Washington, D.C.: 1950
I am four and pretend I am an Egyptian princess. For this game I arrange planks of wood across my parents’ brown-and-white checked bedspread. The wood becomes a tributary of the Nile River, and as I flee along the bank, escaping, green reeds brush my legs. Someone is chasing me. Downstairs in the living room my father builds furniture with his electric saw, a gleaming metal table with a round, jagged blade, whirring as it nears the wood, whirring as it severs a plank gripped in a vise. I believe I hear the wood screaming, the metal slicing faster. I run faster. Metal slits my back. The blade against bare skin. My father accidentally cuts his hand on the blade and there is blood everywhere. I must slip off the bank to wash in the river because I see it: blood on my body. The Egyptian princess is gone.
I fold and refold my handkerchiefs. I trace a finger across white embroidered initials on lace: SWS. I press my face against a hand-kerchief decorated with pink flowers as if I can smell them. A blue and red handkerchief shows cartoon pictures of “Blondie.” I have a magenta handkerchief with a white filigree design. I love all my pretty handkerchiefs. But because I can’t bear to soil them, I never use them. Yet I still hand-wash each one in the sink. I watch them dry. When my mother sets up her ironing board I stand on a stool and iron and re-iron each handkerchief until it’s perfect. I’m scared I might iron wrinkles into the material, rather than iron wrinkles out. As I iron I sprinkle the cotton with water stored in one of my father’s old bay rum aftershave bottles that my mother saved for her ironing water. The residue of bay rum scent makes me dizzy. I don’t understand why the scent reminds me of nightmares, reminds me of night. Of metal blades. Of an Egyptian princess fleeing. I try to concentrate on ironing my handkerchiefs. This is all. It is an imperative that the handkerchiefs be perfect.
I spend hours organizing my bureau until it is neat and perfect, too. I arrange ribbons, anklets, undershirts, scraps of lace from my mother’s sewing kit. I have seven pairs of underpants with the names of days embroidered in different colors: red for Monday, yellow for Tuesday, green for Wednesday, pink for Thursday … White for Sunday. This pair scares me. Sundays scare me. I bury it under the pile of underwear. Maybe if I lose this pair … maybe if I never wear Sunday again….
Except when he travels, my father is home all day Sunday. We go for outings in our black Chevrolet. While my mother learns to drive, my father is in a rage because she drives too slowly, wavering along country roads in Virginia. The car is hot and stifling. The gray felt seat feels scratchy under my thighs. My sister Kiki, two and a half years older than I, fidgets. She rolls the window up, down. She snaps the lid of the ashtray on the rear armrest. She will not speak to me. She will not smile at me. Usually Kiki disappears for hours to avoid me, avoid all of us. So today, trapped with her family, she must pretend she is far away from us all.
In the trunk is a wicker basket with a picnic lunch. Later, when we stop to eat, my father will fault sandwiches too warm, chicken not cooked right, deviled eggs not creamy enough. My father turns his wrath first on the food, then on the ants, then on the heat, then on us. The woman and two girls will sit in silence on a pretty checkered blanket, scared to object. No—my mother and I will sit in silence. My sister will wander off to a nearby stream. Or she will climb a tree—one precariously high—with no fear for her safety, while I am scared of everything, especially scared something bad will happen to my sister. And while I long to be like her, I know I never will be. Or, I wish I could bask in the reflected glory of my brave sister’s ability to climb the highest tree or sneak out the back door into the alley after dark. But I am ignored by her, and the more I persist, the more insistently I am refused.
My mother makes a stab at fun on our Sunday outing. She teaches my sister and me a song: “Whistle while you work. / Hitler is a jerk. / Mussolini is a meany …” We sing rounds: “Row, row, row your boat …” My father does not join in. My sister’s voice will be the first to fade, then my mother’s. Finally, my thin voice trails to a slow halt. I sigh and close my eyes. Or stare up at the roof of the car. If I look down I’ll get carsick and throw up. Please, don’t let me throw up. I hate to eat; I hate to brush my teeth; I hate to throw up. I don’t understand why my mouth hates to feel anything inside it—sometimes not even words. I can be speechless for hours, and if I concentrate hard enough I can pretend I don’t have a mouth.
But on this particular Sunday we don’t reach a picnic site. Even if my father is silent, his rage is not. He’s not in control of the car and he has to be, he must be. My mother must feel this rage, radiating like heat against glass. Perhaps the steering wheel scorches her fingers. Perhaps a white searing light blinds her eyes. Slowly we drift onto the shoulder. Beneath the tires I sense soft, tentative ground. The car wobbles. Then it topples down an embankment, rolling over and over. I hear glass shatter and feel the sun strike my face. I pitch against my sister, sharp elbows and knees. Green smells of the gouged earth tumble past the crash of metal.
When the car is still I see treetops and sky. I am breathing. We all are breathing, collapsed against smashed windows and dented doors. My parents ask if we, their two daughters, are all right. Yes, we say, fine really. They don’t think to check for major injury. But perhaps they wouldn’t know where or how to actually inspect for damage anyway. A moment later, comforting hands reach for me—a woman’s hands—helping me from the car window. It is these hands that gently examine my body for bruises or broken bones. But the touch is not scary; it is concerned and caring.
Our house is silent. In our family we don’t know words to soothe each other’s hurts; we lack a vocabulary designated for comfort. My mother is in the bedroom with the door shut. I know she is under the covers, the curtains drawn, her eyes closed and sleeping. My sister slips out the back door to play in the alley. And I—I trudge up the stairs to my bedroom and lie on my bed, trying to imagine the Egyptian princess. But today I’m too exhausted to imagine fleeing along the banks of the Nile. Today, my dolls and my handkerchiefs don’t interest me. I hear my father follow up the wood stairs, this the only sound in the house. His steps are slow and measured. I imagine his hand skimming the rail. He probably plans to check on my mother, but he passes the door to her room. I wonder if she hears him, hears his footsteps pass her room and near mine.
My door is open. I lie on my side, and I glance at him as he stands in the doorway. I am surprised to see him. It is still early, way too early for him to kiss me good-night. His lips are parted—at first I think he’s smiling—so I smile back, but his lips are too tight to smile. Until I do. Then his soften. And my smile—mine—I believe this is why he now enters my room. My smile is an invitation for him, for you, Daddy. I’m happy to see you. He must know this. I believe this, believe he continues to walk toward me because I smile.
He sits on the bed and strokes my back, this now the only sound, the friction of his hand on cotton. But for a moment so quick it is barely time, I feel—no, rather, it is my body that realizes—the difference between the way the woman had touched me earlier and his touch now. His touch—his—feels more like a stranger’s touch than hers, the stranger’s, had. There is a distance, a coolness to his touch, and I wish it were the woman still stroking me. He curls up beside me, his stomach against my back, and holds me tight-tight against him. His breath disturbs the hair at the nape of my neck. “I love you,” he whispers. I believe he does this because I have smiled, he does this because he loves me. Yes, he loves me so much. He holds me tighter. His breath is harder. His tongue—I feel the tip of his tongue on my neck. His fingers grip my chin, and I think of the vise on his electric saw that grips the wood, steadily turning my face toward his. His tongue feels scary inside my … but I have forgotten the word for that part of my face. Moments later I imagine my mouth itself has disappeared. I’m not awake, I am sleeping, and I am tumbling down an embankment, not to the ground, but through time and space. I am the Egyptian princess. Exhausted, no longer able to flee, I have fallen asleep believing I am hidden in a deep thicket of reeds by the bank of the Nile River.
But wait. I am wrong. I am taught a definition for the word “comfort.” I learn this from my father, learn this and many other things from him. I learn that I am able to comfort my father, console him when he is hurt, when he is sick.
And I learn I will never hear my mother’s voice calling to me—Sue, Sue—my name as soft as a dove murmuring—Sue—the three small letters that mean me. But surely my name is too faint for me to hear my mother calling, wanting to save me—and I, the Egyptian princess, am too far away—as she whispers to me from the other side of the bedroom wall.
Or maybe I don’t hear my mother because my name is no longer Sue. I am no longer Sue. Maybe I can’t hear her because I have a new name now, a treasured name, for a girl who’s a ruby, for a girl who’s a pearl. A girl my father surely believes is more beautiful than ordinary, everyday Sue. This must be why I never hear my mother call: Sue, Sue, Sue.
When I am four, my mother begins to examine my Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday underpants. She opens my bureau and removes each pair, inspects them, then sticks them back in the drawer, not neatly folded as before. Once, she pulls down the Monday underpants I am wearing and touches the crotch of the pants as they lie bunched around my ankles. I don’t know why she does this. I’m afraid she’ll find what she’s looking for. And even though I don’t know what this is, I know it is bad.
When I am older I study photographs in the family album. A Jamaican woman, Mrs. Robinson, a nurse or nanny, dressed in white, holds me. I am still an infant. She is smiling—proud of me? It would not be like our family to hire a nanny. My mother doesn’t work. We don’t have much money. Why do we need this woman? When I first begin to speak, I have a Jamaican accent. Where is my mother? Is she asleep in bed even now, years before the car crash?
In another photograph I stand across the street from our house, holding the rail of a metal fence, the boundary of a cemetery. My eyes are closed as the wind blows my short curls about my face. I want to ask that child why her eyes are closed. But I can’t ask her: I don’t dare to know what she knows, see what she’s seen. Other photographs show young sisters in pinafores with white socks and black patent-leather shoes. Two sisters sit on the grass with their mother, picking clover to weave into a chain.
There is one small photograph in the family album I stare at again and again. It is of me, from the waist up, black and white, but dark, with little contrast. A veil of light filters my face. I wear a white sweater. I lie on my back, my arms crossed up over my shoulders, cradling my head. It looks awkward, posed—a slightly adult pose. I am expressionless, staring straight into the lens, but I’m not sure if it’s my expression, or my face.
For there is another little girl. She has my face, but not my face; she has my body, but not my body. She is Dina. She is the girl my father most loves. She is the one to stare into the lens of the camera held by my father as he leans closer and closer to her body.
An excerpt from my father’s journal kept while he was Chief Counsel to the Interior Department. Entry dated August 5, 1947. Occasion, the signing, by President Truman, of the Philippine independence papers:
Called Congressman Crawford and arranged to meet him at White House at noon. Matt Connelly and Charley Ross showed us in precisely at 12:15. We circled the President seated ready to sign the bill. Dozens of cameramen were around taking pictures of the signing. The president seemed disturbed. It was shortly after his mother’s death. He signed the bill with 4 different pens. He dated the Bill “Approved—July 5th.” We called it to his attention. He said: “I don’t know what’s happening to me these days.” We chatted a bit about the measure. We shook hands and left to have lunch with Oscar at Interior. Sat next to Crawford at lunch. He has a great interest in Puerto Rico. I am of the opinion he will do everything in his power to help the economy of the Island.
An excerpt from a letter dated December 15, 1949, to my mother from my father. He is on a government trip to the Pacific islands and Japan, where he stays in the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo:
Another very curious sight is seeing so many of the Japanese wearing masks—the kind used for colds. They wear these masks out in the streets, to prevent the spreading of colds. Everything here is calculated in terms of spreading disease. They are terribly conscious of it. They do not shake hands. Those that do have gotten into the Stateside habit. They take their shoes off when they come into the house so as not to bring the street dirt into the house. We’re told they rarely kiss—even parents and children rub cheeks or noses, but no kissing. I don’t know what they would think of Suzie’s tongue kissing. It’s strictly non-Japanese.