ONE
The Colony
Friday
6 a.m.
2015
Gramma Bea was the
first to rise in the Big House.
Each morning, Fana
Wolde found her grandmother in the kitchen with Mahalia Jackson’s
soaring voice consoling her from the old CD player while Gramma Bea
patted balls of dough between her palms, measuring drop biscuits.
Gramma Bea cooked with care, hour after hour, as if the fate of the
world depended on her getting the ingredients and temperature just
right.
Beatrice Jacobs was eighty-four, but she looked youthful in the
black silk kimono she wore all day sometimes, when she didn’t have
the energy to get dressed. By lunchtime, she would be sweating from
the heat, but she never left her kitchen. When she wasn’t cooking,
she was sitting at the kitchen table, either dozing or reading her
Bible. Sleeping and praying took up the time left after cooking. She
spent more time doing all three since her heart attack.
Like most people, Gramma Bea wore her thoughts like clothing, so
Fana didn’t have to peek inside her grandmother’s head to understand
her. Fana could see it plainly: Gramma Bea stored her grief in her
baking breads and stewing pots. Cooking was her meditation.
Fana’s grandfather had died five years ago, when his car had
overturned in a ditch in the woods a half-mile from his kitchen
table, during a rainstorm. The accident had happened at three-thirty
in the afternoon, snapping Fana out of meditation. Fana, the first
to know he was dead, had shared her grandfather’s last, startled
gasp.
Grandpa Gaines was dead before anyone could bring blood to him,
where a drop might have saved him—or Dad might have been able to
perform the Ceremony at the instant his heart stopped, in the
ancient way. It was so unfair: Gramma Bea had lost her first husband
to a car accident, too. And to lose someone here must feel worse,
Fana thought. No one died here. Fana knew why Gramma Bea always kept
his chair at the breakfast table empty, as if she expected him to
come downstairs to eat, too. His absence was inconceivable.
“Don’t just stand there, baby,” Gramma Bea said. “Start squeezing
the juice.”
The kitchen smelled like oranges in the mornings because Gramma Bea
was from Florida and insisted on squeezing her orange juice fresh.
The oranges were already chopped and waiting, so Fana only had to
pick up her dripping fruit, hold half an orange in her palm, and
scrape off the pulp in the white plastic juicer with the methodical
turns of her wrist Gramma Bea had taught her to perfection; one of
the few things Fana believed she did well.
Mom had bought a mechanical juicer years ago, but Gramma Bea wasn’t
interested in technology except to listen to Mahalia and the
Mississippi Mass Choir and the other gospel she filled her silences
with. Gramma Bea thought machines were a distraction, and the music
brought her closer to God. And closer to Grandpa Gaines, of course.
Gramma Bea thought about dying for a long while every day, working
her way up to the idea. Sometimes, she didn’t mind. Day by day, she
minded less. She had begun to think of it as an appointment she had
to keep, one she’d put off long enough. Fana wondered what else her
grandmother would do with her time if she didn’t have to think about
dying.
But she doesn’t have to die, Fana reminded herself. She knows she
has a choice.
“You’ve got some nice little hips now,” Gramma Bea said, dropping
her dough into neat rows on the cookie sheet. “Nice legs, too. My
legs.” Gramma Bea’s kimono was cut high the way a younger woman
would wear it, to show off her legs. Her calves were veined blue,
but her smooth shins had resisted wrinkles. “You should wear a dress
when you go driving tomorrow.”
Fana felt alien enough outside without Gramma Bea’s criticisms! Mom
and Aunt Alex never wore anything except T-shirts and jeans either.
Sometimes it was hard for Fana to believe that Mom and Gramma Bea
were the same blood: Mom never had casual conversations with her
about going outside, especially not about clothes. Mom only filled
Fana’s head with warnings.
“Why do I need a dress?” Fana said. “It’s just a driving lesson.”
“And lunch,” Gramma Bea said. “At a nice restaurant.”
“Pass. I’ll pack some food from home.”
Gramma Bea tsssked, a click against her teeth. “Go to a restaurant,
Fana. Sit with the people for a while. It’ll be good for you.”
Fana hated restaurants. They always smelled like meat, and the
tension was thick behind servers’ smiles and the kitchens' closed
doors. Restaurants never felt at peace.
“Don’t you want to feel more comfortable around people, Pumpkin?”
Gramma Bea said.
Fana felt stung. Now Gramma Bea sounded like Mom. “What do you
mean?”
“I knew a young man from Midway, Florida...a trumpet player,” Gramma
Bea said, speaking in a story, as she often did, never going forward
until she remembered all the details. She wanted to make sure her
life’s adventures would be remembered, even in passing. “He swore up
and down he loved me, but I came to find out he didn’t invite me to
his sister’s wedding. He said he was worried I wouldn’t know which
fork to use and what-not. So seditty! And I told him, ‘Billy Taylor,
what kind of love is that?’”
Fana waited. Sooner or later, Gramma Bea always remembered her point
again. Gramma Bea went on: “Baby, liking from a distance isn’t the
same as liking up close. You can’t like people if you won’t let them
close to you.”
Fana felt her teeth grind. How many times did she have to tell
Gramma Bea that crowds gave her headaches? Her family tried to
understand, but they couldn’t. Not really. And what good would it do
to go out and meet people? She would only lie to them, too.
I care about people in the way that matters, Fana thought. I heal
them.
“I have friends,” Fana said instead. When she wasn’t reading or
meditating, Fana was posting on ShoutOut, where she had hundreds of
friends around the world who knew her as Aliyah Martin, an American
student and Phoenix music fan living in Tokyo.
But Gramma Bea was wrong if she thought she spent her days
role-playing and gossiping. Fana never used her webcam, and only
three people outside of the colony knew her real name. One person
alone knew who she really was, and Fana hadn’t seen her best friend
in three years. She and Caitlin saved their real communications for
an encrypted site, at least once a week. They deleted and scrubbed
each other’s messages immediately.
Fana hadn’t gotten any messages from Caitlin in two weeks. Something
was wrong.
Anxiety nested in Fana’s stomach, and she knew the chewing sensation
would follow her until she tried to go to sleep, just like last
night. She dreamed in nightmares, and always about Caitlin. Was
Caitlin dead like Maritza? She can’t be, Fana thought. I would have
felt her die.
Was Caitlin on the run, then? She had to be. But where?
“Typing on a screen isn’t the same as talking face to face,” Gramma
Bea said, prying Fana’s worries wide open. “Life is something you
touch. Typing is easy. Touching is hard.”
Gramma Bea was right: Fana needed to see Caitlin in person. But
Caitlin couldn’t come here, the one place she might be safest. One
of the Brothers would know Caitlin’s thoughts as soon as she
arrived, and Fana couldn’t count on masking her. If I were a normal
person, I could just drive out of here and go find Caitlin myself.
It was the worst quandary of Fana’s life, and not talking about it
consumed her. Was it time to tell her family the truth?
Fana almost told Gramma Bea everything, right there in the kitchen
on Friday morning.
“...that dress I got you for Easter is casual enough to wear as a
tea dress,” Gramma Bea was saying, and Fana enjoyed remembering how
much her grandmother had loved buying her clothes, even if she never
wore them. Gramma Bea hadn’t been on a shopping trip in a year, and
her catalogues were piling up in the coat closet. “You’re such a
pretty girl, Fana. Why won’t you let anyone see you? It’s like you
want to bury yourself in the ground and disappear.”
Did Gramma Bea know? Fana had started trancing again, too.
Sometimes when Fana meditated, she let herself get lost, hiding from
herself the way she first learned when she was three and the world
had gone badly wrong, when she stayed lost for years. Life was hard
again, and Fana wanted to step out of it.
Fana felt her grandmother’s fingers beneath her chin, and the
kitchen came into sharp focus: rows of cookbooks, watermelon
knick-knacks and a polished floor. Did I trance that fast? Gramma
Bea looked her in the eye, knowing. “Try to get used to things on
this side, too. Not just the universe in your head, Pumpkin,” Gramma
Bea said patiently. “Start with this.”
Gramma Bea held up a tube of lipstick the color of ripe mango pulp.
“It’ll do wonders for your smile,” she said. “You just put some on
and stare at yourself in the mirror. It’ll make you feel good. Sit
in your skin a while, child. Now, pucker.”
Fana pouted her lips, and her grandmother painstakingly guided the
tube while Fana smelled perspiration, talcum powder and sweet,
familiar Giorgio on her skin. Fana would know her grandmother’s
scent with her eyes closed.
“Look at that!” Gramma Bea said, glowing as if she and Fana shared a
face. She held up the shiny aluminum toaster for Fana to see her
reflection: blurred brown features and a shimmer of orange-yellow
light. “A little color works miracles. See how it brings out your
lips? I still feel naked if I go outside without my lipstick, and
nobody’s noticed my face for years. But, once?”
She laughed, her eyes twinkling with memories both joyful and sad.
Gramma Bea rarely saw how beautiful she was; she only noticed what
had changed since she was seventeen, too.
“Don’t worry, Gramma Bea,” Fana said. “Nobody’s noticing me either.
Ever.”
Everyone else who lived at the colony was either related to her by
blood or marriage, just a kid, or old enough to be her ancestor. Not
to mention that she was also a freak.
“Somebody will notice you when you’re driving,” Gramma Bea said,
certain.
“Like who?”
“You never know who, Pumpkin,” she said. “That’s the fun
part—finding out. Twice in one lifetime, I was blessed with a good
man. Twice. True love is an experience everyone should have, but you
can’t find anyone when you’re hiding.”
Gramma Bea was from a generation when girls got married right out of
high school, Fana remembered. They couldn’t be more different, in
that way. Fana had known since she was three that she would always
be alone.
“Men have the curse of their eyes, Pumpkin,” Gramma Be said. “Their
eyes catch on to things first. It never seems right or fair, but
it’s in their makeup. Until a man sees you with his eyes, it’s like
he can’t see you at all. And if a man’s eyes take hold of his heart?
He’ll move a mountain for you.”
“That just sounds shallow,” Fana said. “Why would I want anyone like
that?”
Gramma Bea shrugged. “We didn’t make this world. The Lord did. We
just visit here.” Fana sighed and picked up the toaster again,
adjusting its angles in the light from the window to try to see her
face through a stranger’s eyes.
“Do you see what I see now?” Gramma Bea said.
Fana nodded, forcing a smile.
The lipstick’s color was a promising speck, but Fana still couldn’t
see her face at all.
