The House of Discarded Dreams (6 page)

If she were asked to explain how it felt, Vimbai would’ve faltered for words, groping for images that best described what she was experiencing. Her grandmother’s sight entered her own like a hand enters an empty glove. Vimbai had been hollow and now she had a center, a depth, a density—she felt three-dimensional and alive and aware. She focused her eyes and she could see every grain of sand in the bottom, every rock, every shrimp hiding in the crevices. She saw kelp forests and the silvering of a school of anchovies, the rapid quirk of a shad. On the bottom, hagfishes braided themselves into an incestuous, slithering nest of Gorgon’s hair in the empty cavity of a dead shark’s head, its gill arches protecting them like the barred windows of a jailhouse.

And beneath and beyond all that, under the sand sifting over the skeleton of a sunken ship, there were horseshoe crabs, pale and unwell. There were hundreds of them, or perhaps thousands, all of their tiny legs moving in unison, burrowing in the sand. As Vimbai looked at them, they stared back with their pinprick eyes. And as if one, they shifted, their legs working in reverse now, digging themselves out rather than in.

Among all the strange occurrences of the past weeks, the fact that the cold-blooded crabs were able to react with such speed and determination bothered Vimbai most of all. She wanted to pull away, to break the surface and to not have to see this, but her grandmother’s quiet attention held her, their eyes—Vimbai’s and
vadzimu
’s—riveted to the creatures. They varied in size, from the tiny ones as small as a quarter to the adults as big as a dinner plate, and yet all of them moved together, the living carpet of them swarming onto the surface of the sand, their mouth parts open in plea or hunger. As Vimbai pulled away, the wave of crabs heaved after her; as she moved closer to them, they retreated but never far away.

“Why are they doing it?” Vimbai whispered.

“It’s like that story I told you,” the
vadzimu
answered. “Weren’t you listening?” Her tone was impatient now, stern—just like she used to be in life, the kind of woman who would take her own daughter to be carved up by razorblades—but always for her own good.

Vimbai frowned. “What does the story have to do with horseshoe crabs?”

Grandmother heaved a sigh. “The tortoise,” she explained slowly, patiently, as one would to a dim a child, “did not want the moon. But the oceans followed him nonetheless, as they always follow the moon.”

“I dreamt about it,” Vimbai interjected. “Seas following the tortoise.”

“He did not want it, did not ask for it—and yet. He drank the moon, and the moon in his belly was bigger than he, and it commanded the ocean whether the tortoise liked it or not.”

Vimbai considered she might have drunk that was so compelling to the crabs, and gave up. It wasn’t her first beer in the house and it wasn’t the tears she cried in secret, letting them soak into her pillow, her hair, her eyelashes. But there was something inside of her that made her find the house and bring her dead grandmother along, something that made her want to study horseshoe crabs—and now, apparently gave her a power of command over them. They were not as cute as Maya’s half-foxes, but they were Vimbai’s—at least, they seemed to think so.

When she opened her mouth, the salt water flooded it, numbing her tongue and pounding her teeth with its frozen hammer. Her face did not feel a thing, and she wondered idly how was she able to hold her breath for so long. Nonetheless, she managed to ask, “What do you want with me?”

The crabs answered in a quiet rustling of their legs and mouth parts, in the sad stares of their tiny eyes,
We want you to take care of us, and let us take care of you
. And this is how Vimbai found herself in possession of a horseshoe crab army.

Vimbai remembered the time when she was little, before the horseshoe crabs and her anxiety about Africana Studies. Back then, she considered New Jersey prosaic and hardly the place where one could hope to grow up while having important experiences. She listened to her parents as they spoke after dinner; when they talked to each other they did it in Shona. Back then, Vimbai did not concern herself with questions why it was so, but now she understood—even though both were taught English from an early age, Shona was a way to set themselves apart, to reaffirm that they were of the same cloth as each other, set against the rest of their surroundings. Later, Vimbai thought it an unnecessary affectation, and forgot most of what little language she knew back then. She did not realize the need to set herself apart—in fact, her childhood was dominated by the opposite impulse, to be one of many.

Her color did not help matters—even though they lived just a few miles away from Atlantic City, their particular town was white; they were the only black family on the block. And no matter how much one tried, there were things that simply could not be hidden.

Afterwards, as an adolescent burdened with an unfair amount of social conscience, Vimbai went through a brief but histrionic stage of embracing her heritage—she reasoned that if one could not blend in, it was better to exaggerate the difference. It brought about a brief resurgence in her interest in Shona and African lit, as well as the love of ‘ethnic’ fashions. Out of these, the latter lasted the shortest—all it took was one eye roll from Vimbai’s mother to plant the seed of doubt. Nonetheless, it was during this time that Vimbai visited Harare and met her extended family on her maternal side.

Harare shocked her by its hasty urbanity—it felt like a city that was created too quickly, without giving a chance to people or the land to adjust to its presence. The tall skyscrapers that wouldn’t be out of place in Philadelphia or New York City jutted out of red soil, as if plopped down by some magic tornado. The houses pushed upward among trees; her mother said that they were called jacaranda trees, and that when they all bloomed, Harare was the most beautiful city on earth. They went to African Unity Square, and Vimbai gawped at the flower market that shone with so many colors—several of them not found on the spectrum, Vimbai was pretty sure.

Much later, when Vimbai was eighteen, she watched her mother cry when she read in the newspapers that the flower market was destroyed at Mugabe’s orders. She felt like crying too, but was too busy drawing a firm line between herself and Africana Studies and everything they entailed—even the flower markets in her mother’s home city. Now she understood the deep hurt of that destruction, the most basic betrayal of one’s childhood love. It was not just about the flowers; it was never just about anything. It was always about what one knew to be true about the world when one was a child, and the death of that knowledge.

Chapter 6

“We have to get back to New Jersey,” Maya said one morning, the ruddy fur carpet stretched by her feet across pale linoleum tiles. “We’re almost out of coffee, and the milk is going bad.”

Vimbai peered into Maya’s cup, the murky coffee in it studded with pellets of milk coagulated in an unpleasant fashion. “Ew.” The question of return had been on her mind, even though she tried not to think about her classes and her mother, insane with grief—the moment she did, her stomach felt sick.

“Exactly.” Maya made a face and took a cautious sip.

“I suppose I could ask my horseshoe crabs to tow us back,” Vimbai said.

Maya smiled. “So they are
your
horseshoe crabs now, huh? Do they have little harnesses?”

“No,” Vimbai answered and drank her coffee black. “But I guess we’ll need to give them something to grab on. They have to walk on the bottom—they are not great swimmers.”

“Why couldn’t you befriend dolphins?” Felix said.

Maya laughed, eyeing her half-foxes, half-possums tenderly. “Yeah. Mammals are smarter.”

Vimbai shrugged. “I don’t care. I like crabs. And they are the ones that can take us home, so be nice.”

“Are you sure that they can?” Felix said.

Vimbai wasn’t. “Pretty sure,” she said out loud.

After breakfast of dry pancakes (they were low on syrup too), Vimbai went to talk to the crabs. Her grandmother came along, quiet and helpful as usual. She helped Vimbai see and helped her talk, and the words that bubbled out of Vimbai’s mouth underwater were both of theirs. Moreover, Vimbai had noticed an increased frequency of dreams about Harare—especially the vegetable garden in her grandmother’s backyard—to the point where she suspected that the ghost’s memories were leaking in and coloring Vimbai’s own. Or maybe the proximity of the ancestral spirit reminded her. Oh, jacaranda trees in bloom, Vimbai sighed underwater. Oh, horseshoe crabs. Will you take us home, to the sand bars and beaches of New Jersey, where you come every spring to spawn and dance through the tides on your little segmented legs?

It’s not yet spring
, they answered.
It is cold and we will die if we leave the safety of our deep sleep
.

Vimbai nodded, her hair floating in front of her face and crosshatching her vision like a mosquito net. Or a fisherman’s one—she shuddered when she remembered the quartered corpses of horseshoe crabs sold as bait in every bait shop. They were good to put in eel traps, they said. No wonder they didn’t want to go back without great necessity. “Do you know of anyone who can help us?” she said. “If we don’t get home, we will die.”

The crabs consulted among themselves, their whispers audible only to ghost ears. Finally, they said,
Go back go back home. We will help you—just hang some ropes for us and don’t look into the water until you get back home. And promise, promise to protect us from death if we come with you
.

“I’ll try,” Vimbai said. “But how can I protect you?”

The
vadzimu
pulled her out of the water. “It is simple business,
sahwira
,” she said. “Just don’t let them die.”

Vimbai had spent this morning braiding ropes that would be long enough to reach the bottom—she denuded the closet in her room of its vines, leathery and tough, and she twisted them together into long strands. She found supple branches in the young forest that had sprung where the attic door used to be, and she peeled off their bark. She teased apart the vascular bundles and twined them around the vines to give them enough strength to move the entire house.

She attached the ropes she made to the steel bolts in the porch, and hung them into the water.

It was difficult to avoid the temptation to look, but she resisted. The crabs asked her for a reason, and Vimbai knew enough fairy tales where a violation of explicit prohibition spelled an immediate and cruel disaster—all her sources agreed on that, European and African both. She just had to make do, and simply imagine the solemn crabs grabbing her ropes, clustering on them, their weak legs digging into the wavy sand studded with shells, and pulling, pulling with all their might. Or perhaps they could secretly swim, and no one ever knew about that—perhaps this is why they told her not to look. She imagined them, floating in the thickness of water, suspended like trilobites in amber, graceful as falling leaves.

She thought bitterly that those who featured in those cautionary fairytales had no graduate schools to apply to—if Vimbai could document such an interesting behavior as swimming, her application would be a snap. Then it occurred to her that the ability to talk was even stranger.

This collision of worldviews—one that allowed for talking horseshoe crabs and one that hinged on graduate school applications—made her breath catch in her throat, bowled her over, brought her to her knees, and she clutched her head in her hands. Ever since she had moved into the house in the dunes (which was now not quite the same house in the ocean), her mind, quite unbeknownst to her, had labored at keeping these two worldviews coexisting but never quite encountering each other. Now, accidentally, the two were brought together by the crabs, and Vimbai rocked back and forth on her knees, her head between her sweaty palms, and struggled to gather her thoughts. What am I doing here, she said to herself. Stupid Felix with his black hole coif and his pet desiccated head, stupid Peb, stupid half-foxes that weren’t even all that cute. Stupid Vimbai for playing along with this nonsense rather than packing up and going back home; her mother would’ve been so happy. She wouldn’t even bug Vimbai about staying out late.

Not that Vimbai had much of a social life, but she occasionally stayed late at her study group, and sometimes they went out for a pizza. No matter how sophisticated and urbane, Vimbai’s mother had a real hang-up about Vimbai staying out after dark.

She had understood it better in Harare, where her grandmother explained to her that decent girls did not stay out late.

“Why not?” Vimbai had said, in a voice that made her mother frown dangerously. She did not approve of Vimbai mouthing off to her elders.

“Because you know what happens with young men and women after dark,” grandmother said.

Vimbai laughed. “What? Sex? It happens during the day too, you know. People might stay out late not having sex, or have sex at 9 a.m.”

“That’s enough out of you,” her mother interrupted, and dragged Vimbai out of grandmother’s house by her arm, to go meet the family of her aunt twice removed.

Now she understood what clinging to habit, to tradition, because sometimes tradition was the only thing that kept one sane.

The house started moving again the very next night. They couldn’t feel it at first, since for a change they all gathered together downstairs to watch the TV tuned to some foggy ghost channel—it showed nothing but snow-covered mountains and two women talking to each other on their cell phones; Vimbai found the women strange, since, despite the split screen, they appeared to be in the same room. Vimbai shifted in her chair and shot Maya a restless look. Maya smiled lazily back and whistled at the half-possums at her feet.

“Not hunting tonight?” Vimbai asked.

Maya shook her head. “Tired. And what’s the matter with you? You hardly ever went . . . well, anywhere!”

“The house has mutated,” Vimbai parried. “How do you know it’s not dangerous?”

“I don’t.” Maya shrugged and stared at the TV screen again. “It probably is. But it is certainly more interesting than this.”

“Yeah,” Felix agreed from the couch, where he lay framed by the ghostly shapes of Vimbai’s grandmother and the Psychic Energy Baby. “The TV here sucks. I wish the phone worked instead.”

“It’s the middle of nowhere,” Vimbai said as mildly as she could. “But don’t worry, the crabs said they will get us back to New Jersey.”

“About time,” Maya said. “Are we moving yet?”

Vimbai looked out of the window, and at first she thought that the house remained as it was—there was nothing but water and star-studded sky wherever she looked. But soon she noticed a small wave rising where the porch met the water. She rushed over to the window on the opposite side of the room, and had to clear away a thin, disconcerting layer of fresh meat that had grown over the windowpane just recently. She saw a luminescent wake, and cheered. “We are moving,” she said to the questioning gazes of her roommates and ghosts.

And so they were. Vimbai tracked their progress by the rotation of the alien stars overhead, waiting for the familiar clangy shape of the Big Dipper to swim into her view. As the house traversed the waters, Vimbai found herself in little need of sleep, and she stayed up until morning, looking from one window or another, and feeling like a mariner and the discoverer of the world.

Her grandmother sat next to Vimbai, silent, but Vimbai knew that the
vadzimu
did not share her fascination with explorers and pioneers, discoverers and seafarers. They were trouble, they only brought bitterness with them, and they took away and even when they gave back it was not the same. They spoiled everything they touched.

Vimbai’s grandmother was not nearly as politically aware as Vimbai’s mother, or even Vimbai herself—she had seemed preoccupied with her vegetable garden and her family, and politics and history were dwarfed by these concerns, existing only as distant and vague hurts, a persistent feeling that things were worse than they could’ve been, and the blame was easy to find. Grandmother grew up in Rhodesia, and she never went to school because the black people were not allowed to. The occasionally heard claims that the English brought education to Zimbabwe sounded hollow to Vimbai because of her.

“Grandmother,” Vimbai said, and tore her gaze from the darkened window. “How did you find us? Why did you come with me instead of staying with mom?”

The ghost’s eyes clouded for a moment, by memory or regret. “Past speaks to the future,” she said. “The present is already crumbling.”

Vimbai’s heart fluttered in her throat as she pictured her mother—her parents, both of them, still young and beautiful—getting older and smaller and more fragile, birdlike, and finally shrinking away to nothing, falling apart like a handful of ash. She shook her head, no, it cannot be like that.

“And you called me,” grandmother said. “Your mother never did, but you called to me, through your anger, through your contempt.”

“I never . . . ” Vimbai started.

Peb floated up to the window and peered along with Vimbai for a short while; then it went to the
vadzimu
and nestled on her back, like an ugly festooned hump. When Vimbai looked at him and all his absorbed phantom limbs, she thought of the exotic fish that decorated themselves with fins and outgrowths until they resembled a piece of coral or an algal bed.

“Maybe I’ll do better with you than I did with your mother,” grandmother said.

“You didn’t do badly with her,” Vimbai said. Really, she didn’t—it was not her fault, she did as she was taught, she meant as well as the parents all over the world do.

“She left home.”

Vimbai smiled at that. She could not leave home, at least not now—the home was spacious but surrounded by a flat watery expanse that offered little in escape possibilities. Even with the horseshoe crabs in her command, Vimbai would not dare to dream of escaping. Then again, she did not really want to. “I won’t leave. Your other daughters did not leave. Why aren’t you home, with their children?”

“They have the whole clan. You have no one. No ancestor spirits to protect and guide you, to connect you to the creator.”

“I appreciate that,” Vimbai said. “And mom would too . . . if she knew, I mean.”

Grandmother nodded, consoled or just playing along. “What are you thinking about,
varoora
?”

Vimbai looked around to make sure that neither Felix nor Maya was within earshot. When she was content that there was no chance of being overheard, she moved her head close to the ghost’s. “Love,” she said. “Being in love, I mean.”

Boys—or, she supposed, in her age bracket they should be properly called young men or guys—were a minor puzzlement in Vimbai’s life, and one more point of tension between her and her mother. Vimbai’s mother was downright schizophrenic when it came to Vimbai’s dating life—she warned her away from staying out late and spending too much time gawping at men, and yet she worried that Vimbai didn’t.

Vimbai remembered going to the prom—just two years ago—and she remembered the dress she wore—a bright yellow silk sheath, golden even, the perfect color of the noon sun. She still kept it, in vain hopes for some occasion to wear it again. She did not remember the boy who took her to the prom. She remembered her parents being happy that she came home early but then whispering in the kitchen.

Vimbai did not know why she wasn’t interested in them—like all her contemporaries, she went through the pre-assigned stages of development. When she was in middle school, she read encyclopedias on the sly, hunting for dirty words and hoping for illustrations. She pored in secret over art albums that her parents kept out in the open, but looking at the paintings with them present felt uncomfortable, like a too-tight scratchy woolen collar. And yet, the actual boys with their stained hands and hostile eyes did not appeal to her.