by Alfredo Vea
“Just because they cut your left breast off don’t mean you have to cut off all of the hair on that side of his head! You’re not the reason that the world is tilted on its axis.”
Cleonice laughed, then squinted to inspect her work. It was true. She had ignored the entire right side of his head. She sighed with the realization that she was not as strong as she had thought. She cared what the world saw when it looked at her chest. She cared that her husband’s fondling hands had one less option. Lately she had been using her left hand more and more. She laughed a sinister laugh. Her comb and snapping scissors moved reluctantly to the other side of his head.
The second sister, Myrinne Thibideau, walked to the sink and began mixing the ingredients for the elixir that would restore the old man’s lost youth and his sexual desire. When the thick compound was thoroughly mixed, she rubbed some of it on her finger and tested it for color against her own dark hair. In moments she was spreading the concoction over Priapus’s scalp and newly trimmed locks. As she did, she realized that it had been decades since she had touched her father. She rubbed his scalp thoughtfully, feeling the memories just beneath her fingertips and the single foolish hope that was sequestered among them.
Her father groaned under the wet weight of anticipation. There was discomfort in his eyes as his second daughter worked. Could she feel the deception beneath the deception? The second sister wrapped a towel around her father’s newly blackened head, then returned to her seat. The gray hairs would be invisible for a few months. Her job was almost done.
The old man sat quietly though impatiently in his chair; the linoleum tiles around his feet were littered with flecks of his grayness here and with whole clumps of his grizzled years there. Specks of age had fallen onto his precious brown wingtips. The kitchen floor beneath his chair resembled a fossil bed. He looked down at the proof of autumn on his very own boughs and prayed silently for just one more printemps—a single hard-legged spring; for another warrior’s summer to come invade his life and conquer this impending winter.
He swooned in his chair as a lovely Frenchwoman from out of the distant past threw her arms around his black body as he and his colored comrades marched through Normandy. He had been walking behind a Sherman tank when she burst out of the crowd and ran toward him. For an instant there were flowers at his feet and loose petals clinging to his youthful sweat. Why was the nearness of death so much like the nearness of love? he wondered in enraptured confusion.
Persephone Flyer, the third sister, rose from her chair and with a treezers began to pull the disgusting hairs from her father’s nose and ears. With each disinterment of a follicle the old man’s right leg kicked out reflexively from beneath his chair. How he hated those hairs and the efforts required to remove them. Each violent kick was followed by a wail of relief that contained within itself odd-order harmonics of pleasurable pain. It had been the same in 1944—the wonderful pain of illicit, forbidden love.
The Frenchwoman’s husband and every member of the local resistance had been exposed by traitors and executed by the Germans. On a single blissful evening, all of her terrible grief and exulting joy had been impaled upon Negro corporal Priapus Boudreaux in the grassy field behind her home. Creole sweat had met with perfume and sat glistening in commingled beads upon Alsatian skin.
So the old man sat in the kitchen, a feeble partner among four prima donnas. He sat denying le tempspassé, denying the passing years, and longing fervently for the turgid power of war.
“Ayez soin!” he screamed at his daughter. “Be careful with those damned tweezers, ma fille!”
“Taisez-vous, mon père,” hissed Persephone. “It’s a shameful day when a veteran of World War Two is wounded by tweezers. Each hair means one day discarded. Look at all of the days scattered around your shoes. Count yourself among the lucky, mon vieilliard. Each discarded hair is one day that can be lived again.”
“Listen to your daughter, you old fool!” shouted the men from the parlor.
Even as the chorus spoke, the fourth sister rose from her chair and began preparing for her solo. First she swept up the hair. In a few moments, in response to the subtlest cue, she would take her turn to perform. As a cosmetologist, she would be the one to remove the excess dye from his hair, to sculpt a new, more modern hairdo, and to soften the scars that time and concern had left on his face. It was a formidable task.
She stood back for a moment, looking carefully at her father. Had she ever really seen his face? She walked toward the doorway and flicked on another light. To her amazement, his eyes were deeper than she remembered, more shadowed with need than she wished to acknowledge. She turned away to avoid the inevitable, to keep from thinking the next thought: a living person had been buried in this home. Now his daughters were preparing his body for the next life.
He had always lived in the shadow of his wife. In time the man had been completely eclipsed by his own love—by his choice of lover and eventually by his female progeny. But Miss Lizzie had been dead for years now, all but one set of her costumes and toe shoes had been put up in the attic.
What a night that had been, that long night at the mortuary when all four daughters had dressed their mother’s body. They had put her in her favorite costume, that of the dying swan, even as they passed that long night telling stories of her vital beauty and grace. Now the girls were all married off and had moved away. Now it was time for their father to find a companion for his last years, perhaps an old maid or a widow to cook for him and to walk with him in the evening. This house had become a tomb, a mausoleum, and he had become its doddering caretaker. Enough was enough.
The old man had evolved a plan to cure his loneliness, to reverse the direction of his life. He would buy a new double-breasted suit and new shoes. He would dust off his bronze star and his purple heart with clusters, and take a bus over to Savannah, then hire a motorboat to one of the small sea islands just off the coast. It had all been arranged and paid for in advance. On that island were rising hills of sand and stands of tall, verdant grass that hid enfeebled, elevated walkways and tiny, wood-plank houses held up by rotting stilts.
There were families out there in that grass, families with a powerful linguistic memory of the Cote d‘lvoire and the Costa de los Es clavos still lingering on their tongues. Glottal stops were hidden within their exclamations and their sobs. Families lived out there in small shacks crowded with numbing despair and starving children. Their lives were lived just above the whim of the tides.
There were working men out there who did battle with the infertile soils and with the murky, fishless waters, men who had no work to do, and young but never youthful mothers out there whose hips bore both the agony and ennui of those men. There were human bodies out there, striated and worn. There were children out there—fecund girl children who were available for marriage, but at a price.
The sweet daughter of Cinesias Williams was out there. The old man’s right hand reached down into his coat pocket. He felt the manila envelope there, enough money for an unemployed father to buy a motorboat. Enough money for Cinesias to abandon his wife, those children, and those godforsaken islands forever.
“So tell us about this woman,” said Persephone. “You said she comes from Atlanta and her family owns a grocery store.”
“A couple of stores, maybe even a chain of them,” retorted the old man angrily. It was a bald-faced lie and he sensed that Persephone knew it.
“She don’t need my money, if that’s what you’re thinking. Elle est trés riche. Trés beaucoup d‘argent! She don’t need a single red cent from me. Not a red cent.”
The old man pulled a cigar from his jacket pocket and lit it with indignation. Persephone reached for a nearby spray bottle and doused the flame with equal fervor.
“We’re just curious, Papa,” said Persephone. “You never say anything about this mystery lady, not a single word. She must be somewhat younger than you are or you wouldn’t have asked us to do this rather extensive makeover for you. Comment
s‘appelle? Quelleâge? Racontez, vite! Is she sixty-five, seventy?”
“Leave him be!” cried the chorus of old men.
“Mind your own business,” retorted the chorus of women.
The old man said nothing. The soggy cigar hung limp from his teeth. Persephone tilted his head to the left, then grabbed an entire bunch of ear hairs with the tweezers. She jerked them out of his head like so many radishes from the ground and he reacted by whimpering and pulling his head away. She was angry at her father, but grabbed a towel to dab at the blood in his ear. She then leaned down to whisper.
“Je t‘aime, Papa. We all love you. Don’t you think we have a right to know? ”
“You’ll meet her when the time comes,” said the old man, who turned his ear away from his daughter’s lips. In truth, he hoped that the time would never come. He was sure it never would. These daughters of his departed wife would be unmerciful in their disgust and revulsion if they ever found out their father had taken a child bride. They would make his life into living hell if they ever discovered that he’d paid money for her.
He sighed anxiously to himself. There was a growing feeling of finality to this gathering. If he was lucky, these four domineering daughters would never again visit him in this lifetime. They would go back to Athens, Georgia, and to Sparta, New York. They were just like their dear mother, and thank God, their mother was dead. For good and all, he was through with strong women.
As Persephone softly rubbed away the furrows that had appeared on his brow, the old man closed his eyes and began once more to dream of the Frenchwoman. He had always intended to return to France to find her, but never did. The memory of that glorious day had almost died away. In order to spark an accurate picture of her in the remaining neurons of his mind, he began, once again, to dream a dream of war.
Persephone Flyer would be flying back to San Francisco in the morning. All four sisters had left their father to his new hair and face, and were gathered around the kitchen table to both celebrate and mourn her departure.
Meanwhile, the old man was off with his comrades. They were in the parlor drinking, recalling battles in the French countryside and passing around a photo of the girl-child of Cinesias Williams. The old men were giggling and snickering over the length of her knobby legs and the merest hint of breasts beneath a flour-sack dress. Priapus Boudreaux cast a nervous glance toward his youngest daughter. It was Persephone whom he feared the most.
In the kitchen, Persephone felt her father’s probing glance, but her mind was elsewhere. In the left cup of Persephone’s brassiere were two envelopes. She had forgotten about them for most of the evening, but now they chafed her skin as the anticipation grew. She had carried them on the plane from the West Coast. The postmark on the first letter indicated that it had been mailed from Seattle.
The second was an official dispatch from the Department of the Army. Would this be their final letter to her? Had they at last located his body? Had some Vietnamese farmer run across his Creole rib cage and his dog tags while plowing a field? For some reason she hadn’t wanted to read them until she was safely in the family home and surrounded by her own flesh and blood.
With her sisters beside her, silent and breathless, she carefully opened the first envelope. At first she tried to open it along the flap, but she grew impatient, and in a fit of pique, tore it open. The letter inside was the second carbon copy. The original was in Washington. The third and fourth carbons were suffocating somewhere in the bowels of some far-flung army post that was charged with generating such documents.
“He’s still listed as missing in action.” She sighed. She considered crying but held back her tears. It was certainly far better than a “killed in action” designation, or a “missing in action and presumed dead.” Years from now, other letters would come bearing just those designations. Her sisters moved about her, touching her shoulders and kissing her cheek with delicacy and experience. It was better than killed in action, their fingers and lips repeated. Better than KIA.
“Good-for-nothing man will be back on your front porch in no time,” said one of the sisters. “Pretty soon you’ll wish he was back in the army. When he comes back, tell him he ain’t never gonna get none of that good loving of yours if he stays a soldier.”
“That’s right,” echoed another sister. “Don’t give him no sexual favors unless he swears on the Good Book to stay home with you. Be as cold as ice to him, and never stir a limb. He’ll stay home. You better believe he will.”
“He’s missing, that’s all, just missing,” said the sister with one breast. “All you need is one good letter. The next letter will be better. It’ll be the news you’re waiting for. Who is the second letter from?”
“There’s no return address,” answered Persephone, “but this handwriting has to be a woman’s.”
She sniffed the envelope, then passed it around for the others to peruse. She was relieved to find that there was no perfume on the paper.
“It has to be a woman’s.”
For a moment there was a hint of panic in her voice. Could it be possible that some strange woman in Seattle knew something about the fate of her Sergeant Amos Flyer? Had she met him on a rest-and-recuperation junket to Singapore or Saigon? Did they have sex, or worse, did they make love? Did they laugh between the sheets? Did they make love at night and in the morning, too, the way that she and Amos had when they first met? How on earth did she get my old address in San Francisco? The envelope had been addressed to her old apartment. The manager there, an old friend, had forwarded it to Persephone’s new home.
Slowly, carefully, she opened the envelope. Somehow Persephone was certain that this letter would have more to say about her husband than the first. Steeped in anticipation, her three sisters held their cups of tea in the air before their lips as she slowly tore at the seal. All they would dare taste at a time like this was hope and expectation. They all sighed in unison when they saw the number of pages contained in the letter—at least a dozen. Would the information be hidden, couched in innuendos or sequestered carefully in the code that mistresses used when they communicated with wives? Still frozen with ceramic cups filled with orange pekoe hovering in front of their faces, they waited in silence until Persephone finished the final page, then folded the letter back into its envelope.
She dropped the letter into her purse, then began to weep softly, her face in her hands. Then she lifted her head to face her impatient sisters.
“Remember when you girls would do my makeup for me?” She smiled. “Remember when you would dress me for school and comb my hair for me? You”—she pointed to her oldest sister—“helped me put on my first pair of pantyhose, and you taught me how to coordinate my outfits. I never seemed to be able to pick out my own clothing. As you can see, I can’t choose outfits for myself.”
She gestured toward the clothing that hung from her body.
“The next time I come home, maybe the three of you will dress me again, for old time’s sake. Perhaps it’ll be for my Amos’s home-coming. You all remember how scared I was when I got my first period?” Persephone’s voice broke as joy gave way to heartfelt sincerity. “My sisters have always been there for me, no matter what. Je vous aime tant.”
She rose from her chair and moved from one sister to the next, embracing them each in turn. As she hugged each one she whispered into an ear, “Finally, after all of this time, we have word from Amos.”
The sisters rose from their chairs, one after the other, their teacups and saucers dropping and spilling and shattering. The tea would stain the floor for years. Not even Priapus’s child bride, on her hands and knees for three full hours, would be able to scrub away the discoloration.
“My lover’s words are written upon a forearm. Mes soeurs, we have another sister.”
Clearly impatient to begin her flight to the West Coast, she clutched the precious letter to her bosom. There was a woman in this world—a stranger who would become more familiar than family—a woman who had cut Persep
hone’s name and old address into her arm, a woman who was suffering the same sadness and love, a woman who was living in Seattle.
She glanced toward her father, who was with his friends on the other side of the house, dreaming of the scorched metal scent of artillery pieces and the soft, sizzling sound of burning white phosphorus. To her amazement, Persephone noticed a bulge in her old father’s pants. Either the old fool had hidden a lance in his clothing or the septuagenarian was having an erection.
“If the old fool chooses someone who is underage,” she said suspiciously, “we should think seriously about putting him in a home.”
The two women did not know each other immediately. Each had imagined the face of the other in a hundred ways. So, for a time, they stood in the crowded United Airlines gate casting nervous glances in every possible direction. The force of the crowd—the hurried and the harried, the disembarking passengers and the loved ones who ran to meet them—forced the two women to within arm’s length of each other. At one point their shoulder bags accidentally collided. At another point they jostled each other, back to back, the smaller woman’s shoulder blades cupped in the small of Persephone’s back.
Eventually they brushed past each other, their hands barely touching. Now earnest inadvertence yielded to unconscious intention. Lovely Mai, in high heels, stumbled near the edge of a carpet and found, as if by accident, Persephone’s brown hand to give her balance and stability. Now a flurry of polite excuses and apologies gave way to long minutes of rapt attention as platoons of passengers swelled and faded in the background.
The first sight of the other seemed to be the confirmation of something already known deep in the heart: loneliness can recognize itself. Persephone and Mai stood staring at each other as one hundred eighty tickets were presented at the gate and given seating assignment. They stood mutely as the plane was filled and lifted noisily into the sky above their heads.
The two women, thrilled at the touch of the other, embraced shamelessly and silently at gate 79 of the United terminal. They then walked, hand in hand, without words toward Persephone’s car and toward the rest of their lives together. The conversation about Amos and Trin could wait. The information was so scant. Without saying a word, they had reached an agreement, an accord.
