The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [19]
Frustrated, I tried to shrink you down too. Your adult features on a tiny girl’s head, your body loose and skinny. I flattened your breasts, straightened your hips and there you were at my waist, looking up at me, your billowing hair soft in my hand. Strange for a child to have eyes like little coals, I thought. Strange, you thought, for a white lady to ask so many questions.
You were born on an island named Wakenaam in the vast Essequibo River, where the family had moved for your father, Joseph, to run a logging concession. But where exactly were you born? In a hospital, in the house? I wanted to picture you entering the world, but you just shook her head, laughing. Who cares, I’m here now. Because your family did not have money for cow’s milk you were weaned on coconut water, the cloudy amniotic fluid of a towering tree.
You were the last of eighteen children by your father, a fact you first told me first by the hors d’oeuvres table at a party. I almost dropped my paper plate. By the time you were born, you had siblings in their forties, grown brothers and sisters with their own children. Your mother Rowena, your father’s second wife, already had five boys and a girl. And it was hard coming last, your father getting old, never enough powdered milk for tea in the morning. I’ve had enough black tea in this lifetime, you always told me, adding cream, spoonfuls of sugar.
Joseph was handsome, fair-skinned, half-Portuguese and half-Indian, an alcoholic at your birth. After you appeared, he stopped drinking suddenly, without explanation. He named you, as he named all his children, after characters in movies. Majestic, melancholy names: Aloma, Cordell, Rohan, Lelord, Hilrod, Gregory. You became Ardis.
Nights I stayed with you we slept together under a gauzy mosquito net that blurred the moon. We secured it to the ground with massive white dictionaries you’d bought used, excited when you found the old set with the softest onionskin paper. One morning I pulled a volume out and opened to the A’s, seeking Ardis. It won’t be in there, monkey, you said, still sleepy, it’s my name.
It’s in here, I said, flipping through pages that threatened to tear, my eyes gliding past arctic, arcturus, arcane to find, finally, one written fact of you. The dictionary was authoritative; you respected it. I loved telling you what your name meant.
The first, a variation, Ardisia, a bush that gives hard, red berries and grows in East India and the West Indies. There was a little picture with this one, lines for the branches, little berries we had to imagine red. The second, from the Greek, point of an arrow. And so I recognized you as hard-won, like those few small berries, and sharp, not just the arrow itself but its winnowed tip. Your father had named you well, for a future he would never know. You tried to find Katherine for me, but it was only a name.
Joseph was smiling in the one water-stained photo I saw of him at your brother’s house on rainy afternoon. I noticed his perfectly straight teeth. Dentures. He pulled out all his teeth once when he had a toothache, you told me, laughing. So he would never have a toothache again, he said. I looked at the photograph again, tried to find his eyes through the tinted glasses. Pulled them out himself? With what? No anesthesia? I asked. Don’t worry about it, you told me, the man was crazy. Another time he poured buckets of paint from an upstairs window on a neighbor who had crossed him. He beat you with planks and telephone cords and hands. He beat your mother, threw a bike at her, shoved a pumpkin at her head. When he locked her out of the house in the rainy season she had to sleep under the house. But he kept you in school when Rowena wanted you home scrubbing floors. You guessed it was because he thought you would support him in old age. Still, you thanked him most for that.
Rowena was your mother, a half-African, half-Chinese woman. Standing next to Joseph she is dark-skinned and plump, beaming. She balances her first grandchild on her hip, a kitchen