Grandma,” I said, thankful now for a script. Thankful for her reference to what she considered the other mixed marriage in her life—my parents’. “Look at me! I’m fine. I’m happy and I live in a world that doesn’t wonder what I am. By the time we have children, their world won’t be as divided as yours has always been.” How naïve to think this, but how could I have known?
She wouldn’t look at me. She just shook her head. Continued to cry. Was it an hour before she spoke? A day?
“There’s nothing I can do to convince you?” she asked finally, and I watched her free hand fold and refold a cloth napkin on the table. I looked at her clear nail polish, her papery white skin. Wondered if the bowl would tumble out of her lap onto the floor and smash to bits. Wondered who would clean it up.
“Convince me?” I asked.
“Because if you marry him,” she said and looked at me, her round eyes narrowed to slits, “don’t ever come to me. Don’t ever come to me again.”
I knew then that I never had to eat soggy chicken parmesan at a crappy Italian restaurant again in my life. I saw the exit map and I wanted to follow it. I could get out of this condo, forever. I pushed my chair back and stood up. Walked to the door.
“Julia,” she said behind me.
I turned and saw her there, small and sour. Did I want her to take it back? Did I want her to come through herself and back to me? Did I turn because she was my grandmother, because she was my father’s mother, because once when I was small we stood together at his grave and cried? She could have made it right with a word.
But instead she shoved the glass bowl into my hands. I grabbed onto it because I didn’t want it to smash my toes. I grabbed onto it because I didn’t want it to smash her toes. I grabbed onto it because she shoved it into my hands and I couldn’t do any other thing.
We looked at each other for a moment, but there were no more words. So I turned and walked out the door with my gift. But once out onto route 84, I pulled into a rest stop, opened the driver’s-side door, and placed the glass bowl on the black pavement. Looked at it in the rearview mirror as I drove away, an illusion of light in the afternoon sun.
BY THE TIME I joined the Taconic Parkway an hour later, almost safely returned to my apartment in the woods, singing along with Joni Mitchell with the sun shining and my eyes alert for deer in the median, I felt a familiar tap on my shoulder.
“It’s just a muscle spasm,” I said aloud, though I’d never before pretended to believe the tap on my shoulder was anything but what I knew it was. My dad, reminding me he’s here.
I steadied my hands on the wheel and pulled myself up a little so I could see the backseat rather than the road behind me. I startled hard and swerved into the other lane, looked back to the road to right the car. Took a deep breath.
“No one was there, Jules.” I said this out loud, too. But I saw him there in black lines and fuzzy shapes and tan cloth-covered car seats. Was he in the car with me, or hovering just outside?
I pulled into a rest stop that invites tourists to park and gaze at the view. Turned around in my seat and looked bravely into the back, convinced I’d be able to tell that he had been there, certain I’d see mustaches and transition lenses and a mop of curly black hair. Lying in the backseat maybe, giggling like a girl.
But of course the backseat was empty. So I stepped out and walked around the car a couple of times, held tight to the bike rack and stretched my arms long, arched my back to open it. “It was just a fucking muscle spasm,” I muttered under my breath before I got back in the car and pointed it toward home.
6
“TURN IN HERE,” Ngoni said as he touched my elbow to steer me into a small restaurant with tables and chairs lined up along a narrow window, a counter at the back. “This is the place I learned about fish and chips.”
We were just off the bus from Cardiff to Llantwit Major, in Wales, where Ngoni went to high school. Our fiancé visa application required forms signed by city officials in each of the places he’d lived, and we managed to make a reunion out of this one. We hadn’t seen each other in six months, and it seemed worth the credit card debt to meet here for a week to spend some time together before the wedding. Make sure we meant it.
I looked around at the people in the little Welsh café and thought about Ngoni’s uncle Dakarai, if he’d ever eaten here. If any of the people here knew him. Dakarai had married a Welsh woman he’d met at Oxford, but all I knew was that it didn’t last. All I knew was what Ngoni had written to me about Dakarai these last months.
“Me being here helps my grandparents’ burden with Dakarai,” he wrote in one letter. I’d not known there was a burden with Dakarai. “Dakarai talks to himself sometimes now,” he wrote in another. “Dakarai broke down the door in his bedroom,” in a third. I sensed fear in Ngoni’s tidy blue cursive words but didn’t know how to hold it. This wasn’t a topic we could talk about on the phone, Ngoni standing in the hallway of his family home. So in my private thoughts about Ngoni’s uncle I used words I’d applied to my own father, and which Ngoni sometimes used to discuss his—mental illness, schizophrenia. But I didn’t know if Dakarai’s illness was like that of his older brother Donal, Ngoni’s dad. If he was, did that mean the illness snaked through this family I was marrying into, as it snaked through my own?
“Tell me more about Dakarai and Cati,” I said to Ngoni as we sat in that Welsh café, unable to ask what was really on my mind.
“There isn’t very much to tell.” His face looked weary. “They met at university, at Oxford. They got married in Zimbabwe.”
Now I had different questions. What was that wedding like? How did his grandparents, who raised Ngoni and whom I had not yet met, treat that white daughter-in-law? I looked across at my fiancé, his soft face, his stoic eyes, the newspaper greasy in his hands, but I couldn’t ask any questions at all because thoughts about race and mental illness were mixing up inside me and I wasn’t sure which topic to pursue, wasn’t sure which topic I really wanted to know more about. Nothing felt safe.
“When they moved back to the U.K., he couldn’t find a job, the marriage fell apart. So he returned to Zimbabwe.”
That conversation we’d had in my dorm room about Ngoni’s father came back to me in a solid beat. How his grandparents had sent him—a child in grade school—to a traditional healer in the bush whom they’d hired to heal his father. Father and son spent weeks there, drinking and expelling medicines, hoping to also expel the evil spirit, because “the spirit that possesses the father possesses the son as well,” he had told me. I wondered now if the family took Dakarai to a traditional healer to expel his spirits, too. If the spirit that possesses a man also possesses his brother. Dakarai went to the best private high school in Zimbabwe, was its first black head boy, studied at Oxford. As Ngoni reminded me of this, I realized that maybe my future in-laws didn’t believe in just one thing. Maybe they lived in two worlds. They’d blamed spirits for possessing Ngoni’s father, but maybe this time they’d blamed something else.
“If he’d been able to find a job, become productive,” Ngoni said, “he and Cati would have been fine. He would still be living here.” He stood up, wiped his hands on a thin paper napkin, wrapped up the newspapers with our other trash, and tossed it all into the overflowing bin. “It’s as simple as that.”
It didn’t seem simple, but something stopped me from saying so. The same thing that stopped
