You Don't Have to Live Like This (18 page)

The sense I had of unreality was strong. Robert had left his shirt over one of the chairs and put it on again, buttoning it slowly; his fingers were probably cold. He didn’t look very happy—we lost that last game by six or seven points, and I got this funny feeling that Obama was talking so much because he won. But then I couldn’t read him at all. His face was very expressive. Of course, he was used to being looked at, and maybe the best way of covering up what you
think is to show a lot of expression. But then at other times his face went blank, he stopped paying attention, and people around him had to repeat their questions. Robert I knew a lot better, but he was strange to me, too, and I wondered if they had been working on some deal that didn’t come off.

Gloria said to me, “Take me home.”

“You ready to go?”

“If you can’t make it with me now, you never gonna make it with me.”

So I took her home.

G
loria was one of those people with a confession to make. I don’t mean confession exactly, but something she has to tell you if you’re going to get to know her. There were probably twenty people she’d told this story to, a couple of high school friends, a few of their parents, one of her teachers, someone from camp, her roommates at Michigan, a few other college friends and most of her boyfriends.

When she was seven years old she learned to ride a bike. Her father used to take her out on Saturday mornings. He worked as a lawyer for the UAW and didn’t see much of Gloria in the week—mostly he got home when she was in the bath. But Saturday morning was Mother’s morning off (on Sunday the whole family went to church), and Gloria could pick whatever she wanted to do with her dad, eat pancakes, go to the zoo. That summer she mostly felt like riding her bike.

Sometimes they rode through Jefferson Chalmers to Lakewood Park and looked at the water, or they rode over to Chandler Park or they went into Grosse Pointe, which started just across the road from their apartment block. Gloria liked to look at the big houses, and the streets of Grosse Pointe are wide and quiet. There isn’t much traffic.

They were biking along Whittier Road one day, just off Charlevoix, when her daddy came off. He just leaned over slowly and the bike leaned with him, and turned to the side, and since there isn’t much of a curb on Whittier he fell into one of those patches of grass between the road and the sidewalk, and lay there next to a tree. She laughed at first, but then she had to turn around and go back to him, because he didn’t get up. The bike was still between his legs, he was still breathing, his eyes were open, but he didn’t do anything or say anything when she shook him or shouted at him. It was about nine in the morning. Even as a kid Gloria liked to get up first thing, and her daddy made her breakfast on Saturdays and sometimes they set off while her mother was still in bed.

For almost an hour she sat by her father in the grass. After a while she even stopped crying. A few cars went by and there was a jogger on the other side of the road, but nobody came out of their houses to see why a little black girl was sitting next to a fifty-five-year-old black man in the grass by the curb with their bikes on the ground. The reason she didn’t knock on anyone’s door to ask for help is because she was scared they weren’t supposed to be there and she didn’t want to get her daddy in trouble.

The front lawns on Whittier were bigger than any yard she’d ever played in. The houses were made of those bricks they build schools out of, with white plantation shutters on either side of the windows. Once or twice her father had invited one of his colleagues from the UAW back to their apartment, a white guy, another lawyer, but her parents didn’t do much entertaining, and the people they had round were mostly family or from church. In other words, when she was seven years old she didn’t know any white people to talk to.

There are sidewalks on both sides of Whittier Road, but they don’t get much use. Everybody drives. A few people must have got
in their cars while Gloria was sitting there, but nobody stopped by or said anything until a cop pulled over by the side of the road.

By that point her father was dead. When the ambulance eventually came they took Gloria to the hospital with him and checked her temperature and gave her something sugary to drink. Her father lay on the gurney with a blanket over him, as if he was cold. That seemed weird to her; she was sweating. Then her mother came to the hospital and a few hours later took her home again without him.

Years later she got into one of those stupid teenage arguments you get into with your mother. Here’s what her mother said: that if Gloria had gotten help sooner, her father might still be alive. At Michigan Gloria looked into this a little—one of her roommates was premed. Her roommate told her that they probably had ten or twelve minutes to respond, after the coronary event. In other words, unless the first door she knocked on had a doctor in the house, or somebody who knew CPR, there was probably nothing that Gloria could have done to save her father. Even if they called an ambulance immediately it would probably have come too late.

But Gloria still thought about why she hadn’t asked for help. When the cop came over she was just sitting on the side of her bike spinning one of the wheels. She had wet herself and still remembered the feeling of not being able to hold it in and letting go. It was a hot July morning and getting hotter. By the time her mother drove her home she was totally dry—she didn’t even get changed. If they had gone biking that morning in Jefferson Chalmers or Morningside, she’s pretty sure she would have knocked on somebody’s door when her father fell over. But she didn’t because she was shy of white people, and nothing any white person had ever said or done to her was a good enough excuse.

I said to her, “There’s another way of reading this story. I can’t believe nobody came out to see what was going on.”

“When a kid screams, how often do you check to see what’s wrong? Even if you do look, you see a man lying down beside her.”

“If you were white,” I said, “somebody checks. Some mother would consider it her responsibility. Some busybody, some neighbor.”

“Where he fell down was next to a tree. So from one side you couldn’t see us too well, and from the other side was across the road.”

“If you were white, somebody stops the car, they get out and look.”

“I know you mean well,” Gloria said. “But I don’t want it stirred up like that. Please stop.”

We were sitting in her living room, on two of the chairs. Gloria felt hungry when we got in from Robert’s party—she made us something to eat and lit candles and all that. Afterwards we sat over a bottle of wine.

The conversation was a mood killer, but I spent the night at her place anyway. I don’t sleep well in other people’s beds, and her bedroom was small. It was kind of a good little girl’s room, very plain and neat. She had a single in it, and I lay on my back all night with my eyes closed, trying not to move and wake her. Then when it got light she made me take off. On Sunday mornings she had a weekly date with her mother to go to church. The early morning service started at nine a.m. This is the one her mother liked to go to, because there weren’t any kids, and afterwards the two of them had breakfast together. So I said, “Can I call you later?”

And she said, “Please, call me.”

Then I put on last night’s clothes and carried my tie in hand and walked out. It was cold in the stairwell, I could see my breath in the
one landing light still working, but outside didn’t feel much colder. The air was still, and snow had fallen overnight and covered the roof of my car and tufted the side mirrors. I palmed off the snow with bare hands. The sun hadn’t made it yet over Gloria’s apartment block, but the rest of the street, up and down, showed the line between sunshine and shade very vividly. On the west side, on the Detroit side, the milk-carton houses sat in brilliant light.

Snow lay about a foot thick in the middle of the road, so I decided to leave the car and walk home. It took much longer than I thought. I ended up on Mack Avenue, where the storefronts and service stations and jury-rigged churches eventually gave way to concrete sidings topped with chain-link fences. By this point it had become a six-lane highway. There were train tracks running underneath it and some kind of industrial plant spread out alongside. But the parking lot had no cars in it, just heaps of garbage, rubble and tires, and pileups of snow. I started to feel scared. I was also hungover and sleep-deprived. The world seemed very large around me, not just the planet itself but the number of people, the scale of buildings and the general infrastructure, highways and tracks and office blocks and container depots. It’s almost impossible to keep your sense of proportion, you come out too small, so you have to combat how little anything matters with your most unreasonable voice, saying, it matters, it matters, it matters. These are the stupid thoughts that went through my brain. I could still taste Gloria’s mouth in my mouth, my feet were wet and numb, and then I passed the twenty-four-hour McDonald’s on the corner of Conner Street and went in for a pancake breakfast and Styrofoam cup of tea. Later I got Walter to drive me back and picked up the car.

T
here was a message on my answering machine, but I didn’t listen to it till I went to bed, which was early, about nine o’clock. My brother wanted to know if I was coming home for Christmas. He couldn’t get away with the kids (he has three of them) and the house in Baton Rouge was too small. Andrea had put her foot down, and Mom didn’t want to commit to Christmas in Houston until she had heard from me. Of course, I was welcome to sleep on his couch if I wanted to, but regardless, I should let Mom know. I should call her anyway, just give her a call, he said. She’s building this whole thing up into something it’s not. It’s stressing her out.

My father offered to pay for my flight. Walter and Susie had also invited me to spend Christmas with them, but life seemed pretty tense downstairs. She was under doctor’s orders to stay in bed until the baby was born. Her due date was six weeks off and Walter not only had to run the kids’ workshop himself but also look after her—clean house, go shopping, bring her meals. She was taking this bed rest thing very seriously and shuffled around instead of walking, when she had to go to the bathroom, for example. I said once, how do you feel, do you feel weak, does something hurt, but she said, looking up, I just feel worried. Worried people can walk,
I thought, but didn’t say anything. Walter looked strung out. So I took my dad’s money and flew home.

Home felt weird to me, too. My mother made meat loaf the night I got in, because it was my favorite thing to eat when I was twelve years old. After she went to bed, my dad offered me a shot of Jim Beam. We sat up watching TV and both got a little drunk. That’s what we did every night—watch TV. I didn’t tell either of them about Gloria, but all week long I had this
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
fantasy going around my head. For some reason I liked to imagine their reaction.

Gloria and I called each other practically every night. I sat in my old bedroom like a teenager, with the door closed, talking quietly, except when I was a teenager I didn’t have a girlfriend. One night I even went through my bedroom closet, looking for shoe boxes—the ones I had stashed my lead soldiers into a couple of weeks before going to Yale. They were still there. I unwrapped a few of the figures from their squares of kitchen towel, feeling a sort of abstract sadness. It struck me that all of my childhood interests and enthusiasms could be explained as displaced sexual energy.

On Christmas morning, while my mother got the dinner ready, my dad and I drove down to the racquet club and played squash. I could beat him easily these days. His hair, which was yellow, had become yellow-white. At least he hadn’t gotten fat, he was never particularly skinny, but he had these skinny legs. And since his feet didn’t bounce off the ground anymore, his running looked like a kind of sprightly walking. Especially since he held himself uncomfortably upright, even chasing balls. There’s a history of back trouble in my family. I felt sorry for him, beating him, but he didn’t seem to mind.

Afterwards, in the showers, he said, “Are you having an okay time up there?” His chest was broad and muscular. It had faint
white hairs, almost the color of his skin, running between his breasts and down to his navel. He was still physically vain and soaped himself off with pleasure, but his hair looked thin under the water. “Are you living the way you want to live?”

“Getting there.”

“Because I know that was always very important to you.”

“Whatever that means,” I said.

The club was pretty empty on Christmas morning, there were only a couple of old guys in the showers, but my dad knew one of them, so we had to put off our stupid argument until the drive home. Then he started asking questions about the setup in Detroit—what had happened to the people who used to live in these neighborhoods. Really he wanted to impose on me his Greater Knowledge of the World.

“You don’t need to talk to me about these people. I’ve thought about them more than you have, believe me.”

“Give me a break,” he said. “I used to be a union rep.”

“You represented a bunch of journalists. The oppressed middle classes.”

“What are you talking about, I started out on the docks, with the ILA. Don’t talk to me about racial tensions. I only got out when you kids were born, when we moved to Baton Rouge. So it shouldn’t surprise me I have suburban middle-class kids. But this isn’t what I wanted to talk about. One of my boys wants to make money, and gets it; and the other one wants something else. I just wanted to know if you were getting it.”

“I don’t know what you mean by
something else
. You make it sound like a kind of luxury.”

“Well, for most people it is. If we’re talking about some philosophical idea of happiness here. People in my experience live much more for pleasure, they’re forced to.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say. That’s not even true. I don’t even think you know what you mean by the distinction.”

“That’s three different arguments,” he said. “Pick one.”

But we all tried our best when we sat down to eat. Christmas is a lonely meal for three people. The food outnumbers the company. There was turkey and two types of stuffing, cranberry sauce and greens, a salad and mash potatoes, and gravy, and a bottle of wine, which only my father drank much of. I never felt comfortable drinking in front of my mother.

“Why didn’t you want to go to Houston?” I asked them.

“Your mother doesn’t like Andrea’s cooking.”

“She’s a fine cook.”

But my mother said, “It isn’t her cooking. She has no sense of ceremony. The children should get a sense of what Christmas means.”

“You mean, they should get a sense of the effort you put into it. They should feel guilty.”

“Putting a little effort into something is nothing to be ashamed about. The fact is that Andrea is not a great coper, which I don’t understand at all, because she has much more help in the home than I ever had.”

Afterwards my mother and I cleared up and my dad went out to smoke a cigarette. “Did you have a fight about something?” she said, over the dishes. “What about?”

“I don’t really know.”

“Who won?”

“You mean the squash? I did.”

“You know that’s not what I mean.”

The next day my brother drove down from Houston by himself, about a five-hour drive. We had a late lunch together and afterwards Brad and I went out to throw a football in the street. It was about sixty degrees out, there was no wind, and even
through the endless white cloudy sky you could feel the heat of the sun.

Brad was a couple of inches taller than me, bigger in the chest and better looking, with fair hair and a blond face. But he’d also grown a gut, sitting on his ass and billing time. Mostly he threw and I chased the balls down, running routes down the middle of the road.

At one point he said to me, “So you getting any action in Detroit?”

“I think I got a girlfriend,” I said. “A real Detroiter.”

“What does that mean?”

“Someone who grew up there, not someone like me. She’s black.”

“I meant, what do you mean,
think
?”

“It’s early days.”

You couldn’t talk like this throwing a ball back and forth, but sometimes a car came by, and then we stood around together by the side of the road and carried on a conversation. We wanted to talk and sometimes flipped the ball between us for an excuse.

After a while, he said, “I think Dad’s got a girlfriend.”

“What makes you say that?”

“He keeps calling me up. He wants to talk. He wants to make me like him before he tells me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“This is why Mom’s stressed out.”

“I don’t understand, did Mom say something to you?”

“She’s been saying stuff like this to me for the past twenty years, but this time she says it’s true.”

“And you believe her this time?”

“I believed her some of the times before.”

“How come Mom doesn’t tell me any of this stuff?”

“Come on, Greg. You’re her little boy. She loves you more.”

He drove home before supper, around six o’clock. My mother tried to put something on the table for him, but Brad said he planned to eat on the road—it would keep him awake. So this was the last real conversation I had about anything until I got back to Detroit. But that was partly my fault. I don’t know why I didn’t tell them about Gloria.

A FEW DAYS INTO THE
New Year, my dad moved out and I started spending a lot of time on the phone with my mother. She didn’t know for sure if he was seeing somebody. At first all he did was rent a room from some friends of his in New Orleans, the same place I moved into briefly after quitting my job at Aberystwyth. My mom had bad things to say about these people, whom she once considered friends of hers, too, but I also felt implicated in the business. As if I’d been giving him ideas.

“Look,” I said. “It’s not like I was particularly happy there. I mean, I didn’t last long.”

“I’m sure he’s having a ball.”

“Are you talking to each other?” I said.

“He tries to call me about every other day, but I don’t want to talk to him so I hang up the phone.”

“What did he say to you when he moved out?”

“He said he wasn’t very happy. He said he’d been trying to talk to me about this for some time, which is true, but that I didn’t want to hear it. That’s true, too. I never could see the point of analyzing what you can’t change, which is that we were more or less stuck with each other. But apparently he didn’t see it that way.”

“So what did he say? I mean, did he explain what he thought he was doing?”

“He said, the way we were living, it didn’t seem to him any vi
olation of our marriage for him to get a room somewhere in New Orleans and spend a little time there.”

“What did he mean by that?”

“You know what he meant. Don’t make me say it,” she said.

It was very hard for me to tell how much I cared. I don’t mean that I didn’t seem to care at all, just the opposite. I talked about what was happening to Gloria and sometimes it felt like a kind of offering to her. She had told me her terrible story about her father and so I was telling her mine. Gloria turned out to be a good sympathizer. She had the kind of sympathy people want more of. But what I was doing using this material, which was more or less the story of my life, the people who made me, my whole childhood, and feeding it into a relationship that was about a month old, like it was some kind of fuel, to raise the temperature, I don’t know.

A week after New Year her classes began, which knocked her out most evenings, but we saw each other on the weekends. She introduced me to her mother, who was an attractive, elegant, not very nice woman, in her early fifties. She had long straightened black hair, with some white in it, and a long sort of French-looking face. I guess her coloring was what people in books call high yellow. By this point I had started reading a lot of African American literature—
Black Boy
first, then
Another Country
. I figured I may as well educate myself, but I was also a little ashamed, since it seemed I had a taste for it, and I didn’t want Gloria to know it was a taste.

Her mother was named Eunice; her stage name was Eunice Ray. She used to be a singer and was moderately successful in her thirties, when Gloria’s father met her at Cliff Bell’s jazz club. It wasn’t called Cliff Bell’s then, but something else. I heard this story from Gloria first, and then Eunice. Tom Lambert seems to have been a well-known, well-liked figure in his community. People came to him with their legal problems, he listened to everybody, he worked
hard. But he also liked to have a good time, even if he didn’t drink, he liked pretty women. “I was one of them,” Eunice said. “Gloria takes after her father. What?”

“Nothing,” Gloria said.

But she showed me a few photographs. Her father had one of those innocent happy dark-skinned white-teethed black faces that probably cover up a lot of private opinions. He must have been fairly old when they had Gloria. I got the sense that she was his darling girl, and maybe Eunice used to resent it, and still did.

The first time I met her she gave us brunch in her apartment. It was all laid out when we got there, on her number one china. Eunice was dressed in a thin floating dress or robe, which had an African print on it, made of different browns, but you could also see through it to her gray silk underclothing. I was incredibly nervous, but Gloria told me not to worry. My mom’s a big snob, she said. And in fact we ended up ganging up on Gloria, making fun of her.

Afterwards I saw her around the building occasionally. She always looked heavily made-up, even when stepping out with the trash. I offered to carry it down for her once—she seemed the kind of woman who doesn’t mind a little gallantry.

Gloria and I talked about our parents a lot. At the end of January a letter from my father arrived. He had called a few times while I was out, but I hadn’t called back. This is what he said in his letter, or the gist of it anyway. He said he hadn’t been happy since he retired. There are men who like retirement but not that many in his experience. He used to argue with my mother about moving back to New Orleans, but the truth is, she never liked the city very much, and her life was the house. But he didn’t have anything to do.

“This is why I watched all that TV,” he wrote. “Even when you were kids I watched a lot of TV. Instead of getting up to no good. I thought, better stay on your ass and watch TV. Keep out
of trouble. And I don’t regret the time I spent on the couch, because I wanted to be a good husband and father. And believe me, the TV helped. But I’ve been playing that game now for almost forty years, and after a while I thought, who are you doing it for anymore. You kids don’t need us anymore. And I don’t make your mother particularly happy. You’re sixty-five years old, and all your so-called domestic virtue is really just another name for laziness. So get off your ass. I don’t have any illusions about going it alone either. Men of my generation weren’t brought up to it. But I’ve got a room at the Wenzlers’, and there isn’t a TV in it. If I haven’t got a reason for going out I lie in bed and read books. When I was your age, or maybe a little younger, I loved to read. Of course, there’s another side to my life here but I don’t expect you want to hear about it so I won’t tell you. But this is what I want to say. From the outside I look like a worse man now than I did two months ago. But it doesn’t feel that way from the inside, it really doesn’t. For the first time in years I feel like a moral agent again. I’m a human being, and people coming into contact with me are bumping into somebody who is actually there. They get some response. For years, and this is literally true, I didn’t say a single thing I hadn’t said before, not to anybody, not even to your mother. Now I say something new every day. All this is kind of a long-winded apology. But what I really want to apologize for is that dumb fight we had over Christmas, when I was still dealing with this shit. Maybe I was jealous of you. Your brother understands a little better what I’m talking about, he has three kids of his own. But he’s also got his own reasons for staying mad, which you don’t have. So next time I call you pick up the phone, don’t play these answering-machine games. They’re beneath you. And let’s talk.”