Amor and Psycho: Stories Part 7

While among the Mezima-Wa, Sam had sent regular texts from his cell phone-a form suited to his terse, epigrammatic style. From these communiques, I'd gathered that Natalie's year abroad had not pleased her parents, who actually stopped speaking to her for several months. Part of the trouble seemed to be cultural; having so recently left the region themselves for the economic opportunities they hoped a life in America would make possible for their daughter, they objected to her return to the nation-peninsula (engaged in a civil war when they left, which Natalie barely remembered) and to her study of the Mezima-Wa culture as a living, dynamic possibility. It seemed to them that they had the best of both worlds in St. Louis-Mezima-Wa values within an American economy and a capitalist structure that protected their investments, including and especially Natalie. After Villanova, they expected Natalie to attend Harvard Medical School and become, like her aunt, a pediatrician.

Maybe, too, Natalie's return to the Mezima-Wa struck them as romantic or frivolous. "Bet they grieve loss of their homeland," I'd texted Sam.

"Grief counselor examines world through lens of sorrow," he'd texted back.

What other lens could I use? Four mornings and two afternoons a week, grief knocked at my office door, presented evidence (lost children, failed marriages, demented parents, financial ruin, existential dread). This is not to say that I don't love my job; grief counseling is the most satisfying work I have ever done-it brings me pleasure, and I believe in the process. Twenty years of compelling narratives have convinced me that as an organizing principle for life, grief works.

DURING THE COURSE of their daughter's year abroad, Natalie's parents came to understand and accept that Sam was not a traditional Mezima-Wa man. (The initial confusion stemmed from Sam's name, which is actually the Mezima-Wa word for "calabash" or "capacious urn"-an auspicious symbol.) They realized that in returning to Mezima-Wa, Natalie wasn't unraveling all their work in coming to the United States, but, rather, reclaiming her ident.i.ty and cultural heritage as a Mezima-Wa while maintaining a friendly, nons.e.xual relations.h.i.+p with a promising and affluent(!) American-born boy. On the other hand, when they learned that Sam wasn't Mezima-Wa-American, but just a random person Natalie had met during her year abroad, and with whom she lived in unseemly proximity, they naturally began to worry that Sam might not fully appreciate the urgent, paramount importance of Natalie's remaining a virgin until her wedding day. Their concern eventually reached a hysterical pitch.

Then came the bombsh.e.l.l, a text from Sam: "Natalie and I plan to marry on return to States. Yes we're sure." Sam a.s.sured me that Natalie's parents were relieved and had expressed willingness to accept Sam as a husband (according to Mezima-Wa tradition, he would be called "Husband" not only by Natalie but also by her parents). They had also accepted me as the husbandmother.

Natalie's parents arrived at the beginning of July at my house in Santa Cruz for the monthlong visit that precedes any Mezima-Wa wedding. During this time, although we all lived under one roof, Sam and Natalie could have no physical contact at all. They couldn't even sit at the same table to eat, though no one objected to them Skyping from their laptops between the rooms. At first, I felt glad to have Sam back to myself, whatever that means. But delicate marital matters demanded his-our-full attention: determining the agreed-upon number of children the couple would produce, for example, and the penalties should either side (not just the husband and wife but also their extended families) default. Natalie kindly pointed out that her family would naturally a.s.sume that as the husbandmother-to-be, I'd demand a number of children higher than Natalie could comfortably or safely bear-and only then would we negotiate.

Sometimes, pa.s.sing by Sam's room, I'd see his face glowing into his computer screen. He'd smile and give a little wave. Then I realized that he was Skyping with Natalie-he didn't see me at all.

But he responded immediately to my messages.

"Two children is a nice number," I texted.

"Two is nothing. We can get more," he replied.

If I weren't divorced, it turned out, we could have commanded five or six children from poor Natalie. But Sam and Natalie agreed on three, and each of us signed the doc.u.ment that outlined specific ameliorations should Natalie prove infertile or unwilling to bear the planned number of offspring. I couldn't read the doc.u.ment, as it was written in Mezima-Wa. Sam read it aloud to me, translating as he went, his face adorably close to the page. Although I felt the doc.u.ment exerted a fair amount of pressure upon a young couple with student loans to repay, I signed my name on the line above the word Husbandmother-Husbandmother, the most beautiful concept in the Mezima-Wa language, Sam told me.

ENDING MY MARRIAGE had been like jumping from a beautiful tall building filled with people working and loving and laughing, a building illuminated against the darkness. I jumped and fell slowly, Alice-like, past each floor. I saw the various scenes of human contact and togetherness and knew that I could no longer live inside.

Marriage-the end, the loss of faith-is not something I'll recover from, financially or in messier ways. Recessions and housing crises are always good for my business, but I have a mortgage built for two and a son in college. To complicate matters, Bob isn't Sam's biological father, who was never in the picture, really. (That early encounter was brief and strangely productive, and it all took place during my junior year in Rome.) During the marital negotiation, Sam had asked me not to mention my impulsive youth. It was enough to say that Sam's father lived abroad.

When Sam announced that he and Natalie would be getting married in a traditional Mezima-Wa ceremony, I had three hundred dollars in my checking account and a Discover card I'd prophylactically cut in half. Circ.u.mstances compelled me to expand my practice-to bring more grief into my life.

Natalie's parents were better-off. Her mother had attended a Catholic high school among the Mezima-Wa, then, after the civil war and her move to the United States, put herself through community college and then through a master's program at Ohio State. She now directed an international nonprofit organization that did incredibly bold and dangerous work with child soldiers in war-torn countries. Natalie's father, Mondal-Wa, was an orthodontist. They spoke with pride about their Roth IRAs and 401(k)s (all of which were disclosed and enumerated on the marital doc.u.ment). Natalie was their only child.

Before we met, I felt confident that Natalie would warm to me. I've always been a favorite of girls, who see me as tough and independent and androgynously, fabulously feminist-probably because I am tall, single, and forty-five. But Natalie remained cool.

"Come, we live in America now," Natalie's mother, Fenn, told her daughter. Fenn explained to me that among the Mezima-Wa, divorced women lost all status. "It's a fate worse than death," she said, "though a small percentage of Mezima-Wa women still choose to leave husbands for the most serious reasons." These women lived together on the margins of the Mezima-Wa territory in a desperately poor but beautifully organized gift economy.

"All will be well," Fenn a.s.sured me, patting my arm. She picked up my hand and put my thumb into her mouth and held it there, looking sternly at the olive tree outside. This gesture of consolation is among the more endearing intimacies practiced among the Mezima-Wa. Before Natalie's parents arrived, I had seen Natalie do the same to Sam, and Sam reciprocate. The inside of Fenn's mouth was like another world-warm and dark and safe. We sat there for a long time-maybe fifteen minutes, my thumb in Fenn's mouth, and all was well.

Mondal-Wa was an attractive man, taller than I, with gorgeous, sleepy eyes. He admired my CD collection and shared my enthusiasm for Bill Evans, Miles Davis, Grace Jones and the early Sting. He slept in Sam's bedroom; in fact, he slept in the same spot where Natalie had lately slept, next to my son, in the twin bed Sam had used since he was three. This was inviolate custom among the Mezima-Wa; the bride's father symbolically guarded the future husband, or guarded his daughter from the possible predations of the future husband. But Mondal-Wa's presence in my son's bed was not hostile or purely preventive, Sam a.s.sured me; it was also a chance for the father and husband to bond. Similarly, Natalie moved from my son's room into mine. She brought her pink ditty bag, her tampons, her incense, her secret birth control pills, her collection of bras from Victoria's Secret, her G-strings, her flannel pajama bottoms, her tank tops, her Haruki Murakami novel and her plastic basket of dirty laundry. She slept on the bed beside me.

Fenn slept on the floor. She claimed the red rag rug I'd stepped on first thing every morning and last thing every evening for the past fifteen years. At first, before Fenn explained its deeper cultural significance, this abas.e.m.e.nt horrified me. With one thing and another, raising my son, keeping up my practice and so on, the rug had probably gathered dust. But Fenn just shook it out the window that first night and smiled warmly through the sparkling motes. "Your dreams will reach me here," she said.

Fenn added that sleeping on the floor immediately beside the bed of the husbandmother was a privilege and even a pleasure. "It's a nice change for me," she confided. "I've slept next to Mondal-Wa nearly every night since our wedding-and he snores like a buffalo." I asked if she would like, at least, a yoga mat to lie on. She pursed her lips and then said, "Yes." When I found my old yoga mat-in the garden shed, of all places-she asked for a pillow (with feathers, if I had one). I felt we were making progress.

Natalie did not complain about sleeping next to me; in fact, she warmed slightly. We sometimes whispered for a few minutes after we put aside our reading (mine: "Experiential Connections Between Zen Buddhism and the Grieving Process"; Natalie's: Murakami) and turned out the lights. I asked Fenn if our whispering kept her awake, and she said, "The sound of your voices running together reminds me of my white-noise machine in St. Louis, which lulls me to sleep with the drumming of tropical rain."

THE MEZIMA-WA rarely drink spirits, although Sam and I went to some effort (williams-sonoma.com) to procure the specific seedpod, called gamm, grown on the northern plains of the peninsula and now threatened with extinction because of the loss of the oruna, a native songbird. One of the seedpods is ritually chewed by a matriarch (Fenn) and then spit into the calabash-the sam-to begin the fermenting process. The remaining pods are processed in the bathtub in the usual Mezima-Wa way, then added to the calabash, which is filled with water and held at room temperature for six days. (We used the bucket in which I brine our Thanksgiving turkey.) Some Mezima-Wa families stir the mash daily; others allow the bubbles to rise to the surface undisturbed until the last day, when they whip it with a special spoon. (Fenn used a wire whisk.) The finished punch opens the voice of the Mezima-Wa, making possible the exchange of interfamilial information-medical and psychiatric secrets, for example-between the husbandmother and wifemother. (Mezima-Wa society is matrilineal.) These secrets are traditionally transmitted through song-actually a mimicking of the singsong cry of the oruna-under the heady influence of gamm. For the sake of clarity and more perfect communication, Fenn suggested that we speak in English, without attempting the specialized tones of the oruna-for which I felt grateful.

When the Mezima-Wa do imbibe, they do so intensely. We drank for the prescribed hours (seven) from one of my coffee mugs, the closest relic we could find to the traditional Mezima-Wa cup fired out of clay dredged from the Mezima Basin. Sam, of course, was exempted from the ritual. He used his free time to take care of a glitch in his student loan paperwork from his year among the Mezima-Wa (the bank had confused the University of Mezima-Wa with another accredited international university) and to watch old noir films in the den.

The gamm tasted yeasty and bitter, like the fermented oatmeal I once enjoyed at the wedding of my second cousin in Glasgow. I remember little of the night, except that the gamm kept returning. Among the Mezima-Wa, it's considered rude to "pa.s.s," or sip without gusto.

The alcoholic drink-the cup, the stickiness-reminded me unpleasantly of an uncle from my youth. But the experience advanced overall my relations.h.i.+p with Fenn and Mondal-Wa, who spoke of their courts.h.i.+p and early days together in the capital, and their affection for America-the International House of Pancakes, the Grand Canyon and the music of Cole Porter. They pressed gift after gift upon me-beautiful tunics in the traditional Mezima-Wa fabrics and colors (plant-based, mushroom-dyed), French-milled soaps, DVDs, a ninety-six-pack of toilet paper from Costco, a plastic hairbrush, a traditional tub-sc.r.a.ping sh.e.l.l and a large bottle of white vinegar. The couple told obliquely shocking stories of distant relatives, after which I revealed my own early struggles with dyslexia, and a discreet, partial narrative of Sam's quasi-father: his dedication to magazine journalism, our enduring friends.h.i.+p, his qualities of character, much-admired in Oslo.

After the drinking ceremony, Natalie and her parents took a ritual walk into the forest, where they built a small fire to symbolize the kindling of their new life among the husband and the husbandmother. I slept alone, exceptionally deeply, waking with a gamm hangover-not a headache, but, rather, a dinging pang in the area near my heart, a rousing sensation that I dimly recognized as something akin to a stirred libido, as if unfamiliar states of desire or appet.i.te had been suddenly spirited up with a wire whisk. In fact, all the symptoms I had come to a.s.sociate with midlife were gone.

Fenn, I found, had occupied the kitchen. She'd used my Moroccan tagine to bake eggs with the strong cheese that the Mezima-Wa favor (any blue-veined variety will approximate it) and with parsley and the spices I recognized from Natalie's packets. She'd French-pressed coffee and sliced oranges. The CD player spun a trio in G minor by Schumann as Mondal-Wa read aloud the headlines from the New York Times. The crossword puzzle, folded into its quarter page, was almost complete.

Over breakfast, we discussed the plans for the wedding we'd agreed upon at the conclusion of the gamm ritual. The ceremony itself was to be held at the Mississippi River; the guests would form a receiving line leading up to the sh.o.r.e; any licensed person could officiate. Immediately following the vows (which Sam and Natalie had already written), the bride and groom would proceed through the gauntlet of their well-wishers directly into the river. They would swim in their wedding clothes, holding hands, some distance into the Mississippi, to symbolize the terminal depth of their union.

I realized only as it was ending how easily we'd slipped into a routine. Every day, Fenn borrowed a different pair of my shoes, "to walk in your way." Natalie disapproved of her mother's wearing the shoes of a divorcee. "But she is a child, very narrow," Fenn told me, stepping into a pair of tall leather boots. Every morning, before attempting the crossword puzzle, Mondal-Wa went outside to greet the day, then jumped one hundred times on the trampoline in the yard, his face ablaze with pleasure, his perfect teeth gleaming.

The joy in Mondal-Wa's face as he jumped on the trampoline where Sam had spent so many hours of his youth-how can I speak of it? On this morning after the gamm ceremony, I ran down and joined him. I climbed up over the metal rim and studied his rhythms until I'd calibrated the perfect counterpoint, so that Mondal-Wa's landings on the trampoline lifted me higher, causing me to displace greater energy on landing and raise him higher still. We jounced dangerously, maniacally, until I lost my balance, and Mondal-Wa's hand reached out and pulled me back into the black circ.u.mference. I saw in his face real panic, real family feeling. After we settled, as if by instinct, I put his thumb-manicured, smooth-into my mouth. It seemed in the moment the most natural gesture in the world.

SAM AND NATALIE STOOD in the kitchen doorway together and announced that the wedding was off, due to an unbreachable rift between them. There was clearly no more to be said on the subject; Fenn and Natalie had both stopped speaking to me. I drove the family to the airport, leaving Sam in his room to process his grief. Mondal-Wa sat in the pa.s.senger seat beside me, shuffling through CDs and asking difficult, probing questions about the music of Amy Winehouse, until Fenn said, "Shh!" whereupon Mondal-Wa closed his beautiful eyes against me. Natalie and Fenn sat in back, Natalie's thumb firmly placed inside her mother's cheek. The curtain of formality hung between us, as if Fenn, Mondal-Wa, Natalie, Sam and I had never shared those delightful intimacies made possible by the demands of family and strong tradition. I dropped them at the airport curb, with their Adrienne Vittadini luggage and couldn't even say thank you.

Sam sulked in his room for the rest of July, from which gloomy precinct he applied-successfully, it turned out-for a cultural fellows.h.i.+p to Gurinda.

Acknowledgments.

Thanks to the editors of AGNI, Gargoyle, Fifty-Two Stories and The Idaho Review, where some of these stories first appeared. Thanks too to Anita Amirrezvani, Catherine Armsden, Randall Babtkis, Callie Babtkis, Eli Brown, Dorothy Cooke, Laurie Fox, Charlotte Gordon, Tess Holthe, Herb Kohl, Edie Meidav, Jordan Pavlin, Heidi Pitlor, Sarah Stone and Kate Walbert, for their insights and encouragement.

A Note About the Author.

Carolyn Cooke's Daughters of the Revolution was listed among the best novels of 2011 by the San Francisco Chronicle and The New Yorker. Her short fiction, collected in The Bostons, won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and has appeared in AGNI, The Paris Review and two volumes each of The Best American Short Stories and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. She teaches in the MFA writing program at the California Inst.i.tute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.

Other t.i.tles by Carolyn Cooke available in eBook format.

Daughters of the Revolution * 978-0-307-59661-1.

ALSO BY CAROLYN COOKE.

Daughters of the Revolution.

The Bostons.