to call her back to me, to ask her to take me up into her arms and tell me that everything was going to be all right. But just as I’d learned to do when I was little, I shut that feeling out, turned to my face in the mirror, pasted on a smile.
Then it wasn’t long before someone told me that James had arrived, that it was time. I walked to the top of the stairs and stood where we used to sit and listen to their dinner parties when we were tiny, and I could hear Dad’s deep voice and loud laughter wafting up at me through the years, and for a moment I lost my balance and thought the heels on these stupid shoes were too damn high. I grabbed the banister with my shaking left hand, looked down and saw my brother smiling up at me. His face blurred and he was Dad, hair longer and smile broader and shoulders wider.
When I reached the bottom of the stairs, it was Josh’s voice that whispered, “You look beautiful,” but maybe it sounded like Dad. I smiled and blushed and Michele snapped the camera, but the flash didn’t go off and I knew the picture was lost, the one picture I ever would have seen of me and my dad. Tears sprang to my eyes as I rounded the corner and there was my aunt Libby in her striped dress.
“Does anyone have a Kleenex?” she asked. “Jules and I have this thing.” Her voice wavered as she, right there in the middle of me walking down this makeshift aisle, reminded us of all the Thanksgivings during which we’ve cried when we caught each other’s eye as someone spoke aloud the Robert Burns poem before the meal. I realized no one said it this year—we were so preoccupied with the wedding a few days away—and as if to make up for the neglect, or to bring myself back into this moment, I said it in my head as I crossed my childhood living room:
Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it,
But we hae meat and we can eat,
And sae the Lord be thankit.
But do I have meat or do I want it? Which one am I in the poem? Because how it feels is that something is missing, and even when there’s a feast on the table I’m hungry and alone.
When I arrived at the front of the room, the windowsills heavy with purple day lilies, Ngoni, Kathleen the priest, my beautiful sister Nan, and Dave the blond best man were each looking my way, and I had to shake out those thoughts and return. I focused on Ngoni’s herringbone suit, his black hair cut short to his head, his tidy wire-rim glasses, the deep browns of his skin and eyes coming together in a shy smile. His cheek twitched just a little.
Kathleen looked at me long before she told what she said might be an apocryphal story. “In antiquity,” she said, “when a marriage procession and a funeral procession came together at an intersection,” she said, “the marriage procession had the right of way.”
I was conjugating verbs in my head, left turns and triangles and ceremonies not my own. She saw my confusion, Kathleen the priest, and so explained it to let me catch up.
“The story tells us that love is more powerful than death.” She joined our hands there in front of the family who knew what she meant.
Then it was Ngoni’s turn, and he took out the papers on which he’d typed up some words from the book of Ruth: “Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”
I was too hot and couldn’t focus my eyes and my head was thumping and pumping. I turned to Nan and asked for the John Donne book she was holding, opened it to the page I’d marked, but the book shook in my hands and I couldn’t see the words, so I took a deep breath and tried to get steady.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desir’d, and got, t’was but a dreame of thee. . . .
My face in thine eye, thine in mine appeares,
And true plaine hearts doe in the faces rest,
Where can we finde two better hemispheares
Without sharpe North, without declining West?
What ever dyes, was not mixt equally;
If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike, that none doe slacken, none can die.
Dad wasn’t mixt equally, I wanted to scream. Our loves be so alike, you and I, I wanted to whisper. But when I looked across the space that separated me from Ngoni, I couldn’t tell if he saw me anymore. If he wanted to take my hand.
Kathleen burned brimstone, filling the house with smoke and the smell of sulfur. Rings were exchanged, vows spoken, our hands were wrapped together in a colorful stole as Kathleen declared that those whom God has brought together no man can put asunder. But when I kissed him, for the smallest moment, it felt like make-believe.
Until my aunt Annie said, “Doesn’t it make you want to clap?” and there was loud applause and we stood in the living room closed in by walls my father Sheetrocked, surrounded by the people who raised me or came up with me there in that house on State Street, and I came back into myself and then I clapped, too.
When it came time for the toasts, Ngoni gathered me up by his side and wrapped his arm around me, and the people in the room formed a circle around us. He said, using his teacher voice, “In Zimbabwe, where I’m from,” as though anyone there didn’t know where he was from, “it is believed that when a person dies, his soul goes to the wind.”
I heard Annie moan just a little. I felt Ngoni’s arm tighten around my shoulder. “I would like to toast the winds that brought us together.” And then I knew that he felt it too, our dads blowing by in the November night. They were there for me and they were there for Ngoni, and we couldn’t see through them to us but we knew that everyone was there to help us try to see through them to us. We knew that we would try to see through them.
THAT NIGHT IN the hotel room I had the dream again. The one I had the night I met Ngoni. The one where my dad is really alive. This time he was a homeless man in my hometown. I came upon him in the dark cold entranceway to the old record store on Main Street. I’d walked by him my whole childhood and not seen him.
We talked for hours, and by the end I understood why he had to do it, why he had to make us believe he was dead. I promised to keep the secret and I walked around the next morning proud that he chose me, proud of this secret only I could hold.
8
THREE YEARS LATER, Ngoni and I sat huddled on an airplane hurtling ever closer to Harare for my first visit to Zimbabwe. His immigration status was tenuous even after we got married, and until his paperwork was in order it didn’t seem wise to leave the country. We had brought his grandparents—Gogo and Sekuru, who’d raised him—to visit us a couple of years before, so I knew there would be some familiar faces when we arrived. But for the most part I spent that plane ride wondering what these weeks would hold. What it would feel like to see Ngoni in his place. What it would feel like to be the outsider.
The plane was filled with Zimbabweans, and I watched them talk to their children and their spouses and their elderly parents thinking about where they’d been, if they were returning to stay. I listened to their voices when they spoke Shona and tried to discern syllables I recognized from Ngoni’s phone calls with his grandparents. I listened to their voices when they spoke English and tried to hear words that would answer my questions. I lowered my eyes when they caught me looking and wondered what they thought about
