Homegoing(98)

Graham gave her a strange look, but he didn’t say anything, and so she didn’t have to explain. Ever since she had heard the story of how her father and grandmother got their scars, she had been terrified of fire. When she was just a little girl, the firewoman of her grandmother’s dreams had haunted Marjorie’s own waking hours. She had only heard about her from her grandmother’s stories on those days when they walked to the water so that her grandmother could tell her what she knew of their ancestors, and yet Marjorie thought she could see the firewoman in the blue and orange glow of the stove, in hot coals, in lighters. She feared that the nightmares would come for her too, that she too would be chosen by the ancestors to hear their family’s stories, but the nightmares never came, and so, with time, her fear of fire had waned. But every so often she could still feel her heart catch when she saw fire, as though the firewoman’s shadow still lurked.

“What’d you think of the movie?” Graham asked, putting the lighter away.

Marjorie shrugged. It was the only response she could manage because she hadn’t been thinking at all about the movie. Instead, she’d thought about the location of Graham’s hands in relationship to the popcorn or the armrest they shared. She’d thought about his laugh when he’d found something funny, about whether or not the tilt of his head toward the left, toward her, was an invitation for her to tilt her own head toward him or to rest it on his shoulders. In the weeks they had spent getting to know each other, Marjorie had become more and more enamored with the blue of his eyes. She wrote poems about them. The blue like ocean water, like clear sky, like sapphire—she couldn’t capture it. At the movies, she had thought about how the only real friends she had were characters in novels, not real at all. And then Graham had appeared and swallowed up a bit of her loneliness with his blue whale eyes. The next day she wouldn’t for the life of her be able to remember what the movie was called.



“Yeah, I felt the same way,” Graham said. He took a long drag from the whiskey bottle.

Marjorie wondered if she was in love. How could she know? How did anyone know? In middle school she had been into Victorian literature, the sweeping romance of it. Every character in those books was hopelessly in love. All the men were wooing, all the women being wooed. It was easier to see what love looked like then, the embarrassingly grand, unabashed emotion of it. Now, did it look like sitting in a Camry, sipping whiskey?

“You still haven’t let me read any of your writing,” Graham said. He stifled a burp, passing the bottle back to Marjorie.

“I have to write a poem for Mrs. Pinkston’s assembly next month. Maybe you can read that one.”

“That’s a few weeks after prom, right?”

Her mouth went dry at the mention of the dance. She waited for him to say more, but he didn’t, and so she just nodded.

“I’d love to read it. I mean, if you want me to.” The bottle was back in his hands, and though it was dark, Marjorie could make out the deeply wrinkled lines of his knuckles, turning red from clutching.

—



That week the Bradford pear trees started to bloom. At school everyone said they smelled like semen, like sex, like a woman’s vagina. Marjorie hated the smell of them, a reflection of her virginity, her inability to liken the smell to anything other than rotting fish. Every year, by summer, she would grow accustomed to the smell, and by the time the blossoms fell, the smell would be nothing more than a distant memory. But then spring would come and the smell would resurface, loudly announcing itself.

Marjorie was working on her poem for The Waters We Wade In when her father got a call from Ghana. Old Lady was frail. Her caretaker couldn’t tell if the dreams were the same or different. Old Lady didn’t leave the bed as often as she used to—she, the woman who had once been afraid of sleep.

Marjorie wanted her family to go to Ghana immediately. She stopped writing the poem, snatched the phone away from her confused father—an act that on another day would have earned her a knock on the head—and demanded that the caretaker put Old Lady on the phone, even if it meant waking her.

“Are you sick?” she asked her grandmother.

“Sick? I will soon be dancing with you by the water this summer. How can I be sick?”

“You won’t die?”

“What have I told you about death?” Old Lady said sharply into the phone, her voice sounding stronger than it had at the beginning of their conversation. Marjorie tugged at the cord. Old Lady said that only bodies died. Spirits wandered. They found Asamando, or they didn’t. They stayed with their descendants to guide them through life, to comfort them, sometimes to scare them into waking from their fog of unloving, unliving.

Marjorie reached for the stone at her neck. Her ancestor’s gift. “Promise me you won’t leave until I can see you again,” Marjorie said. Behind her, Yaw placed a hand on her shoulder.

“I promise I will never leave you,” Old Lady said.

Marjorie handed the phone back to her father, who gave her a strange look. She went back to her room. On her desk, the piece of paper that was supposed to hold a poem simply said, “Water. Water. Water. Water.”

—



Marjorie and Graham went on another date, this time to the U.S. Space & Rocket Center. Graham had never been before, but Marjorie and her parents went once a year. Her mother liked to look at all the pictures of astronauts that lined the halls and her father loved to walk through the museum, examining every rocket as though he were trying to learn how to build one himself. In some ways, Marjorie thought, her parents had already traveled through space, landing in a country as foreign to them as the moon.