From the Olive Tree with Love
by Ra’Niqua Lee
A wash of bubbles rises like a glow of secrets. The guests all hold bubble wands and look hallelujah happy under the shadowed steeple of Mother Emanuel Baptist Church. Issa watches as the newly minted husband adjusts his tie and raises the hand of his newly minted wife. Father and new stepmother. He finds three faces in the crowd, his children, and nods to each one. It is there in his eyes. Son, son, son. The oldest two blow bubbles like half submerged fish. Issa forgets the wand and the tube of soap, caught on unspoken words. Son. Son. Son.
It’s definitely not the time to argue about labels surrounded by friends, family, and friends of family. And again, not in a banquet hall lined with white curtains and carpet flat as concrete. Weddings and Groom/Brides require martyrs of guests. Everyone steps into themselves, into white and black tie, and pre-ordained poses. Poses tried and baptized in fire. Cast in plastic atop a tower of white chiffon and whipped butter cream. How much has Issa already given up for this day? A new haircut, a nice suit, and a dead name.
She rolls meatballs over potatoes in a little game of Sisyphus. Food solves many problems. When the doctor asks why the extra pounds, the answer will be told in the weight of another body. The other self that Issa has learned to carry on top of the one that counts. This self that Issa puts down and picks up again when necessary because this self is bullet proof.
Toast time, brother one—the oldest, football coach turned trucker, and self-identified best man—holds up champagne. He glosses over growing up in a house of know-nothing testosterone chromosome Y’s, how the house was clean enough, but the laundry was never finished, and the food was either burnt, bland, or texturally repulsive. He slips in the time they went camping but hadn’t bothered to find a real campsite. Instead, they pulled a tent into the thin ridge of trees behind their house, wedged in with each other on uneven ground, smelling each other’s gas and hearing each other snore as if their butts and throats were tuned to the same gravel frequency.
There is no singular best man. All three children have been given the title, and so the second oldest, undergraduate student taking his sweet time, grabs the mic in his matching rented suit, gray with a soft-green colored pocket square. Olive, the bride calls it. Olive trees are from the same family as lilacs, jasmine, and ash trees. It takes four years for an olive tree to bloom. Fifteen years for harvest. Issa learns this after deciding to write a poem for the reception. She drafted a few lines comparing olive branches to love. The trees can live three thousand years, might as well be forever. Eternity must sound like romance to people who believe in heaven.
Issa twirls spaghetti noodles into a limp tangle, promising to eat herself whole. The glut of her own body devoured with clear plastic cutlery. Two selves stuffed into one. Lighter or heavier? She just wants to float.
Second oldest passes the mic to Issa, who stands in uncomfortable oxfords, men’s size ten. She recites the olive poem and performs the same spiel. “I love you, Dad. I only want the best for you, and it certainly seems like you’ve found the best.”
It is the absolute wrong time with Great Grandma Ruby one seat away, a plate of spaghetti on her shriveled knees and oxygen shooting up her nose. Grandma Ruby always said tell the truth and shame the devil, but this truth might be too much for her one hundred years. She has been interviewed by a local newspaper because she is the oldest living person in the county. She has lived through several wars, presidents, and broken promises. In recent months, she has only left her house to visit doctors and church on Easter, to celebrate life, resurrection, and to prepare for the end.
Isa returns to her seat. Sacrifice done, hands nailed, feet bloody.
Great Grandma Ruby turns to her with the strength of a century in her hazy eyes and says, “Eat up, chile. Eat up.”
She passes Issa the dinner rolls from her own plate. Issa tries to protest. She explains that she has eaten too much already. She has chewed through the buffet line three times. She is too full to even consider the wedding cake. She has run out of space to swallow.
Still, Grandma Ruby insists, grabs Issa’s hand, and says, “Eat. Enjoy. Be happy.”
Issa rushes off to the bathroom. She vomits, cleans herself, and returns to her seat.
She sits and says, “I’m not hungry.”
The DJ has turned the volume higher. Issa isn’t sure that she can be heard, but her grandmother hooks an arm and pulls her close despite her breathing tubes.
“Don’t eat then,” Grandma Ruby says in her ear. “Just be happy as you are.”
New wife and new husband have started out on the dance floor. They rock from side to side with eyes only on each other. Bone of my bone. Flesh of my flesh.
Issa wants to say that she can’t be happy like this, double bound in an ugly rented suit, packed into a mold that has never fit, nose full of Obsession perfume and Bengay. Her grandmother knows nothing, but her arm around Issa is as stiff as rigor mortis. She smiles as she pulls Issa side to side, rocks her like a cradle. Old and young and equally ignored, they dance their own dance with butts planted, feet useless on the floor.
Ra’Niqua Lee writes to share her particular visions of love and the South. She is currently pursuing a PhD in African American literature at Emory, where she works as assistant managing editor for the online, peer-reviewed research journal Southern Spaces. Her work can be found at Split Lip Magazine, Cream City Review, the Bitchn’ Kitsch, and elsewhere. Every word is in honor of her little sister Nesha. For her, always.