Black Milk

The Fugitive Passenger

On the first day of September 2002, the Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul to New York takes off with me on it. The plane is jam-packed with undergraduate and graduate students, businessmen and businesswomen, trained professionals, journalists, academics, tourists and a newlywed couple on honeymoon… Besides Turks and Americans, there are Indians, Russians, Bulgarians, Arabs and Japanese who have come from connecting flights. This will be my first visit to America. I think about Anais Nin arriving in the United States in 1914 with her brother’s violin case in one hand and a yet-to-be-filled diary in the other. I am smiling at the curious little girl in my mind’s eye when I notice something and stop.

A young, lanky man two rows in front of me is grinning sheepishly at me. He thinks I was smiling at him. There is no way I can explain it was for Anais Nin. In order to cause no more misunderstandings, I slide down in my seat and hide my face behind a book: In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays.

Shortly after the food service, I walk down the corridor to go to the toilet. Out of the corner of my eye, I check to see what the other passengers are reading, craning my head left and right to decipher the titles of the books they are holding. I notice some Westerners reading books on Turkey or Istanbul (including a novel of mine), which intrigues me, because most tourists read about a foreign country before they go to see it, but very few continue reading after they have seen it.

There are two vacant restrooms. As soon as I open the door of the first one and step inside, I freeze on the spot. There, next to the liquidsoap dispenser beside the sink, stands a finger-woman. I’m just about to say “excuse me” and leave when she calls out.

“No, please, stay… I want to talk to you.”

I look at the stranger quizzically. She kind of resembles the others in the Choir of Discordant Voices. She is no taller than them, but probably weighs more. She has a kind, round, freckled face, a pointy chin, hair the color of Turkish coffee and eyes so blue they suck you in. She’s wearing no makeup except for eyeliner and perhaps some mascara on her long lashes, it’s hard to tell. She seems to be in her early or mid-thirties, and I am sure I’ve never seen her before.

“Who are you?”

“Don’t you recognize me?” she says again, sounding slightly offended.

I scan her from head to toe. She is wearing an aquamarine dress that reaches her knees, red shoes without heels, a belt of the same color, beige nylon stockings. Her wavy hair is held back in a ponytail by a modest hair band. The chubbiness of her cheeks is due to her extra pounds, but she seems to be at peace with her body. She doesn’t have the tense air that the calorie-counting Little Miss Practical radiates.

“I’m one of your inner voices,” she says finally.

“Really? I’ve never seen you before. Did you just arrive?”

“Actually, I’ve been with you since you were a little girl playing with dollhouses,” she says.

Confused and clueless, I ask her name.

“They call me Mama Rice Pudding.”

I break into a laugh, but when I see her scowl I swallow my chuckles and put on a serious face.

“I see you find my name amusing,” she says coldly.

“I am sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

At my guilty pause she smiles. “What strikes me is that you don’t find the names of the others amusing at all,” she says. “You don’t laugh at Milady Ambitious Chekhovian or Miss Highbrowed Cynic, do you?”

She’s right. I have nothing to say.

“My name is what it is because I happen to be a motherly, loving person,” she continues, flipping her hands upward to make a point.

“Really?” I say, under my breath.

“Yes, I relish hanging bamboo wind chimes on the porch, growing begonias in cute little pots, pickling vegetables in the summer, making pink grapefruit marmalade… You know, keeping the home fires burning. I know how to get ink stains off carpets, what to do when you spill olive oil on your best skirt, how to clean a rusted teapot and other important tricks. I bake pastries and desserts. Just this month one of my recipes has been featured in a cooking video, and they named it Mama’s Heavenly Rice Pudding.”

For almost a minute I don’t say anything. I am sure there must be a mistake and I consider how to kindly break the news to her. There is no way a finger-woman like her can be one of my inner voices. I lack the skill to crack eggs for an omelet or the patience to boil water for tea. I hate house chores and other domestic duties, and avoid them as much and as best as I can. My friends don’t need to know about this, but I could live in a room without cleaning it for days and weeks, and if the going gets rough, I’d prefer to redecorate the room than to have to clean it. And if the entire house gets too dirty, I’d rather move into a new one than have to vacuum, scrub and polish it thoroughly. My take on this is that of a hotel client, easygoing and laid-back: I like to sleep in my bed knowing that I’ll not have to wash and iron the sheets the next day.

Mama Rice Pudding purses her lips and pouts as if she can read my thoughts. “You never let me speak, not once! You stored me away in the depot of your personality, and then forgot all about me. All these years, I’ve been waiting for you to accept and love me as I am.”

That is when a bigger wave of guilt begins tugging at the edges of my mind. I feel like an old-fashioned conservative parent who has renounced his son for being gay and pretends he doesn’t even exist. Is that what I have done to the maternal side of me?

“How about the other finger-women?” I ask. “Do they know about you?”

“Of course they do,” replies Mama Rice Pudding. “But they prefer not to tell you about me and the other chick.”

“What do you mean by ‘the other chick’?”

But she ignores my question. “Like many young women I, too, want to get married, wear a wedding dress, have a diamond ring, raise children and cruise the sales aisles of supermarkets. But you pushed away all my desires and looked down on them with such force that I couldn’t even mention them. I was silenced, suppressed and denied.”

I think of Anais Nin again-a vigorous woman who once said, “Ordinary life does not interest me”; who believed that a critical writer such as herself could never make a housewife. She had an unruly side, a mostly disordered lifestyle and more than one lover by her side. “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage,” she would say.

“What are you thinking about?” Mama Rice Pudding asks.

“Anais Nin…” I murmur, not expecting her to recognize the name.

But she does. “Those edgy avant-garde writers!” she says, spitting the words out. “You know what your problem is? You read too much, that’s your problem.”

“Wait a minute, what kind of criticism is that?”

But she raves on about the terrible effects of books on my soul, getting more and more carried away. “You convinced yourself that you couldn’t be a normal woman. Why do you frown upon the ordinary?”

Seeing that this conversation is taking on political overtones, I try to navigate my way through it as delicately as I can. “Hmm… Miss Highbrowed Cynic always says whatever calamity has befallen humanity is because of ordinary people. She quotes the bright Jewish woman philosopher Hannah Arendt, who has shown us that fascism has thrived and grown due not to the bad people with wicked aims but, in fact, to the ordinary people with good intentions.”

“Oh my God,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Do you see what you are doing to yourself? Here I am talking about marriage and motherhood and muffins, and you respond by alluding to Hitler and the Nazis.”

Baffled, I gape at her without so much as a blink.

“Forget about all the other finger-women,” she continues. “They’ve been eating away at you for years. Don’t belittle the beauty of the ordinary, of seeking simple pleasures. You and I can have so much fun together.”

“Really? Like what?”

She beams. “We can go to the farmers’ market every weekend, buy organic zucchini. We can wait in front of