Tatjana Soli - The Forgetting Tree

“This is lovely. Like it was forty years ago,” Mrs. Girbaldi said. “Let’s toast.”

Everyone raised a glass. “To the past.”

Minna lifted her glass. “To the future!”

* * *

Don took a snapshot of them at the table, Claire with her arm around Minna, smiling as if they were ordinary tourists on a pleasure jaunt. When he left to use the telephone, Claire held Minna’s hand.

“Tell me we never have to go back.”

“I’m honored you included me in this escape.” Mrs. Girbaldi drank down her margarita.

“Let’s walk on the beach,” Minna said.

“No,” Claire said, but it was too late. Minna had already pulled her to her feet.

“Count me out,” Mrs. Girbaldi said. “I’ll order us another round.”

They walked along the sand, around a bend that hid the restaurant from view. A breeze came up and rattled the dried-out palm fronds overhead. Claire’s arm that held her hat in place prickled as the blood left it.

“Let’s wade in the water,” Minna said.

“It’s too hard.” Claire motioned to the hat.

“Take it off.”

“No!”

“No one cares.”

“I won’t.” Impossible to explain the damage of seeing one’s disintegration reflected on the faces of strangers. Far from wanting to attract attention, Claire wished to be invisible.

“Okay, look.” Minna pulled off the coral top she wore. Underneath, her white cotton bra did not pass for a bathing suit. She hiked her cotton skirt up and knotted it on the side of her hip. Her thigh was rounded and heavily muscled, like a runner’s.

“Easy for you,” Claire said.

Minna held out her hand, and reluctantly Claire took off her hat.

Once it was gone, Claire had to ignore everything, concentrate only on nature, to save herself.

The water was cool; it tugged and sucked against her legs, luring her out to the darker, purple-blue depths. Claire was not brave enough to look back at the shore so she waded, knee-deep, and stared out. She had never felt so exposed in her surroundings, naked and peeled, a turtle unshelled. Absurd that a hank of hair insulated one so much from the world. She had experienced this exposure before, in a much more devastating form. How had she ever recovered from the stares after Josh’s death? Hadn’t she been singled out and forced into the part of victim then, too? Wasn’t it the same — the internal, private agony and then the public one added to it?

“This reminds me of home,” Minna said.

“Tell me what it is like.”

“A pink house on top of the hill.”

“Pink?”

“A beautiful pink house, with a red-tile roof. Windows arched and trimmed in white. And bougainvillea — red, purple, and gold. Bird-of-paradise bushes that brushed against each other like chimes in the wind. Hibiscus flowers as big as trumpets.”

Claire closed her eyes. “I want so much to see it.”

“The inside cool as a cave, even on the hottest day. The oiled wood floors smelled of lemons. The greenhouse, hot, humid, smelled of flowers and earth.”

“Take me.”

“Leta, our cook, loved me. Famous people came to eat her dinners and said that her dishes were better than the finest restaurants, not only in Roseau, but in Port-au-Prince or Kingston.”

“Maybe she would have cooked something I could bear eating.”

“She said her secret was knowing to put both sweetness and saltiness in each dish. She was more than a cook; she had magic. She told me the sun was a sweet orange in the sky.”

Unlike Claire with her parochial life, Minna dreamed of a specific place because she was already at home in the larger world. Claire imagined that the bookish sophistication of Cambridge and the hedonistic pleasures of her sister’s Paris had taken Minna further and further from the simplicities of that pink house. The exotic, the fantastic, possibly even the transcendent, held no surprises for her. Claire, on the other hand, had buried herself on the ranch until anything outside its borders frightened her. Now she felt alienated inside her own body.

When finally they waded back to shore, a Mexican family quickly turned around to walk in the other direction, the parents shoving their children along in front of them. The children turned back, jeered. A scene from the novel came to Claire: children taunting Antoinette, singing, Go away, white cockroach, go away, go away. Minna, oblivious to the snub, tied a scarf around her head, then put on her shirt. She handed Claire the straw hat. But Claire dropped it onto the sand. No more hiding.

* * *

When they returned to the restaurant, Claire made her way to the bathroom to patch together some semblance of a presentable face. After being in the company of Don and Minna, after being filled with new places, scents, food, after her revelation on the beach, she was under the illusion of returned health, and the death mask that stared back from the mirror shocked her. As if she could outrun her fate. Not a glimmer of health to be found no matter how she searched: shrunken head, skin bluish white like a ghoul’s. She wanted her hat back. What was this conceit of theirs that she belonged among them, the living, the loved?

Claire dried her hands, determined to go find the hat, or if it was gone, buy another. She took a left that should have been a right, found herself down a dimly lit hallway stacked with cases of cerveza, bags of frijoles and arroz . At the end of the hallway, she saw the back of their pretty, plump waitress on her knees, the heavy, oiled hair like a snake down her back. Don leaned against the wall, his pants down.

For a moment what she saw did not register. She stood stranded, confused as if in a dream, but Don’s eyes made her back away, made her trip over a box in her panic. The waitress turned. Claire fled, ran, as their laughter chased her. It wasn’t they who were mortified but Claire.

When she returned to the table, Minna’s eyes widened. “Are you okay?”

Claire nodded, speechless. Sat down and drank her water, then Mrs. Girbaldi’s.

The waitress came to deliver the bill and lavished a Cheshire-cat smile while presenting a wedge of flan on the house as Don came and sat down. Did Claire detect sadness in his eyes, or resignation?

“How kind,” he said, reaching up to straighten the waitress’s crooked blouse.

“Where have you been, Donald?” Mrs. Girbaldi said. “We’ll be late for our appointment.”

“Can I have your autograph, Señor Richards?” He signed a menu when she returned with change, leaving a piece of paper among the bills on which her name and number were written. When she turned away, Minna snatched it up and wadded it into her palm.

“What if I wanted that? Jealous?” Don asked.

Claire had rarely seen him so pleased. No sadness, certainly no mortification.

“Not at all. It’s a respect thing. Between women,” Minna said.

On the way out, the waitress stood at the entrance and again smiled. “ Buenas tardes, Señor Richards. Please come visit again. I’m here every Tuesday through Friday.”

Even Claire fumed that the waitress treated them as beneath acknowledgment. White cockroach. Minna went up to her, stood close as she shoved the paper down the girl’s blouse, holding her in place by stepping down on her foot. Before releasing her, Minna ground down her heel, and the girl screamed.

The owner came running.

“I’ll sue you,” the girl said. “It’ll be in the papers.”

Confused over what had happened, the owner, a bent-over old man, took the girl to a chair, then hobbled into the bar for ice.

“I don’t think so,” Claire said. She felt a thrill of adrenaline go through her.

“Why not?” the girl said.

“Is the owner your father? Or an uncle? Does he know what you do in the back hallway?”