The Turner House (20 page)

Lelah felt she did not deserve nor could she feasibly manage a real relationship, but that didn't stop her from trying to make what she'd started with David closer to her ideal. To this end, she offered to cook, to show up at David's house during a respectable hour and make the two of them a proper meal. Corned beef and cabbage.

For the past week, their relationship had centered on simple, hungry lust. Sex for the sake of it. She'd slept over David's three times. It was as if she'd suffered from scurvy and that chance meeting with him was a booster shot of vitamin C. She dissected their meetings after she left him, ran their touches and jokes through her mind too many times. She tried to ration this reminiscing but could not. It had been too long. His mustache on the ridge of her top lip when they kissed. The way he pulled his mouth away from time to time and breathed into her neck, as if the kissing itself was too much and required breaks. His elbows and knees the same color as the rest of him because he was dark enough for that, for very little wear or discoloration to show. She hoarded these details. She was here and already in the future looking back at here. Editing, perfecting, reliving it. She feared what lay around the corner, what two weeks, a month of their coupling might mean. Lelah and David were what Brianne would have called hanging
out
, messing
around
, hooking
up.
Two adults over forty couldn't do that for long without one of them asking what's what. At the very least David would want to see her apartment, catch her in a lie or two. And that would be terrible. Lelah preferred to leave David's apartment while he showered—a self-preservation tactic, so that she would never be asked to leave—and she took meandering routes back to Yarrow. She had no reason to suspect he would follow her, but there were only so many main thoroughfares on the east side and not much traffic. How terrible to be caught at the wrong intersection with him.

The beef was in its pot, the cabbage cut and cleaned, the pickles sliced. Lelah joined David on the living room floor in front of the couch. She grunted as she settled next to him.

“I've never met a grown man who liked the floor as much as you do.”

“It's my back,” he said. “What I get for slouching my whole life.”

He sat cross-legged with his back flush against the couch. His knees jutted out and made him look froggish. Lelah couldn't manage to sit cross-legged for long, so she folded her legs under her. The TV was on ESPN, but David had it on mute.

“This how you meditate, down on the floor?” Lelah asked.

He raised an eyebrow at her.

“How'd you know about that?”

“I'm nosey,” Lelah said. “And I can read. Those CDs on your nightstand.”

“I don't think Troy even knows I meditate.”

“Troy wouldn't care. Or he'd just care long enough to make fun of you.”

“Ha. Probably.”

“I didn't think it was a secret cause the CDs were out in the open. Nobody's supposed to know?”

He put his arm around her. The smell of him was clean and unfussy. She'd found no cologne in his apartment.

“Not everybody gets to come into my bedroom, Lelah.”

She rolled her eyes at this. He kept meditation CDs on his nightstand, and the small bookshelf in there was full of motivational books about making money, like
Rich Dad Poor Dad
,
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
, and even a few touchy-feely talk show favorites. He seemed to be very interested in fixing himself as well as fattening his wallet, in finding out how to make concrete adjustments for the better.

“So why do you do it?” she asked.

“Do what?”

“Meditate. What do you get out of it?”

“Nothing,” David said. “I don't necessarily get nothing out of it.”

But the set of his mouth suggested the contrary. Maybe this was none of her business. After all, hooking up required keeping personal revelations to a minimum, didn't it? To hell with that, Lelah decided.

“When'd you start doing it? I'm not trying to make fun of you. I just . . . is it religious? I remember Angela Bassett in
What's Love Got to Do with It?
when she dumped Ike and found Buddha. You remember she had that chant? That's ignorant, I know. Are you even supposed to say ‘found' Buddha like folks say they found Jesus? I bet not.”

David laughed.

“Nah, it's not religious.” He flopped one of his legs on top of hers. Heavier than it looked. “It's just a long story. You really are that nosey, huh?”

“It's like a sickness. Comes from being the youngest.”

“Alright, fine. So I met this girl when I was in San Diego and we got married. She was from out there. She had a big Filipino family, and I got along with everybody pretty good. I used to play basketball with her cousins. She was even close with my mom, even though she wasn't black and my mom is old school, you know.”

Of course Lelah felt jealous listening to him. Of course she felt ridiculous for feeling this way. She tried to imagine a petite Asian woman with light brown skin next to David. She could and she couldn't.

“Anyway, after like two years we were ready to start having kids, but I didn't wanna be gone on tours and stuff with a baby, so I started thinking about getting out of the service. This was like, '96, '97. Long story short, I volunteered to go back on a ship to try to stack up some money, and I ended up cheating on her when I was away, and I told her about it. Maybe if we had kids she would've stayed, but we didn't. I quit the navy and moved to LA for a little bit, but my money was low, so I moved back home.”

“And the meditating?”

“Yeah, I bought a tape at this African marketplace when I first moved to LA, and I been doin it ever since.”

“Why?” Lelah asked again. David spoke as if this was the logical next step after his wife leaving him, but it wasn't to her.

“Cause it worked? I don't know. I was tired of feeling like everybody hated me, like because I had fucked up in this one way her whole family was done with me. The tapes helped.”

“With what?”

“With being alone, I guess.” He shifted his leg on top of her. “If you can get used to being alone, sitting quiet for a long time with just you, then you can do anything.”

This sounded like a line out of a self-help book to Lelah, or the type of easy solution they pushed at GA meetings.

“So why do you need to meditate to get that? Isn't it just gonna
happen
regardless? You get older, you get divorced or whatever, and then you're alone. It just happens.”

The pot of water for the cabbage boiled over and hissed on the stove. David lifted his leg to let Lelah up. She went into the kitchen and turned the fire down.

“Yeah,” he said. “But that's not the same as being alright with it. I bet we both could name a
lot
of people who aren't alright with it.”

“Mmm,” Lelah said. She wanted to say something about how when you have a child it changes the way you feel when you're alone, how you are never alone in the same way again because there is a live, independently thinking part of you out in the world that you can never fully push out of your awareness, even if you try. She did not say these things to David; he mentioned that he had wanted kids, and he had none.

They ate at the kitchen bar because David had no dining table. The conversation moved on. They talked about how she used to play the flute, his early aspirations to play basketball, and how everyone would be better off when they had a new mayor and a new president. They shared their guarded optimism that Barack Obama might be the next president, like an expectant couple talking about the health of a baby doctors told them they could never conceive. After dinner they had sex in his bedroom. Missionary, slow and close.

“You ever bring any of the dudes you dated around your daughter?” David asked. They lay on their backs on top of his sheets. He moved his arm behind her neck and snaked it around so that his hand rested in the hollow between her breasts, where there was surely sweat, as well as direct access to the accelerated thump of her heartbeat.

“Mmm, not really,” Lelah said. “No, actually there was one guy when Brianne was around ten or eleven. Named Damien. Security guard at the airport, back when I used to work at the airport. He never lived with us, but I let him take me and Brianne out. Didn't work out though.”

Damien, with the big, adorable, Will Smith–looking ears and an accent that didn't bother with the last consonant of most words. He'd wanted to marry her, Lelah explained, move her and Brianne down to Atlanta where he was from. She pictured him cheering Brianne on as she went down the giant slide on Belle Isle by herself for the first time one summer. Brianne's nervous, eager-to-please grin.

“I didn't wanna take Brianne that far away from her dad,” Lelah said now. “I still thought he might get his stuff together and start coming around. Plus, my own dad had passed and I didn't wanna leave my mom up here.”

A catalog of past relationships was inevitable if she and David were to do more than hook up, Lelah knew, and she'd likely opened the door for it by quizzing him about his meditating. Still, she was unable to tell the full truth. There were other factors in her refusal of Damien's proposal: fear of being far away and alone with a man again, as she had been in Missouri with Vernon. Her having already ruined her credit gambling at Caesars and not wanting Damien or anyone else to find out. Smaller, seemingly insignificant things, like the way Damien immediately reached to put his boxers back on after they had sex, as if he could only stand to be that vulnerable around her for the shortest time necessary.

“Atlanta's a cool city,” David said. “Got a lot more business and stuff goin on since it had the Olympics . . . I mean, it's not no Detroit, though.”

“Not even close,” Lelah said. She couldn't tell if he was joking or serious, but having never been to Atlanta herself, she still felt confident the cities had little do with each other.

Save for Damien, whom she dated for three years, Lelah had had no relationships more serious than sporadic sex partners and preliminary dates for more than ten years. Either she stopped calling the men or they her, the mutual interest petering out like the last few seconds of a song. What she'd said earlier about the inevitability of ending up alone had transpired in her own life without much fanfare. The time had passed, and one day not being with someone began to feel like the norm.

“What about you?” Lelah said. “You ever start coming around one of your girlfriends' kids?”

No answer. Judging from the slow rise and fall of his chest, David had fallen asleep. Lelah turned over and watched the river outside of the window.

WINTER
1945

By the fifth month of Francis's absence, the chances of him and Viola reconciling and having one more child, let alone twelve, were quite low. Viola no longer believed he would return for her. She started saving money to leave Arkansas as soon as she could. She might have considered staying Down South, living in the shotgun house for the foreseeable future, had she not worked for the Joggetses. The work itself was not the problem; it was the commute. The bus ride began jovial enough, with her, Olivia, and Lucille cracking jokes and gossiping. Once they were on board there was a light, communal feeling among the other colored passengers. But as the distance to Pine Bluff shrank, faces closed in on themselves; eyes dulled and jaws tightened. Viola imagined the indignities that others—maids, nannies, cooks, drivers, gardeners, construction workers, waiters—faced at their respective destinations. She would not let Cha-Cha grow up and face such indignities himself.

On one ride to work Viola caught Barry Stuttle staring at her. Twenty-five-year-old Barry Stuttle, son of Deacon Stuttle, one of the three old deacons at Reverend Tufts's church, must have had no clerical aspirations himself, because he wore a white chef's coat and cradled a tall paper chef's hat in his lap. He smiled when they finally met eyes. He had an underbite but was not terrible-looking. Viola did not smile back.

Lucille whispered in Viola's ear. “About time you noticed. He been eyein you like you owe him money for at least a week.”

Viola shrugged.

“Wish I could pay him to look the other way.”

She had attracted suitors since she was fourteen, some more promising than Francis in her parents' eyes. Men who were closer in age to Olivia or Lucille had shamelessly inquired after Viola instead. Olivia had never shown interest in a man. Lucille—the eldest, as quick to laugh as to curse folks out—once had a steady boyfriend, but he'd been drafted early on into the war, and she hadn't heard from him since.

The next morning, as they waited for the bus, Barry Stuttle cautioned a wave. Viola nodded, then turned away from him.

“You know,” Olivia said. “Ain't no shame in movin on.”

“None whatsoever,” Lucille added. “Shoot, you did all what
you
was supposed to do. Ain't your fault the man ain't made good on his part of it. You got a child to feed and a life to get on with.”

Viola had stopped going to church because she feared the disapproving eyeballs and the prying questions. She wondered if Reverend Tufts himself would judge her for moving on. The last time she'd gone to service, about a month after Francis's departure, she'd noticed Reverend Tufts moving in her direction through the after-church crowd. On impulse, she hurried out of the sanctuary before he could reach her. She wanted Tufts's approval and also felt angry with herself for caring what he thought. Every time Viola had spoken to him in the past she'd felt cornered, or scrutinized. Despite being short, he had a looming presence; he shrank others down when he spoke. Most women found him handsome, but Viola and her sisters weren't sure his looks made up for his demeanor.