She crawled to the other side of the bed and pulled out those drawers, found another envelope, more fistfuls of money. Now she staggered to the toilet and gagged herself to vomit the rest of the contents in her stomach. In the kitchen, she drank glass after glass of water. Could luck in one’s life appear in such sordid ways? Salvation by such dark means? She kicked off the high heels, hiked up the long dress, and moved like a madwoman, yanking drawers out, sending the insides flying — pajamas, panties, bras, socks, shirts, scarves. No other envelopes to be found, but the two were enough.
She took an empty purse from Linda’s shelves and stuffed the money inside. She took nothing else than the dress and the gold sandals, strapping them back on and wobbling through the living room. On a whim, she grabbed the signed book out of its glassed prison. The book was hers, belonged to her through shared pain, and no one like Linda deserved to own it. Some things belong to one because life had earned it off one in blood and sweat. Marie made her way out the front door, careful to lock it behind her. She walked outside — a black woman in an evening dress in broad daylight. If a policeman stopped her, she would have confessed and turned herself in. She had nothing left to fight with. She would have accepted being sent back home or to prison. She would have let them kill her as they had Maman. Perhaps their line was simply not made up of survivors.
Not a single person spoke to her. As usual. She walked on as if invisible, for over an hour, till she reached the bus station. Her feet ached. She asked for a ticket and pulled out a crisp hundred-dollar bill. The woman behind the glass was overweight, with damp skin and glasses that kept sliding down her face. Marie guessed from her eyes that she also went home to an empty room. The woman nodded as if she were about to fall asleep.
“Can’t break a hundred, unless your fare is close to that amount.”
“Where will this much money take me?”
The woman blinked behind thick lenses that magnified her drooping eyes as she studied the timetables. In that affluent area, the people who went out by bus always had unhappy reasons for escape. “Where you headed? North? Not much South left from here. Key West. Not much East either, matter of fact.” She said this in a jokey way that Marie could tell had been repeated thousands of times before so that it had lost its meaning.
No other explanation for the woman’s lack of surprise except that each day she was confronted with people who had no requirement to be in any one place — no pull of family or job or particular inclination — but instead chose place as a substitute for freedom, for meaning, for love.
“Someplace warm,” Marie said. “Like this but as far away from here as possible.”
The woman sighed, considering the proposition. “Two of those bills will get you to California, how about that?”
Chapter 5
Minna didn’t believe in the past, it was just a story that happened to someone else, to a girl named Marie, whose mother lost her face in the iron forest, but when she first saw Claire’s farm, she thought it was the most beautiful place in this world. She did not want to take off her sunglasses because tears of homecoming were in her eyes. Far as the eye could see there were oranges and more oranges, and she remembered Maman’s prophecy now come true — they would be returned to the time of sweetness.
She was the Antoinette of the novel; the book, too, become prophecy. Antoinette goes to the convent. My refuge, a place of sunshine and of death … Marie had traveled to a foreign land only to be returned to the original Garden, her own place of sunshine and of death. Only words stood between her and the coming sweetness. Words that she had learned to use like a knife.
* * *
Claire’s eyes matched the pale of the foreign sky. Although she was sick, her daughters only thought of going away, tending their own wounds and interests. To them, too, the sweet of their own blood didn’t matter. Marie would be the one to stay. She would be the devoted daughter that she could not be to her own maman. They thought she was one of them because she talked like a little Englishwoman, like the queen herself. The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain. She talked as if gold coins were dropping out of her mouth.
* * *
After everyone had left the farm, Marie could finally feel peace. She heard the breathing of the trees in the morning and felt the slow, dry bake of the earth in the afternoon. The sun was again like a sweet orange in the sky, and the moon hung high like a crisp sheet. All the days were buttery. She had not known such happiness since she was a girl in her maman’s arms. She assumed Claire’s silence about her past, about the small mistakes in her story, was a form of acceptance, and Marie’s care was a form of love.
She mopped the floors and washed the dishes and went to the store where she could buy as much food as would fit in the kitchen. No one cared, no one watched over her. A crime, but there were no punishments, not even a harsh word. She wiped the windows and made the beds and picked up each book on the shelves to read just one page. If she lived to one hundred, she would not have time to read all the books in that house. This was eternity, but she had not died yet or become angel.
Claire and she lived together, and she was content. It was as if two people shared the same life. Inside this life, it was impossible to believe the hate of the world outside. That must be what it meant to be protected. When Claire grew sick, Marie hurt because Claire was like her own maman. It pained her that Claire couldn’t enjoy all the riches in her life. But Marie reminded herself Claire would get better. And once she did, there would be no more need for Marie.
In America she would never get over how many things each person had. The same dress served a woman at home to marry, christen her children, and then be buried in. Here one person owned more plates and cups, more knives, forks, and spoons, more dresses and oranges and books, more shoes, than the person would ever know, or miss. Cleaning, wiping, worrying over Claire’s things, made her dizzy — so Marie took them. Claire would never know or care.
Those months of living on the ranch were the happiest in Minna’s life. They lived surrounded by trees, and she felt Maman’s spirit. She gorged each day on sweet kindness, and the salt slowly leached out of her. Claire cared so little about Marie’s blackness that for the first time she knew what it must be to be white. To not have to think of skin color at all. Marie forced herself to look in the mirror each day and remind herself she was still poor, she was still black.
* * *
In the months of living with Claire, Marie grew a relationship, even a kinship, with the objects under her charge. Touching each thing, she felt richer. She thought of cleaning as a meditation each day: she mopped floors and vacuumed Persian carpets; feather-dusted the piano, shuddering the black and white keys; ran a rag over mica lamps and Chinese vases; plumped pillows on the sofa into inviting shapes. She pretended she was a novitiate, and these were her tools toward salvation, but with time this feeling began to grow smaller, meaner. With time, she was no longer in awe of these objects and grew tired of them, in the way one gets with things of too little value compared to what one thinks one deserves.
Marie cleaned less and less, and finally skipped the dining room altogether, with its large crack down the center leaf of the oak table, the showiness of the bright colors in the Chinese vase that she learned from the antiques dealer showed it was a cheap reproduction. The china cabinet with its stacks of eggshell-thin plates. Wasn’t whoever bought these things trying to put on airs? No one had eaten in the room since she had lived here. She left the mica lamps unplugged because they were so poorly wired they were fire hazards; she decided they should drink out of jelly jars because the English Staffordshire coffee cups had handles so brittle they snapped off under the least pressure like bird wings.