Yellow Dress.
Photo from the Museum of New Zealand on Unsplash.
“The deadness of the dead is not what we fear, but we fear that they are alive when we lay them in the last chamber — and awake to agony.”
The soft tick-tick of the clock-thing is everywhere. It stopped when Mother went out with Father about two evenings ago, when the sun was a huge red cotton ball disappearing into the corner of the streets. Now, it is ticking, but one of the hands is stuck. If you did not know what a clock was, you would think the house had a heart and it was beating fast-fast.
The clock-thing in the house is not working like it used to. It has not been working since Mother was sad. If Mother was happy, she would know why the minute hand is not working. My hands are life-giving, like God in Genesis, Mother said one time. Life-giving means giving life. I have god-hands. I take the clock down from the nail in the wall, and a thousand cockroaches scatter in all directions. Mother would have killed them with her flip-flops, but she is not happy.
Mother has been sad since she was brought home. I knew she was not happy because she was wearing the yellow dress she hated—the one with the green butterflies. Somehow, even though she hated the yellow dress, she would wear it whenever she was happy because Father liked it when she seemed to be happy. He would hold her hands and say, “My happy wife, my happy wife.”
I knew she was not happy because she would have taken it off in minutes. Her hands barely hanging by her sides, tugging on the dress enough for it to slip down from her shoulders, and hanging limply a few inches above her elbow. I knew she was sad because she was quiet, and Father was drinking that bitter adult tea thing without milk or sugar, and pretending to be happy.
In this house, we are all pretenders. I have been walking through the balconies all day, my ears pressed to the cold wall, straining to hear my mother’s voice from when she was here, but I hear nothing except scratching. For a minute, I think her voice is trying to break free from the walls, but a baby cockroach crawls out from a hole just above my head, and under a chair.
I knew Mother was sad because dead people cannot be happy, and happy people cannot be dead. Because a happy person moves. Because the lady on the TV is singing No Woman, No Cry, and Mother is staring right at her, as though in disapproval. I think all a dead person knows how to do is disapprove and disapprove, because if you don’t say anything, it means no, no?
Father says we bury our dead to wake ourselves up, to tell ourselves we were right. To let the dead decide if it is to remain dead. Like we are saying, “If you are not dead, tell us now o.” If the body was indeed cold, and the eyes empty and unseeing. And if the dead person is left unburied, one way we know is the absence of their voice and movement. The hands drop. The body breaks open to free the inner bones, the skeleton man.
So, we are waiting—a happy family eating a happy dinner, mother propped up on her favourite pillow in the dining room, staring into the distance. The stare is the same empty kind that made one apologise for wrongdoing. For increasing the volume of the TV to the loudest while she made her hair, a Bible between her laps—lonely strands of curly broken bits dropping onto scripture. Mother used to say God heard her the most when she was taking her twists out and pulling out the black wool thing in her hair. I would imagine God, still as I, watching the halo of a black hair, like in our Jesus picture, disappearing under a cap.
—God and I must be cut from the same cloth, ma.
—What do you mean?
—He must be too busy looking at you to do anything but nod to your prayers.
She would chase me away, laughter caught in her throat—ram in the thicket.
—God was in love with me, she would say when Father wasn’t listening.
To have a God in love with you is to be, which means to “are” or to “is” in the now. To live without no understanding of how you have come to be, to be a mothering thing; woman like mother, or a fathering thing; man like father. Father would say that he was birthed from a tree, and mother, from a God in love. But to be alive without any warning is to be unaware of when you will not be. You were not anything once, and you will not be anything at one point.
But we are a happy family eating dinner, and Papa is playing pretend. He is holding up the newspaper, sipping up his muddy tea, and nodding his sleepy nod. The TV is playing at the lowest, and mother is still staring at the grey walls.
—Prop your mother up properly.
—Yes, sir.
Mother’s skin is marble-like and cold. I pinch her when Papa looks away, and it remains—a narrow dip in her skin.
We do not really eat anything. We are only playing pretend, so there is no need for food.
—To sit a dead person at a table is to remind them of what sustenance is. Food is sustenance, just as breathing is sustenance. It is acculturation, Father says, stabbing at his stone yam. A dead person is no longer part of our culture and can no longer participate in the culture of the living, so we must remind them.
—Do we now bury the dead because they do not want to be reminded?
—Hush, son. Kiss your mother, and go to bed.
Warm lips on cold skin. Death against life. I had no idea of death until it ate with us. This is not to say that death is not familiar. Almost everything around us is dead, the polished wood and the bodiless sunflowers in the vase—life surrounds itself with death. It is in this closeness that we know that one is the other. But to know death, is to eat with it.
—Kiss your mother goodbye, Father says on the fourth day. Her skin peels on my lips and the house smells like it is rotting, but we eat our happy dinner anyway. Even when her limbs dropped, and her stare, and her feet.
I kiss her rotting fingers, and when he is not watching, drop a seed in a hole in her side. I am fixing the clock-thing because I want to show her that I also have god-hands, but Mother is looking ahead in disapproval. Like she is saying “No, no, no, I can’t look at you because what you are doing is wrong.” Because if you have god-hands, am I not dead enough for you?
The last cockroach runs out of the clock-thing, and the minute hand continues working even though Mother is dead and does not know. After all this time, it still works.
