Our house still has no electric light—Mama had no time for the invention, and after her death we kept postponing it because of the expense—so Nunu’s entrances tend to be a little theatrical. This time, too, she stood there with the flickering candle in her hand, her gray hair standing up everywhere, in her nightgown, like some midnight apparation. “Lady Macbeth,” I said, smiling. “Come over here and sit down.” I knew she would look in on me that night. Nunu is the family member who “stands in” for all the other family members in the house. She had arrived thirty years before, part of the nomadic process whereby families drift about the world like mythical figures: she arrived out of an archaic past, part of the genealogical fabric of great-aunts and grandnieces, just for a few weeks. Then she stayed because she was needed. And later she stayed because everyone else in the family had died off before her, so Nunu was left, decade on decade, step by step, to ascend the ladder of family hierarchy, until she finally took Grandmother’s place, moved into the room upstairs, and inherited her sphere of influence.
