Page 32 - WTP Vol.VII #2

So Much the Better (continued from preceding page) “She died from...?”
I fell in love with Nadya; though, she smoked like a steam locomotive. I took up the habit and sat with her at the end of each day. We’d watch the sun set over Pikes Peak. She’d talk, and I’d listen.
“Cancer,” offered Ezra. “Ah,” said Nadya.
She brooded about her visitors long after they left, staring at the wall in a halo of cigarette smoke. Her caring and introspection snuggled into a corner in
my heart. Occasionally, her dark eyes would brighten, and she’d sigh, “Ah.” A wisp of a smile would touch her lips, and she’d turn her attention to me, asking about my day and about the work I had done. She’d take my hands in hers and inspect them. My responses were short because I wasn’t a conversationalist, and I pre- ferred to hear her words.
It was quiet for some time as Nadya bewitched the man. Then, she lowered her voice an octave.
“Your wife’s name was Candice?” “Claudine.”
“Ah,” said Nadya. Her next words were delivered in a slow oration. “Claudine’s body has bypassed hell, gone beneath...to a hotter inferno. She’s paying mightily
for her sins, Ezra, and she cannot die again to achieve release from this punishment.” She paused again. “But the weight of gravity at this core of the universe has attached to you.” Ezra moaned. “We will release this gravity together.”
The dark hue of her skin drew me toward her. My ancestors were Indian from the heart of Mexico, and I was dark as any sin. People in Manitou Springs shied away from me. She claimed her father crossed the Atlanta from Romania, a stowaway on a ship, living in the steel-ribbed bowels with rats. He had married the darkest woman he could find upon arrival in Colo- rado Springs to work in the Pike View mine, the dates ambiguous, her mother never mentioned again. That’s why Nadya said she was so dark. She asserted she had 90 percent Gypsy blood coursing through her veins. When I tried to correct her on that point, she gave me a look, and I shut up. The chronology of her stories was askew. She’d mix in Halley’s Comet 1910 arrival, Nazis in Europe, and Mamie Eisenhower fashion with- out batting an eye. I kept silent, absorbing the sound of her voice.
~
Nadya met Ezra on Wednesday afternoons. She greet- ed him with, “You’re getting more handsome each time I see you,” and “Your hair’s thickening like the mane of a stallion,” and “Look at how your veins are puffing out under your skin so healthy-like.” He looked exhausted after each session, barely able to walk a staggered step out her door, but I observed a faint smile on his face. He began to bring his two teenaged sons and, then, a beautiful long-haired daughter holding a school-age child by the hand. Ezra’s sessions with Nadya became clamorous, the sound of laughter like a party. She served a medicinal drink called kava, claimed it came from an island in the Pacific.
It was obvious she missed her father. She told me the Ku Klux Klan had hanged him in Penrose, Colorado, for apple thievery when she was two, but she didn’t elaborate. I didn’t believe her for a second.
Then, the sessions turned dark. During one, she made Ezra strip to the waist and whipped his back with branches from a linden tree, all the time yelling “Set him free.” and “Leave him be,” let his children take turns, even the seven-year-old. His back was an abrad- ed mess, but he endured. Nadya rubbed his cuts with what she said was a balm made from olives grown on the grounds of the Vatican in Rome, Italy, but I knew it was lard from a tin on her stove.
When I became Nadya’s handyman, John F. Kennedy had been president for one year. His Catholicism meant nothing to me, but his brazenness and deter- mination gave me hope for people of color. Nadya shared a birthday with Elizabeth Taylor, the actress, and let everyone know. We had seen Butterfield 8 during the spring, and Nadya predicted correctly that Taylor would win the academy award for her portrayal of Gloria Wandrous. She spread the news of the correctness of her prediction throughout the valley community.
The strangest thing, Ezra got better. He became more perpendicular to the earth on which he walked, his load lightened. A rosiness appeared in his cheeks along the perimeter of his beard. After four months of sessions, Ezra dropped by one day with a woman on his arm. He introduced Nadya to his future wife and asked Nadya to be maid-of-honor at the wedding.
~
25
~
She was afraid of the dark, said it was because of what her grandpa had endured on the boat coming over. When I asked her to clarify whether her story was