about it by accident.’”