Temple of My Familiar Read Free

foreign even than Zedé’s, shopped calmly in the local stores. Pointing to this American thing or that. Murmuring in puzzlement. Holding their money trustingly out to the clerks in the stores, who were invariably patient, respectful, curious. It was the obvious culture that had gone into the making of the babies’ clothes. No one in the Americas, except the Indians (called “Indians,” she learned, because an Italian explorer considered them, on first take, to be in dios , in God), had lived long enough as a culture to create such a powerful, routine aesthetic. You looked at a Hmong baby and grieved that it should wind up in the Tenderloin on some of the city’s least colorful or cultured streets. Carlotta loved, also, Samoan women. She loved their characteristic heaviness of body and their square jaws. Their seeming good nature and equanimity. Natural queens. And Balinese men; she could always recognize them because of the expression of horror in their faces as they looked about them at the glass and concrete of the city. They were not seduced, not at all.
    “Exercise is to the body what thinking is to the mind,” said Arveyda, gasping.
    She, who never exercised but was always in motion on errands for her mother, ran easily. Breathing and running and never thinking of them as separate events. She pulled ahead of him effortlessly, her shapely legs flashing. Later they would shower at his house and lie on his bed in the sun.

H E HAD COME FROM Terre Haute, Indiana, where his mother was one of three black women who had organized and founded their own church: the Church of Perpetual Involvement. His mother, whose name was Katherine Degos, was one of the most intrusive people he knew. She did not recognize limits, whether of body or mind. She could not stay out of other people’s business; all business was her own. The church was a front for this tendency to interfere, which would otherwise have gotten her into trouble. She was a woman of such high energy she always seemed to him to be whirling, and the first time Arveyda heard the expression “whirling dervish” he thought of it as a description of his mother.
    But then, in mid-whirl one day, when he was ten, after having broken up innumerable fights, delivered innumerable babies, baked and given away innumerable cakes and turkey dinners—because “doing” for others was her way of winning a place in their affairs—she simply stopped and sat down and looked out a back window of the house for three years. Her church dissolved. The women whose babies she had delivered forgot what she looked like. The hungry eyed her well-fed body with scorn. She didn’t care. She began to play with her makeup, painting her face, dying her hair, doing her nails as if she were creating a work of art with her body, and with her mind she appeared to roam great empty distances.
    She gave up trying to improve the world and, instead, declined to notice it. As a teenager, Arveyda had felt no strong connection to her. He was good in band, terrible in everything else. She did not seem to mind. Everyone on their block praised him for his music. He sang and played guitar and flute. She gave him no praise. She looked through him. One day the picture of his father—kept in a silver frame on the night table by his bed his whole life—disappeared.
    “Nothing, No Thing, Can Replace Love.” That is what she’d wanted on her headstone, but one of her sisters, his aunt Frudier, to whom she’d left this directive, thought it too risqué. His mother was instead buried under a pale gray stone that carried only her name, and not even the year she was born. But he thought of it as a kind of key to her he might use later on, when he knew more. Who was she, this woman who was his mother? He didn’t know.
    Lying with Carlotta on his spacious bed, the blue satin duvet cover smooth and cool beneath their legs, Arveyda told her odd bits and pieces of his life. Of the father figure he’d somehow found for