The Temple of My Familiar

by Alice Walker

  "A happy ending!" Suwelo cries, flinging his arms around her.

  "MY MOTHER IS DEAD," Suwelo says to Carlotta. It sounds as if he's finally admitting it to himself. He sees Marcia once again timidly approach the door. She stops, her fist upraised to knock, and listens. She is so surprised to hear he is speaking of her! 'Come in, Ma,' he says. But she stands there frozen, in shock, her fist in the air. And, just as he feared, she looks behind her.

  "She was killed ... along with my father, in something that was called a 'car wreck.' It was really," Suwelo says, "a people wreck. They were driving along--my father was driving--very fast. 'For some reason,' as so many people phrased it later, the car ran off the road, hit an embankment, at ninety miles an hour, and they were both killed instantly."

  Suwelo recalls Miss Lissie's voice on the tape. "Remember the last time you stood over them," she said.

  He will try.

  He had taken the bus home from college, an hour away, and someone, a relative, had driven him to the funeral home. Both his parents were laid out in the same room, just as they'd been brought in. There were black and purple swellings and bruises, and deep cuts, on both their foreheads, from crashing against the windshield. His mother had crashed all the way through; his father's progress had been blocked by the steering wheel, which had crushed his chest. They were dressed for church. His mother wore a red-and-white flowered dress that Suwelo had always liked because it made her look so girlish, and lime-green T-strap slippers. His father wore his one good navy-blue suit.

  "My parents' lives were so miserable," says Suwelo, "that I couldn't let myself think about it." He feels a chakra opening at the base of his spine. Something begins to unfurl, like a tiny flag, or a sleepy snake. His mother knocks on the door with more assurance. He sees that, yes indeed, the old man, whom he hates, Louis, Sr., is behind her. Suwelo stands on his side of the door and leans against it. There is no strength in his hands.

  Marcia easily pushes her way in.

  "They were all explaining to me how my parents died," says Suwelo. "All our neighbors and friends and the funeral-home people. The state trooper who'd gotten to the scene first said my father had been drunk, and speeding. I knew this was undoubtedly true. I'd seen him drunk and speeding a million times, since I was a little boy. He always seemed to be trying to run away from himself. My mother would beg him, 'Slow down, Louis. You ought to slow down.' He would or he wouldn't slow down, depending on which demons he was listening to.

  "It was when everybody had left and I was alone with the bodies that I realized what had happened. I went over to where they were and I looked into their faces. Daddy's face was finally peaceful. I was actually soothed by it. But her face. It had frozen in a kind of grimace, an exaggerated version of her usual look of desperation. Even her teeth were bared, as if she were struggling to give birth. It shocked me to think that's how she looked. And then I lifted the sheet, and I saw her hands... ."

  Suwelo starts to weep. He feels Carlotta's arms around him. He feels her kisses soaking up the tears on his cheeks. He cries a long time. But Marcia is inside, standing beside him now, and there's Louis, Sr. still outside the door.

  "Her nails were broken off, every one of them; her fingertips bloody," he says. "Now I understood what had happened, and why they were dead. My mother was trying to get out of the car."

  He breaks down completely. He does not want his snot to fall into the tub, so he gets out, blindly, Carlotta following, and she wraps a large white towel around him and another around herself.

  "I'd seen that look of desperation on my mother's face all my life. I hadn't understood what it was. My father, you know, had been a soldier in World War II and he'd lost half of one arm and all of his mind. But he was still a gung-ho army man. Even when I was leaving home for college, he was pressuring me to enlist. When I was in college and the Vietnam war was going strong, I refused the draft. I knew I'd rather rot in prison than have done to me what was done to him. He refused to understand this. I didn't think he'd ever stop cursing me for taking this stand. I couldn't understand why he would want to send me off to be maimed or killed. Did he hate me that much?" Suwelo pulls the towel closer about him, feeling his flushed body beginning to lose its heat.

  "We stopped speaking. I hated my mother for staying with him. But she was trapped. Like a bird in a cage. He wasn't the man she married, but some kind of wounded, crazed patriot. More often drunk than sober. Frequently abusive. With his good arm, the one he had left," Suwelo says flatly, "he held on to my mother as she struggled to get out of the speeding car."

  And now he can actually hear Marcia's voice as she says, "Just let me and Louis, Jr. out of the car, if you're going to drive this way." And he remembers his father reaching across her and then into the back seat, where Suwelo sits, and locking all the doors, and cursing them, and speeding up even more.

  How had he repressed so much terror? Suwelo wonders about this as he relives it. There he was, all those years, all those different times, small, then not so small, and frightened. Why did he and his mother get into the car in the first place? This he still does not understand. But at least he lets himself understand his mother's determination, at last, to get out.

  His father is standing at the door. He is not old and drunk, but young and handsome. He has two arms. "My name was once Suwelo, too," he says gravely, holding them out. Suwelo is suddenly too tired to keep watch over the door of his heart. It swings open on its own, and this father, whom Suwelo has never seen and whom he realizes he resembles very much, walks in.

  FANNY AND ARVEYDA ARE naked. After leaving the hot tub and shower, they have permitted the night air to dry them. Fanny has quickly rubbed sweet almond oil over her own body, even between her legs and between her toes, and now leans over Arveyda, who is stretched out on his stomach on the futon massage mat. They have decided to forgo the sauna, an inviting cubicle off to the side of this room they are in, which contains little besides the massage mat, a shelf full of massage oils, stacks of clean white towels, and a collection, in a corner by the door of the sauna, of straw-bottomed thong slippers.

  She places her warm hands first on the center of his back; one hand is just between his shoulder blades, the other at his waist. She holds her hands there while she asks for guidance in this work she is about to do for Arveyda's healing. She asks that Arveyda's spirit guides be present, along with her own. She gently presses down and with an alternating pressure of her hands slightly rocks his body. Then she straddles his body and begins kneading his back and neck and shoulders.

  Fanny is very patient, thorough, and slow. She listens to Arveyda's body as she massages it. Wherever there is the slightest ache, her fingers hover, listening, and descend. Arveyda is amazed. All the pain in his body seems to be eager to show itself to Fanny, who presses points here and there that make him cry out from the pain, but which, before she touched them, felt entirely okay. And then, after she releases the pressure on these points--pressure of which he has been unaware--he feels the energy once again flowing freely in his body. He has almost forgotten what unblocked chi feels like.

  It is warm in the room, and there is only the moonlight coming through the small window across from them, and the flicker of a candle on the floor.

  Arveyda sinks almost immediately to another level, a very sensual level of consciousness, assured that Fanny's touch, which never leaves his body, will hold him safe. The warmth of the room makes his mind drift to Mexico, where he and Carlotta and the children go each January to see Zede. He recalls lying on the warm sand in the tiny village of Yelapa, where all of them, their "new age clan," gather, and how he and Angelita and Cedrico oil each other while the three women--Carlotta and the two Zedes--walk slowly, their arms loosely around each other, back and forth, up and down the crescent-shaped beach. They are always talking and listening to each other intensely, as if whole worlds hang on their words. And they are all three perfectly beautiful. Zede the Elder, the matriarch, stooped and brown, with her long, as
h-white hair tied back from her face with a scarlet ribbon; Zede the Younger, full of vitality and joy, bright-spirited at last, kissing Carlotta over and over; and Carlotta, the most beautiful of all, with her short hair, her string bikini, and her skinny legs, which she kicks into the air from time to time in sheer exuberance, like a gamine in a Charlie Chaplin movie.

  Arveyda lies on the massage mat but he is really lying on the sand. He watches these three women and he thinks of the suffering each of them has endured. He thinks of the pain he himself has felt, and caused... . His heart, so often full, seems to brim over with the strange mixture of all that he feels. He finds in his mind words for the beginning, the middle, or the end, of a new song: "Isn't this sadness a part of happiness?"

  Fanny is stroking his body to the rhythm of one of his own guitar-and-flute melodies, from a fifteen-year-old album called Ecstasy Suite. In her mind, "Ecstasy Is the Sea" is playing, and she imagines her hands are the waves of the ocean that shape the ocean floor, and the dunes of the beach and the tiniest seashells.

  She also thinks, with something like disbelief, that one of the spirits she's loved so long is actually right beneath her, his very neck, at this moment, under her hand. Gradually, she works her way down Arveyda's body, marveling at the beauty--smooth, glistening from the oil--of his rich brown skin. She presses points on his buns that make him squirm, then moves down his thighs and his very hairy legs. She takes her time on his feet, slipping her thumbs between his toes, working her knuckles along the arches and the balls of his feet. Arveyda groans with mingled pain and pleasure.

  He has given himself up to Fanny, as if all of himself is resting in her arms. He feels there is something about her, something in her essence, that automatically heals and reconnects him with himself. He felt this even before she impulsively kissed him on the trail. He imagines making love to her, as he feels her hands sliding up his inner thighs. He thinks that if he were to join himself with her in lovemaking he would feel literally re-membered.

  He utters a deep, secret sigh at this thought.

  Fanny thinks of her lifelong habit of falling in love with people she'll never have to meet. Is this how people create gods, she wonders. She thinks she has always been walking just behind (oh, a hundred to a thousand years behind) the people she has found to love, and that she has been very careful that their backs were turned.

  What would she do if one of them turned around?

  Fanny feels a slight quiver in her stomach. She is frightened, for a moment, as if she is about to come face to face with her own self.

  She takes a deep breath. It seems to her, fortunately, that this particular spirit has nodded off. She strokes him gently, just at the back of the neck. "Time to turn over," she whispers.

  But Arveyda is not sleeping. Far from it. He is thinking of Fanny and of her kiss. Of the pleasure and pain of her touch, which seems easily to find the most buried knottedness in him. And if he turns over, she will see the results of his thoughts.

  Fanny waits patiently, on her knees beside the mat. Will he turn over, she wonders, this spirit behind whom she finds herself? She wonders this sincerely, as if Arveyda is a real spirit who might simply disappear by sinking through the hardwood floor.

  Fanny is terribly aroused, as she looks at Arveyda's smooth defenseless back, his humble neck, his beautiful hands and nimble fingers, the tips of which, touching his instruments, have already given her so much pleasure.

  With a sigh of brave resignation, the "spirit" turns himself over. He is embarrassed, and is looking down. "I'm afraid," he groans, "you have lit a little candle."

  Fanny, seeing its erectness and nearly comic hopefulness, readily takes Arveyda's "candle" into her warm hand.

  When she has seated herself on it, and feels how snugly it fits, as if it has found its proper niche, she looks into Arveyda's face. Into his very human eyes. There are tears in them, as there are in her own. They begin to rock, turning now so that they lie, their arms around each other, equitably, on their sides. Weeping, they begin to kiss.

  Fanny feels as if the glow of a candle that warms but could never burn has melted her, and she drips onto Arveyda.

  Arveyda feels as if he has rushed to meet all the ancestors and they have welcomed him with joy.

  It is amazing to them how quickly--like a long kiss--they both come.

  She is fearful of asking him what she must. Timidly she says: "And did you also see the yellow plum tree and all the little creatures, even the fish, in its branches? And did you see and feel the ocean and the sun?"

  But Arveyda says simply, "Yes. And the moon as it moves over the ocean, and the lilacs, and mountain ranges, and all the colors of valleys. But best of all," he says, kissing her, "was the plum tree and everything and everybody in it, and the warmth of your breath and the taste in my mouth of the sweet yellow plums."

  They lie cuddled together in sheer astonishment.

  "My ... spirit," says Fanny, at last, her face against his chest.

  "My ... flesh," says Arveyda, his lips against her hair.

  Years before this day, Suwelo had had a recurring dream. He did not usually remember his dreams, but this one stayed with him. It was very brief. He was sitting at the bedside of a very old man, and, though neither of them seemed to be talking, much information was being exchanged. No, not exchanged, for even in the dream Suwelo had had little to say. He was there simply to listen to the older voice of experience, for the sake of his own present pitiful life.

  As he walks up the steps to the Mary McLeod Bethune Memorial Nursing Home on a tree-lined street on the outskirts of Baltimore, Suwelo remembers his dream. He says good morning to the old people gathered in rocking chairs and around Chinese checkers tables on the porch. They are black and white together, finally, Suwelo thinks. They are so old color seems not to matter, as they shift about for seats at the various tables, or in the rocking chairs, or simply places in the sun. Nobody seems to hear very well either. A nurse walks up and down among them, directing dim eyes and faltering feet this way and that, and giving cheerful instructions in a bright hoarse voice.

  "Move on over here a little bit more, just a little bit more. You can do it, Mr. Pete!"

  The old man stands rooted to the spot, appearing to wonder where the voice is coming from.

  "Do you need your walker?" the nurse asks.

  Mr. Pete mumbles something.

  Suwelo passes through the door.

  Even inside he is struck by the thorough integration, not simply of the patients but of the staff. At the front desk there are three women, two black, one white; they are jovially discussing a concert which all three attended and apparently enjoyed over the weekend.

  He is distractedly given directions to a "space, way down on the end" of one of the halls that fan out from the reception area in all directions. A faint smell of cabbage permeates the place.

  When he comes to Mr. Hal's and Miss Rose's "space," Suwelo knows it, without looking at the two of them. Unlike the bare walls of the rest of the nursing home, the wall behind their beds is covered with paintings. But, he quickly notices, there is also a television set, attached to the ceiling, hanging, like a threat, over Mr. Hal's bed.

  Mr. Hal and Miss Rose are expecting Suwelo. They do not see him standing there at the edge of their cubicle looking at them. They are waiting for his visit with the alert expression of children in a doctor's office. There are other beds and cubicles up and down the long room, on either side of them. Old people lie in bed or sit in chairs beside the beds, sometimes talking, sometimes staring into space, sometimes simply watching TV.

  The two of them are so clean they shine, and their small area, with its two twin beds, two nightstands, and two chairs, is as neat as a pin. Mr. Hal's bed is adjusted so that he is sitting up, and Miss Rose sits in a chair next to him. She is crocheting. Suwelo has seen Miss Rose only a few times before, when she came by Uncle Rafe's house to bring him food. Then, she was always with Miss Lissie.

  She is old and
looks something like a dumpling or a really wizened apple, with small sunken eyes and thin white hair. She finally notices Suwelo's presence and slowly pushes herself up from her chair with a soft cry. How odd it feels now to Suwelo that he has eaten so much of her food and yet knows so little about her.

  He moves forward, smiling, into their space. He has brought a plant, which Miss Rose, admiring it with squinty, nearsighted eyes, places on the nightstand. Suwelo hugs her, feeling the insubstantial flesh, the soft bones, the severe curvature in her spine that makes her short and stooped. But what an energetic hug she still manages. He feels quite squeezed.

  Next he turns to the bed where Mr. Hal lies smiling, with what appears to be the blissful patience of the blind. Suwelo sits on the bed and leans toward him gingerly; moving very slowly and carefully indeed, he envelops Mr. Hal in his arms.

  "We had to marry!" says Miss Rose, serving Suwelo tea. "At our age!"

  "But why?" asks Suwelo.

  "That was the only way we could live in the home together."

  "They don't want folks living here in sin," says Mr. Hal, sarcastically.

  "Hal had to come here first, you know," says Miss Rose, who has pulled a chair for herself right next to Suwelo's so that they both face Mr. Hal's bed. "Among all the other things that weren't working too good, his eyes had just give out."

  "That's the truth," says Mr. Hal. "I stopped painting after Lissie died. I just couldn't do it. Next thing I knew, it looked like a curtain had dropped."

  "I started coming to see about him," says Miss Rose, as Suwelo sips his tea. "Brought him tasty things to snack on. We'd sit here and keep each other company. Talk about the weather; talk about the white folks and their destructiveness, black folks and their foolishness. Talked, all the time, about Lissie. We sure do miss her."

  "They were friends for--what was it Rosie?--sixty years."

  "No, not quite that long," says Miss Rose. "But long enough. I knew she'd want me to look after you."