by Tatjana Soli
* * *
Blossoms dropped off, replaced with small, green, marble-size lemons, just as Claire’s hair began to fall out. Paz did the spring cleaning, finding strands of hair everywhere. Crying, she stayed outside, ostensibly to air the pillows for the outdoor furniture, even though Claire wasn’t allowed to be in the sun. Feeling helpless, Paz was almost glad that Minna had the job of caring for Claire.
As the first speckle-skinned Blenheim apricots ripened, ulcers broke out inside Claire’s mouth, and unable to eat, she sat on the linoleum kitchen floor, defeated, while Minna spooned honey in her mouth to sooth the burning.
“I can’t do it,” Claire said.
Minna held her forehead, her hand, held her body up when Claire was too dizzy to walk. She put her in a chair and rubbed her back while Paz hurriedly changed the bedding, then they both helped her lie down. “You will get through this. I’m going to make you a special drink, an elixir my maman taught me. It heals everything.”
True to her word, Minna spent hours in the kitchen boiling all sorts of herbs, flowers, and plants. Strange smells issued from the kitchen, but when Claire tried to go in, she was shooed away. The elixir was addictive; it always tasted different, but always made Claire feel the same. Calmer, healthier. Unaware, Claire began her first steps into magical thinking, the idea that Minna’s cures could indeed heal.
On the one day a week Paz was there, she and Minna found everything to fight about. Minna disliked how her things were moved around when her room was cleaned. She complained that too much detergent was used in the laundry, claiming it gave her a rash. Said dust was accumulating everywhere, bad for Claire’s breathing, and what was the girl doing all day long anyway?
Paz told Claire that Minna left dirty clothes and dishes everywhere, that the bathroom was a nightmare to clean, that when she cooked in the kitchen, it was a disaster afterward—the sink clogged and a sticky tar burned on the bottom of the pots.
One day Paz snuck into Claire’s room and woke her as she napped. “I don’t think Minna is right in the head. She gets so angry, she’s messy, she always is lying around, not working. This is not the right person to care for you.”
“She’ll get better.”
“Let me come and care for you.”
Claire took Paz’s hands. “Law school is your father’s dream. I want to live long enough to be at your graduation. Give me that.”
Paz hugged her as they both heard the creak of the floorboard. Minna shifted her weight; obviously she had been standing there listening.
* * *
In May the fog lifted by noon, and then the sun, magnified by being denied all morning, scorched the edges of the rose petals, turned the skin on the figs a dark purple even though the flesh inside remained unripe.
In the evening, the fog returned, a salve on the bruised vegetation. The women waited for the cooler temperatures to work in the garden. Since Claire hadn’t had the energy to plant seeds earlier, she cheated. Although she knew Forster didn’t want to come to the farm or watch the ravages of her illness, she traded on his guilt and asked him to fill the back of his pickup with seedlings from the local nursery. When he unloaded and realized the women were facing the task of planting alone, he relented and picked up a shovel. All day the three of them transplanted tomatoes and squash and basil into Octavio’s neat, ready-made rows.
Claire sat on her knees, winded, stabbing at the ground with her dull spade while Forster and Minna did the real work. In all the years she had grown vegetables, she had been too lazy to do the necessary labor of digging up the rocky, clayey soil, replacing it with rich topsoil. This omission cost her much each year in extra tilling and fertilizer and salt-burned plants. She waged a constant battle trying to supplement with compost—grass clippings, coffee grounds, banana peels, apple cores.
Now, a couple of inches down, the tip of her spade hit a rock, sending shock waves up her arm into her shoulder. The lymph nodes had been removed under that arm, and the doctor had warned her that bruises or cuts on the arm increased the risk of lymphedema, permanent swelling. Scared, she held it away from her trunk now, as if it were a dead thing.
“Are you okay?” Forster asked.
He tried not to look at her too closely. She felt even more sick, more ugly, around him. Why was a woman’s love different in kind than a man’s love? She loved Forster beyond husband, loved him in spite of his graying hair and the wrinkled corners of his eyes. She loved him in his weakness, in the clear knowledge that he would not be there through the worst. Her mortality, her illness, caused him to flee her now, in spite of loving her.
“Need some help?” asked Forster.
“I’m fine.”
Claire tried to concentrate on the job at hand. Minna, natural and easy in the garden, effortlessly planted six seedlings for Claire’s every one. What puzzled her was that one could not simply dig a hole the size of the root ball. She was used to pushing seeds into the muddy, late-winter soil with her thumb, not even bothering to use tools. Now, the recalcitrant earth broke up in stiff, clumped spadefuls, had to be dug twice as wide as it was deep, to reach far enough down without the sides collapsing, or a rock inhibiting the spreading roots. By the time Claire had a hole of sufficient depth, it resembled a small gravesite, large enough for a bird or a mouse. She thought of all the countless small pets that had been interred by the children over the years: mice, rats, hamsters, goldfish, snakes, birds, crickets. Hadn’t there been a ferret once? Never a serious pet such as a dog or a cat that deserved a proper memorial.
“In fact, Claire does need help. The farm is too much in her condition,” Minna said.
Forster flushed red but kept digging. “I suppose that’s a conversation between the two of us.”
Minna shrugged and turned her back on them. Exhausted, Claire stared into the steep sides of her hole, mesmerized by an earthworm trying to tunnel his way back into darkness, when Minna gave a yelp of surprise. In her hand was an Indian arrowhead made of shining black obsidian, the small crescents visible where the edges had been pounded sharp.
“We find a batch every spring,” Forster said, dismissive.
Minna dug another hole and found a tan shard of pottery. “Can I keep it?”
“You’ll be sick of them in no time.”
“This farm belonged to someone else before it was yours?”
“Well, I don’t know who Forster’s great-grandparents bought it from.” The accusatory tone of Minna’s voice irritated Claire. She considered the farm created out of whole cloth from the hard, barren alkali soil, created out of nothing, worthless really but for the hard work of Forster’s family and her own. “I don’t know how long ago Indians were actually here.”
“Maybe the Chumash?” Forster said.
“My great-uncle on my father’s side, the English side, had bought land on the far side of the island because it was cheaper. He was clearing the jungle for his coffee fields,” Minna said. “They began digging up bones. All sorts of bones. He pretended they were animal ones because otherwise it would be considered bad luck, make the land worthless. Until they dug up skulls, and the lie was up. It turned out to be a slave burial site. But this uncle kept plowing, hiding them by throwing the bones in a big pile in the jungle. After he was done, the pile was high as a man, wide as four men across with outstretched arms.”
“What’d he do with them?”
“Forgot about them.” Minna rubbed her calf with her hand. “A year later his crops failed. A year after that, the plantation house burned down. They moved to town, and his wife and daughter died in an outbreak of typhoid fever. He went back to England, broken. Became an alcoholic.”
“That’s terrible,” Claire said, gripped by the matter-of-factness in Minna’s recitation of events. People used to making a living off the land had a natural sympathy for each other, knowing the hardship involved, even at the best of times. Especially in her illness, Claire was full of the idea of unfairness in all its permutations.
“W
hat’re you implying, Minna?” Forster chuckled. “Some kind of curse?”
“He was careless. He shouldn’t have ignored the bones,” Minna added, as if to ease the blow of her words.
Forster studied her for a moment, debating. “Who were you talking to on the phone that night, right after you first came here? When you were so upset?”
Minna’s eyes widened, then narrowed. Claire cursed herself that she had confided in him; he could never keep a secret. “My cousin. I borrowed money from him. He wants it back.”
Forster looked at Claire significantly. “How much are we talking about? Is he threatening you?”
Minna shook her head. “It’s not like that. I call him because he’s from home. A familiar voice.”
“If there’s a problem, you can tell us. We’ll help if we can.”
“None.”
Claire hadn’t told him about Minna’s recent requests for advances on her pay.
“He talks to my family. They are angry I’m not in school. I say there are other things in life.”
“Do you believe that?”
Minna smiled slyly. “It’s okay to enjoy yourself when you’re young.”
After Forster left, Minna clucked her tongue. “You betrayed me. Told him about the call.”
“It frightened me.” The truth was that during the last month, the intimacy that illness necessitated had created a bond between them so that Claire no longer questioned Minna. Such distrust was in the past.
* * *
Although it had not been discussed, Minna assumed a right to be gone every couple of nights. At bedtime, she slipped out the kitchen door, and Claire ran up to the second-story hallway and peered out the window just in time to see a faraway pair of glowing headlights like predatory eyes, waiting at the far-off foot of the driveway.
In the moonlight, the tree trunks shone smooth and heavy as bones, and even the paths between the rows resembled the ribs of an animal long succumbed. The faintly rotting smell of oranges on the air made it difficult to breathe.
Claire longed to forbid Minna these visits. All those years of living by herself, and now she could not admit the clinging panic she felt on those nights, alone, the waves of fear. Wasn’t she paying for Minna’s time? At two in the morning regularly, she woke with a pounding heart, watery bowels, a feeling that if she continued to lie there in the darkness another minute, she would simply cease. If Minna was home on those nights, she would appear magically with hot milk and sing her back to sleep, or would massage her back and legs till she drifted asleep. Claire stopped short of picking up the phone, calling either the girls or Forster to complain. Clearly she was protecting Minna even if it was against what she herself wanted. In the calm of daylight, she admitted to the irrational panic, admitted, too, that she didn’t own the girl’s soul. A companion, an assistant, but not a friend, not a lover, not a slave.
* * *
On those mornings when Minna had been at Don’s house the night before, Claire found her in the kitchen early, preparing breakfast, bruise-lipped, quiet and satisfied as a cat that has feasted enough to last for days.
“Aren’t you tired of taking care of an old, sick woman?” Claire pouted. “What can there be for you here?” Miserable at herself for being so whining. In her worst moments, not only did she resent Minna’s health, but also her youth, her beauty, even her previous night out. What she really resented was the unfairness of all those things ending in her own life.
“That’s why I need to be with Don,” Minna said, measuring coffee into a filter. “Do you never watch the mother bird fly away from the nest? The babies worry, but then she comes back with a big, fat worm for them to eat. If they all stayed in the nest, they would starve.”
* * *
Minna owned only a few dresses, rotating so regularly Claire knew which day it was by the choice. What to make of a girl not having more than three dresses and a pair of white jeans to her name? Perhaps it was some bohemianism in her, or an asceticism that rejected material things. Which begged the question of what she did with all the cash she was getting. As a favor, Claire asked her to pick among the girls’ old clothes and her own, explaining how the waste bothered her. Claire especially wanted her to try on a dress made of pale-green and pink silk. In her own opinion, she had reached the nadir of her attractiveness—hairless, unexercised, bloated, and pale—and was convinced she would never again do it justice.
Minna slipped it on. Underneath, she wore no bra, and her nipples were clearly outlined in the fabric as if the dress were designed expressly to accentuate her nakedness instead of clothe it, making her all the more alluring for both what it revealed and what it hid. She twirled on her bare feet, rising on tiptoe, and Claire clapped as the gauzy fabric fluttered out from Minna’s legs. Claire had not felt such childlike pleasure in a long time.
Minna went to her room and returned with a magenta printed scarf, which she wrapped around Claire’s head despite her protests. In the full-length mirror, Claire had to admit that it was a better solution than her alternative of patchy, sad molting-bird baldness.
“Now we are real sisters.” Minna laughed. “Exchanging skins. Why do you insist on making yourself ugly?”
The comment shocked, doubly so since it was her own complaint about Gwen. Was it true that children divided up and took the parents’ traits? Yet it was true she had lost the knack for the physical. “I can’t help it.”
“I see no men here for you. You never talk of anyone.”
“All that is in the past for me.”
“That’s ridiculous. No one is past the need for love.”
That night Claire watched as Minna in the pale-green and pink ex-dress disappeared down the driveway.
* * *
Paz was sorting laundry a few days later when she came across the dress. She brought it to Claire, chiding her that she should know better, that it required dry cleaning. What if the loca (as Paz referred to Minna) had got hold of it for washing, she continued, the ongoing feud between the two turning her bitter. Loca would ruin it. Claire took the dress and said nothing. After Paz left the room, Claire held the dress close and caught a whiff of Minna’s perfume, the patchouli Lucy had given her. She brought it closer to her nose, and there was also the unmistakable tang of sex.
Chapter 7
On those nights when she could neither control Minna’s nocturnal wanderings nor control her own mortal panic, Claire rose, turned on the lamp, and read the novel Minna had given her. Finishing the last page only to start at the beginning again so that the conclusion became beside the point; she craved only the journey. The novel did not abate her fears, but instead made her feel that she was not alone in that fear. Ever since the chemo started and her attending physical deterioration, the past had moved closer, taken up physical residence beside her. She would not admit that she was perhaps looking for meaning in her suffering—why had she been so afflicted, both before and now?
When the wind blew through the trees, Claire heard voices, as in the old days when workers slept overnight in the bunkhouses. A lone avocado falling down on the roof rang out like the crack of a gunshot, and she felt at her chest for a bullet that did not exist. Creakings of the worn boards in the house convinced her intruders had broken in; in the novel she read about creakings of bamboo outside Antoinette’s bedroom window. After a time she forgot which had actually happened and which had been imagined.
Having read it many times before, Claire now read the book as a proxy for Minna’s background, of which she was so stingy. Rhys’s earlier novels failed to interest Claire, but the last novel, set in Rhys’s native islands, spoke about the solace to be found on one’s own land. One always searched for one’s own story in a book no matter how exotic it might seem.
The imagined Minna flourished to the proportions of a romantic heroine, rushing down the crushed-shell driveway of her Coulibri into the arms of some moody island boy, or perhaps an Englishman’s son? Claire backed up, not wanting to turn it into some tawdry rom
ance novel. From her privileged background, it was clear why Minna felt at home in the elite world of Cambridge, even girlfriend to a movie star, but at what price? Did her English suitor lust after her dusky beauty, but not love her for that same non-English blood, just as Antoinette’s Rochester failed to love her?
None of this seemed any more far-fetched than the reality of contemplating her own disease, reading the drug side effects, the survival rates, on pamphlets and disclosure forms. Reading her blood count before each treatment, to see if she was strong enough to endure more. Without the fiction of the Sargasso Sea to lose herself in, Claire would have gone mad. She prayed for metastasis, not of death, but of life, the spreading of an imagined world that would cover over the deficiencies in the real one.
* * *
One afternoon on her way to the garden, Claire found Minna sitting on a stone retaining wall, swinging her legs and humming in a voice so low, so mournful, it sounded more dirge than pleasure. Her face was swollen lumpy from crying.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s so beautiful here. But I’m still in a bad place.”
“Poor girl, you’re safe here!”
“I’m dead and drowned.”
Claire felt a catch in her throat at the possibility something treasured might be snatched away. She knew about the pernicious effects of nostalgia. Raisi had been plagued with just such longing, until Claire’s father saved up enough money to send her back for a visit, nearly twenty years after she had left. When she returned to California, she said little about the visit and never mentioned going back. Was it a great disappointment, the comparison between memory and always failing reality?
“What do you believe in?” Minna asked.
