One String Guitar

by Mona de Vessel

  Upstairs, I noticed the fetid smell of the room. A faint putrid odor of the previous meal—a veggie sub with salad dressing and something else, some strange hidden body secretions. The cats were curled up on the bed. They barely opened their eyes when I entered, stretched and then curled up again in the middle of the crumpled blanket on the bed. I brushed the hair off my pillow half-heartedly and watched Wolf as he climbed up on the mattress I had set up for him next to my bed.

  I felt the old pang in the chest. My parents were gone and I thought about how in the end, I had to ask them to leave. I had pressed my mother for my twin sister’s address and then I had sent them back out into their world, into the borrowed places where I spent years growing.

  I looked outside. It had begun to snow. I thought about the vulnerability of my parents out in the cold. I imagined them, small and wrinkled and old, and I asked myself if I had a heart. The words still hung in the air like a stench, like an unshakable stench: Twin—a twin, another one of me—another. I tried to see myself; I tried to close my eyes. I listened to the wind outside, the howling wind in the eye of the brewing storm and I tried to see myself. My hair, long brown hair, straight as a sheet. This is what Dana had said to me once in our third-grade recess: “You can’t play with us. Your hair is as straight as a sheet.”

  And I remember trying to understand her words. Even now, I don’t quite get it, beyond her singling out my otherness. But it was her eyes I understood that day, the blue of her eyes squinting when she said it. As if she wanted to close the deal, to mark her words with movement of change. And the girls around her cackled. They giggled and laughed and then their backs were turned on me. I tried to stand straight and walk the other way. I went into the bathroom because I could feel the sting in my eyes and the involuntary tears getting ready to come. I passed the mirror and I caught my reflection. It startled me. I saw myself as a ghost, hovering, trying to hold on to a place that no longer existed. I no longer existed. My people no longer existed—or did they? And yet I stood in this bathroom with my stinging eyes and my yellow dress. And the ribbon in my hair. The ribbon Marie put in my hair to match my dress because she said:

  “Yellow is beautiful on you, it glows with your color.” Your color. My color. What color was I? I tried to see what others saw. I stared at myself in the mirror, through the blur of the tears and all I could see where the run of the colors, the black of my hair, and the yellow of my dress whirling in my head until the bell went off.

  I called Leon. Suddenly I wanted to see him. I wanted to hold his calloused hand and smell his scent. I wanted to bury my nose in the nape of his neck. His scent is like no other: musky and bitter, soft and biting, eucalyptus and pine, arid soil and salty marshes. I wanted him to hold me. The line rang. He answered. His voice cracked through the phone. I visualized the distance between us. The miles between here and the nation. The snow standing in our way. The wind blurring our own footsteps.

  “Hey, sweet girl. I thought you were going to rest tonight.”

  “My parents came, from Vermont, out of the blue.”

  “That’s good, then. Maybe I can meet them.”

  “They just left.” I felt a pang of relief. They would never meet. Their words would never collide. Relief and regret.

  “Already? I thought you said they just came out of the blue.”

  “They did, long story.” I didn’t want to explain.

  “I need you.” The way I spoke those words startled me. Rattled me, as if the words had fallen out of me like coins out of my pocket. I tried to backtrack.

  “If you want. I mean, I know it’s snowing, and…”

  “I’ll come right over.”

  I’d never asked Leon anything and he’d never had to grant or refuse me. But suddenly the urgency had made my head spin. Wolf was staring at me. He looked as though he wanted to speak. He wanted to tell me that I scared him a little that he loved me and that he understood, but that my sadness was taking up too much room in the house.

  Outside, the streets were quiet. A few cars passed slowly the sound of their tires muffled by the thick blanket of snow. I thought of the strings of people in my life moving their way through the storm. Moving towards me, away from me. Moving. I heard the growling sound of Leon’s car cut through the silence and then stop. His car door slammed and then silence again. I ran to the door and opened it. I felt like a child at Christmas. He was my Santa Claus. He was here to deliver a piece of myself to me. He would tell me who I was. He would know.

  When I opened the door, I was struck by his presence. His ponytail had come loose and long strands of black hair draped his broad shoulders. Hundreds of snowflakes were now melting on the top of his head.

  “Hey, baby.” I stood on my tiptoes to kiss him, my bare toes stepping delicately on the monstrosity of his cold and wet boots. I buried my nose in his neck. His scent had shifted. A subtle shift of pine and marshy waters and a faint smell of whisky. When I kissed him, it wasn’t just whisky, but bourbon. Black Bourbon, he later told me. I searched for myself in him. In the broad open palms of his hands, in the tangled knots in his hair, in the way he held his head slightly off to the right, like a bird listening to a forest fire. I watched him move in the space I had claimed. I watched him smile. I watched him moving his lips, in the way he kissed me, in the way he held me without holding me captive. In the way he stood as if he would never move again and in the way he moved. He never asked me about the sadness. He never asked me about my parents. And I never told him. The world closed in on us that night. The muffled sound of winter unraveling itself for the first time. The first storm is the most violent. The most ravaging. It is rarely the storm that kills. We’re not willing to pull ourselves together in the face of what we know can annihilate us.

  We found our way into the bedroom because words no longer carried meaning. I tripped on myself over and over again. In my invisibility. I tried to etch myself in the motion of Leon’s hands on my body. We slipped under the covers, first cool—the cool of the sheets—and then warm again. Blood against blood, hidden in folds of our flesh and bones. Leon’s body is angular. It breaks in places, likes waves against the roundness of the land, against the curves of my waist. He held on to my breasts, one in each hand like he had finally found his way home. He squeezed them, causing pain and then pleasure. I pushed away the absence, filling me up all the way to my nose. I pushed away the blurred vision of the third-grade yellow dress and the black of my hair. His tongue found his way inside me, between my legs. He first moved quickly, like a reptile or like a quiet monster, and then he became motionless, his body resting between my legs like a fallen tree. I entered a world of light with his tongue. Gold, aqua and jewels at the bottom of the ocean with each stroke of his hunger for me. I slipped and slid and fell inside the cavern of this strange pleasure. This luminous world of pearls and coins. I heard myself, the small whimpers, the shallow breathing like a fugitive fox, cutting through the woods at the speed of light. A silver fox crouching in the hills. I spread my legs wider. I wanted him to crawl inside me. His body whole. First his tongue and then the rest of him, leaving nothing behind. The shallow breaths were pushed out of me, turning into grunts. A loud grunt and then a bang. His body shifted and he was deeper inside me. The golden sparks and the aqua from before shifted—a ray of light, an explosion; he was moving against me, pushing his way home, lapping against the shore of my stomach. I began seeing myself from the inside out, an inverted image. First filled at the center. He was drawing me, one line at a time. With each push, the contour of my body became firmer, more definite. Charcoal lines of my waist. Of my hands pushing against the flanks of his buttocks pushing him deeper inside me. The harbor of my legs opened wide, darker lines for the chiseled form of my arms now entangling him, unraveling him, tangled branches around his shoulders. His breath brushed against me, the wind of his panting. The bitterness was gone now. He’d pushed his hair back into a tight ponytail. I tried to find his eyes; I tried to latch on to his gaze. A compass
, a midway point between absence and the definition of light. With each push, my body became clearer. I could almost see myself whole. I felt myself tighten around him. I was holding him, holding him inside me. I could not lose my way home. I watched my arms around the square of his shoulders. The red of his skin, the red of mine. We formed a human tree. The ancient tree of life. But when he left my apartment that night, I felt invisible again.

  **

  After Leon left, I remained with the trails of our love, his scent on my body. I could still feel him on me: the scent of man, of smoke and eucalyptus—or was it mint? Or pine with a trail of whisky? He always had the lingering smell of alcohol. I said nothing about being adopted, about my mother being French. I did not speak of my father’s ancestry in Ireland, of his devotion to the land in Vermont, of the shattered history of my ancestors. We are bound by silence and by what we leave behind.

  This is what I liked best: tracing back the past. I should have been an archaeologist, not a history teacher. I would have liked to have measured the world in the traces of the past, in counting bones and piecing them back vertebrae after vertebrae. Pulling them out of the sand, unearthing the human body: whitened bones, whitewashed in late summer sun. I would have liked to have seen the centuries on the broken fragments of the past. One tiny, shattered teacup; one clay pot, two molars and a fractured skull. These are the only ways we can measure the world.

  I found comfort in yesterday’s imprint, in what others have left behind. The past was washed out with nothing but remaining trails. We have all been washed out, and one day nothing will remain but our bones.

  **

  When I first saw Leon, all I saw were his piercing black eyes, a riveting night sky without any stars. And his hair, his long flowing hair, smoothly groomed. I’ve watched him after we make love, brushing his hair with a hundred strokes, but his hands move like a man’s, not a woman’s. The way he holds his shoulders square. The sharp angles of his jaw offset the fluidity of the sheen of his hair. This is what I noticed first when I saw him at the Westcott Street Fair, a community event held once a year to connect the neighborhood with its various businesses and organizations—an excuse to play live music and eat good food on the streets. We saw each other across the crowds of golden-haired heads, across the sea of liberal white faces and the few scattered brown children running around pushing their way through the crowds to sing songs. He saw me too. I was holding a small basil plant I’d bought at the organic herbs and garden stand. He was passing through as he later told me, marching away from the crowd in a straight line. And then we saw each other. There we were: two Indians. He said he knew from the second he saw me that there was something different about me. And for a while, I told myself I didn’t know what he meant by this. He never explained it. But secretly we both knew that he was talking about my “ways.” A white woman in an Indian costume— an apple, as they call us—white on the inside, red on the outside. From the moment I met him. I wanted saving; I wanted him to save me. I felt a pull, this strange magnetic tug, and before I knew it, we were standing next to each other. We said nothing; we both smiled.

  “I’m Leon.”

  I extended my hand. “I’m Elbe.” Maybe this was the first transgression on my part. Is this what Indians do? I thought. Do they shake hands? He took mine and kept smiling. I waited for something to happen. Something momentous. Something that would shape and alter me. This is what I wanted, alteration like a misshapen sculpture going into the hands of an artist for perfection. I remember the sun. The early autumn afternoon light. The same light with the same canopy sky I’d seen on that street five years earlier when I’d moved there. Low and cloudless almost touching the roofs of the red brick buildings of the neighborhood. I remember feeling safe there in Leon’s presence, in the presence of this shifting light. Autumn in Syracuse, in this part of the state is a passionate season—a crossroads between richness, abundance and ease: summer warmth still lingering and the impending, violent transformation of winter. I could feel the warmth of the sun on my face as he smiled. I loved the heat of this transitory season, and in this moment I could almost forget that winter was on its way and that I had never been held in the arms of a mother, a woman who resembled me. I could almost forget that I could not really see myself in the mirror, and that Leon was just a man and that he did not have the magical powers of someone who would be able to save me from my mangled past.

  The phone rang, interrupting my memories.

  “Hello,” a stranger’s voice said tentatively on the other line. “My name is Sam, I am the coordinator with Catholic Charities.” I listened to the “case” of this new family of refugees from Rwanda who needed me to take a woman and her son to the doctor the next day. I heard myself agreeing to the appointment and hung up.

  What had made me sign up for this volunteer work? Why did I need to help refugees from Africa make sense of the world around them? I did not even know myself. When I spoke, I could hear myself from a distance. I was split into two equal parts. One part listened to the facts, jotted down names, addresses, times, and locations, and the other measured the span of my decision. Did I really want to help? I wanted to fill the void with more obligations, with fewer meaningful ties. If I could turn to strangers, I wouldn’t have to turn to those I knew.

  The next day, I drove across town to a poor neighborhood on the south side. I never drove in this poverty-striken area unless I was passing through to a wormhole, to another world waiting for me on the other side of myself. I was stepping out of my ivory tower. Stepping into the other side of humanity. When I parked, I noticed that the house was large, once an elegant one-family home at the turn of the last century, now it was three tenement apartments on the wrong side of town. I rang the bell: 2B.

  I heard commotion on the other side. Voices clamoring in a foreign language—it wasn’t French. Then, a young girl of maybe eight opened the door. I later learned she was actually ten but had suffered from malnutrition. Her poignant eyes were fixed on me; I lost myself in the pain within her gaze.

  Bonjour, I greeted her in French. James, the coordinator, had told me that this family didn’t speak a word of English. The child didn’t smile when I looked into her eyes; instead she looked away.

  “Bonjour,” she answered. “My name is Elbe. I am here to take your mother to see the doctor.”

  The girl pulled away from the door and indicated I should step inside. She yelled something in a language I didn’t understand. I waited in the hallway with her; she seemed obligated to keep me company. I could feel the forced smile on my face and I wondered how alienating I must seem. I looked away.

  A woman in her early thirties approached the doorway. We appeared to be the same age, but her face reflected a kind of suffering I had only read about. She was beautiful, the way felines are beautiful with their long and narrow lines. Her cheekbones carved out in lines of symmetry offset perfectly by a fine nose and generous lips.

  “My name is Francine,” she said, extending her hand in mine. She smiled tiredly. Her face drawn. “Umuhuˆungu!” she yelled, glancing behind her. A little boy came walking slowly to the door. He was small and frail, a tiny chipmunk. I felt the urge to take him into my arms and carry him, but instead I stood by the door smiling.

  Francine put on her coat and walked quietly to the car. I waited for the boy to follow us. He grabbed a worn coat and made his way with us outside. The child looked at me intermittently, turning his head away quickly each time I tried to make eye contact with him. It was important I not let the silence pull us into permanent awkwardness. I wanted to find out the boy’s name but instead I asked Francine:

  “How long have you been here?” I knew all of the basic facts about them through the organization. They had arrived two months ago to the day, but I was trying to make conversation. Francine rubbed a crucifix like a charm, as she answered my questions. I noticed the long, drawn out circles under her eyes.

  We drove to the east side of town where Francine’s Medicaid doct
or was located. The waiting room was busting at the seams with people, every single one of them a varying shade of brown. Where were the white faces of my world? There was one open seat; I offered it to Francine and her son. She sat and left him standing by her side. I wanted to reach for the child and hold him, but I reminded myself that he was not my child to comfort. Staring down at his feet, the little boy stood on one foot and then the other as if playing some kind of game of hopscotch. Francine did not seem to notice him. Francine and I were relieved of the feeling of having to talk to each other. One baby cried nonstop, her face visibly flushed and warm. I counted the people in the waiting room: 23.

  23 people, two doctors who walked in and out. 22 chairs, two piles of books, ten books in each. I made the count in my head. I was multiplying the world, making an inventory of reality.

  We waited for an hour, watching the faces shift in the waiting room as more people entered while a few left. I got a seat across the waiting room from Francine. Every once in a while, I looked across the room and smiled at her and the boy. Their faces remained impassive as if they were unable to notice anything but their own internal world. I watched the little boy’s hands, how small they were as he pretended each finger was a tiny person talking to the other. I tried to discern his imaginary conversation, to catch a word here and there, but the bustle of the waiting room overpowered his secret whispers.

  We were called into the examination room. I walked ahead, showing them the way. I was the beacon. The nurse took us into a large white room.