Nowhere Is a Place Read online

  * * *

  Taken aback when he approached her, he’d looked down into her troubled face and greeted her by name.

  The Mazda was up on a lift in the backyard of Miguel’s Fix-it Place even though she knew she would never reclaim it. The small efficiency cottage she rented every year from Annie Perau, the French expatriate who had started visiting Santa Rey back in the ’60s before the paved roads were laid and the pot-smoking, backpacking hippies had to navigate the rocky terrain by foot or hired mule.

  Annie had come to Santa Rey Obius for the same reason Sherry had started to come: to forge and renew.

  Now in her mid-sixties, Annie had a thriving business, toasted almond– colored skin, white wavy hair, and a clear mind.

  It was a clear mind Sherry was meditating on when the young man approached.

  She’d held her hand up, shielding her eyes from the sun, and was only able to make out the dark shades he wore, the duckbill of an orange cap, and a glint of gold about his neck.

  “Please don’t tell me you’ve forgotten about me after knowing me for all these years.” A smile, broad and sunny backed by blindingly white teeth.

  She’d asked him to take a step to the side. “The sun is blinding me; move a little to your left.”

  “Aw, man. You’ll break my heart if you tell me you don’t know who I am,” he’d said as he moved left and blocked out the sun.

  She looked up and into his face. Yes, yes, it was familiar, but—

  She smiled then and he removed his shades. It was the eyes that caught her: catlike, green in color and flecked with gold.

  His name had always escaped her. It was an odd one—Raven? Hawk? Something birdlike.

  “Uhm?” She smiled and pointed a finger at him. He smiled back and waited for her to say his name.

  Handsome was what came to mind first and then a slight thought to his age. High yellow in color, a bit of blond in his mustache.

  He folded his hands across his chest. “Sherry, Sherry . . .” he muttered, shaking his head and trying to sound wounded.

  His father’s name she could remember: Sam.

  Sam, Sam the umbrella man. Everybody knew Sam. You needed to know Sam if you wanted shade from the sun and weren’t resourceful enough to have brought your own umbrella.

  But the son—his name?

  He was squatting now, kneecaps broad and flat. He was looking at her. She could see the tendons in his arms, in his neck. Straining, pulsating.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, shrugging her shoulders in surrender.

  Sam had children. Small ones: two boys, a girl sometimes—only when the mother was there, which was rare.

  Sherry chewed her bottom lip . . .

  Another boy, a teenager. Wiry, quiet, always polite.

  Sparrow? Pigeon?

  A reader, if she was remembering right: The Catcher in the Rye, Native Son.

  He was what? Sixteen, maybe seventeen years old when she first started coming down.

  “Falcon,” he finally said, and Sherry felt something in her decompress.

  “Yes, yes, that’s it,” she said, and found her hand gently swiping the back of his. “So how have you been?”

  * * *

  It had started that way and had evolved to him pulling her into the water, his hands brushing away wandering strands of seaweed from her shoulder and then finding her waist and settling there.

  She had felt the sun on her teeth and was surprised at the sound of her own laughter ringing in her ears.

  Her foot brushed the top of his, and even in the velvety wrap of the water he felt the roughness of her heel and commented on it. She’d blushed, ashamed that she’d forgotten about herself in some ways.

  She’d managed to keep her nails clipped and square, but hadn’t paid much attention to her toes or the heels of her feet. Her hair was decent though, and she’d continued to floss after every meal, but her feet . . .

  “Oh,” Sherry had muttered, turning her face toward the shore and feeling that block of blue ice that Edison had left inside of her rattle as Falcon, too young for her, forbidden even, bent and plucked a sea stone from the ocean bottom. He caught her by her arm, pulling her close to him, and then hoisted that big old leg of hers up and out of the water like it was feather light and brought her foot to rest on his shoulder. He began to work the stone against her heel as he hummed an old Bessie Smith tune that he couldn’t remember the name of.

  Anyone watching saw dead flakes of skin drop off and into the water, but Sherry saw ice shavings.

  * * *

  By September she had smooth heels and a compilation CD of Bessie Smith and knew all the words to “Gulf Coast Blues,” but Falcon still preferred to hum the tune whenever he was in her small one-bedroom cottage that overlooked the Pacific, which was most times.

  In the evening his sandals sat alongside her flip-flops at the door while they prepared meals together. She forgot the years that lay between them and began thinking of him as hers when they took turns reciting Rita Dove’s poetry to each other at night before making love.

  In February, on his birthday, she tells him that she believes she knows his heart. Asks if he understands what that means, and he pulls her in to him, kisses her cheek where the piano-playing fingers once stroked then struck, and says, “Yes, I know yours too.”

  Falcon, loving her, warming her insides along with the first bright sun of a new June, melting the ice block into candle wax and then water, making it easy for another baby to float there.

  * * *

  After Sherry had put the phone back down in its cradle and crawled into bed, she announced her plans to Falcon. All he could say was, “The family reunion is where?” Falcon’s tone carried more fear than surprise.

  ‘‘Georgia,” Sherry had whispered into his neck, and then threw one leg over his waist in a half straddle.

  The bed creaked and Falcon tried to turn himself over, but she had him pinned and so he just breathed and asked, “What for?”

  She didn’t want to see his face. There would be pain in his eyes to match the fear in his voice. He didn’t want her anywhere too far from him. He’d told her that a hundred times, and now that she was pregnant . . . well, he practically didn’t want her out of his eyesight.

  “I’ve got to clear up some things. Learn some things,” she responded, and then moved herself closer in to him.

  He knew about some of the things but, he suspected, not all of the things. The slap had come up in conversation a number of times. Sometimes accompanied by tears, other times a sheet of silence like black ice followed the utterance of it. “No way around it,” Sherry murmured.

  “Got to go through it to get over it,” Falcon said, then sighed and reached his hand back, resting it on her thigh.

  He wasn’t a selfish man, so he wouldn’t complain about her going to be with her people to handle her business, but he did say, “What about the baby?”

  “Well, I’m going to take the baby with me, of course!” The humor of the statement wasn’t lost on him, and Falcon uttered a small laugh.

  Paradise, Nevada

  July 1995

  Dumpling

  Sherry call the first of the month. No other time. Always the first. So imagine my surprise when on the sixteenth, I picked up the phone and heard her “hello” coming from the other end.

  What’s wrong?

  She said, Nothing, Dumpling. Can’t a daughter call and say hello to her mama?

  I look at the phone and then tap the receiver on the nightstand a few times before I put it back to my ear. What? I say.

  Sherry just sighs and says, What you banging the phone around like that for?

  Static, I say. And then, So how you?

  Okay, she say, and then ask about the weather, but I know something wrong or really right, you just never know with Sherry ’cause she always been odd.

  She the strangest one of my three children. She also the middle of the three, so I guess that explains it. I don’t read much, but I list
en to the radio, watch plenty of television, and the people say that the middle children got a hard road to walk, not the first, not the last, falling between—not the eldest and not the baby—second in line. Always floundering, one talk-show host say. Always searching, another say.

  Always asking, I say.

  Why this and why that?

  I answer as many questions as I can. Sometimes I say, I just don’t know. Other times, I wave my hand and tell her to hush up her mouth. My ears hurting from you asking so many questions and my throat parched from trying to answer them all. So hush!

  She ask a lot of questions, but don’t answer too many.

  I still don’t know all of what happened to her in Chicago. Edison tell me some, say he messed up big-time, say he want her back, ask, Is she there?

  I told him no, ain’t heard a peep since the beginning of the month. You know how it is with us, I tell him, Sherry’s calls come on the first, right along with my pension check and Kmart credit card bill. What you do to her anyway?

  He never did say, and then the first of the month rolled around and Sherry called and said, Here’s my new telephone number.

  I wrote it down and said, Sure is a lot of numbers. Where you at?

  She say, Mexico, now take down my new address, you gonna need an airmail stamp if you want to write me.

  I hadn’t been writing her, but I take it down so’s I have it when I want to send her birthday and Christmas cards.

  Mexico?

  She says, Yes, for a while.

  I say, Edison calls, he say he messed up, want you back, still love you. He sounds sorry to me, what he do?

  Sherry say, He dead to me, next subject please.

  I didn’t ask no more.

  Madeline my eldest girl. She married with three of her own children. She tall, brown, smart, marry a man half her height and twice her weight. Kids are squat and yellow like their daddy, look to me like I got three butternut squashes for grandchildren. But they okay. I love ’em. They part of me.

  My boy, Ethan, we call him Sonny Boy ’cause he named after his daddy, my husband. He in and out of the house. Sometime in school, sometime working, sometime in love, sometime not, all the time wanna be onstage, he think he gonna be a star—he got another name we call him, “Mr. Hollywood”—he ain’t got but a lick of talent and think his good looks gonna carry him far.

  Maybe they will. I see loads of pretty people on television ain’t got no talent.

  Now my Sherry, she looks the most like me. We ’bout the same height, wide in the hips, big legs, big breasts, long hair, peanut-skin brown. She all of what I was when I was her age, ’cept she single, childless, and still trying to find her place in the world.

  She been to Africa six or seven times, spent a month in India, been to all of the islands, South America, Central America, Greenland, and a bunch of other places that I can’t recall the names of—and she still feel “displaced” is word she use.

  I say, Don’t the home you were born in feel like home?

  No.

  Her answer is short, sharp. I wince and turn my head away. My feelings don’t usually get hurt so easily, but I feel a knife in my heart.

  I wait for her to change her answer, to ’splain herself. Five years pass, and I’m still waiting.

  Whatever, I think—it’s her fault she feels displaced, don’t you know. She done lived in twenty different cities since she was nineteen.

  Now she living in Mexico of all places. Cleaning toilets and making beds in some dive she stumbled on some years ago.

  What you go to all the universities for if all you wanted to do was be a chambermaid?

  She say, It’s honest work.

  I say, It don’t make no kind of sense!

  I’m still searching.

  What you looking for? I ask.

  She say, Myself.

  I say, Yourself? There you is right there, I say, and poke her with my finger. I see you; feel you too, don’t you?

  She say, Not like that. She say, I’m looking for my purpose. Why it is God put me here. You know?

  No, I don’t.

  * * *

  Sherry got respect for me, but not much love. Been like that for years now. Can’t quite remember when the hugs stopped, when the Saturday-morning snuggle sessions ended, or whose birthday cake I was making when I offered her the bowl to lick and she turned the offer down flat.

  Can’t remember the year, but I know she was young, scrawny, and loved hamburgers and hot dogs and fried pork rinds more than it seemed she loved me.

  She ain’t never come right out and said she hated me or disliked me, but I saw it in her eyes, heard it in her voice, felt it all over the house after she moved out and only came back to visit.

  I ain’t done nothing to her I ain’t done to the other two. But you would think I was the worst mother in the world, when all I did was try to be the best mother I knew how.

  So imagine my surprise when she called me up from Mexico and asked, The Lessing family reunion going on this year, right?

  Yeah.

  Where?

  Sandersville, Georgia.

  You going?

  Wasn’t planning to, why?

  I wanna go.

  Really? That’s a surprise.

  I wanna drive.

  To Georgia? Long trip.

  I want you to ride with me.

  Really, me and you? Like I said, long trip.

  Will you?

  She my child, and even though she hate me, I love her and so I say, Sure, sounds like fun, why not.

  Sherry say she coming in four days and then arrive in three.

  She pull up in her shiny brand-new car. I mean, SUV—she been correcting me all the time about that. It’s nice. Classy is what come to mind. Sonny Boy beg and plead to drive it, Madeline can’t understand how Sherry can afford it.

  Sherry ain’t held down a job for more than six months her entire life, she say. Always in school, taking a class for this, taking a course in that. How cleaning toilets and making beds pay for something like that?

  Madeline pouts and then folds her thick arms across her big tits and sticks her lip out like she four years old again.

  I say, What you care for? You paying the note? You got two cars, a house, three kids, a dog, a cat, and a parakeet. More than Sherry got.

  Parakeet died last year, she say.

  Whatever, I say, and wave her away. Next day, Madeline pulls into my driveway in her brand-new SUV.

  It’s bigger than Sherry’s, got a third row and got a sunroof. Sits so high up on its wheels, Madeline’s husband Aaron got to help me in.

  Now we can all ride together, Madeline say, and my eyes roll over to Sherry who smile and say real calm-like, No we can’t.

  Madeline’s face go red and she look at me and then back at Sherry and say, Why not?

  Sherry cock her head and look Madeline dead in the eye and say, You can take your truck if you want to, but I ain’t riding with you and neither is Dumpling.

  Madeline ain’t never been a fighter and so she just fix her mouth the way she do when things don’t go her way and grab hold of the flabby skin of her husband’s arm.

  Aaron say it would be better to fly, the kids would get too restless on a long ride like that, and Madeline agree. Like that something new.

  * * *

  Sonny Boy don’t look like he gonna make it. Something about auditions—but I think it sound more like “money.” Madeline warn me not to pay for his ticket, he already owe everybody too much money as it is, she say. I nod and pretend to agree like I’m my own daughter’s child, and call the airline soon as she back that SUV out of the driveway.

  I would do the same for her.

  * * *

  We head out Monday morning. Six a.m. I can’t tell if Sherry excited or not, her face always wear the same expression.

  Me, I’m bubbling inside about seeing family. I ain’t been back to Sandersville since I left it. Not even when my sister Lovey call and say she was mov
ing back. And that’s been a good twenty years now.

  Sherry eases her SUV onto Interstate 40 and then into the left lane, and we begin to fly.

  I say it’s gonna be nice to be ’round my people when we ain’t weeping over somebody that’s lying dead in a coffin.

  Sherry nods her head yes, and I see a smile tickling the corners of her mouth. ‘

  I lean back in that butter-soft leather seat and watch the city streak by outside my window until it’s just black highway and the hum of the engine. My eyes flutter and close and I’m dreaming of trees: sweet gum, white oak, sycamore. Flowers follow: lady slipper, May apple, bloodroot, and Cherokee rose.

  I see the young me, before I hated the color blue, and the pain in my knees slip away, the gray in my hair disappear. Water come from the spring and not bottles, vegetables grow in rows and don’t come in cans. Oil lamps and quilts. Loons sing us to bed at night and roosters wake us in the morning. Peaches, pecans, and guinea fruits that it seemed God put there for just us alone.

  Romping, running. High, bright sun. No cares, no worries. Youth.

  * * *

  I hear Sherry’s voice slip into my dreams. Dumpling? she says real soft. I feel her hand shake my shoulder. I uh-huh her but don’t open my eyes.

  Are we there yet? I kid, and try to recapture my dream.

  She laugh a little and cut off the air-conditioning. The windows come down and she hit a button on the radio and all of a sudden there’s the sound of cymbals and bells and a woman moaning.

  Why she crying? I ask.

  Sherry say, It’s called chanting.

  Whatever, I say.

  Like I said, she is the strange one.

  * * *

  We been on the road three hours now. My mouth dry, bladder full, belly burning empty.