Confessions of Madame Psyche. Dorothy Bryant

church again. Was she Buddhist? No one knew. Father went to the nearest church, a Catholic one, but the priest refused to come.

      Then Erika went out and returned with a huge basket of flowers to place on top of the coffin. She stood in front of the coffin while Sophie, Father and I sat on the bed facing her, barely room for all of us in the small bedroom. She recited some lines of poetry. Years later I recognized them as Whitman’s, the section of “Song of Myself” which begins, “A child said, What is the grass?”

      We hit another snag when the undertaker said the body would have to go across town to the Chinese cemetery. I cannot now remember how Erika solved that problem, but she did. My mother was buried in a run-down, nearly full little graveyard near the end of Army Street. Then Erika disappeared again.

      Our house, on what was then called Gull Road, was a plain plank cabin, all kitchen with two attic bedrooms above. My father and Dilly had shared one bedroom, Sophie and Erika the other, until they left. After I was born, I had their room. Before long my mother was coming to sleep with me, and my father’s room was usually empty.

      Now he slept in it most nights, and Sophie slept in my bedroom. It was months before I got over the shock of slowly waking each morning expecting to see my mother and instead seeing Sophie. I would close my eyes tightly, trying to make reality go away, until Sophie would prod and shake me and say it was time to go to school.

      Then I would quickly dress and eat and leave. Sometimes I went to school, more often not. The first time a classmate asked me, “Did your Mom die?” I ran out of the schoolyard, not stopping until I reached my knoll, my private, hard, silent rocks. On that day, just after a big drive from San Jose, the cattle were in, lowing and bumping each other, herded all around me, uneasy with premonitions of the nearby slaughterhouse. It may have been dangerous to be among them, but I felt safer there than anywhere else.

      The depth of my grief, my pain, racked me with shame. Grief weighed on me like a disgrace that must be kept secret. It seemed strong enough to kill me, and I imagined that I could survive the grief only if no one knew. One look of pity, one clear sign of understanding of my suffering, would add a burden I thought would crush me. I must, at all costs, never let anyone see the disgraceful depth of my grief. That was why, on the days I went to school, I was often sent home for being unruly, disrespectful, and a bad influence on others. I didn’t go home, of course. I roamed the shore or swam out to a derelict hulk or talked to the tanners or herdsmen or fishermen. Sometimes, when a new herd was in, the Mexican cowboys let me ride double on their horses. The rocking warmth of the horse was the only comfort I could accept.

      I purposely came home too late for dinner. By then my father would have left to spend the evening at the Egret, a bar on the edge of South Basin, and my sister Sophie, having put a plate of stew in the warming oven of the wood stove (I hated that soggy, overcooked food—my mother and I always ate crisp sauteed vegetables from a wok which had now disappeared) was off to her nightly seance.

      Sophie had found an Italian woman the neighbors called La Strega (the witch) and who called herself Signora Renata. She held nightly seances attended by Sophie, who ignored Father’s exasperated warning that she was only being “taken for what little you’ve got, foolish woman!” Since it was customary to give a few cents at each sitting, he was probably right. Sophie came home each night cheerfully announcing that Richard (the youngest of her three dead children) had “come through quite clearly. He says heaven is wonderful, but he does miss the ginger biscuits I used to make for him.” That Richard died at thirteen months, when he was able to utter few words, did not faze Sophie. Children grew up at a normal rate in the spirit world.

      Alone in the evening, I often sat at the kitchen table with a candle and a brass-handled hand mirror, the only one we had. I would look into the mirror, which, in the flickering light gave back a reflection that looked very much like my mother. I would look at my round face, with its deep, almond-shaped eyes, its barely raised nose, black hair pulled back like hers, and I would whisper to her, smiling and pretending that the reflected smiling face was hers, and that the words I spoke came from her. “Little Psyche-mei-li was a girl so beautiful that the goddess who lives in the Bay was full of envy.” I always knew that I was pretending, that my mother was dead and gone forever. I was taking comfort, not the delusions of the credulous Sophie.

      But after a while my sittings with the mirror stopped giving me that comfort. My grief had changed, had been assimilated in a way that made this playacting unsatisfactory. I was older, nine, on the outer edge of childhood. Worst of all, my reflection in the mirror was no longer a replica of my mother. My face had lengthened, giving me a pointed chin and a high forehead. My nose was losing the delicate slope of childhood, rising to a narrow ridge like my father’s. I was becoming ai bai! My hair thickened and began to curl like my father’s wiry moustache. The only things left from my mother were my narrow black eyes, my high jutting cheekbones, and my tan skin, even darker than my mother’s, since I spent so much time outdoors. I watched myself losing the mother in the mirror, hating the changes reflected there.

      Simple Sophie was not completely stupid. “I know you miss your mother,” she would say, and I would stiffen to hide the scream which her stab of sympathy threatened to release. “Why don’t you come with me to see Signora Renata? Maybe Dilly will come through to you. Why, my Elsie even sent me a flower last week.” She would show the brown, dead poppy which had fallen on her in the dark and had since remained crushed in a locket around her neck.

      “Stuff and nonsense!” my father would shout. “Get the child to school. Learn sums,” he would shout at me, “so you can get a little shop or something, or you’ll end up like Erika or a maid to someone like Erika.”

      “It’s Erika who sends money,” I wanted to say, “that gets us through the last days of every month.” But I did not, for in those days, even a disobedient child like me did not talk back to her father.

      I was, however, very rude to Sophie, refusing to speak to her for days at a time or laughing when she told me the latest message from her children “on the other side.” I agreed with my father, who shouted at her that if she kept on “like this, you’ll end up at Napa,” the name of a state mental hospital mentioned often, like a threat of hell, among the people near us. Even the young children taunted the different, the odd, with, “You belong in Napa!” although they had no idea what or where Napa was.

      During the day Sophie puttered around the house, mumbling. She was talking to them, she assured me, to the spirits of her dead children, who, Signora Renata told her, were with her all the time, though they returned her chatter only through the medium, to whom Sophie went every night. If I shouted at her that there were no spirits, that she was just talking to herself, she would stop whatever she was doing to sit and weep. After a few minutes she would raise her head, dry her eyes, and with a surprised look, as if not remembering what she had been crying about, she would begin to mumble to her spirits again as she picked up her broom and began sweeping. I looked at her with a mixture of envy and fury that she refused to feel a grief as hopeless as mine.

      One day, when I looked into the hand mirror hanging on the kitchen wall, I was so enraged at the face Isaw-now bearing only my mother’s eyes trapped in my new face-that I pulled it off the wall and threw it across the room. Its metal frame clanged against the wall, its glass shattering into a spray of fragments. For a moment I was shocked at what I had done. I heard Sophie upstairs, her weak, high voice asking what had happened, her slow, clumsy steps moving toward the stairway. On impulse I leaped silently over a kitchen windowsill and ran to the outhouse, where I stayed for a few minutes, listening to her calling me. Then I came out, walking back to the house and entering through the kitchen door.

      “May? Oh, there you are.” She stood near the wall, holding the handle of the mirror, looking at the slivers of glass on the floor.

      “Look out where you walk. Don’t come in yet.” She reached for the broom. “Where were you? Didn’t you hear me call?”

      I shook my head, waiting for her to accuse me, to threaten to tell Father. Instead she looked at me with puzzlement that was becoming excitement. “But if you and me were the only ones here, and I didn’t do it and you didn’t … then it was Something Else!”