Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (19 page)

He thought maybe he would show her a picture of the new place, though from the outside it didn’t look like much. He’d been skeptical when the broker showed him the listing, not to mention skeptical of Brooklyn in general. As a child in the Bronx, he’d hated Brooklyn on principle—too much boasting on the part of its inhabitants, too low to the ground, too many trains involved in visiting anyone who lived there. But the apartment, the converted upper half of a Fort Greene brownstone, had won him over. There were two levels, and three bedrooms, and windows everywhere you looked. He had taken to walking around the neighborhood in the evenings. He ate roti one day and giant hamburgers the next. He was becoming a fan of Brooklyn’s parks. He had once seen a young man in a T-shirt that read BROOKYLN. YOU KNOW BETTER. He wondered if this was the sort of person Eva would know.

The apartment had cost him the better portion of his savings, but it was a good investment, and good for him, after all these years of living a life he pretended he could leave at any minute, even as he got more and more settled, to own something, to put down roots. Besides, he had been making, for almost a decade, far more than he’d been spending, what with his ascetic lifestyle. He needed a place—and this was a good one, a place where they could rebuild things, a place where he could see Eva living, her art in one room, her in another, until she was on her feet, until whatever sad thing that surrounded her had been lifted.

“Listen,” he said. “I’ve moved to Brooklyn. I got a real place to live. It’s beautiful. Lots of room.”

He did not mention the lack of furniture. He would get new furniture. He was fifty years old and he had never bought a piece of his own furniture. Even in the middle of the divorce, he had let Debra pick out what later sat in his old apartment for twenty years, and make arrangements for its delivery. This time he and Eva could find things they both liked, make sure she would be happy there. He’d thought of her in the big bedroom over the garden, sleeping safely, putting what she wanted on the walls. He’d remembered her racing through the small apartment he and Debra had shared so long ago, running down the hall with the light behind her. He’d remembered her stumbling into the kitchen sleepy-eyed on Sunday mornings, crawling into his lap and helping him grate cheese for the omelets Debra was making. He remembered what it was like to be at home in a place.

“Look,” he said. “There’s room for you. Two rooms. You must be so crowded in your studio. Your mother says there’s not even room for real furniture. You shouldn’t be living that way. Come with me. We’ll get whatever you need. Stay as long as you need to stay.”

 

 

“Daddy,” Eva said,
pushing away the half-full plate of pasta. “Oh, Daddy. That’s wonderful for you, and wonderful for you to think of me. But I think we’d just get in each other’s way. Besides, I like living in my studio, and you need your own space. Everybody needs their own space.”

Eva saw the look on her father’s face and fought the urge to take back what she’d said. He looked almost the way he had looked when she and her mother had first left him. She closed her eyes and could remember nothing but that morning years ago, dull sky, October leaves on the ground. He had taken her to get a last slice of New York pizza while her mother watched the moving men put the last of their things on the truck.

“It’s not so far away,” he’d said. “Remember how much Daddy loves you?”

“The whole world much and then some,” she’d remembered. She’d thought of love being like tentacles, reaching from wherever he was to wherever she was. She’d giggled.

“Is that funny?” he’d asked.

“I am thinking of you like a jellyfish,” she’d said, but he hadn’t understood.

I
need you to take Chrissie for a little bit,” Aunt Edie says, because apparently I pass for a role model these days. It’s Thursday night, and they’re standing on the doorstep, unannounced. Aunt Edie doesn’t bother coming in. She looks exhausted, her eyes puffy from crying, her usually impeccably braided white hair hanging loose and disheveled. Her last living sibling, Chrissie’s grandfather, has been in the hospital all summer, and odds are he isn’t coming out again. I tell Aunt Edie that I’m going out of town tomorrow—which is true, there’s a half-packed suitcase on my bed to prove it. She tells me I can take Chrissie with me, which more or less settles it. Chrissie breezes past me. Her footsteps on the creaking wood floor of my father’s house swallow her hello. I have a long list of reasons why Chrissie shouldn’t come on this trip, but few of them I’ll admit to myself, let alone to my great-aunt. In any case, she isn’t leaving much room for argument.

“I’m tired,” says Aunt Edie. “She needs someone to look out for her, and I’ve got other things on my mind right now.” She reaches into her purse and stretches out her hand to give me Chrissie’s cell phone, which Chrissie is apparently banned from using. “Her father’s not leaving Bobby’s bedside,” Aunt Edie goes on, “and Tia can’t take her because she’s too busy with nursing school, so that leaves you.”

I stop myself from asking who it is Tia’s supposed to be nursing. Tia is Aunt Edie’s granddaughter, my cousin—Chrissie’s, too—but she is not a nurse or a nursing student. She may possibly own a nursing uniform, but if she does, it has breakaway snaps and she’s generally wearing a G-string under it. I don’t know where Aunt Edie got nurse from, but no one’s allowed to say Tia’s a stripper. Tia’s job bothers Aunt Edie for reasons involving hellfire and eternal damnation. It bothers me because even though Tia’s twenty-five like I am, she looks thirteen. I love her, don’t get me wrong, but she’s got chicken legs, and nothing in the way of hips or boobs, and a big head with wide almond eyes and a long blond weave, and while I can imagine many reasons why men might pay good money to see a real live woman, there’s something unsettling about so many of them paying to see a real live Bratz doll.

In fairness, there isn’t much else to do in Waterton, Delaware. It’s close to everything else in Delaware without actually being part of any of it—about an hour away from the noisy hedonism of Rehoboth Beach’s and Ocean City’s boardwalks, about an hour from the suburban sprawl subdivisions that might as well be North Maryland or South Jersey. It’s not quite the Delaware that’s mostly pig and tobacco farms, though there are farms in Waterton, and a fresh fruit and vegetable stand every mile or so, and the world’s largest scrapple factory. When you approach the city limits from the highway, there’s a painted wooden sign that says WELCOME TO WATERTON: WHEREVER YOU GO, THERE YOU ARE. It doesn’t tell you that where you are is a city that gets seventy percent of its annual revenue from ticketing speeding tourists who got lost on their way to the beach. It’s mostly a town that still exists because no one’s gotten around to telling it that it can’t anymore. The highlight of most people’s weekends is losing money down at the Seahorse Casino, which is forty minutes away and not even a fun casino. It’s just a big room full of slot machines and fluorescent light, and the only drinks they serve are shitty beer and something called Delaware Punch, which tastes less like punch and more like the Seahorse Casino is determined to single-handedly use up the nation’s entire supply of banana schnapps. Considering the options, it makes sense that Tia does good business here.

I live here because right now I have no place else to be. The house I’m staying in is my father’s, and was my grandfather’s before that. It was either come here and be alone for a while, or move in with my mother, which would have felt like an admission of failure on both of our parts. The house is on the back corner of a parcel of land that was once large enough that it meant something for black people to own it back in the day, but it’s been divided and subdivided through the years—split between children in wills, sold off piecemeal to developers, whittled down so that, between the fifteen of us, everyone in my generation probably owns about a square inch of it. My father moved into the house twenty years ago, after my parents’ divorce, looking for a place to get his head together. Or at least, my father’s furniture moved into the house; my father himself got into the antiques market and seems perpetually on a plane to some faraway place in pursuit of a stamp, a coin, a rare baseball card, anything of more-than-obvious value.

Now that I’m here again, I can hardly blame him for leaving so often; I am learning the hard way that it’s not a good place to get over anything. In every room of the house, fighting with my father’s coin chests and signed sports posters and ceramic knickknacks, there’s a reminder of what people are supposed to mean to each other. The set of initials carved into the handmade frame of the front door. A sepia-toned photograph of my grandparents, who died within weeks of each other, months after their forty-fifth anniversary. The lavender corsage my grandmother wore at her wedding; my uncle Bobby found it pressed into my grandfather’s Bible decades later and had it framed on the wall of the master bedroom. The wooden archway leading to the dining room, the one that had been knocked down and rebuilt by my father at Uncle Bobby’s request, the year a foot amputation confined his late wife to a wheelchair too big to fit through the original doorway. The wedding quilt on the living room wall, the one thing besides their life savings that my grandparents had salvaged from the house they fled in Georgia, hours before a mob torched it on a trumped-up theft charge. As a child, I’d taken comfort in the house’s memorabilia—I imagined this was the sort of unconditional love that all adults had eventually—but now, fresh off the end of my last relationship, the house feels like a museum of lack: here is the sort of love you never saw up close, here are souvenirs from all the places your father was when he was not with you, here is something whole that one day you will own a fraction of.

Chrissie’s sprawled out on the bed I’ve been sleeping in since I got here a few months ago. It’s the same bed I slept in when I visited here as a kid, with the same Strawberry Shortcake sheets I never had the heart to tell my father I outgrew, and lying on them Chrissie looks like a little kid herself. Her hair is tied up in a silk headscarf, which means she must have spent half a day blow-drying and flat-ironing it movie-star straight, humidity be damned. She’s wearing cut-offs and ratty sneakers and smells like a bottle of tamarind perfume I remember her borrowing from me the last time she was over here.

Chrissie’s parents are splitting and she’s spending the summer in Waterton, Delaware, with her father because that’s supposed to make her OK with it, except her father’s been cocooning himself in the hospital all summer, and Chrissie’s spent most of her time so far playing hearts with Aunt Edie and the two widows next door, and the rest of it mysteriously unaccounted for, though Tia’s filled me in on some rumors.

“Where are you going?” Chrissie asks me, nudging my suitcase with her elbow.

“We’re going to North Carolina, I guess. Aunt Edie wants you to come with me.”

“What’s in North Carolina?”

I consider the question. “A friend” would be a lie of omission; “an ex” would put Brian in the same category as Jay, who I came here to get away from. Jay, who still lives in the apartment with my name on the lease and is probably fucking another girl on my sofa right now. Jay, who earlier this week sent me an e-mail that seemed to presume I would take time off from not speaking to him, and working on my own dissertation (“She Real Cool: The Art and Activism of Gwendolyn Brooks”), in order to proofread his (“Retroactive Intentionality: [Re]Reading Radical Artists’ Self-Assessments”).

“A friend,” I say. “Brian. He’s in a band. He wants me to see his show.”

“A friend you’re meeting in your underwear?” Chrissie asks, sitting up and gesturing toward my suitcase, which for the time being contains nothing but toiletries and underwear. She arches her eyebrows at me and giggles. “What kind of show does he want you to see?”

“I haven’t thought about the clothes yet. Underwear is the easy part of packing. There’s no deciding. You can’t go wrong with underwear.”

“So the only panties you own are black lace?” she asks, smirking into the suitcase.

“Shut up,” I say. “You shouldn’t be looking through other people’s underwear. And what do you know about lace underwear, anyway?”

Chrissie blushes so red I’m sorry I asked, and then just as quickly starts singing, “
I see London, I see France, Brian’s gonna see Carla’s slutty underpants . . .”

Given my history with Brian, this is too close to true. Every item of non-underwear clothing I’ve considered packing I’ve rejected because it would seem like a deliberate provocation. I don’t own much that Brian hasn’t ripped off of me at some point in the past, even when he was seeing other women, even when he was with the fiancée before the one I’m ostensibly going down there to meet. I shush Chrissie off to bed while I finish packing, but I hear her in the next room, tossing and turning, riffling through the pages of a magazine. When I finally zip my suitcase shut, I go back into the bedroom to check on her. I haven’t seen too much of Chrissie since I’ve been in town, and she thinks I’ve been avoiding her. She’s probably right: lately watching Chrissie has been like watching a taped recording of my own adolescence, which is nothing I want to revisit.

Though the lights are off in the bedroom when I go to check on her, I can tell Chrissie’s only pretending to be asleep.

“Night, Chris,” I say.

“Night,” she mumbles.

“Hey,” she calls as I start to leave. “Can Tia come with us tomorrow? It’d be fun. Like a girls’ road trip.”

I consider the many reasons why this would not be fun. Tia never liked Brian. Once he made the mistake of telling her he understood oppression because he was half Irish and one-eighth Native American. After that, Tia always called him he-who-has-metal-in-his-face, because of his eyebrow piercing. Brian never liked Tia, except for that one time in college he drunkenly asked me if I thought she’d be into a threesome, and I stopped speaking to him for a month.