The homeboys don’t notice me on the way back to my car. It’s after school and they are being vamped by girls who are more in tune with the times. I get into my stifling junker and think about Margaret Mead, the mother of all us girl anthropologists, and about what she would think of this. Our world is changing so fast that the kids have to figure it all out for themselves, so they reject the parents’ experience as nonrelevant. A very sixties view, Margaret, and explains hippies and hip-hop but doesn’t explain me. I was thirteen when she died, and never met her, but Marcel knew her quite well, thought her a nice lady, good writer, knew zip about culture, depending as she did throughout her career on the honesty of her informants. They all lie, darling, he would say to me, all the informants lie. Wouldn’t you? What would you do if a person in a weird hat and the wrong color skin accosted you on the street and asked you, You like fuckee-fuck, eh, girlee? When you start fuckee? Who you do it with? Old men? Boys? Other girls? How many times? You likee orgasms? You let boy touch-em titties? You like suck-em willie? Would you tell this ridiculous person the truth? You would not. I once actually peed on his foot I was laughing so hard at one of these riffs. Marcel was not a great believer in mere objectivity. Objectivity is the leprosy of anthropology, one of his sayings. French intellectuals are obliged to come up with pithy, witty apothegms, and he was no exception.
The breeze from the car window is somewhat cooler than the waft from a hair dryer on low, but I am not much bothered by this. People who are excessively attached to the creature comforts would be well advised to eschew anthro as a career. The temperature in my car right now approximates the shade temperature inside my bon in Ulune’s compound at Danolo, during nearly the whole of the dry season. My sense memories are returning, I think. I attribute this to the child. Now, for example, I pick up Luz in the cool shade of the patio at Providence and I am nearly overcome by a recollection of being held by my father, on our dock. I must have been about Luz’s age, the age when you can still ride comfortably in an adult’s arms, held easily by one hand under your bottom. It’s low tide, and I can smell the tidal stink around us. We’re at the dinghy basin and we’ve just finished a ride in our tender. My father smells of tobacco, marine varnish, and wood dust.
Luz is carrying a paper sack. When we are in the car she shows me what is in it. It’s a present, she says, it’s for candoos. A great lump of baked Sculpey in the shape of a candleholder, with thick flowers stuck on and all painted primrose yellow with cobalt blue splotches. Nice Ms. Lomax must have pressed the butt of a candle into the soft clay because this part looks quite functional. I appreciate it lavishly. No one has given me anything for some time. We make a special trip down Grand to the rich folks’ Grove to buy a candle to fit in it. We stop at the thrift shop and rummage like the poor people we are and Luz finds a tattered Goodnight Moon, which I gratefully buy for fifty cents.
So we dine by candlelight. I have made a big fruit salad with cottage cheese, which she seems to like, and which helps to cool me down. After dinner, she has to blow out the candle and I have to relight it many times. When I was studying aikido, sensei used to make us douse candles with our fists, to practice speed and control. The point is to compress a column of air in front of your fist and stop your knuckles dead a few millimeters short of the flame. It’s harder than it looks, like everything in aikido. Or sorcery for that matter. Without thinking, to entertain Luz, I snap out my fist and find that I can still do it. More, demands Luz, and I light the wick again and then I recall how her mother died and feel a rush of grinding shame. While I am thus self-absorbed, Luz attempts the trick and slams her little fist into the candle and spills hot wax over her hand and forearm. Wails and a rush to the sink for cooling water. I bring her back into countenance with sleight-of-hand tricks. I take some quarters from a jar where I keep my spare change. I make them walk across my knuckles and I vanish them and produce them from her ears and hair and off my tongue, fingertip productions, toss vanishes, flick vanishes, French drops, and coins-through-table as a finale. I am good at this, I could amaze those even older than four. Marcel always said that legerdemain was the root of sorcery, and one of the field anthropologist’s most valuable tools. It is all about attention, magic. Most of the rest of life is about attention, too.
After the tricks, we lie in my hammock together in our sleeping Tshirts and I read to her, all her books, in the order she likes them, the bird book first, then Bert and Ernie, then the new Goodnight Moon, a great success, three times and she’s out. I had Goodnight Moon, too, and although I suppose my mom must have put me to bed sometimes, I can’t recall being read to by anyone but my father.
Sleep won’t come. There is a gibbous moon and a scent of jasmine. I rock slowly in the hammock. On its uproll the mesh overlays my view of the treetops and the cloud-scudded moonlit sky. Mesh or line, our lives, one of the great questions. I have been shaken by what happened in the office today, the old lady and the dulfana and the news about the slaughtered pregnant girl. Stuff is breaking loose, like rock from an eroding cliff, and poor Dolores is hanging on by her fingernails. Jane Doe is yelling from her tomb, Hey, Dolores! I’m all squashed down here, lemme out! Not yet, Jane, says Dolores. Things are still too obscure. A bird calls from the yard outside:
Whit-purr Whit-purr Whit-purr WHIT WHIT
My blood curdles, a fist presses down on my heart. It can’t be, but I know very well that it could. It is the unmistakable call of a honeyguide. I have heard it a thousand times in Africa, but there are no honeyguides in South Florida. We used to say it was calling my husband; that was before we knew what the honeyguide meant, its ways, that it was a kind of sorcerers’ mascot because of its magical powers, how it got men to do its work of busting up beehives, how it was never stung. How it eviscerated the nestlings of other birds with a special scalpel-like tooth on its beak.
I go through the door to the landing and listen. Ordinary twitters and creaks. Imagination. Funk. As sweat dries on my skin, I go back to the hammock. Not a honeyguide, not yet. An auditory hallucination. Speaking of which …
I’m thinking that it must have been just around now, a little earlier perhaps, that I first laid eyes on Marcel Vierchau. It was finals week, and I was in my Barnard room studying French and hating it, wanting to be home, out sailing, at the beach. I am quite good with languages, the speaking part at least, which put me into French lit classes over my head. This was Twentieth-Century French Prose. Colette was fine, but Sartre? Derrida? Not in balmy June. My junior year: so, fourteen years ago. I remember feeling the need to get out of the room, take a walk, get a cold one, maybe lie on the grass or join the perpetual volleyball game in front of Minor Latham for a while. The point is, I was just about to go out, I was looking for my wallet, at that very moment, that’s how close I was to not having my life changed, when Tracy O’Neill came barging in and said, Come on, we’re going to see Marcel Vierchau. And I said, Who’s Marcel Vierchau, and she said he’s the world’s greatest anthropologist, dummy, and he’s gorgeous, we’re all going to go over to Low Library and sit in the front row and masturbate. I said I wanted to get a beer and she grinned and held out the remains of a six-pack of Bud, sweaty-cold.