I knocked on the door of the house and asked the plump, middle-aged woman who answered if I could look around. The high ceilings, the bay windows, the afternoon light flooding the rooms, the sculpted fireplaces, and the secret door in the kitchen that opened on to a secret patio with irrepressible ivy climbing everywhere – I immediately knew it. I had seen it somewhere in a dream. I often move around the house at night when Ionica and Andrei are asleep, each in his own room, and touch the banisters, the walls, the windowsills. I count all the things I’ve done that no one in my family had ever done, like working in the theatre, getting a divorce, smoking marijuana, hitchhiking in a yellow Fiat, owning a house with bay windows at the edge of a cornfield. I often imagine Jessie Gibbons getting ready to go to Ricky Danford’s ball in her fuchsia dress and a long string of pearls, her dark eyes sparkling mischievously. She is fanning herself. It is hot and humid in the Indiana summer night, and it smells like honeysuckle everywhere.
In the silence, when my loneliness is sharper than ever, so many miles, so many worlds away from my birthplace, I feel my limbs stretch into strange shapes. They reach out past the walls of my house, past my street, past the welcome sign with its Elks and Rotarian logos announcing a population of seventeen thousand people, out into the world, across cornfields and the whitecaps of the Atlantic. But my arms, stretched thin as tendrils, crumble into dust just as I reach out to touch the lilac bush in front of our window or to pick a stem of the queen of the night. Just when I can almost touch the white rock on top of a mountain where the sun shining down on the clouds bathes Mona and Mihai in blue and pink light.
My arms become just arms, and I wrap them around my body. I listen to the slow rhythm of my children breathing. I take turns lying next to each of them. I wrap my arms around their warm, sleeping bodies.
I wake up tired and grouchy from these nightly patrols. I drop spoons on the floor as I make breakfast and get the children ready for school and day care. As we sit around the kitchen table, I like to think we’re a little nation of three people, a Romanian-speaking enclave in this little midwestern town; Ionica gets mad at me because I don’t answer him when he asks for another bottle of juice. He calls me spider. It’s the new swear word he uses when I don’t pay attention to him. Ionica tells me I am “ten times spider, big black ten times spider”.
I drag myself to the university to teach. Then it’s time to rush from work and pick up the boys from school and day care. The judge has finally decided, after my psychological evaluation, to allow Andrei and Ionica to live with me and visit their father on weekends, holidays and for half the time in the summer. The court-appointed psychologist, a tired woman with lanky unwashed hair, showed me butterfly-shaped paint stains, and I had to tell her what they resembled, that is, the meaning of the splattered paint in the shape of butterflies and bats. I felt like I was back in first grade when we played with finger paints, squeezing colours from a tube and squishing them between folded paper. I invented beautiful gardens and meadows and seashells, and the psychologist took voluminous notes. Apparently, I was fit to raise my children after all. I wondered if there were any even marginally sane parents who said they saw mangled body parts of lawyers in black suits in those blotches of paint, after they’d paid twenty-five hundred dollars for the services of this depressed-looking woman. When the judge mumbled his decision, I felt sorry for all of us. I looked at Tom in his best suit and thought of my children sleeping next to me at night. Tom seemed sad as well and looked like the Tom I knew in our better days. He finally was accomplished and sure of himself, despite his melancholy air. He had shaved off his moustache and his face looked nobler than ever. I heard he had finished his PhD and opened his own family counselling practice in Chicago. For a quick second, I almost thought, Why didn’t we try harder, why wasn’t I more patient? Maybe everything would have worked out in the end, as Americans like to say. Everything except that I wasn’t really in love with him. But I quickly shook myself from the thought, what’s done is done, let’s just get on with our lives.
Sometimes my limbs hurt as I lean over the kitchen sink and try to pull myself together to prepare another dinner containing all, or at least most, of the food groups written on the chart Andrei brought home from his health class: grains, meats, dairy, fruit and vegetables, no fats or processed sugars. Then I just make a big pot of mămăligă, the food of the Romanian peasants. Water, salt and golden yellow cornmeal. It has to be stirred a special way with a wooden spoon until your arm aches. People ate mămăligă, five hundred years ago in my part of the world, just as I eat it now with my two sons in our kitchen on nights when I don’t give a damn about the food groups they teach in school. We eat it with sour cream and butter, members of both the dairy group and the fat group, and my soul feels appeased, at least for the time of one dinner. A brief respite as the cornmeal fills me with its golden, heavy warmth. My children puff their cheeks at each other and grin.
Sometimes I’m angry that I do all of this alone. Where is that whole village raising your children when you need it? My body, collapsing on the bed, begs for sleep, and stretches out in its greed for sleep. Sometimes I feel like banging my head against every wall in the house.
Marta drives over from Chicago. She’s now the head pharmacist at the drugstore where we worked together. She’s moved into a bigger apartment. Daniela loves maths and drawing. She draws funny pictures of me and my two boys whenever we get together.
Marta takes over the kitchen and makes a dish of rice and vegetables. Daniela helps out with Ionica, who wants to kiss her all the time and wants her to draw a Tasmanian devil for him. Ionica tells his brother that if he keeps tripping him the Tasmanian devil that Daniela drew will eat him up. I calm down a little. Tonight we are a big happy family speaking Romanian and Spanish and English. Marta and I drink a little tequila and laugh through dinner.
“You’ll find someone who is worthy of you,” Marta assures me, “you will marry again and be happy.”
“I don’t want to marry anyone,” I tell Marta. “Not again . . . Maybe if you were a man I would have married you.” We laugh and pass the bottle.
“You are strong. I don’t know what will happen, but I know you’ll make it. Don’t worry,” Marta says and hugs me.
I feel like Marta is my blood relative, one of the no-nonsense, feisty women in my family. If only she could stay with me, if she and Daniela could move in with us! But she has to get back to Chicago, to her work. I cry for hours after Marta and Daniela leave and I have to face tomorrow all alone again. Another week of gritting my teeth and hoping I don’t drive off a bridge, hoping I don’t drop dead in the middle of a lecture and have to lie there with my students staring down at me. The department chair would come into the classroom and stare at my dead body and say, I knew I shouldn’t have hired that crazy Romanian. I knew she would be trouble. Now what am I going to do with the body?
Something goes wrong. The plot of my life has got too complicated; there’s too much of everything. I have been too greedy, and now I am paying for it. I am tired and my brain is burning. A big hard knot sits in my throat all the time. I’m always scared of making some big mistake, of overlooking something disastrous. I dream, I have visions. I move in and out of sleep, and in the evening I let myself daydream for hours. But during the day I keep precisely to my schedule. Breakfast for the children, work, pick up the children, take them to piano lessons, soccer, birthday parties, cook dinner and get them to bed. Correct papers, balance the checking account.
I wake up feeling strange in my head, heavy and squeaky. I move in clouds of eccentric words and scarlet gestures that smell like the Romanian cornmeal mush, mămăligă, like the Black Sea the Roman poet Ovid described, like the Puerto Rican oregano I grow in my garden, like the French cancan, like scorched petunias on summer nights. Ideas have shapes and colours and bodies. Ideas dance on pointed shoes and make pirouettes in white and pink tutus. Ideas are blue and red and white and look like violet water lilies opening up through crack
s in the smooth, cool surface of a pond.
Thank God I work in the theatre, where madness can be an asset. What would I do if I were an engineer or an accounts payable specialist? I move in and out of words with ease, in and out of languages: Romance languages, Germanic languages, Slavic languages. They slip off my tongue lightly and create iridescent and incandescent patterns like little fireworks. I let them float into the air in my classrooms towards wide-eyed students. I release them like balloons in conference rooms towards serious, bearded, grey-haired scholars who think I am charming but then never listen to what I say. I launch them on stages of school theatres towards weary audiences who yawn and nod asleep.
The Atlantic Ocean
MY MOTHER LOOKS at me mischievously from a photograph my father took on the beach in Florida. They went to Florida in the summer a few years after their arrival in America, to visit an old colleague of my father’s from the university who had also emigrated from Romania and had settled in Florida. It turns out that this friend, whom my father had thought was just another refugee, like himself, used to work abroad for the Romanian secret police. A year after my parents visited him, an assassin put a bullet in his head at the dinner table in front of his wife and children. It appears that the government actually sent some of their secret police abroad to follow people who were denouncing the abuses taking place in Romania. Two years after the 1989 Revolution, a Romanian university professor was shot dead in a lavatory at a Chicago university. My father said it was still the secret police in agony.
“He knew too much,” my father says about his friend. “They had to get rid of him.” My father is sorry for his friend’s violent death, though he’s shocked to discover his friend had been an informer all that time. He feels betrayed and sickened and sad to realize a friendship is gone in more ways than one.
My father is not well: his heart, his lungs, his kidneys, all of him is slowly melting, stopping. He looks haggard and has lapses of memory. Sometimes he is not sure whether he is in Chicago or in Bucharest and asks my mother to go with him to the University Square, to his favourite tobacco store, where his friend Lucian with the amputated legs from a train accident is selling cigarettes and pipes. At other times he is fiercely lucid and talks sadly about how much he would have wanted to go back to his country to see what Romanians are doing with their freedom, to see his old friends. “My country, my country,” he repeats. “You have to go for me, Mona. And for you,” he keeps telling me. “You have to see and find out everything.” He coughs very badly at night sometimes, and his face gets red.
One day when I am visiting Chicago in the summer with the children, he calls me into his room and starts to tell me something about a manuscript. “During those times, you know, I wrote something. You know, a sort of a book . . . I would like you to find out what happened to it.” He stops there and starts coughing. When my mother comes in to give him his medication, he lights up another cigarette. My mother is furious and takes the pack away from him, crushing it in her hand. But then my father calls one of his Romanian friends he knows from the Romanian church and asks him to get him a new pack of Merits. He doesn’t tell me more about this mysterious book, though I’m dying to find out more. But when I insist, my father coughs himself into a frenzy. I decide to let it go. Maybe he’ll feel like talking about it later, another day, when he’s coughing less. When he is suffering less. Eventually, one of his friends arrives and secretly gives him the pack of cigarettes and sits with him in his room, talking about how the Communists had destroyed the country and how all the Romanians over here in Chicago are worried about the Revolution not having changed things too much. “This new president, this Iliescu, he used to be Ceauşescu’s right hand,” my father lectures in his room. “I bet the Securitate are now just like wolves in sheep’s clothing, hiding and then appearing under a new face.”
My father’s friends, some of whom have actually gone back to Romania for short visits, tell him he is right, and that there are children sniffing glue in the streets of Bucharest now, and inflation is so high that people who used to be professors and doctors and engineers are now barely surviving; some are even becoming homeless. “Count your blessings that you are here, Professor,” his friends tell him.
One day, his friend Mitica says that there are people who are saying it was better under Ceauşescu than it is now. “Maybe they are right, Miron. At least then there was order,” Mitica concludes. My father gets so mad at those words that he starts shouting and coughing. He tells his friend to leave him alone and go away, how could he be so idiotic to say or believe something like that, has he forgotten what Ceauşescu was like, has he forgotten? “Order?” he yells hoarsely. “Order? Stalin brought order, too, and also Hitler!” My father’s friend leaves embarrassed, telling my mother that he’ll come back to visit when Miron feels better.
But the day I get back from Chicago, I am staring at this Florida picture again, and there is my mother with her eyes as blue as the ocean that stretches behind her, with her mysterious sea smile. She gave me my wild love of the sea, the deep, irresistible love that draws sailors back for one more voyage. Calm and restrained and proper as she always was, my mother became reckless swimming in the sea. When I was little, she took me on long swims so far out that the beach looked like a thin yellow line. At all hours, when the sea was milky cool and violet at dusk, smooth and sparkling in the morning, fidgety at midday, we swam side by side beyond the lifeguards’ whistles, the sounds of the beach reaching us as a remote hum, the water sliding over our bodies in smooth ripples. I see us together far away, gliding away towards sunset on the sparkling green waters of the Black Sea.
I pack our bags, one for me and one for Andrei and Ionica. We go on our first holiday to the Atlantic Ocean, our first American adventure together, to a place on the coast of North Carolina whose name we all find hilarious: Nags Head. “Like a place for witches,” says Ionica. We take our breakfast on the balcony, looking out at the ocean. We spend hours on the beach, running, swimming, walking. Andrei runs after all the seagulls and imitates their cries, Ionica buries himself in sand. Let the waves roll.
We indulge in new little pleasures. We buy a Mexican tile with a sad guitarist painted on it. We eat Tex-Mex food in a special restaurant for the first time: tangy, spicy, delicious. Andrei tricks Ionica into eating brownies with Tabasco sauce, and to get back at his brother, Ionica puts a live hermit crab in Andrei’s bed. There are shells and sand and live sea creatures in our hotel room. I laugh as I scold them and tell them to settle down.
I swim in the Atlantic Ocean and play in the waves with my energetic, shivering boys. At night we walk the boardwalk by the sea and pretend we live on one of the big, lighted cruise ships. We dream of going to Patagonia or Malta. I search deep for all the sources of strength and sanity inside myself as waves and foam and algae surround me and splash against my body.
We return to our midwestern town golden brown and smelling of salt water. I wink at my own face in the bedroom mirror. The day I start planting marigolds and petunias and parsley and tomatoes in the first garden I have ever owned, I daydream of coloured shoots. Stringy, snaky, coiling tendrils that grow out of my toes and fingers and weave a lacy canopy around me, the core that is me, a web of turquoise, fuchsia, yellow, scarlet, lime green. On the outside of this wildly coloured canopy grow plump tomatoes, round watermelons, leafy lettuce, fragrant basil. I am inside it all like a cocoon, warm and safe. As I walk down the streets of our town, people cheer me joyously and lawyers in black suits with squeaky voices drop dead at the sight of me like ugly flies.
I flush all the antidepressants down the toilet. I plant anything that strikes my fancy, without any particular plan: tomatoes and marigolds, watermelons and lettuce. I work without gardening gloves, getting the dirt under my fingernails and smearing it all over my hands. As my hands sink deep into the black earth, among so many roots, I miss my native earth and its special smells. I decide I have to go back to touch and smell and taste everything aga
in, to assure myself it all actually happened, that I was in fact born and had grown up in a troubled country cuddled in the curl of the Carpathians and washed by the green waters of the Black Sea. At the hardware store, I buy seeds and fertilizer and that tool whose Romanian name is one of the fourteen Dacian words: tîrnăcop, hoe. My father’s words about not being able to go back to his country before he dies keep ringing in my ears. The thought of Mihai having died fills me with sorrow as I stare at the dark earth with its coiling roots. Mihai must be buried in the cemetery at the foot of the mountain, where we buried Cristina. I must see Mihai’s grave to fully understand his death, I think. I must see everything again, see and touch and smell everything. I want to go back.
Last Dance
MY FATHER IS weaker, and his illnesses are getting worse by the day. He is sad and cannot remember recent things, though he remembers his youth and his childhood in great detail. The years of his exile in this foreign land have not brought him happiness or fulfilment. He never wanted to rid himself of the melodious words of his native language, and his freedom came too late for him. Chicago is harsh and cold this Christmas on the brink of the new millennium, just like my first winter when my feet were frostbitten.
He tells me I am the love of his life, my mother and me both. He is so weak, so small and frail. I hold him for a long time in my arms as he tells me he will die very soon. He says not to forget our country. “It’s where you were born and grew up Daddy’s girl. You go, Mona, go and see Matilda’s grave, don’t forget to see all the graves,” he says. And then, a few days into this New Year, my father dies in his sleep, of heart failure, on a cold, windy Chicago morning.
It’s a bad time, as bad as the year when I was eight or nine and everybody in my family seemed to be dying. But this is worse, because he is my father, and we’re burying our dead in foreign earth, because I can’t hide in my aunt’s wardrobe and hug my bare knees for comfort. It’s worse because my father died sad and confused.
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