A Simple Distance (4 page)

In Baobique, when you look to the mountains, all you see are trees, tall and arching in the wind, their uppermost fronds green and, perhaps, slick with rain; at night, maybe two or three houses with electric lights, unless you are down south in the capital, Bato, where they have known for quite some time how to work the politics, get themselves things like running water and electricity.

In Bato, at night, looking up at its hills is like what it must have been to look up at Oakland long ago, barely dotted with lights. But during the day I saw no such similarity.

As the bus climbed the bridge, I could see the Golden Gate, the Pacific just beyond, and my mind left my mother’s ocean for mine.

Just beyond the cliffs at Fort Point was where Cynthia and Linda bought their house, when Sadie was due. Three pieces of a once solid whole.

As the bus descended the downward slope of the bridge and we reached San Francisco, I wondered what was so wrong with the concept of sharing; why the law so loved the mutually exclusive. I deboarded heavy of foot, crossed the street, and made my way inside.

I remembered a recent telephone conversation with Cynthia, her anger still palpable as she told me,
I saw it coming, you know, Linda and Cara. But I shut my eyes.
She’d hoped it would pass on its own. Linda and Cara were coworkers, saw each other every day in the halls, at meetings. Things like that. Then it’d become social: pot luck dinners, office lunches. Linda would put it on Sadie. She’d say,
Kids aren’t really going to be there.
So it was better if Sadie and Cynthia stayed at home.

Cara’d grown bold. Calling Linda’s cell phone at home to invite her out on the weekend, putting Linda on the spot.
How can kids not be allowed to go swimming on a Saturday afternoon at Lake Chabot?
Cynthia would ask.

Of course I knew. I knew before Linda
, she said. Continued,
Weeks after she left, I thought I’d lose my mind with anger. My neck, my arms, my hands—I burned rage. I called their office, but I didn’t know Cara’s last name, so I couldn’t get past the damn voicemail. I wrote her letters, but again, no last name—so I couldn’t send them. I steamed.
Stuck, alone with her righteousness.
I wanted Cara to know that Sadie and I were real and their actions had consequences outside themselves.

But Linda’d checked out.

Linda wants what she wants. There’s nothing I can do about that. But I want what I want, too. And I want her to regret her choice.

I’m sorry, Cynthia
, I’d said, trying to offer comfort, but not too much. It was selfish of Linda and Cara, it was. It sounded hard, but look at Cynthia, at what she was doing—using Sadie to see Linda hurt—who was she to talk?

You don’t need to take a right from one person to grant it to another. I wished Cynthia could see that. But that week, she had the law on her side and could have taken us back over a decade if she chose.

I grabbed a quick cup of coffee, lots of cream, lots of sugar, passed the receptionist’s desk in the kitchenette down the hall from my office, logged on to my computer, pulled up the decision:
Sharon S.
:

Annette F. petitioned under the independent adoption statutes to adopt Joshua, the biological son of her relationship partner, Sharon S. (the petitioner here). After the women severed their relationship, Sharon sought to terminate the adoption proceedings, arguing in part that the adoption statutes do not permit a second-parent, or co-parent, adoption (one in which the unmarried relationship partner of the parent adopts that child and the parent retains parental rights). We agree …

The rules that govern our actions derive from conflict. What
Sharon S.
meant was, if you were gay, and you and your partner wanted to parent a child in California, you did so at your own risk. A single paragraph withheld from unmarried couples and their children that which married couples took for granted: family, legally recognized.

And at the end of that week, mine was to be the mouth that made this happen. I cleared my throat, thought about grade school and autumn, when the leaves on the gingko tree in the courtyard of Frank Lloyd Wright’s home and studio, kitty corner across Chicago Avenue from the playground, would be yellow and falling to the ground. Thirty-two years old and I was in the fourth grade all over again.

It was at the side of the long, low brick wall protecting the yard from the likes of us, that Sally Johnson first called me a
jungle-bunny.

Then there was the time in first grade, early spring because my birthday is in May—May 18, Peace Day on the calendar, and also the day Mount St. Helens erupted and we learned for the first time that there were volcanoes in America—that Meghan Callahan, for a joke, sang “Happy Birthday” to me at recess, back behind the dodge ball circle, and when it got time to sing my name, instead of singing,
Happy Birthday to Jean,
she sang,
Happy Birthday to the black girl, Happy Birthday to you
. As if I didn’t even have a name.

Until Margaret in the fourth grade, I was the only black student at Lincoln School. Abraham Lincoln Elementary School.

Margaret was in my class. She was tall and thin and almost ran faster than me, even though everyone knew I was the fastest kid at Lincoln, period. Faster, even, than any of the boys in both the fifty-yard dash and all the way around the block. But Margaret didn’t know that. She was new. So she kept trying to beat me in the fifty-yard dash, and it got me angry because sometimes she almost did, and she didn’t seem to know when to quit. Margaret moved into the duplex next to Sally Johnson’s, on Forest, just off Chicago Avenue, right across the street from Wright’s home and studio.

When the tourists walked the area with their portable tape players and headsets, they’d go past the other Wright houses, but they’d stop inside his studio. We’d sell them lemonade on the corner in the summer.

Then one day Margaret wasn’t at school. She just stopped showing up. Sally said Margaret’s front lawn had a cross burned on it with fire, and that Margaret’s family had moved away immediately. Right when Sally said it, I knew it was her brothers who’d burned that cross.

I just couldn’t figure out why. Why they’d never done that to us; why Sally and I were friends, her parents feeding me lunch sometimes, once even inviting me up to their cabin, the one they built themselves by hand, all the way up in Northern Wisconsin, even though Sally didn’t tell me where they all took poops at night and when I stepped right in the middle of some, Sally and her brothers and her dad all just laughed. I thought maybe they hadn’t burned a cross on our lawn because we didn’t move in right next door to them. We were all the way on the other side of the block. Or maybe they hadn’t burned a cross on our lawn because my dad looked white, or because I was friends with Sally, or because our moms were friends.

But I never could figure it out. And I sort of felt like I had something to do with Margaret leaving, like I should have protected her or something because her skin was just like mine. And even though I’d never really liked her, wished she’d given up on the fifty-yard dash business like everyone else, when she left it felt scary, like I was all alone.

* * *

I printed out the
Sharon S.
case, tossed it on the top of Cynthia’s file, and left for the day, catching the bus back to Oakland stuck somewhere between disgust and despair. Because when one of us gets burned, we all scar. And right then, I was the one holding the match.

CHAPTER 6

Perhaps my mother was expecting a signal, my small gray hatchback to turn into the drive, because she startled when I unlocked the front door. She was talking on the phone, sitting on the futon and watching the side window, which would have allowed her to see my car pull in, if only I had driven instead of taken the bus.

How can you defend her, Lillian? What she’s done to me. It’s as if she doesn’t care about her own mother! Oh look, she just walked in. I should go … All right, I will. You take care too, dear.

Tell Auntie Lillian I say hello, Mom.

Jean says hello … All right, I will. Bye, dear.

My mother always calls long distance on other people’s phones because she can’t afford it herself. I had no idea how long she’d been on, but the fact that she couldn’t afford to talk with Aunt Lillian, her godmother in England, for hours on end, I’m sure, would not have prevented her from doing so on my dime.

I’d always thought Aunt Lillian was related to us by blood, but she isn’t. Even though she lives in Europe, she’s one of those people who’s always around. At least in conversation. She trained as a nurse in England during World War II. They say she had a fiancé back then, a Baobiquen pilot in the Royal Air Force. But he didn’t survive the war.

Baobique’s no place for a young woman disinterested in the rest of its men. I guess she thought she was better off where she was. So she stayed in London, worked in a hospital, bought a flat, earned herself a pension.

Normally, I would have commented on the cost of the call. Normally, that would have been bothering me most.

But I was more upset by the substance of the conversation I walked in on than I was its length.

Were you two talking about me?

Well, of course. You’re my daughter.

Something was going on and I wanted, more than anything, not to find out what it was. I did not want to wind up in the middle. But I was angry.

Mom, what were you saying about me? For Christ’s sake, I just flew you up here. How can you say I don’t care about my own mother? What the hell is going on?

Jean, there’s no need to get nasty on top of it all.

Mom, I don’t even know what I’m getting nasty about! Tell me, specifically, what is going on.

You know exactly what’s going on, Jean. This is all your doing. Mama’s telling Lillian it’s because of that damn goat. What do they think I am, na, a fool?
She pressed her tongue to the back of her front teeth, made that sucking noise she only started doing since she returned to Baobique. A noise well below her family’s station on the island, a noise that would have sent my grandmother to an early grave. But right then, that was just what my mother would have liked to do.

When I was in Baobique visiting my sick uncle, about a year before his death and my mother’s trip to Oakland to recuperate, her dogs killed the goat of a man named Mr. Williams. He worked for her picking seed nuts from the coconut trees at Godwyn to sell in town for three dollars apiece at Saturday market. But when I was there, it was the plums that needed picking.

Mr. Williams had a bum leg, so he couldn’t pick the plums. He’d hurt it the day before on the estate, twisted it tripping over a root from some tree that couldn’t keep itself entirely underground. My mom and I had to drive him home in her jeep, down the road to Sommerset, where both the ocean and the people are rough but where we managed to accomplish the following things: bought a flat of eggs for bread pudding; gave condolences to a woman whose father had recently died from drinking a jug of lye; said hello to Mr. Issacs, Uncle George’s secretary’s father, and to another older, balding man whose connection to my relatives I’ve forgotten. People gathered in the little intersection as my mom’s car blocked the road and we talked.

At one point, four young men walked by eyeing me, as most of the men there do to all women under forty. They looked me up and down, hung out in front of our car until my mom honked them to the side. It was obvious they didn’t like us, with our car, our house, our maid, while so many people lived in shacks. There was one man in particular who scared me, his right eyelid sewn shut, who wouldn’t look away even as we rolled by.

Next morning, bright and early, Rascal and Lucia started barking. Like mad dogs at the bottom of the plum tree. My mom told me to grab her cutlass from the kitchen wall, so I did. And we went to investigate.

When we got to the dogs, we looked up and saw two sets of brown eyes staring down at us from among the plums. But it wasn’t the men from Sommerset, it was Mr. Williams’s two sons, come to steal what they could off the tree bursting with fruit.

They told us they were just there to see about their father’s goat; that Rascal and Lucia had chased them up the tree. With Mr. Williams’s boys, it was always a risk to trust the words coming out their mouths. Mr. Williams treated them badly because they were his wife’s from another man.

But my mom still needed the plums picked. So she told the boys to clean the tree and she’d split the basket with them.

We’d thought that was the end of that. Even when the dogs started up barking again farther into the gardens.

Then, all of the sudden, we heard something screaming, loud and shrill, like a child. Only it wasn’t a child at all, it was the goat.

I grabbed the cutlass off the wall again and ran as fast as I could past the plum tree, the guava and baobab trees next to my grandfather’s grave, through the bush, and into the gardens. The day was hot already, but I was too focused on the screaming goat and the feel of the machete’s wooden handle in the grip of my right hand to notice. And then I was right on top of them: the dogs, mixed with pit for protection, their jaws locking onto the hind quarters of Mr. Williams’s small goat, which was tied to a tree with a rope from some drug smuggler’s boat found, perhaps, in the cove at Sommerset.

I couldn’t think through all the screaming, the goat’s sounding more human still than even the boys’ behind me, and my mom’s. I had a machete. They kept telling me to cut it loose, but I couldn’t get around the dogs, tearing, tearing into flesh. It was then I noticed the heat, there with us all in the humid, tangled, buggy bush. I tried to slap the dogs away with the machete, until I realized you don’t slap anything with a giant knife unless you’re trying to kill it. Finally, I got to the rope. Cut it. And the goat took off into the estate, the dogs behind it; Rascal’s jaw still locked on its left hind leg. The screaming continued for some time. And the dogs came home later, bloody, bloody.