Writings / Creative Non-Fiction: Susan Fenner

Down

Turning into a single lane, I dodge potholes and chickens and kids. They pause an instant to gawk at my rental car, foreign phantom on their turf. Not malevolent, just curious. Pulika’s place is only a few more twists through streets lined with board shacks and brick houses. No zoning bylaws here. My fingers tremble.

This morning Ginny and I had met and hugged like two separated sisters, a relationship born of our two linked groups and nurtured through emails. Before meeting the African gogos group I’d wanted to meet Pulika on my own. Ginny’s map was a scribbled embroidery leading me through the warren of the black township.

The engine competes with my heart pistons as the car stops outside the chicken-wire fence around her house. A paralysis sets in, prevents me from switching off the engine, and time sticks to the roof of my mouth. There’s an old car up on blocks and I’m self-conscious of this late-model Nissan. Chickens scratch in the dirt yard … I think of my manicured flower beds. Her concrete-block house is tin-roofed … I think of my tile-topped, ranch style home. If she hasn’t seen me I could drive on unnoticed. Towards the rear, through a flapping camouflage of laundry, the corner of my eye snags on a teeter-totter as it lurches, erratic like a rock-and-feathers weigh scale.

Aiyaiyaiyaiyaiy – a high pitched trill like I once heard in a Moroccan club after a belly dance performance. A tall woman in a turquoise and emerald traditional dress and head wrap poses erect on her stoop, arms fanned open to me.

My shabby sneakers stumble toward her. I curse my choice of white T-shirt, faded denim skirt with the droopy hem, and hope she’s not offended by my lack of sense of occasion.

“Suzan, Suzan, Suzan, you are come. Praise God.” Her hug swallows my intended handshake, and her laugh is deep like a lake. I’m a bit off kilter, swirled in a hint of wood smoke, and wonder if her laugh is at me.

“Sawubona, Pulika,” I greet her in one of my few Zulu phrases. I say how thrilled I am to finally meet her, then crouch to greet the two little ones who’ve dismounted their teeter-totter and materialized, barefoot, eyes dubious.

Balancing Act

Pulika has made tea, thickly black the way I like it, the way no one back home ever takes the time to do. Her muffins are dense and I’m perversely pleased. Baking is not my favourite sport – I often over-mix muffin batter with similar results.

I’ve memorized her family’s names, ask about each in turn. She laughs often, tells me about Jabulani’s promotion to vice-principal. Five-year-old Nstwaki disappears outside with a backward glance, skeptical. The younger grandchild, Johanna, scrambles onto Pulika’s lap with a scrap of paper and draws looping circles. It makes me think of Venn diagrams.

Pulika’s voice liquefies. “Pinky, she very-very sick for long-long time. Hospital, too. Ooowwee, we so worried, pray and pray. This one,” she squeezes a big hug around Johanna, “she is Pinky’s baby.”

The HIV question that crowds my mind, but I dare not ask. “How is Pinky now, was the doctor able to help?” My heart-mind reaches back thirty years to my month-old baby’s pyloric stenosis surgery, to my panic that hinged on his survival. I know that terror like a fist through a mother’s ribs. I confide to Pulika the agony of my newborn’s illness. She touches her fingertips to my blonde-streaked grey hair and we fill with mother-merge.

“Pinky, she is better now, praise God.” The tea stews on the wood stove; she fetches it and pours. She updates me on another son’s involvement as a municipal worker in the recent strikes, on another daughter’s new job as book-keeper for Spaar Foods. I tell her about each of my children scattered from Toronto to Vancouver, about my granddaughter who is close in age to Johanna.

“And your youngest, Celeste,” I ask, “is she in Johannesburg with her husband and two children?”

Pulika scoots Johanna outside to play with Nstwaki. Her mouth tightens like a walnut, her head twitches, a guttural noise rolls in her throat.

“Is not good for Celeste. Her man is bad to her. Ooowwee. She wants to divorce him.” Her voice slides up an octave, “I say no. Who will pay for food, for rent, for school fees? Celeste, she is not having a job. No, Celeste must try harder.”

Her hand, worn like a leather glove, is in my anemic hand. “Pulika, I didn’t say this in my letters, but I was divorced many years ago. My wonderful man now is not my first husband.” Her eyes hook mine. I tell her my story of Cinderella hopes, of realities and delusion and pain, with dual responsibility, without blame. I talk of self-respect, and the pressures of an upended world since those days.

She nods her head, eyes varnished wetly. Then her deep laugh ruptures the moment, opens the door of her face. “Suzan, thank you my friend. I am loving you.”

I laugh, too, startled. Fears drown in the lake of her laugh, in the clasp of our two pink palms. We like black tea, we don’t bake. We nurture, we worry, we love. There is a oneness.

She smoothes her dress like settling feathers. I compliment the design, the colours. “I make expert sewing. Come.” She tours me through her sparse, but exquisite, peacock’s wardrobe hung on spikes on the bedroom wall. Sewing had been a pastime of mine long ago and I praise her plackets, seam finishes, and designs.

On a makeshift table hunkers her sewing machine. “Your stitches is come loose little bit.” She points to my floppy hem. “I want to mend your skirt but my machine, it needs a fix. And no car to take it to the city.”

Words spurt before my thought forms. “After the grandmothers get together tomorrow I’ll be driving to the city – come with me.” We make a plan. I will ask her then about marogo, see if I can finagle a cooking session.

A howl sounds, the siren of a child’s 911. It presses the same granny-response buttons in Pulika and me, and we bolt toward the cry. Behind the house the amethyst glitter of a blooming Jacaranda vacuums my breath – the incongruous beauty of it. And under its glow the teeter-totter is anchored at one end by an upminded Johanna, blindsided, her legs splayed in the dirt. Nstwaki stands behind the raised end, hands clasped over her mouth. We’ll probably never know if the surprise in her tea-cup eyes is because she carelessly got off without warning, or because she jumped off for the impish effect.

It is clear that their teeter-totter balancing act – the give and take, the transitions, the communication – needs practice. Relationships are like that. After a few words Pulika leaves them to sort it out. Once more, a niggling in my back-brain begs attention, this time to questions of parallels and convergence and the parts of a whole. I reach for transcendent meaning in the shaded space of our Venn diagrams. I walk alongside Pulika to the house, her arm slipped through mine. The ease of our connection tingles light on my skin, dissolves the weight of my in-flight fears. I commit to memory the teeter-totter image until my thoughts ripen.

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