Our culminating stop was Oakland, where we visited his eldest sister. When we got there, the idyll halted when we learned that she had an advanced cancer. Ficre and I took it on like we always did, finding the very best doctors, contacting NIH about experimental protocols, reading and deciphering pathology reports, talking with her children. That was what we did in the family.
In many cultures and religions they warn you about looking too hard at one thing, because something can happen behind your back. West Indians give their children nicknames so the angel of death will not find them; he only knows to look for them by their proper names. When Solo was born, an Egyptian friend gave us an evil eye and told us to pin it into his stroller blankets, and indeed, I am glad it is there when people reach in to touch the exquisite child. We got another evil eye, and put it at the front of the house, along with a Chinese red rooster in the kitchen, everything but a mezuzah. I believe in all the charms and superstitions I did not grow up with, the beautiful objects that keep a family safe.
We light candles for Tadu with one hand and call NIH with the other. She makes plans to travel to Lourdes. Miraculously, her cancer will retreat. No one can understand it.
III
“THE EDGES OF ME IN THE HANDS OF MY WIFE”
One
There you are, out the back bedroom window in early morning light, bundled in your red hat with the gold piping, your grass-green fleece vest, a fuzzy scarf. You are smoking and drinking coffee, perambulating the side yard, walking, clearly thinking. You would sometimes set up camp in the gazebo on nice days with the newspaper and coffee and cigarettes, surveying the yard and our home, guarding the roost. For a time you liked an old wicker table and chair stationed on the side by your vegetable garden, where you could watch the main street and all who drove or walked there. But mostly you liked standing and thinking by the side door of the house, never too far.
I tap on the window and wave. Your smile breaks open in return as you wave up; such pure happiness and light. I am here in the house, you are there through the window, and we are together: Contigo en la distancia, you like to say, and sign your notes, to me.
Two
Two days after the funeral it was Easter, and Cindy drove down from Boston with all the fixings for Easter dinner, including a ham. We have to have Easter, she said. I watched her slim fingers peeling potatoes and dicing white onion at my kitchen table with my mother. This is how we do.
A few weeks later, Robin brings another whole ham wrapped up in heavy-duty aluminum foil in a roller bag on Metro North. When she arrives, she starts the oven and studs the ham with cloves and yes, pineapple rings. We sit and talk quietly as the house begins to smell like a million Negro homes across the miles and the years. Eat something, baby, she said. Some ham on a homemade cloverleaf roll. Please, honey, eat just a bit.
Ficre loved the cri de coeur from August Wilson’s play Two Trains Running: “I want my ham!” He called those plays so African, the ways Wilson’s communities absorb their eccentrics and make space for them, without explanation.
Once on a trip to St. Croix in the Virgin Islands, we went to visit an artist friend of my parents’ who made tie-dyed fabric and dresses. We sat in her atelier on a Saturday afternoon as folks wandered in and out, soliloquized, and left. The preacher, the hustler, the wino, the diva, all came in without announcement, said their piece, and exited stage right. It’s so African! said Ficre, in love with the quotidian theater. It’s like Africa, and it’s like an August Wilson play!
Do you see why I miss him? I call out, to no one. Will I remember everything? What am I meant to keep?
Three
“It’s the shock, not the grief, baby,” my hairdresser says, as he runs his hands over and through my newly coarse, wildly gray hair.
Four
Three times a week at bedtime I’d put my tongue out like a kitten and he’d place a single baby aspirin on it. We entered middle age together. Baby aspirin are supposed to prevent heart attacks.
Five
I dream my house has no exterior walls, only the walls between rooms. The roof is afloat. I am on the first floor, open to the elements. An icy wind is blowing. I have no shawl.
I open my eyes and turn to his side of the bed. For the first time I begin to take the actual, physical measure of what I alone have lost. I picture and trace with my index finger his warm chestnut scalp, its furrows, and the seam down the center of his bald brown head. I feel the exact heft of him, his length lying next to me, the small bit of stomach that my hand held when I curled around him, my latch to his body.