The Summer We Got Free (11 page)

"Pastor
Goode and Linda is downstairs," Lena said. "They brought us a
meatloaf. Come on down and say hello."

“We’ll be down
in just a minute, honey,” Chuck said.

Lena lingered a
moment, George thought, before going back downstairs.

Chuck turned back to George. “We
wasn’t
close, me and my father. Now that he’s gone, I feel like I missed out. Like I
should have tried harder. You know what I mean?”

George nodded,
but didn’t say anything. He felt for Chuck and wanted to be of some comfort to
him, but he hated thinking about his own father, and all the ways he had not
been the right kind of son. He wished he had the sweet potatoes to give to
Chuck. He wished he had a way to say the things he wanted to say.

“I’m an orphan,”
Chuck said, and laughed. “I’m past thirty years old and I still think of it
that way. An orphan. At least you still got your mama. Cherish that, George. It
means something to have somebody in the world who you came from.”

“I guess,”
George said. “But living up to her expectations is just as hard as living up to
his was.”

Chuck nodded. “They always the people we want to
understand us the most. But we always think they can’t.”

“I know she
can’t,” George said.

“Well,” was all
Chuck said to
that.

George sighed.
“I’m a good son. I got a good job, a wife,
smart
,
good-looking kids. I go to church. I do everything I’m supposed to do.”

“You think your
mother don’t
know that? Or maybe it’s yourself you trying to
convince.”

“What you mean?”
George asked.

“I don’t know,”
Chuck said. “Just sometimes I don’t think you like yourself much, friend.”

When they got up
to go back downstairs, George asked Chuck, “You think there’s anybody that can
really understand us?”

“The Lord can.”

George smiled, and nodded, but he didn’t really
believe that the Lord could understand him any better than his mother.

***

The block party started at nine in the morning, and
lasted until after dark. Although it was meant to be a party for the block, and
not for the church, almost everyone in attendance was a member of the church’s
congregation, because almost every family who lived on the block attended Blessed
Chapel. The one and only exception were the
Caseys
,
who lived five houses up from the
Delaneys
, in a
house they rented. Ruth Casey was Dexter
Liddy’s
half-sister, and she lived in the house with her three sons. Doris had very
little good to say about her sister-in-law. So little, in fact, that what good
she did have to say could easily have been mistaken for none.

“She always need
something from us,” Doris told Regina, Maddy, and Grace Kellogg, who lived on
the next block but came over for the party, as they all sat in the shade of
Regina’s porch, drinking iced tea. “If she don’t need to borrow money we aint
got, then she need Dexter to spend time with her children that he don’t have.”

“It’s hard
raising boys without a father,” Maddy said. “I’m always worrying that mine aint
gone turn out right.”

“Compared to
them three,” Doris said, nodding towards Ruth’s sons, who were roughhousing in
the street, “all y’all children
is
angels. Them boys
is
hoodlums in the making. Aint got a lick of good sense
between them.”

“They just kids,
Doris,” Grace said.

“The smallest one aint no older than Sarah,” said
Regina.

“I know it,” Doris
said. “And he the worst one. Lamar. I got to hide my purse every time he
come
in my house. But what you expect, when she don’t even
take them boys to church? Aint no
child ever turn
out
right that didn’t know the Lord.”

Regina, Maddy
and Grace all nodded in agreement.

“Just listen to
that music she got playing,” Doris said.

Almost all the
music that was playing along the street, wafting out from record players set
near the open doors and windows of many of the houses, was gospel. But from the
Casey’s open window, Louis Jordan’s
Aint
That Just Like a Woman
blasted out into the street, and most of the teenagers
and children on the block stood near the Casey’s steps, dancing along to it. Doris’
seven year-old
daughter
, Sondra, was among them.

“Sondra!” Doris
yelled. “Get your little behind over here right now!”

There was
nothing little about Sondra’s behind. She was the biggest seven-year-old Maddy
had ever seen, built like a solid wall, wide and dense. But Maddy refrained
from correcting Doris. “Ooh, I love that song!” she said instead, snapping her
fingers.

“Me, too,” said
Regina, tapping her feet.

Grace laughed.

Doris rolled her
eyes at all of them and got up and left the porch. They watched her hurry over
to her husband, inserting herself into his conversation with his sister.

“Who y’all voting
for?” Maddy asked, when Doris was out of earshot. She was talking about the
vote for block captains, which was taking place that day. The Pastor and his
wife, who had been block captains for the last five years, were stepping down
because running both the block and the church was getting to be too much.

“Well, I don’t
live on the block, so I aint voting for nobody,” Grace said, “but Pastor want
y’all to vote for Doris and
Dex
.”

“Well, that makes sense,” said Regina. “Doris and
Dexter do a lot for this block, and for the church. Who else is running?”

“Nobody,” Maddy
said, waving a dismissive hand. “It aint never been a thing you run for. We
just decide
who
we like and vote for ‘
em
. You can vote for anybody. Even me.”

“Oh, Lord,”
Regina said, laughing. “This block would go to hell in a hand-basket in a
week.”

Maddy leaned
over and smacked her on the arm.

As the day wore on, people cast their ballots, pushing
folded pieces of paper into a slot that was cut into the top of a shoe box that
sat on a table full of condiments, next to the mustard. Maddy had almost
forgotten to vote, and only remembered when she went to get pickles for her
third hamburger, around three in the afternoon. She was about to write “Doris
and
Dex
” when Ava ran over and stuck her hand in a
large bowl of potato chips, then turned and ran off again. Maddy laughed and
was filled with the same warmth she always felt when Ava was near her. She
turned back to the ballot and, without thinking, started to write “Ava” but
just before the pencil scratched against the paper she realized that was silly,
as Ava wasn’t but six years old. Instead, she wrote “Regina and George,” and
when she folded the paper and stuck it in the top of the cardboard box, the warm
feeling was still with her.

Near sundown,
somebody thought to count the votes. Everyone gathered around and Linda Goode
made the announcement.

“We got
ourselves what they call an upset,” she said. “Forty-six for Doris and Dexter
Liddy
; and fifty-one for George and Regina Delaney.”

There was murmuring
in the crowd. Doris’s smile was like something painted on, rigid and
emotionless. Pastor Goode looked like he didn’t understand what had just
happened. Regina couldn’t believe it. She had never even thought about being
block captain, and she was sure George hadn’t, either.

For a moment, it
seemed that nobody knew what to say. Although more people had voted for George
and Regina than for anybody else, it was as if each person who did had expected
to be the only one. After all, the
Liddys
were the
Pastor’s choice: he had all but appointed them the new captains. The
Delaneys
had been on the block less than three years.

Then, suddenly,
Dexter
Liddy
shouted, “See what happens when Negroes
get the vote? You never know who we gone put in office!”

The crowd
erupted in laughter.

All except Pastor Goode, who, Regina thought, looked a
little less than
amused.

1976

A
va got to work
at ten. The museum’s cafeteria, which opened at eleven on Sundays, and closed
at four-thirty, was empty except for the three cooks. Ava was responsible for
buffet set-up on weekends. The cooks, who got there at eight, had already made
the afternoon’s food by the time she got there, but the buffet, with its shiny
aluminum and plastic sneeze-guard, was still empty. Ava went to the back corner
of the kitchen and grabbed a small white bucket. She filled it with hot water
and dropped in a disinfecting tablet, which turned the water blue and fizzy.
She got a clean dishcloth and plunged it into the water, and then wiped down
the buffet. She then poured the dirty water into the large drain in the floor
of the kitchen. The aluminum bins, out of which the food was served, were
stacked along one wall, and she began grabbing them and placing them in the
empty slots of the buffet. When there was a bin in every slot, she went back
into the kitchen, where the cooks had placed the day’s food in large containers
that they had left on the tabletops. “Got ‘
em
all
ready for you, Ava,” Silvio, one of the cooks, a skinny Italian boy with acne,
said when he saw her. Ava grabbed one container of meatloaf and one of corn and
carried both to the buffet, where she dumped their contents into separate bins,
then returned to the kitchen for the chicken wings and the mashed potatoes. It
took a few trips, but in a short while she had got all the bins full of food.
She carried the empty containers back to the sinks and set them aside for the
dishwashers. Next, she got the plates of desserts, the cakes and pies and
brownies, all of which had been pre-sliced by the cooks, and set them on top of
the buffet. Lastly, she grabbed a stack of “Sunday” menus, and placed them by
the plates and utensils at the start of the buffet.

As soon as the
cafeteria opened at eleven, customers started trickling in and Ava served them.
The whole time, through every spoonful of cauliflower and plastic-gloved handful
of tater tots, she thought about the drawing. Whenever she had a free moment,
she took it out of her back pocket, unfolded the yellow page and stared at it,
its angles and shadows, the way it seemed to breathe on its own, as if she had
not just drawn it, but had birthed it, a miracle on the page, a thing she could
almost not believe she had actually done, and absently, thoughtlessly, at that,
a doodle on a grocery list. Where had it come from, this easy talent?

“You don’t have
macaroni and cheese today?” It was Richard from the ticketing desk, on his
lunch break.

Ava shook her
head, no. She folded the drawing, stuck it back into her pocket, and scooped
him up some cream corn.

When her shift
was over, she decided to walk through the museum and out the front instead of
out the back like she usually did, even though

cafeteria
workers weren’t supposed to. She walked through the
cafeteria, down a corridor, out into the Great Stair Hall. She had worked at
the museum since she was seventeen, but she had rarely ventured out of the
cafeteria, because the paintings and sculptures in the rooms that surrounded
her had never seemed especially interesting. She had gotten a job there only
because a job had been available, or, at least that’s what she had thought.

In the Great Stair Hall, she was met by the late day
light coming in through the large, high windows and skylights, casting itself
onto the Greek-temple-like, ceramic-glazed columns. As she descended the wide
marble staircase, there were, on either side of her, huge, high-ceilinged exhibition
rooms, and as she passed by them on her way down, she glanced inside, catching
only glimpses of the art within them, seeing only colors and angles. When she
got to the bottom of the stairs, she turned and went through a large archway
that opened into the museum’s American collection. At this time of the day,
near closing, there were only a few people roaming the galleries.

Ava stood in front of a wall of drawings and her
attention was pulled to one in particular, a charcoal drawing made around 1940,
of a man at a grinding wheel, his large hands holding some instrument to the
wheel, his body slightly bent at the waist so that he leaned into the work. His
face was created in curves and shadows, with a broad nose and thick lips, and
the set of his brow, deeply troubled in charcoal, along with his slightly
rounded shoulders, suggested the weight of the world around him, which was hidden
in charcoal shadow.

Ava moved from
that room into the next, taking in images of farmers in cornfields and urban
skylines, and drops of heavy color splattered on enormous canvases. Turning a
corner into a green-walled room, she came upon a painting titled “In the
Boudoir: (Before the Mirror)” showing a dark-haired woman standing before a
looking glass, seeing herself reflected in odd shapes and contours, and
mismatched colors, so that the woman in the mirror—faceless, without eyes
or mouth—looked little like the woman standing before it, whose skin was
made in gold, and whose cheeks were blushed. The only thing that was the same
about both the woman and her reflection was the way their arms raised high over
their heads. Ava sat staring at the painting for a long while, her head tilted
slightly to one side, her eyes moving along the angles, the strange curves of
the woman’s neck, back, buttocks, and thigh. The color seemed to enter Ava, the
red filling her view like blood or sunset, the blues racing through her,
cooling her skin in the already-air-conditioned room. She thought again about
who she had been, before, and wondered when the woman in the mirror had become
different. The obvious answer was that it had happened after her brother died,
though Ava did not now remember anything that had felt like a change within
her. The days and months that had followed Geo’s death seemed now like a blur
of wailing and screaming—and not her own, but Regina’s—and the hazy
memory of a dull aching inside herself. She could not remember crying, could
not recall, even as she sat there trying, the sting of the loss, the
overwhelming grief that she knew she must have felt. Or had she? If his death
had numbed her, changed her so completely, maybe it had happened quickly, in a
moment, and she had never had the chance to feel much of anything at all. She
wished she could remember.

Staring up at
the gold-skinned woman before the mirror, Ava willed herself to recall the day
Geo died. She knew it had been hot, the thick of summertime, a muggy August morning,
a Saturday. She had been thirteen, with barely-combed hair and eyes flashing
fire, standing in the church parking lot at Regina’s side, staring down at the
boys lying on the scorching asphalt. She felt a kind of shock, a confused
disbelief, flooding through her young self, but not the heartache and grief
that should have followed. She remembered now that it had surprised her even
then. Standing there she had wondered why it did not rip through her, why she
did not fall to her knees as her mother did, why she did not clutch her chest
and tear her hair, why she did not die herself when she saw him there. Instead,
she had stood aside as Regina lifted Geo from the ground, with a physical
strength that made a liar of her small stature, and carried him up the street
home. Regina had laid Geo on the sofa, and wept beside him, on her knees, while
Sarah shook and cried beside her, and George stood in the kitchen doorway,
watching in silence. Ava had knelt next to her brother and looked into his
eyes, which were still open, but all she had seen there, in the deep brown, was
her own reflection.

Ava opened her
eyes and the colors of the woman before the mirror seemed lusher, deeper than
just moments ago, as if some filter had been removed and she could see it purely
now. The reds and blues, greens and
golds
, that had
already filled her up now overflowed and, just for a moment, she felt she was
drowning in color.

She got off the bus a few stops before home and pulled
out the yellow sheet of paper once again, this time to examine the grocery
list. Inside the store, she grabbed a wire basket, and was in the produce
aisle, squeezing tomatoes, when she heard a familiar voice call her name, and
looked up to see Sarah walking towards her.

“What are you
doing in here?” Ava asked. “It’s my turn to do the shopping, I have the list.”

“We came to get
some crab legs,” Sarah said. “Helena’s gone cook them up for dinner.”

“Is she here
with you?”

Sarah nodded.
“In the seafood section.” She looked happy, grinning widely. “We spent the
whole day talking. She’s so interesting, Ava, so independent. She told me about
all the places she’s been to, all the different kinds of people she’s met. We
had a real good time.”

“That’s good,”
Ava said.

“Mama wants okra
to go with the crab legs,” Sarah said. “Help me pick some out; she don’t never
like the ones I get.”

When Sarah said
mama
, Ava was almost sure she sounded
annoyed, though detecting the nuances in the tones of people’s voices wasn’t
something she was good at. She was usually completely unaware of her sister’s
irritation or upset until Sarah came out and said she wasn’t happy about something.

She helped her
sister pick out the okra, checking for color and firmness.

“Sarah?”

“
Hm
?”

“Do you remember what I was like when I was young?
When we were children? Before Geo died?”

A shadow passed over her sister’s face. “Of course I
remember.”

“Tell me what I was like.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t remember.”

“What you mean, you don’t remember?”

“I don’t remember being different than I am now,” Ava
said. “But I was. Wasn’t I?”

Sarah folded her arms across her chest. “What you
trying to do?”

“I’m not trying to do anything,” Ava said. “I’m asking
you a question.”

“You can’t stand it, can you? You can’t stand it that
somebody’s paying attention to me.”

Ava just looked at her sister. She had no idea what
Sarah was talking about.

“You don’t remember what you were like? That’s
ridiculous, Ava.”

“I guess it is, but it’s the truth. Why would I say it
if it wasn’t true?”

“To remind me.”

“Of what?”

“Of how great you
was
. Of how
everybody loved you best, even Mama and Daddy. Of how nobody ever knew I was
even there—”

“That’s not what I’m doing,” Ava said.

Sarah’s face turned suddenly worried and sad. “
Ava,
please let me have this. I need this.”

“Sarah, I don’t know what you’re talking about! I am
not
trying to take
anything
away from you!”

Both women were startled by the
force in Ava’s voice
. Some people
turned and looked at them. Some of the fear in Sarah’s face disappeared, but
she still looked unsure.

“I think something happened to me, maybe after Geo
died, maybe
because
he died. And I
changed,” Ava said, her voice calmer now. “Did I?”

“Yes,” Sarah said.

“Right after he died?”

Sarah thought about it. “No. Right after he died, you
were like you always were. Except that you didn’t cry. You started painting
more.
All the time, all day long sometimes.
Grandma
yelled at you for hanging the dirty ones up everywhere.”

“The
dirty
ones?” Ava had a flash of herself, naked on canvas.

“And then you stopped.”

“Painting?”

“Yes. And after that you started acting different. The
pain of what happened caught up with you.” Sarah frowned. “You saying you don’t
remember all that?”

“That’s what I’m saying,” Ava said.

Sarah stared at her for a long moment,
then
said, “Well, what happened to him changed all of us.
You
was
the closest to him, so it was bound to effect
you the worst. After mama, I guess.” She shrugged. “Why should you want to
remember any of it? I wish I could forget.” She sighed, and held out her hand.
“Give me half of that list, so we can get out of here.”

Ava tore the grocery list in half, and gave Sarah the
half without the drawing. Sarah walked off towards the back of the store and
Ava continued adding produce to her basket. When she was done, she headed for the
dairy section and saw Helena coming up the aisle towards her, carrying a
brown-paper-wrapped package. Her skin looked even blacker in the fluorescent
lighting and the contrast of her eyes was even
more stark
.
A trace of the fascination that had been there that morning was still in her
eyes as she looked at Ava, together with the worry that was there again, too,
and seemed even more pronounced than before. “Your sister is around here somewhere,”
she said.

“I know, I just saw her.
Crab legs?” Ava asked, pointing to the wrapped bundle.

Helena nodded. “I wanted to make something special for
dinner. Sarah’s upset with your mother, and I feel it’s my fault.”

Ava shook her head. “You only asked Mama a question. You
couldn’t know she’d been lying to us about her father.”

“No, I couldn’t have known that,” Helena said, “but I
did know there was something.”

“How could you have?”

“I saw the look in your mother’s eyes when she talked
about her father. I saw the pain, tucked way up underneath the smile. I tend to
notice things like that.”

Ava nodded.

“Where’s Sarah now?” Helena asked.

“She took half the grocery list.”

“Oh. Well, then I’ll help you with this half.” She
placed the crab legs in Ava’s basket and they walked together down the aisles
of the store, getting butter and eggs and pork chops, Helena holding the list
and reading things off. When they’d got everything on the list, they found
Sarah waiting in line and they bought their food and left the store, walking
home together in the late daylight.

They cooked the crab legs in the broiler and Regina
fried the okra. Sarah found some old nutcrackers and they used those to crack
open the crustaceans. Paul was working late and George hadn’t gotten home from
work, so the women sat around the table together, with napkins tucked into
their collars like bibs and a growing mass of shell remnants around them. There
was something about breaking open the crab legs that made them all feel lively.
Sarah seemed to especially like it, sometimes reaching over and cracking
Regina’s or Ava’s food, and Ava saw Helena smiling, looking pleased with
herself.

When George came
in and saw them all around the table, laughing and looking happy, he frowned.
“Y’all know I don’t like seafood,” he said, when Sarah suggested he join them.

“We didn’t think
you’d be home for dinner,” Regina said.

“Mama fried some
okra, too,” Sarah said.

“And it’s a couple leftover drumsticks from last
night,” Regina told him.

George nodded. “Alright, I’ll have those.”

Sarah got up to heat the chicken for her father and
George took a seat at the table. He was aware of a slightly different energy in
the house. Some of the heaviness that always lingered in the corners, no matter
what they were doing, was a little bit less heavy. Not only did no one talk
about the
long-dead
, but no one not-talked about them,
either. The oiliness of unsaid things, which usually hung over them all like
particles of cooking grease in the just-used kitchen,
seemed
lessened.

“This reminds me of the time we went to Savannah, not
that long after we was first married,” Regina said. “We went out and ate at one
of them places by the water, the only one that had a colored section in the
back. Way in the back, past the kitchen, almost outside, but that was
alright
, ‘cause we could see the water from there. You
remember that, George?”