As Good as True Page 25

  Sweat beaded on Marina’s forehead.

  I patted her forehead with the rag. “Your father held the cub and handed me the bottle to feed it.” One reason I married him was because I thought he was that person—that young man who showed me kindness when I was hurting.

  “I wish I had known this.” Sweat rolled down her temples.

  “It was a long time ago.” My skin crawled at my foolishness. I did not understand my life with him, nor had I thought through my life without him. I left to dampen and cool the rag again. I knew Marina thought that if I had shown him compassion, our life would have been better.

  In the kitchen, Louise sat with her head bowed. She was resting or praying. She looked up. “You are good?”

  I nodded and ran cool water over the cloth. I took it to Marina. I turned up the fans as hard as they would go and the whir filled the room.

  “Tell me more.” Her lips pinched together as if she was in pain.

  “Gus and I took turns with the bottles. The milk dribbled down our arms, and she licked us with a sandpaper tongue. When she had enough milk, she lay down in the sun, with her belly exposed. Your father sent us in for Coca-Cola and candy before he went back to welding.”

  Marina relaxed. The pains faded and she blotted her neck and face with the rag.

  “Papa watched me like a hawk that day. Elsa and Nelly talked in Arabic, and usually he’d clamor on with them, but he kept his eyes on me.” He thought he had lost me too. “I turned away and pretended Elsa’s voice was Mama’s.”

  Marina stacked the pictures she wanted to display and put the others back into the hatbox. “I can’t believe the town let him keep a lion in a cage all those years.”

  “People thought it was interesting. When it was young, he drove it in his truck like it was a dog, and then he kept it tied on the backside of the store. But once it got big, he welded it in. He was afraid some crazy would let it loose. I could hear it grunt and call all the way at Papa’s store.”

  “I’m going to have this picture run in the paper—tell that story,” she said. “How people came to see the lion. How the store got its name.”

  The clock ticked. The house bloomed in the heat. The cuckoo began its litany of chirps. Marina looked at me, and then at her watch. “It’s twelve already.”

  “Are you okay now?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. Her mind shifted gears and she sounded impatient. “Mama, it’s time to clean up. We need to set up for the visitation.”

  I did not want her to be ashamed of me. I wanted her to know I stayed in my marriage to be with her and Eli. I could have run away and left them. I wanted her to know that she and Eli were the loves of my life, but it sounded too strong, so smothering that it would repel her. I wanted to prove my love, that I wanted to care for her and her baby.

  I could see the pains had affected her, and her expression looked harsh in the bright light cutting through the window. “Time to get busy,” she said.

  I had felt close to her, but her words pinched. Her loyalty lay with him. I wanted to be the kind of mother mine had been—patient and forgiving—but he made me something else. I said, “Marina, I did not choose to have your father laid out here. I don’t want all those people here.”

  Her tone was all business. “Whether you like it or not, you have to mourn him.” Whenever she happened in on his yelling, he stopped and she darted out, both pretending like nothing happened. “We have to bury him with some semblance of respect.”

  “He was good at hiding things from you.” I wanted her to know, but if I showed her the bruises, the bit of comfort we’d had together would vanish and we’d be back where we started.

  She looked at me hard, her eyes and mouth at jagged angles. She let out a shuddering breath. “I know the two of you struggled. I know he was angry.” She covered her face with her hands, and when she looked at me again, her gaze was soft. Her tone changed. “You’ll feel better after a bath.” She sounded like a child planning a tea party. “It’s time to get ready. I need to get the big percolator going. Eli is coming with my silver. I want to put out those few pictures.” Her eyes scanned the room where Louise had not yet tidied. “First the visitation. Then the Rosary.”

  “This is not necessary,” I begged. “Let’s call the funeral home. It’s not too late to do it there.”

  “It is,” she said without mercy.

  I lingered too close and she shooed me with a wave of her swollen hand. “Mama, go upstairs and freshen up. People will be here around four.” She pushed me into the hallway and retrieved the dress bag from the kitchen. “I’ll help you get ready.”

  I did not want to get ready. I did not want to go through with this pageant for Elias. If I did not change, she would have no choice but to send everyone away.

  But I followed her upstairs. She hung the bag on my closet door and pulled out two day suits with three-quarter sleeves. She laid a navy one on the bed. “For today,” she said. She hung a black one on the closet door and said, “For tomorrow.” The pale skin of her neck met her dark hairline. So beautiful, even from behind, even in her swollen state.

  Growing up, she had asked questions—how I met her father, if I’d had other beaus, what was my wedding like? She wanted the romance and the love story, but there was only a one-sided story to tell. I gave her paltry details. The wedding was at the church, Gus gave us the silver, and her grandfather built the house on property he had purchased for my mother. Then I would remind her, in a harsh tone, how I grew up in Mounds over the store, working when I wasn’t in school, no mother to dote on me. She would frown, sad or appalled at the poverty of my girlhood, so different from hers. She never worked a day in the store and she had anything she wanted—friends, piano lessons, dresses, ribbons, bicycles.

  When she was twelve or so I discovered her in the attic in my wedding dress, and the sight angered me. “Get out of that now.” She looked surprised at my temper. “Get out of it now.” She gave excuses. “I’m playing. Why can’t I play?” I told her to get it off and she argued with me until I grabbed her arm and ripped at the dress. I slapped her backside, a girl almost as tall as me, and she looked so full of hate. “This dress is not your plaything,” I yelled. She had no idea why I was in a rage, but I wanted nothing of the lie of my marriage to touch her. I didn’t know if she ever told her father what I had done or if she stole it away, like a hot brick in an oven, always there to remind her of what I was capable of.

  “How’s this one?” She held up a pale-gray blouse with a bow at the neck.

  “That’s fine,” I said. I should have created more happy moments for her when she was a child, seeds of joy to grow on. Elias had given her so many. But I was stingy and too bitter to share what little hope I had stored away. If I had given her something more, she would have that now. She would see me differently.

  I wanted to weep as she pulled out another blouse, this one cream, otherwise identical to the gray one. She was dressing me up like a plaything.

  “Go, get your bath, Mother.” She zipped the dress bag. “They are sending a hat and some gloves later today.”

  I wondered if she knew that the mailman’s house had been burned and that Eli had driven him to the seminary. She might know, too, what Nelly accused me of. She might be hiding her knowledge to keep me in line, to save face and get through the ordeal of burying her father. Maybe she could handle only one crisis at a time, and my leaving was secondary to her father’s death. Maybe she did not know. She was a mystery to me, keeping her emotions locked safe away, buried deep below the surface.

  If Nelly whispered in her ear, “Your mother murdered him,” I feared Marina would harbor too much doubt not to convict me. It would be easy enough for her to wipe her life clean of me.

  She busied herself making the bed and then sat on it. “I’ll rest here ’til you’re out. Then I’ll help you with your hair.” She held her belly and breathed out a long sigh.

  I turned on the fan above her and widened the opening of the b
edroom window. The mockingbird’s song broke the quiet lull. His noise filled the room.

  “Mother, you only have a short time.” She flicked her hand. “Go, clean up.” She wanted me ready and on stage.

  I walked from the room but stopped and peered back through the open door. Her forearm rested across the mound of belly. A mournful expression fell across her face.

  Her skin glowed. No trace of makeup was left, just the flare of life flowing through her. Good, that she was still and resting, perched like a precious bird in a cage. Marina was mine, if only for a few minutes more, if only for the time it took me to bathe. She was contained there, still, my daughter.

  The Lion

  After I married, I baked early in the morning and worked the rest of the day. I liked getting up in the dark and feeling the oven warming against my side as I drank my coffee. After the sun and the loaves had risen, I opened the oven to put them in and the heat rushed out like a warm sigh on my face. In the beginning I was clumsy with a hot rack or a pan and touched them to my forearm. I collected a row of tiny burns, stacked one on top of the other like a miniature white ladder running up my arm.

  I was happy working. The radio played low and the sounds of the clock and my breathing were peaceful. I liked it all—the kneading, the folding, the flattening of mountain bread between my palms, the smells of yeast and fresh baked bread, the slick of sweat between my clothes and skin. I remembered my mother doing these same things, and this was enough to feel good.

  The baking kept me going, especially later in the day, when I became Cinderella of Nassad Grocery. I cleaned the plate-glass windows, scrubbed the floors, discarded the ruined food, and anything Elias or Nelly asked of me. I also cared for the lion, Leona.

  The creature watched for me. Her large golden eyes fixed on the back door of the store and waited until I came out. I believed she remembered my smell from my childhood and from when I was a teenager and came to her on the nights she rumbled and called and I could not sleep. I snuck into Papa’s store and wrapped bits of meat to take to her. I ran as fast as I could down the river trail, not because I was afraid to be alone at night or that my father or Elsa would be angry with me for going. I ran because I was happy to be alive, to be running, to have the blood rushing through my veins and nothing but the natural world around me. It was like swimming through air and darkness under the trees. I was part of the landscape and no one looked at me to figure out what I was or where I was from. There were only my feet against the dusty trail as I ran beneath the bridges and past the old courthouse. I was anonymous.

  As I got closer to the grunting lion, she stopped her noise and paced the cage, sniffing the air in the direction from which I came. I gave her the scraps of meat and she licked my palms where the meat had been. She lay down and she quieted. I sat with my back pressing against the bars and she scooted her weight close. She could have killed me one way or another, by clawing though the bars or severing my hand when I gave her the meat, but she seemed happy to have another living creature near. I pretended she held my mother’s spirit, and beneath the quiet, dark sky, I told her my thoughts on books or boys or the mean girls, until her head lay on the concrete pad. Then I walked sleepily back home.

  When I married and became her caretaker, she waited for me, like a sphinx, her head intent and high, her hind legs beneath her, her forepaws in front. She jumped to standing when she saw me coming, waved her tail high, and paced her cage. The sight of me signaled food and water, relief from her loneliness. I hosed down her cage, lugged meat and bones for her, and gave her fresh water each day. I was the one to touch her and scratch her side. She purred from deep in her chest and it sounded as if it came from the center of the earth.

  I never talked about the lion to Marina because that animal lived in constant misery until she died. A big cat, five feet long, she paced the cage, and her black-tipped tail constantly swatted away flies. Her tongue lolled out of her fleshy mouth and over yellow teeth. People came to buy a Coke, candy, or cigarettes and to have a look at her. She smelled, marking the corners of her cage and lying inadvertently in her own foul. There was the stink of the meat too. She went through a hundred or more pounds a week, most of it bits from the slaughterhouse or the hams or shanks about to spoil in Elias’s cooler.

  It was a nasty job, but I did it because I cared for her. She lay on the concrete floor with no shade on the hottest days and no protection from the wind or rain. I did what I could to help her, because when the lion saw me coming, she softly grunted as if she were saying “Hello.” Her greetings were gentle compared to the great noise she was capable of—her grunting could be heard five miles away. I dreamed of saving her, but there was no place for her to go. The sight of her caused my heart to swell like a bruise, but it cheered me, too, when she looped her tail high and rubbed her flesh against the bars of the cage because I was near.

  I persuaded Elias to rig a tarpaulin above her. “She’s been fine all this time without a drape,” he said. But I insisted, and he did as I asked, maybe to humor me. I rolled it back on nice days to give her sun, and when it rained I pulled the tarp over the roof and down one side of her cage.

  Nelly chastised me for wasting my time, but Elias shushed her. “What is the harm?” he asked.

  “She’s wearing herself out taking care of that beast. She can’t conceive.” Nelly berated Elias that I was not yet with child, and she whispered in my ear, “It is a sin to interfere with God’s work.” She was greedy for a grandchild to hold, for someone to love. For my failure to produce a child, she looked down on me. She said, “When I was your age, I had borne my sons, had come to America, and was running my husband’s business.”

  She told Elias to take me someplace nice—a vacation. Nelly said if I relaxed from work, I might conceive, but I did not want to have a baby. The idea that I might die as Mama had made me lonelier than ever. I had no mother to help me or teach me. Nelly would take over and the child would be as much hers as mine.

  Elias wanted to get away, whether we created a child or not. He told me to pack a bag. We left the lion and the store in Ivie’s care the next day. We had been married a full year when we drove toward Gulf Shores on a clear, blue spring morning. The dogwoods bloomed white and pink, and the redbuds had popped open their purple blooms. Easter was near, and that meant a big production with Nelly. I was thankful for the coming week without her and her constant questions.

  As we drove toward the Gulf, I thought of my parents’ crossing of the sea and the start of their new lives. I hoped the beach trip would be a new start for us. We were escaping Nelly and the store, but I worried about the lion in Ivie’s care. I worried I had abandoned her.

  Elias had not yet turned bitter and hateful, not yet raised a hand against me or called me ugly names. As we drove, I listened to him talk and realized he was like me, uncertain of his purpose. He hated being a grocer. He complained about the constant smell of rotting produce, the bloody butcher’s aprons, the loading of boxes and crates, and most of all, the “kissing the asses of all the asses”—his customers. He hated being under his mother’s thumb, but he said that when his father had died, “I had to keep things going. I had to keep them fed.”

  For one stretch of the drive, Elias talked about how his father had had little tolerance for Ivie’s pranks, stealing cigarettes or getting caught with moonshine. Their father beat Ivie for every transgression—when the teachers said he didn’t pay attention in school, or when he did not finish a job at the store, or when he broke down and cried for no apparent reason. Elias’s father had other punishments too, like running laps in the heat or holding books with arms outstretched for long periods of time. Elias mostly avoided his father’s brutality, but Ivie always stepped into trouble. Elias said, “I felt sorry for him. I want to help him for Mother’s sake.” He worried, too, about leaving Ivie in charge. “He’s been sober for months,” Elias said. “I hope it sticks.”

  For the first four days at the beach, it rained. We stayed in the cabin
and nervously shifted around each other. Elias seemed pleased enough to be free of the store and his daily duties. He chain-smoked and drank coffee as he read paperbacks and newspapers in a soft chair in the corner. He did not shave and his beard grew in dark and handsome. At night, a lamp glowed near his face and he looked peaceful in the dim light.

  I made coffee all day, and out of habit, I made the round discs of mountain bread, but without the rush of Nelly pushing behind me. We’d brought a crate of groceries and a cooler of sandwich meat, and he waited on himself according to his own hunger. I wore my hair loose, no jewelry or dresses. If our eyes met, he smiled and nodded, but he did not bother me in any way, no touching or climbing on top of me in the night. We were free from the roles we played at home and at his store. In the beach cabin, we were two polite strangers sharing a space.

  I sat inside a screened porch overlooking the beach and watched the rain pelt the white sand and the wind blur the gray line between sea and sky. Each day, as the light dimmed and the gray line of sea and sky went black, I felt the disappointment of a child missing the circus. I had expected more—the excitement of my mother’s Beirut, the exotic seafood, the octopus, the oysters and shrimp that tasted of the sea, and throngs of people, cafés, grand hotels, the lights of the city, sandcastles—or her excitement of seeing New Orleans when she came to America. I suggested we drive there for the day and spend the night, but he said, “No, we’ll be battling weather all the way.” There was only endless rain, sand in the sheets, Elias’s cigarette smoke, and the bland food we had brought from home.

  On the fourth morning, Elias woke me and said, “Let’s go out.” We drove in the rain down a strip of cabins and red Vacancy signs glaring against the wet, gray atmosphere. There was a Ferris wheel at the end of the road where we turned right to go into town. Elias said, “You couldn’t pay me to ride that contraption.”