speak to her God. She bowed her head, and her wire-rimmed glasses slipped down her delicate nose. Grief kept her voice quiet, and I wanted to reach over to soothe her, I wanted to steady her. But I stayed still as she prayed. Gogo clutched her small purse between fingers wrinkled and dark with age, her thin wedding band loose on her finger. But my eyes couldn’t focus, and it was Mom’s ring I saw through tears, a diamond and two sapphires tipping to the wrong side of her hand as she stirred the sugar into her cup of black coffee. I was ten.
* * *
I’VE ASKED MY mother one hundred times to bring me there, but each time the answer is the same. “He’s not at the cemetery, kiddo.”
I’m smart enough not to ask where he is, then. Because I would go anywhere. Instead I bide my time, and when my grandmother Rose visits, I climb on wobbly legs into her car. It’s a wide Oldsmobile with red pleather seats and it smells like an old person, and she makes me slide all the way across the front seat until I am right up next to her in that spot where the gearshift is in Mom’s car. She pats my knee in a rhythm that I think means she loves me, but I can’t tell because it makes me want to jump out of my skin and run. She pats my knee in a rhythm that I think means she’s trying not to cry—not yet, because she has to be able to see to drive us to her son. She is the only person who will take me to this place, and it’s my job to stay stoic and brave beside her or I’m scared she won’t let me come along, so I focus on the stripe across the top of the windscreen where the glass is tinted blue. No matter the weather, things look sunny up there. I’m scared of what will happen when we get there, when we won’t have the blue tinting to protect us from the rain.
Now we’re at the foot of the grave, and just like that day when we put him here, her body shakes with sobs and she pulls me tight and tighter against her. Her straight wool skirt scratches the backs of my bare knees. Her large plastic glasses dig into my shoulder where she grasps them. A Kleenex balled in her other fist is a knot at my neck. We stand at the foot and stare at the stone. I read the words and wait for him to appear. I read the words and try to call him forth. But this is no magic trick, and I can’t make him come and attest to why he left. His mother can’t make him come and demand from him an answer for his absence.
How long do we stand there waiting?
Does she place a rock on his grave?
* * *
I LISTENED TO Gogo pray for her lost son. Thought I am lost. Felt something shift and start to loosen. I didn’t know where I was, was not safe. I didn’t know this man at my feet and shouldn’t be mourning him. But was this mourning? Was it grief? My hands shook and tears fell and the lump of clay resisted the squeeze of my fingers. I tried to breathe. Gogo scrunched her nose and sniffled, pushed up her glasses and sighed. She’d said what she came here to say and she walked now to the car. I watched her go but my feet were cement. Sekuru followed her and I watched him go too. After a time, Ngoni turned and held out his hand to me. I couldn’t move. He let me be.
Some time later—minutes? hours?—I walked to the stone and placed the lump of red clay on the rounded granite top of it. Lost my balance and grabbed the headstone so I wouldn’t fall. Hot air filled my lungs, my vision blurred.
* * *
I’M TINY. I climb up onto Dad’s monstrous lap, an ocean of legs for a little girl. “Can I sit in your square?” He bends his leg, places his right ankle on his left knee. Puts me there.
“You can always sit in my square.”
10
AT THE SOUND of my approach a few days later, Gogo came to the open door of her second-grade classroom and stood in the fading sunlight, clapping quietly in greeting. She made this now-familiar gesture to welcome me to this place, the last school she’d teach in before her retirement in a couple of months. Her eyes met mine without wavering, with neither pride nor reticence, just an understanding between us that it mattered I’d come. Mattered that I could accept and return her welcome. So I clapped shyly, and smiled.
Everything was tidy and in its place in Gogo’s classroom, and while there were no children at the desks that late in the day, evidence of them wasn’t hard to find. Stacks of books piled neatly here, art supplies and drawings over there, a chalkboard at the head of the class with the day’s agenda carefully transcribed. Gogo walked over to her desk to push in her chair and collect her purse and said, “Shall we take a walk around the grounds before going home?” It wasn’t really a question, and I welcomed another chance to see the sky.
We soon came upon the headmaster on his way to his car, and Gogo introduced me with actual pride in her voice. “This is my muroora,” she said, rolling the first r and extending the middle syllable for emphasis, so he knew she meant it, and so that I did. The Shona word for “daughter-in-law” wasn’t one I thought she’d ever use for me. There are just some words that don’t apply to white people here. But after she had held my hand on the way home from the cemetery the other day, something had shifted between us, and now she got to announce it, make it formal. My body relaxed at the sound of that word, and I shook the headmaster’s hand firmly, didn’t look away from his gaze.
But I didn’t know if there was a new term I should start using for her. I’ve always called her what Ngoni does, Gogo, a term borrowed from the Ndebele, the other main ethnic group in Zimbabwe. It means simply “Gran,” though she is more of a mother to my husband than a granny. When Ngoni’s father became ill, his mother left, and for a short time Ngoni and his little sister lived alone with Donal. There were scary days, ones Ngoni doesn’t talk about much, but in time Gogo and Sekuru—which is Shona for “Grandfather”—took them in. They nursed Donal in his illness and raised the kids alongside their own. Their youngest child, Tendai, is only a year older than Ngoni. Technically his aunt, she feels more like a sister to him. In those early days of our acquaintance, she was starting to feel more like a sister to me as well.
Once the headmaster went on his way, I turned to Gogo, hopeful I’d find a way to talk openly with her. I felt I owed her an explanation for what happened to me at the cemetery, the place where Ngoni was meant to finally, formally mourn his father, and instead it had been me who wept. But I didn’t know how to tell Gogo about my dad, about how he died. I didn’t even know how to explain that he’d been an unobservant Jew. It somehow made more sense to start with my grandmother Rose, how she’d forced me to decide between her and Ngoni.
“Listen to me, my daughter,” Gogo said when I’d finished, taking me by the crook of my arm as we walked toward her house. “When you married Ngoni, you became one of us, you became a Munemo.” She emphasized the surname, made it sound royal. “And from now on, when I need something, I will come to you.”
I smiled, but I didn’t know what she meant.
“In our culture, when the mother—or in this case, the grandmother—needs something from her son, she cannot go to the son. Once he is married, she must go to the muroora.”
I tried to imagine what sorts of things she might need from me, from Ngoni, and it took me a moment to realize this wasn’t about things—or it wasn’t only about things. So I said, “I will be here,” and squeezed her arm with mine.
“This is one of the ways that we tie a family together,” Gogo said, her eyes steady on the road ahead of us. “This is how we create bonds. When I need something from Tendai, I go to her husband. He speaks to her, and in this way we become more closely tied together. It will be the same with us.”
I didn’t know why this was her response to my admission about my own grandmother and how she’d hurt me, but I’d been learning in Zimbabwe
