The House of Discarded Dreams (2 page)

Vimbai left the office marveling at her mother’s ability to sniff out any shirking of one’s responsibilities, no matter how otherwise preoccupied she was. And she had been preoccupied—ever since the new department chair, Dr. Bouchard, was appointed, Vimbai’s mother seemed to know no rest. Even late at night, she paced the hallway, sometimes muttering to herself in English and Shona; Vimbai could hear her voice through her closed door. All the more reason to move out, Vimbai thought.

She arrived to her class late and slunk to the back, to take sporadic notes of plants’ inner workings and to brood. The tubes inside the plants formed neat organized patterns Vimbai enjoyed sketching; it felt almost like doodling rather than studying, and her thoughts flowed along with wavy lines and pooled in quiet oases of shading, neat little areas of cross-hatch pencil strokes.

“This is nice,” the girl on Vimbai’s left whispered, peering into her notebook.

Vimbai remembered the girl’s name—Sarah. They were in a few classes together, and Sarah had irritated Vimbai on several occasions with her pre-med student’s obsessive anxiety. “Thanks,” Vimbai said with a little stingy smile.

Sarah smiled back, apparently oblivious to Vimbai’s disinclination to make friends. It always puzzled Vimbai, this implied certainty some people possessed that their attention could not possibly be an imposition.

Vimbai turned the page and took more thorough notes than usual to indicate that she was not going to participate in any conversations.

Undeterred, Sarah waited for her after class. “Boring, huh?” she said by the way of striking up a chat.

Vimbai shrugged. “I like it. I like anatomy.” She took a tentative step away.

Sarah followed, and there was really no good way of escaping her in the long straight hallways, made all the more desolate by the poisonous shade of their green paint. “You have any more classes today?”

Vimbai nodded. “African American Lit,” she said.

“Oh,” Sarah answered. White kids never knew what to say. “How is it?”

“Why don’t you take it and find out?” Vimbai suggested with more vehemence than she felt.

“I don’t think it’s for me.”

“Why not? You know all there is to know about it?”

Sarah shrugged. “I’m just not interested.”

Of course she wasn’t. Vimbai remembered her mother’s frequent complaints that the white kids never took any classes at the Africana studies, that they always assumed that black equaled special interest. As much as Vimbai hated to agree with her mother, she had to in this case. But she didn’t argue with Sarah—the fatigue was overwhelming, the sense that she had had this conversation and this argument too many times before. “Whatever,” she said. “I have to go.”

It wasn’t true—her next class did not start until an hour later, but she was not in the mood for explaining herself. Another thing her mother complained about—the constant necessity of explaining oneself, of answering questions. “People are just trying to be nice,” Vimbai used to argue when she was much younger. “They’re just showing interest.”

“Showing interest,” her mother had replied, “would be bothering to do some research on their own rather than pestering people with questions. Don’t you see? Even when they’re nice, they’re placing a burden on you. Just wait and see how quickly it gets on your nerves.”

Vimbai sighed and headed for the library—it was usually empty during the lunchtime, and in the stacks it might be easy to avoid Sarah or any other overly talkative classmates who would be eager to burden her with their interest or socializing.

The library was located in the new building, adjacent to the science labs. It had tall narrow windows running all the way from the high ceiling to the tiled floors, and Vimbai liked the way sunlight striped the stacks, while others hid in the shadows, light and dark interspersed in regular narrow slats. She headed for the shelves draped in soft shadow, meandered between then into the unexplored library depths hiding reference materials—newspapers from the sixties and the seventies, artifacts no intrepid explorer would be likely to sift through—and sat on the floor, her back resting comfortably against the cloth-bound sheaves of papers. The air smelled of dust and air-freshener, mixed with Vimbai’s own scent of warm skin and salt, and she curled up in this quiet welcoming ambience.

Unlikely to disturb anyone, she dug through her book bag and found her cell and the crumpled sheet of paper from the dunes. She dialed the number and almost chickened out and hung up when the female voice said “Hello.”

“Hello,” Vimbai answered, keeping her voice low out of the old library habit. “I’m calling about the house . . . in the dunes.”

“We still have a room,” the woman said brightly. “The rent is two hundred bucks a month, and you will share with myself and Felix—he has the third bedroom. Interested?”

“I’d like to see it first,” Vimbai said.

“Come by tomorrow,” the woman said, and dictated the address.

Vimbai wrote it down and promised to stop by.

That night, she dreamt of sea and whales. The whales floated on the silvery ocean surface like balloons, and water from their blowholes rose and fell like the fountains in Longwood Gardens. The whales sang in surprisingly soft voices, a rhymed children’s song Vimbai could not remember when she woke up; but as the dream retreated, she kept smiling—the whales were a good omen.

Chapter 2

No wonder the rent was so cheap—the house was in a woeful state of disrepair, its wooden siding bleached by the ocean winds to the color and consistency of driftwood; the street on which it nominally stood proved to be a cul-de-sac, almost concealed by the sand blown off the dunes that surrounded the house like waves. The surf pounded the beach nearby, and Vimbai suspected that the house wasn’t condemned only because of pure oversight, since it clearly violated several zoning laws and the next good storm would likely flood it. Still, she could not deny that she was thoroughly charmed.

She lingered for a while on the porch, cracks between the boards wide and gnarled like fissures in dry clay. She thought she caught a palimpsest of motion in the shadows under the porch, a quick shift of light and a change in the quality of the cool dusk. Some wildlife was bound to nest there, and for no good reason Vimbai hoped for a den of the tiny dwarf foxes that still lingered in the barrier islands, despite the constant expansion of the tourist towns and vacation homes. The foxes who begged by the roads, their red tongues teasing and wet between their sharp teeth; a whole nest of tiny pups, Vimbai imagined, cuddled together in the somber secretive darkness under the porch.

“Do you want to see the rest of the house, or are you content with the crap under the porch?” a female voice said next to her.

Vimbai straightened, smiling. “I thought I saw something under there.”

The girl who stared back at her smiled too, then laughed. “Of course you did.” She was taller than Vimbai, and gave off an air of good health and clean strength. She wore a somewhat unseasonable yellow tank top and bleached cutoffs that exhibited her long strong legs to great advantage. She shook hands with Vimbai. “I’m Maya. We talked on the phone.”

Vimbai nodded, her fingers trying to hold their own in Maya’s strong grip. She shook hands like someone who liked to show strength from the beginning, but Vimbai did not think her threatening. If anything, Maya reminded Vimbai of herself, in her need to establish dominance from the start. So she squeezed back as hard as she could. “I’d like to see the rest of the place, if you don’t mind.”

Maya smiled more, released her grip, and turned away giving Vimbai a chance to wince and mouth ‘ow’ while shaking her hand.

Maya motioned for Vimbai to follow, and stepped through the banged-up screen door much molested by the elements into the kitchen that bore traces of recent but unthorough cleaning. A few plates dripped in the rack, and the linoleum floor shone with fresh traces of water. The windows let through the pale light, and its diluted quality testified to the fact that the panes had not been washed in a long while. Formica counters, bottles with bleach, and a patchy geriatric refrigerator sighing in the corner.

“It’s modest,” Maya said, noticing the trajectory of Vimbai’s gaze, “but it works.”

Vimbai nodded and followed Maya to the sunroom or perhaps the den—there was a TV and a concave couch, which at the moment cradled the languid form of a very young and very white man who Vimbai presumed was the second housemate.

“This is Felix,” Maya said. “He’s quiet, so pay him no mind.”

Felix offered no opinion on the matter, and Vimbai dutifully turned her gaze to a couple of mismatched chairs that huddled by the wall, as if not quite believing their luck in having been rescued off a street corner on a garbage pick-up day, and a stern wooden table, covered in slicks shaped like pizza boxes. Good student living, familiar from the visits to Vimbai’s study group buddies off campus. A sense of hastily put together and transitory space, with a modicum of effort to make it one’s own and yet not to get attached. A ficus slowly dying in its way-too-small pot by the window where there wasn’t enough light.

“The rest is straightforward,” Maya said. “Bedrooms are upstairs, and then there’re bathrooms and closets and shit. You want to see it, or do you want a beer?”

Honesty born out of living at home for all her life, under her mother’s hawk-like gaze, compelled Vimbai to say, “I’m not twenty-one yet.”

Maya shrugged. “I don’t card. Don’t worry, if you’re in no shape to drive, I’ll tell you.”

“Okay then,” Vimbai said. “I guess I want a beer,” and only then realized that she had forfeited her right to the rest of the tour.

“I want a beer,” Felix said from his trough on the couch, miraculously brought to life by a single phrase.

This outburst of verbosity encouraged Vimbai to give him a closer examination. First thing about Felix that she—or anyone, for that matter—noticed was his hair. It wasn’t merely long or big; it undulated. The color of it was darker than black, a pure absence of light, so dense that no individual strands were visible. Occasionally this alarming hair reared up like tongues of flame, and then ebbed, calmed, and returned to its peaceful slow and hypnotic movement.

“I know,” Maya said. “It’s like a fucking lava lamp.” She had returned from the kitchen bearing three golden long-necked bottles, and handed one to Vimbai. “It’s even better with beer.”

Felix sat up and extended both hands to take his, a motion that Vimbai found childlike, almost animal-like. For the first time, Vimbai got an unobscured look at his features.

Felix could’ve worked as a model for a Raphaelite painter specializing in cherubs—he had smooth porcelain skin and a small perfect mouth that seemed painted on—if it weren’t for his eyes. Gigantic and fierce, with jaundiced whites streaked strongly with fat red capillaries, they rolled in his head with quiet fury, quite independently from one another.

Vimbai took a long swallow of her beer. She was aware that staring like this was impolite, but there was just no helping it when faced with Felix; fortunately, he seemed to neither mind nor notice—although the exact direction of his gaze was impossible to determine.

Maya pushed her gently toward one of the armchairs, and took the other. They did not speak a while—Vimbai staring, Felix preoccupied with his beverage, and Maya apparently giving Vimbai a chance to decide whether Felix was a sight she was willing to behold daily. Maya sat in the armchair that used to be burgundy, but currently hesitated between pink and gray; the original color survived only in the piping of the armrest over which she slung her legs carelessly, showing Vimbai the pink soles of her bare feet. Her black curly hair had been freed from the scrunchie that had held it together, and sprang up like a halo to rival Felix’s.

Vimbai smiled and took another pull. “I like it here,” she said. “It’s a nice place.”

Maya nodded. “And I,” she said, “I would like my other roommate to be a girl, and a black girl at that. His pale ass,” she motioned at Felix, “is plenty for me.”

Felix grinned and bobbed his head, as if acknowledging a compliment. “There are forces in the world,” he said cheerfully, and drank.

“Yeah yeah yeah.” Maya waved her hand in the air. “Whatever.” She turned her attention to Vimbai, a smile hiding in the plump corners of her mouth ready to come out as soon as Vimbai gave a signal. “So, what do you think?”

Vimbai shrugged and nodded, and found that her tongue had grown fat and lazy. She had had alcohol before, and half a beer never had this kind of an effect on her—no, it was this house, the languorous strangeness that colored the air despite the mundane furnishings; it was Felix and the black hole of his hair, Maya’s sharp gaze and quick speech. The house in the dunes pulled her in, and she imagined herself sinking all the way, deep beneath the waves of sand where it was quiet and golden, blue shadows of the trees above dancing—or perhaps it was the ocean with its still forests of kelp and bivalve shells scattered about on the wavy sand bottom, shells empty like open hands. She imagined picking up one of these shells and whispering into it, her eyes closed, her weak hand pressing the pearly concave surface to her lips. Another shell to her ear, whispering in the susurrus of the sea, talking in monotone, come back, come back, baby, come back home.

And then her own lips, her slow tongue shaping words like stubborn clay, I’m sorry, mama, I’m so sorry. The sea between the shells a distance, pounding of the surf, the impossible separation by many tons of dense and cold water. Two continents, too far apart to ever hope for reconciliation.

Vimbai pressed the phone receiver to her ear, the voice of her mother so far away, so defeated and alone. “Mom?” Vimbai whispered.

Only the static of the ocean answered, the empty static in the shell of the phone like a small ghost trapped in the wires.

It came over Vimbai whenever she stayed in the house long enough. Being trapped in amber, in ocean water, in time, in distance, suspended and separated finally from everything in the world. She used to dread her mother’s reaction, what she would say if Vimbai decided to move away from home; more than that, she feared her father’s resigned and unconditional support. Now, she could only whisper faintly into the phone, her lips salty and barely moving, I’m sorry, mama, I’m so sorry. She did not let them help her move; her separation, this carving herself off from the rest of her family, had begun.

Maya blamed the strange effects of the house on Felix, on the gravitational pull of his hair; Felix did not argue. Vimbai thought that it was the dunes, the underwater singing of the horseshoe crabs buried in the sand for the winter; the shifting of sand, the lapping of the waves, the eroding processes that ate away at everything, that made land part of the sea and carried the sea over land, the same forces that pulled Vimbai away from everything her parents were. At night, she listened to the whistle of the wind in the rigging of the old house and its creaking moans, the lapping of the tides, unable to sleep. And so it went.

Vimbai liked to sit in the kitchen in the morning—she made coffee and waited for Maya to come downstairs. Maya, always fascinating and evasive, a strange thing in herself, something that needed to be puzzled out and unraveled. Even though Vimbai was not sure why she felt that it was her job to unravel this enigma wrapped in a striped bath robe, she looked forward to the moment when Maya stumbled downstairs, her eyes half-closed and her nostrils flared in anticipation of the hot, clear coffee; there seemed to be few things in life Maya enjoyed more than that first cup of coffee in the morning.

“Good morning,” Maya said and poured herself a cup. “Thanks for making coffee—before you moved in, I was the one making it. Felix always sleeps late.”

“Sure thing,” Vimbai said. “I enjoy making it—I get up early anyway.”

Maya made a face. “Whatever possesses you to commit such silliness?”

Vimbai considered the question she wanted to ask and then discarded it—there was simply no polite way of asking Maya about the way she spoke, about her carefully cultivated non-regional accent, without sounding offensive. She sighed and gave up on the idea—her mother was right: Vimbai, even though she was born and raised in New Jersey, was still a foreigner to most African-Americans, oblivious as she was to fine distinctions of speech patterns and code-switching. She was informed that she was not getting it when she was still in high school, and she was ashamed to admit that she had made little progress in the matter.

Instead, Vimbai poured herself another cup of coffee. “How do you like working in Atlantic City?” she asked.

Maya barked a short strained laugh. “What’s not to like? Casinos surrounded by a ghetto. Land of contrasts, as it were. Plus, it’s a good place to bartend, really—men are too preoccupied with gambling to hit on you. Which is, you know, a good thing. Like Martha Stewart.”

“I’ve been at the casinos a few times,” Vimbai said. “With my mom, mostly. She does some research there—her specialty is urban folklore, and there’s a ton of it in Atlantic City.”

“But not in the casinos.”

“No. We went there for the buffets.”

Maya laughed. “Oh my god. Those are such freak shows.”

Vimbai’s upbringing urged her to argue, to insist that all people deserved a claim to dignity and respect, and ought not to be called freaks. But she remembered these pale and lumbering shapes, their faces slack and remote, their eyes permanently dilated in the artificial semi-darkness. They seemed to live in the casinos—at least, Vimbai had never seen them anywhere else; they seemed shy underground dwellers, sliding softly through their habitual dusk with white porcelain plates heaped high with pasta salad and ribs, their only break from the life of sitting on a high stool and pulling a lever and putting shiny coins into a large Styrofoam cup, their lives augured by the fast-spinning cherries and lemons in tiny transparent windows.

“I know what you mean,” she finally said. “Are the bars any better? I bet you have stories.”

“You bet right,” Maya said. “See, the casino bar is a great place—people come there when they are not gambling or eating, and that usually happens when they just lost a shitload of money, and cannot gamble anymore but are afraid to go back home. Some celebrate when they win, some are just there to hang out, you know? But it’s always the losers who are interesting. This is why I remember them the most, I guess.”

“Oh?” Vimbai smiled and refilled Maya’s cup. This solicitousness felt natural to her, warm. “What’s so interesting about them?”