Late for dinner, p.2
Late for Dinner, page 2
Now I know at last what they knew even then: you were as disoriented by our love as I.
I frightened you as much as you frightened me.
In what way?
You'd never known a woman who could climb so high beside you as if on the same stellar ladder, think the same thoughts in unison, see the same things.
A night fire, a circle of men and women, camouflaged, silent on cat feet. Another time, and yet this same time we inhabited together, wearing different clothes.
You were afraid that in my foolish youthful altruism, full of ignorance, I'd come to harm, and I terrified you because you hadn't planned on caring so, and to keep me out of harm's way, to look out for me, put a big dent in your game.
You might misfire, and you'd always been so sure.
* * *
I've only just gotten home, just now, at this very moment. Seated across from my father at his antique wooden kitchen table we drink black tea out of my mother's chipped brown stoneware pot, the only one that survived her death; the others jumped off the counter two weeks after she left, unable to live without her, trying to follow her just as I tried, unsuccessfully, to do.
My father lights one of my cigarettes, says, "What did you learn?"
"I learned despair. When Mother died I'd thought I'd known what despair was but I had not."
"So what is despair?" my father asked.
"Despair is this: your daughter sells herself to enemy soldiers so that she might have the money to feed her own child. She got pregnant from an enemy rape, yet she still loves her baby and holds it more dear than her own fragile and defiled life. Despair is that you don't know her name or what she looks like, because her mother and you separated before she was born. It's like you were torn apart by the war."
My father stared at me.
"Despair," I continued brazenly, "is that you walk the street at night, your gun in your pocket, knowing those young girls, their sullen, stupid faces masking their beauty, their intelligence, their own rebel fire, with needle marks in their arms and bruises on their cheeks imperfectly masked with makeup, might be your daughter. And you are powerless to protect her from the sometimes violent and disease-ridden enemy soldiers, because you don't know which of them she is. Impossibly dressed as they are, in the colours of fish which might only be legends: green and pale blue vinyl jackets, shimmering wet red boots, cut to the thigh."
My father sighed and put the kettle on for more tea, afraid where this was leading.
"Despair is this: This has been happening for generations."
* * *
You never told me what despair was; I only felt it seeping through your skin, marvelled at what a great comfort I could be, not knowing what you kept hidden within until we walked past that line of girls one night on the way to a film party, and as I made a disparaging remark you dug your fingers into my arm more fiercely than you needed to, said, "You don't know what you're talking about. Any one of them could be my child."
I began, very slowly and in spite of my upbringing, to learn your way of life.
What had attracted me to you in the first place?
Your beauty, your mystery, your power. Your excellent drugs; perhaps even, a little, the glamour of your gun. At least, to me it was a little glamorous; I'll admit that now. To you it was just more. More what?
More despair. Generations-long despair. A blanket of despair thick and all-encompassing as snow.
* * *
My father and I talked all afternoon. We sipped scotch from a flask of Johnny Walker Black I'd inadvertently smuggled across the border in my jacket's second waterproof pocket. He made me dinner, ratatouille over rice: my father's first and best dish. We talked all night. At dawn we were out of cigarettes and drove out to breakfast at an all-night greasy spoon and he bought more even though he'd never smoked till I came home.
* * *
Despair is this: you must make your lover understand. But she is from the enemy side, although at least ostensibly from a prominent liberal family which yet favours the rebels. You have only one hope: that you are able to make her see what it's really like, what it's been like for your family for hundreds of years. She is your only hope. If she understands, and if she tells, the world will perhaps open an eye to your pain at last, and lend a hand. Not fucking likely though, for she is foolish and very young. Intelligent, she seeks the mystery, and doesn't, cannot, understand the despair.
Unless, perhaps she lives it herself.
And so you do what you don't want to do; you cut the strings of language that tie her to her own community, to make her truly one of yourselves, that she might learn.
You turn her out. Or more properly, you say nothing as she takes to the streets herself, taking her place beside your mother, your sister, your daughter, silently handing you the money later that you might use it for ammunition.
Just as they do.
She learns this: these women love each other, love their mothers and daughters, and in one another's company even laugh a little.
They are afraid that even more of their men will die. Just as some will die themselves, too young, of disease and violence. War casualties like her mother.
You hope she will survive, knowing it's quite possible she won't, but will instead get shot, either accidentally or on purpose, by a rebel or an enemy soldier: stateless and homeless as she now is, it could yet be either.
As it has always been for you.
And yet, far away from you, on her own at three a.m. in an after-hours club she won't be able to leave for days, she walks into an empty back room where there are fish. The rebels' secret: a life of beauty so profound it melts all despair, at least in their presence. Their secret wellspring: magic is real, and if magic is, then so too, and perhaps and probably only then, can a true democracy, and true gender equality, be invoked. She crosses the room, slips her hand into the tank, folds a fish into her hand, pockets it. Her fear is not that it will die in the water-filled pocket of her orange vinyl jacket, but that, when and if she ever gets it home, she will not be able to create the right conditions for it to flourish.
* * *
When I described fish on the phone that night, many years ago now, to my father, fish he'd never seen or known in all his waking life, had only heard rumours of: mythical, magical fish so beautiful they could only live among rebels whose culture was as foreign to ours as a Jovian one might possibly be, I think I gave him both hope, and the first notion that I might yet die.
Perhaps rebels have always known the price of hope is death among their numbers, and so with this knowledge I made my father truly one of us and not just a pretender to the throne.
* * *
She waits for you and you don't come. She makes her way home slowly, although it takes many years. She crosses the border at dawn, riding with a friend in a stranger's car. Waiting for a ride, they'd walked along a railroad embankment, an orange moon larger than harvest painted in the sky above their heads. And gone down into the coffee shop when it opened at six to beg a lift and drink the devil's coffee. The second girl knew you too and they both wondered if they'd ever see you again.
One did and one didn't.
It doesn't matter much which. There are thousands of girls like them, after all, gone down to rebel fire, their hearts caught in the crosshairs of a gun.
* * *
Her father had old friends for dinner. When at last she arrived and they asked her, "What did you learn?" she said, only the faintest stain of needle marks and bruises still visible on her skin: "I brought a fish through the door, across the border," and watched the indescribable looks on Petra, Eileen, and Lep's faces as she removed it from her pocket and unfolded it on the table where it began to swim in slow lazy circles. She knew then that all her training, and all her defilement were to this one end, to be a translator, to propagate miracle fish, fish smuggled across the border from another dimension, another world, in her own community.
Copyright © 2000 by Ursula Pflug
* * *
Ursula Pflug is an award-winning, internationally published short story writer. She is also a playwright, screenwriter, editor, arts journalist, illustrator, mother, and gardener. Her magic-realist novel Green Music is forthcoming in 2001 from Tesseract Books. A transplanted urbanite, she has been living in rural Ontario with her family for fourteen years. More information about her can be found on the SF Canada site.
The painting for this piece was done by Christiane Pflug (1936-1972).
Ursula Pflug, Late for Dinner
