The Temple of My Familiar

by Alice Walker

  Suwelo had sat in what would have been Uncle Rafe's chair at such an occasion, at the head of the table. Miss Lissie and Mr. Hal were on either side of him. They raised their glasses of iced tea or lemonade to the spirit of Uncle Rafe, and set to with real appreciation and undisguised gusto. Rafe had loved himself some gumbo, Miss Lissie allowed.

  The gumbo, which Mr. Hal hid assured Suwelo would be even better tomorrow, and the next day and the next and the ... was so good Suwelo could hardly believe he was tasting this dish for the first time. It had the kind of flavor that made you feel as though you were tasting all of life; there was, well, an almost sexual flavor to it. He loved the slick gumminess of it, its spicy fullness. Not one flavor that had gone into its creation was any longer distinct.

  An hour later, after the dishes had been washed and they were still feelingly praising the gumbo, made even more special because the three of them had prepared it, the friends sat in the living room attempting to read different sections of the newspaper. There were the usual reports of murders, rapes, torture, wars, abandoned children, trashed apartments, and new cars. It was Miss Lissie who first threw her section to the floor.

  "There's nothing I can do about any of this madness today," she said. "And just thinking about it spoils my digestion."

  "You're right," said Mr. Hal, neatly folding his section and placing it beside him on the couch.

  "I'd rather keep hearing about you and Fanny."

  "Yes," said Mr. Hal, "if they're going to blow us up, or make us freeze to death and starve in the dark, we might as well be enjoying ourselves by hearing a good story."

  Suwelo found himself in the seat next to the television set. In a gesture he now recognized as ritualistic, he turned slightly in his chair and tugged at the corners of the blue shawl, which did not really need straightening. He sat back and began.

  Suwelo had thought that if he ever sat in the "hot seat" beside the television, he would never be able to talk about his life as Mr. Hal and Miss Lissie talked about theirs. His own life felt too modern, too current--who knew how his and Fanny's story would turn out?--too ... personal. He felt a bit of the shyness he'd suffered as a small boy when asked by an adult to give an accounting of himself, and he felt exposed in a way he had not while helping to make dinner in the kitchen. Talking to them then had been indirect, somehow. They'd each been absorbed in the task before them. It seemed he was mostly talking to the crabs he was cleaning, and only incidentally had Mr. Hal and Miss Lissie heard. He cleared his throat and slid his long fingers up and down his corduroy-covered thigh. His eyes, which had lost their unreflective look, seemed both candid and full of feeling.

  "The yurt that Fanny and I had," he said, in a firm, clear voice, "and our five acres, were on a ridgetop that overlooked a valley of sheep ranches and vineyards. The opening faced east, so that each morning we were awakened by the rising sun. Though we were in a small clearing, there was forest all around, and we shared the land with deer, squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, and birds of all description. There were enormous hawks playing--actually looking for food, but hovering, and appearing to play--against the wind, and the most graceful vultures, with huge wingspans, and owls--which, Fanny always said, I resembled, and so perhaps the owl was my totem--and sometimes sea gulls, for we weren't too far from the sea. If you ever come west, and I certainly hope you do, I'd love to show you this place. It really is special. We were not the first people to think so; we often found bits of chiseled flint and an occasional potsherd.

  "Fanny from time to time thought she saw Indians. The only time I ever saw any was when we ran into them camping down at the state park, with everybody else. But these were not the ones she saw. At least not back up in the hills where we were. 'Just over there by the stream,' she said to me once when we'd gone down to the river to swim and she'd wandered back into the woods to find the source of a small creek that fed into the river. 'What exactly do you think you saw?' I asked. She had that intent, slightly stoned, but joyful look she too often got, for no good reason, it seemed to me. Or, I should say, for no reason I could see. She pointed downstream. 'Just over there, very quiet on the bank, two Pomo Indian boys, their spears raised, fishing for salmon.' Wrong season, I said, pedantically. It was summer and very hot and very little water was left in the river; certainly not enough for salmon, which are huge fish. She wasn't perturbed by my response. She was used to it. Generally, when I used this tone of voice, she would simply stop telling me whatever it was she had experienced. But not this time. She described them: brown skin, long black hair, very round, 'moon' faces, she said. Loincloths. Loincloths? I teased. She nodded. 'As still as deer, they were,' she avowed, 'and as hard to see.'

  "I didn't understand or share these flights of fancy, but when I wasn't resentful that she was the possessor of this dubious gift of--what shall I call it?--'second sight,' 'two-headedness,' whatever, I enjoyed them vicariously. They were part of what enchanted me about Fanny. And in the summers, when I had no teaching responsibilities and we were both able to 'disappear,' as she liked to say, from the world, they were a definite part of the entertainment. Truly that was--the 'disappearance'--her happiest time; when she felt she didn't exist to anyone but herself and sometimes not even to herself. I'd never known anyone who loved the thought of impermanence, invisibility, being at peace under a toadstool, more than Fanny." Suwelo laughed at this image of Fanny, which he visualized perfectly. There she sat under her little brown toadstool, happy as a toad, and being one.

  "She picked up information in ways I never understood, either. She'd given up reading in any systematic way; the information she needed simply came to her. She'd visit a friend, or someone she barely knew, for example, and knock over a vase. The water from the vase would splash on a stack of books on the floor. Fanny would carefully dry off all the books, on hands and knees, apologizing profusely the whole time. Then the information, or whatever it was, she'd been looking for, vaguely, would appear on the wettest page of one of the books. She'd be drying this page in front of the fire and right there would be exactly what she'd wanted to know. Her eye would rest on the page for only a minute, as she absorbed the information, and she would be on her way. I've seen this sort of thing happen hundreds of times; and it was really, sometimes, maddening. By comparison, everything I wanted to learn, I had to work very, very hard for, spending weeks, even months, locked up in musty library stacks with decaying tomes stacked well above my head.

  "Or wishes! Fanny could wish for almost anything--food, clothing, an experience, a ticket to anywhere, a phone call from a friend, anything; more otters in the river, to see a buck with really huge antlers--every September when the deer season opens, the bucks are routinely hunted down and slaughtered, yet Fanny saw not one with huge antlers, but two!--even to be taller than she was. She actually did grow taller by an inch by taking a martial-arts class twice a week... . And whatever she wished for would happen. It was her wish that got us the yurt, an authentic handmade yurt built by a modern Dutch witch from Amsterdam, passing through on her way to God knows where, a yurt that I'd certainly never have dreamed of one day living in. After all, the only yurts I knew anything about were those in photographs taken in Outer Mongolia that I'd seen in National Geographic and that were made out of yak hides. But no, the one she conjured up for us was round, yes, more or less, and made of wood. It had a tiny stove with a chimney pipe that stuck out the side, and a roof made of shingles. There were windows everywhere. She'd gone off somewhere and slept in one, after dreaming about one for months. She loved it. We have to have a yurt, she said. It wasn't a week later that our friends called with the offer of theirs. They had built a regular, square, modern house, which Fanny considered indescribably ugly, and without a soul, and had been on the verge of demolishing the yurt. We moved in. There was about enough room to curse a cat, as they say, but since we were there only during the summer, we spent most of our time outdoors. At night it was just the perfect size for cuddling close on our futon mat and looking up in
to the stars."

  At this juncture in his story Suwelo abruptly stopped talking, got up from his chair, and went upstairs. When he returned he was carrying a small photo album. He passed it to his friends, who flipped through it quietly. They saw snapshots of Suwelo, looking as if on a lark, sitting on the ground and apparently preparing wild vegetables to eat; a funny-looking dwelling that made them think of the little crooked houses in children's fairy tales; and a shapely, sun-brown woman with a look of the most intense anticipation of good on her face. It was a face that expected everything in nature to open, unresistingly, to it. A face that said Yes not once but over and over again. It was one of those faces that people have when they've been sufficiently kissed as very young babies and small children. Though her hands were at her sides in the pictures, one had the sense that they were raised and open, offering or returning an embrace.

  "Can you believe that that face is ever gloomy or defeated?" asked Suwelo, chuckling. He couldn't believe it himself, and he'd seen it so often.

  "'I want a garden,' Fanny said. "But there was not a drop of water on the land from May to November. The water we didn't haul from the park materialized out of a long black plastic pipe connected to a well that two women on the ridge over from us, who had a vineyard, personally helped us lay down.

  "Sometimes I felt swept along in a rush of experiences that felt seriously magical. I came to believe that whatever Fanny wished for would happen, and that whatever she was even remotely against, would fail. In a way this made me feel afraid in any angry confrontation with her. You know the expression 'being withered by a look'? I think Fanny could wither with a look. But, fortunately, she was not the least bit interested in withering. No, her way was to ignore, to withdraw. Suddenly she simply was not available to interact with whatever ignorance she perceived. And when she came back, there was always a definite remoteness, a feeling coming from her of 'Well, we are different, after all. I have my way, you obviously have yours. We shall simply coexist. If I can share space with bobcats, bucks, otters, and snakes, I can certainly live with you.' A week of this. Then we would talk. We'd laugh. And we'd decide my poor behavior and her stubbornness were getting in the way of celebrating the imminent rising of the full moon. We could not have that! And our lives moved right along.

  "I have to laugh when I think of what I told you earlier: that Fanny didn't know about my playing around because she was a space cadet. It wasn't because she was a space cadet that she didn't know. It was because she trusted me. Trusting me, she simply didn't tune in to a lot of the signs the way she could have. And, too, there were all the other signs, from all over the place, that she was getting and trying to relate to. What did it mean, for instance, that a bird one day walked backward slowly and carefully down a big oak tree in our clearing, hopped over to Fanny, looked up at her, and climbed up and sat on her head? This made her think of Queen Nut. Of course it did! And of the ideogram of the vulture on her head. Maybe Nut was trying to tell her something? Who could know? Well, in this case, Nut was trying to tell her something, which she found by talking to a friend of ours who is a Goddess worshiper and an Egyptologist. Her favorite saying of Nut's, said our friend one day as we sat looking at a drawing of her on a tarot card, is: 'Whatever I embrace, becomes.' 'That's it!' said Fanny. 'That's what?' I asked. She didn't explain. But I think now that what she meant was that we must, all of us, turn toward whatever it is that we do want, in our lives, in our loves, on the planet, and whatever we don't want, just have sense enough to leave alone. But I didn't know that then.

  "I remember when I tried to get her to wear Frederick of Hollywood--type lingerie. Fanny has a beautiful body. But you'd never know it. I knew she'd look just as good or better than the women I fantasized. But she covered herself from head to foot in the most unappealing stuff. Long gowns, long, thick gowns, at night. Flannel. With high necks. She wore long Johns. Long Johns. At least they were cheerful. She dyed them all kinds of colors. Red and yellow and orange. She looked cute in them, though, rather than sexy.

  "'But I get cold in that stuff you like,' she said. 'And I feel ridiculous. It's too flimsy to wear. Why do you want me to wear this?' she asked, looking at me so piercingly that I wanted to drop the whole thing.

  "She reluctantly put on some red satin-and-net underwear I'd bought and came out of the yurt and showed herself to me.

  "'I feel like a neon sign,' she said.

  "And I had to admit that there, in the forest, in the middle of nowhere, she looked like one.

  "'But lust loves neon,' was my feeling.

  "Afterward, as they say in early twentieth-century novels, I felt okay, at least I thought I felt okay. She felt terrible. She cried and said she felt degraded. I never saw the red satin and net again.

  "But this particular struggle, which I lost--the struggle to get her to wear sexy lingerie, and to enjoy it as I did--went on for a number of years. I was being influenced in my private life with Fanny by the hidden sexual life I lived elsewhere. She would have realized this, and I'm sure it hurt her. Once, she even sat straight up in bed out of a sound sleep, or so I had thought, screaming, 'Who are all these women in this bed with us? Who are they? Who are they?' And she began to batter me with a pillow, and to weep. But we made a joke of this. For she wasn't supposed to be aware of what I was doing, and I wasn't supposed to be, as far as she was concerned, doing anything.

  "Her tolerance wore thin, finally. 'Listen, Suwelo, you like that stuff, you wear it,' she said. And she actually bought me a little red bikini with a cut-out space in front, a little vee, and I pranced about in it happily. And then I did start wearing skinny, scanty, colorful underwear, because I did like it, and she got a little better when she shopped for herself, but always her choices were tasteful, understated, nunnish. I had to face the fact that to Fanny the cut of her underwear and of her gowns didn't matter very much. She wanted comfort, warmth, sturdy pieces of clothing that were well made. To be truthful, she much preferred shopping for sweaters and boots and items like that in the men's department; she said they were much better made, more generously cut, than in women's wear. Occasionally she bought something we both liked; something usually expensive, and very sexy, but it was nothing that could ever be confused with neon.

  "So, yes, I think she knew. Knowing Fanny, she probably knew before I did. Maybe she stayed away in Africa for such a long time because she wanted me to have the freedom to fuck around.

  "It was a freedom I'd never had. And I was brought up on Playboy, in which the goal of every red-blooded man is to pierce as many women as possible, and to think of their minds, their creative gifts, and their professional abilities as added sexual stimulation, nothing more. I loved that joke inspired, I'm sure, by the Playboy mentality: What did you do with the female scientist who discovered a cure for the common cold? You screwed her. Yuk, yuk.

  "It wasn't as if she wasn't free to sleep around too. She was. And she fell in love at the drop of a hat with all kinds of people, not all of them spirits. But sleeping with them didn't seem that important to her. She tried to explain this to me, using her relationship to the planets, yes, the planets, as an example. 'I live on Earth,' she said. 'I love it; I see that it really needs me, whether it knows this or not.' She smiled. 'Now I know there are all those other beautiful planets out there somewhere, and they may be infinitely more exciting, but Earth is where I am, and the longer I relate to it, the more interesting and exciting it becomes. We know almost nothing about Earth. You do realize, don't you?' As it happened, at this very time Fanny confessed she had never experienced orgasm during our lovemaking, and there I was fancying myself the compleat lover, if only she'd dress properly for her role; though she regularly experienced what she later told me was 'a kind of ecstasy.' But no orgasms. For sure I knew almost nothing about 'Earth' and should have held off trying to get to the other 'planets.'"

  "Woman is a mystery," commented Mr. Hal, encouragingly. It was, Suwelo felt, the only appropriate response.

  Miss Lissi
e said nothing.

  "And another odd thing, too," Suwelo continued, overjoyed, actually, to be talking to them, "was how many of her old lovers were still sort of 'around.' Even the one who'd been drowned in a boating accident off the coast of South Carolina when she was in high school. I don't think anyone she cared about ever left Fanny; and she was incapable of feeling sad when someone died. She felt sad about the way people died, or sad about their illness or whatnot, but, in a way, the living and the dead, once they were dead, were pretty much the same to Fanny, and present to her in about the same way.

  "This was bound to give me a certain feeling of insecurity. There were times when, if she wasn't there, and I could see she was not, though her body was sitting quietly beside me in a chair, I wasn't sure whether I was. I always seemed to be chasing Fanny even when she was literally locked up tight in my arms. Carlotta didn't understand this; who could have? I used to tease Fanny that she brought a new meaning entirely to the word 'bondage.' Sometimes I felt so disillusioned, so full of self-pity and futility, so married--but in a way that seemed totally different from 'marriage' as it is commonly known--I was just sick. The nights I've spent rummaging about in this house"--Suwelo looked up, toward the stairs--"thinking over these things! Other men marry women and say they love them and within five years, though they still live with them, you can see they have essentially separated themselves. There is no longer a spiritual or even an authentic physical connection. Instead, they are connected by house payments, a car, children, political expediency, whatever. Over time, Fanny and I shared none of these things. The divorce was merely our first shedding of any nonintrinsic relatedness. After that, it was as if we just had to see how far we could go. Could we be two people who met anew each time, for instance? 'I couldn't stand feeling bored when I saw you coming,' she said. As for me, I couldn't bear the thought of a loss of autonomy or freedom causing her to lose her magic. Because I came to appreciate and love this aspect of her more and more.