Black Cake(67)
Nearly thirty-five years later, Mabel, now Marble, would feel her phone buzz as she sat under the helmet dryer at a beauty shop in Rome. She would see the words Estate of pop up on her screen and understand, instantly, that the email from an American legal firm, whose name she had never seen before, had something to do with the fact that she was six feet tall and had none of the pinkish tone about her face that both of her parents did. Marble would realize then that she had been waiting for this message for most of her life.
By then, she would be old enough to understand that if her mum and dad had lied to her about her origins all these years, it was out of either love or fear, or both, because, in that moment, these were the very feelings that washed over Marble and drenched the soft folds of her waist. A love of her parents, a fear of what she might learn, a fear of what she might feel. Yes, mostly fear.
Because no matter how much her parents had loved her and coddled her and invested in the dreams of her youth, their presence in her life could not extricate the tiny burr that had lodged itself somewhere under her rib cage and, bit by bit, had expanded over the years, poking at her from the inside. A feeling that someone else, a long time ago, may have decided that Baby Mabel hadn’t been worth loving and coddling and investing in.
Her doubts about her family tree had ballooned when her son was born and his doughy, newborn face began to take shape. His ruddy, veiny skin gradually took on a more even, deep-olive tone, and his hair grew into a soft, brushy silhouette.
“Your grandson doesn’t look a thing like you, does he, Mum?” Marble blurted out one day, when she was feeling catty.
“No, he doesn’t, dear,” her mother said. “You’ve got a little Italian boy on your hands there, is what you have.” Which might have been a reasonable argument had Marble’s husband not been a blond man born to pale-skinned parents. As her son Giò blossomed into adolescence, all he had to show for his father’s side of the family was his freckled nose.
After Marble sent Giò to boarding school back in the UK, she continued to live most of the year abroad. She suspected that if she were to spend too much time around her mother and father, they would pick up on the growing doubt in her eyes. She had hinted around the subject enough times to see that her parents were not going to let her discuss the possibility that she might have been born to anyone but them.
On some days, Marble felt deeply resentful. On others, she looked at her mum and dad, thinning around the shoulders with age, and felt guilty. Her own son was the most beautiful thing in her life. Did her parents feel the same way about her? They might worry that they could lose her. As if such a thing were even possible.
Or was it?
B and B, after fifty years, you’d think it was time for me to accept that I would never find my firstborn child, but I couldn’t do it. Or, what I mean is, I couldn’t live with that, not on top of the sense of isolation that had come over me after your father’s death. As you know, I was feeling so low about it that I took that surfboard out to the peninsula and nearly broke my neck. A foolish thing, I realize that, but I can’t say that I am completely sorry I went out there because, strangely, that is what led me to your sister.
If I hadn’t ended up in the hospital and needed those follow-up tests afterward, I might not have found out so soon that I was sick. I was feeling fine at the time of the diagnosis. So if they hadn’t started the chemo, if I hadn’t been sitting at home one day with two bottles of pills in front of me, too tired to do much else but watch videos on the computer, I might not be here today, telling you the whole story.
B and B, you know that I’m making this recording because I don’t think I’m going to live much longer. I won’t lie to you, I’m sorry to go so soon. But in this short period of time, since that day when I came up with that stupid idea to kill myself, I have lived a lifetime’s worth of happiness. And now, I get to share it with you.
Chayote
Eleanor Bennett had just finished replenishing her seven-day pill organizer and was sitting at her laptop looking up the nutritional values of various foods, having decided that the only way to slow the progress of her disease, if at all, was through diet. She could feel the medication leaching the good right out of her seventy-year-old bones. As she read through an online article, one of those annoying onscreen ads popped up with an image of a chayote. The sight of the chayote’s spiny, green skin took her back to her early years on the island.
In the years that followed her mother’s disappearance, Pearl’s maternal presence, with her daily, talcum-dusted hug, would be a source of great comfort to her. Except on Mondays, because Monday night was soup night. Not bouillabaisse night, not pepper-pot night, but beef-and-vegetable night, which involved the dreaded chocho.
In California, she had learned to call the vegetable chayote. She had discovered that chocho, the local word for the Sechium edule, sounded like the term some Spanish-speaking people used for a woman’s nether regions. It was an association that, after all those years of resistance to the bulbous, lizard-green, dishwater-flavored squash, had brought her a perverse sense of satisfaction. She liked to believe that the chocho, were it a person, might be made to feel a bit awkward. She could never have imagined that one day it might deliver the surprise of her life.
Just the sight of the chayote on her computer screen was enough to make Eleanor’s mouth turn down at the sides, but she clicked on the video box anyway. A narrator explained that the chayote had been spotted at a rural market in Italy.