Unblinking

by Lenzo, Lisa;

  Advance praise for Unblinking

  “Brave, honest, and profoundly good, Lisa Lenzo has never been afraid of places where less angelic writers fear to tread.”

  —Jaimy Gordon, winner of the 2010 National Book Award for Fiction for Lord of Misrule

  “Unblinking reads like a love letter to caregivers. Anyone who has ever provided hands-on, often-grueling care for someone they love will find solace in these stories. Lenzo reveals the transcendent joy we feel when, fearing the worst from our communities, we instead encounter the best.”

  —Laura Hulthen Thomas, author of States of Motion (Wayne State University Press, 2017)

  “Between her earlier book, Within the Lighted City, and now with these memorable stories in her new collection, Unblinking, Lisa Lenzo has forged her own personal Detroit literary tradition. Her work, like that of iconic Detroit poets such as Robert Hayden and Philip Levine, sings with soul and compassion.”

  —Stuart Dybek, author of Paper Lantern: Love Stories

  “Lisa Lenzo writes with grace and courage. In the ten stories that make up Unblinking, her characters mine memories, music, and the magnetic city of Detroit in their search for connection and self-realization. These stories are especially interested in change, whether it occurs over a lifetime or in cataclysmic moments, and the ambivalence of its aftermath. Along the way, readers can count on Lenzo to find the humor and heart that keeps us all hanging on.”

  —Anna Clark, author of The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy

  Unblinking

  Made in Michigan Writers Series

  General Editors

  Michael Delp, Interlochen Center for the Arts

  M. L. Liebler, Wayne State University

  A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu

  Unblinking

  Stories by Lisa Lenzo

  Wayne State University Press

  Detroit

  © 2019 by Wayne State University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America.

  ISBN 978-0-8143-4671-6 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-0-8143-4672-3 (e-book)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957218

  Publication of this book was made possible by a generous gift from The Meijer Foundation. This work is supported in part by an award from the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs.

  Wayne State University Press

  Leonard N. Simons Building

  4809 Woodward Avenue

  Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309

  Visit us online at wsupress.wayne.edu

  For my sibs,

  Steve, Peter, Kris, Anthony, and Amy,

  and our mom and dad,

  Susie and Joe

  Contents

  In the White Man’s House

  Up in the Air

  Losing It

  To the Destroying Angels

  Spin

  I’ll Be Your Witness

  Lorelei

  Note to the New Owners

  Unblinking

  Marching

  Acknowledgments

  In the White Man’s House

  Back in the day, the two of us were tight; people rattled off our names, “Tremaine-and-Jay,” as if we couldn’t be split apart. That began to change in tenth grade, when Jay started calling his parents—not to their faces, but to me—“the light, right Negroes” and “Dr. and Mrs. Tom.”

  We’d stop over at Jay’s house after school, and the minute we’d walk in the door, his face would twist into a scowl. “Look at this carpet!” he would demand. I’d look at the carpet. It was thick and soft and the color of cream—a shade lighter than Jay’s pale beige skin—and it ran through their whole downstairs except for the kitchen. “It’s sick!” Jay would say. “Damn honky-ass rug.” Then, still scowling, he’d shout, “Mama! You home?”

  He knew that she wasn’t, he was just making sure. He’d stand there in the foyer, chewing on the tip of his middle finger. Then he’d tromp through the living room and on into the dining room and reach up and break off a little piece of the chandelier. It was one of those chandeliers made of hundreds of prisms of glass, and he’d just reach up his hand and snap off a piece. Sometimes he’d have to give it a yank, or take out his pocketknife and saw through the connecting wire. Then he’d slip the little prism into his pocket. You couldn’t tell anything was missing from the chandelier unless you knew or looked close, but if he kept it up, sooner or later, it was going to get noticed—probably by Gladys, their maid, when she stepped up to dust.

  But Jay didn’t care, or else maybe he couldn’t help himself. He was so embarrassed by his family: his father the doctor, his sister the scholar, his mother the high-yellow, high-society homemaker. He’d have liked to load the chandelier, Gladys, and his family into their Mercedes, then push them off the Ambassador Bridge.

  I wished I had his kind of problem. Our house was falling apart, inside and out, and my mom, whose dark brown skin Jay admired, was so depressed that she’d barely glance at the bills when they came in—she’d just add them to the pile. My mom was working, but only part-time, serving lunch at my sister’s school. Then she’d come home and sleep all afternoon. My super-light-skinned dad had left us when I was ten and my little sister was six. He’d taken up with a white woman and vanished into the white world. I had a job after school and on weekends busing tables and washing dishes, having become, by default, the man of the house. Yet Jay envied my family because to him—except for my passing-for-white dad—we were “blacker” than his.

  Around the time Jay started carving up his mother’s chandelier, he traded his pocketknife for a switchblade and bought a shiny green suit. One night he came over to my house wearing this new suit with a gold shirt and chewing on a chicken leg. My girlfriend and I had been listening to Let’s Get It On and making out on the couch. Melanie and I pulled apart when Jay walked in, but I kept my hand on her thigh so she’d stay on my lap.

  I’d met Mel at my job, five months back. She came in with a couple of her black girlfriends, and at first I thought she was a black girl herself. Her skin was light, but her brown hair was curly and short, and she talked and acted as if she were black. She’s one of those borderline people, like my dad: if you set them next to white people, they look white, and if they’re hanging with black people, you assume they are black. I thought Mel might be mixed—I guessed her mother might be white—but I found out later that her father was white, too. They lived south of Six Mile, in the city of Highland Park, which is bordered all the way around by Detroit.

  Jay sat down next to me and Mel on the couch without saying Hey or What’s up? Instead he worked away at that drumstick he’d carried in, ripping off the meat in chunks. He scraped the leg bare with his teeth, sucked on the bone, then tossed it on the floor.

  Mel and I looked at each other; I could read her face like she could read mine: What’s with the superfly suit? And throwing bones on the floor—was that supposed to be some kind of down-home black thing?

  Jay just sat there without explaining, like he wore a green suit and a gold shirt and tossed bones around every day.

  I cleared my throat and asked, “Uh, Jay—what’s your problem?”

  “What do you mean?” Jay said, kind of innocent but tough.

  I pointed at the bone and said, “What I mean is, what’s up with that?”

  Jay looked down at the chicken bone resting by his shiny black boots. “Ain’t nothin’ but a bone.”

  “You don’t throw bones on the floor at your house.”

  “This more my house than that place,” Jay grumbled.

  “Well, do me a favor, then, and put that bone where i
t belongs.”

  Jay picked up the bone, but instead of carrying it out to the can in the kitchen, he shoved it into his suit pocket and mumbled something about me “talkin’ too white.”

  “Well, I am part white,” I said. “I’m part Cherokee, too. I could be sitting around talking Cherokee. Then you wouldn’t even understand me.”

  “You know what I mean, Tremaine,” Jay said. “This ain’t about comprehension. It’s about you not respectin’ our people.”

  “Which people?” I said, staring at Jay’s light face and his half inch of straight hair. He obviously had a white ancestor or two, and even though my own hair is nappy and my skin is a deep brown, half of my blood comes from my dad, who was so able and willing to pass that he passed right out of our lives. Back then, in 1975, my mom and sister and I hadn’t seen my dad in five years. Now it’s been over forty. I don’t even know whether he is still alive.

  I don’t know if Jay is alive, either.

  “Fuck you, Tremaine,” Jay said. “You just like my parents. Proud to be house slaves. Forgettin’ who they are so long as they get to live in the white man’s big house!”

  “Jaybird, your parents live in their own damn big house,” I said.

  “Shit,” Jay said, “them and their house belong to white folks. The white man owns everything and everyone in this country.”

  “Well, if we’re all owned by the white man,” I said, “then why are you so down on your folks?”

  “’Cause they like being owned,” Jay said. “’Cause they sold themselves out for a mansion and a Mercedes.”

  Mel ducked her head near mine and whispered, “Jaybird think he the next Malcolm X.”

  Jay heard her, and he lit right into her: “Don’t be callin’ me Jaybird!”

  “You don’t say nothin’ to Tree when he call you Jaybird,” Mel objected.

  “And if you wasn’t here,” Jay said, “I wouldn’t say nothin’ to you.”

  “Man, do you know how sick I am of this shit?” Mel said, strapping her arms across her breasts. Ever since Jay had got onto his “the-blacker-the-better” kick, Melanie had become Jay’s number one enemy. He thought she was undermining my blackness—maybe even ruining my black soul.

  “You guys want to do something?” I asked. Mel was up on her feet and stalking around; no chance she’d return to my lap until she calmed down, and that wouldn’t happen with Jay scowling at her, which was the main way he looked at pretty much everyone anymore. “Like maybe go for a ride?” I said. “Long as we got a car tonight?” Mel had recently got her license, along with the use of her parents’ car. But Mel and Jay acted like they didn’t even hear me.

  “Why don’t you get your own self a girlfriend,” Mel said, “and stop worrying about what ain’t none of your business?”

  “It is my business,” Jay said. “Tree’s my best friend.”

  “And he is my boyfriend,” Mel shot back. “And ain’t nothin’ you can do about it.”

  Mel had hung with black boyfriends and girlfriends ever since Highland Park started to turn. I guess that’s part of why I liked her so much: she didn’t have to throw in, heart and soul, with black people; she chose us. Jay felt the opposite: she was white; she should stay out of our lives. This led to a lot of fights, with me right in the middle.

  “You ain’t gonna stick with him,” Jay said. “You gonna drop him like a burnt potato and take up with some ugly-ass white boy.”

  “I don’t even know any white boys,” Mel growled, still stalking around. She jammed her hand into her pocket, pulled out a stick of gum, unwrapped it, and shoved it into her mouth.

  “There be white boys at your school,” Jay said.

  “Shit,” Mel said. “About fifteen. ’Bout fifteen white boys, and a thousand black men.”

  “A thousand!” I said. “Damn, I guess I’m lucky I made the cut!” I was trying to make Mel smile and at least soften Jay’s frown, but neither of them even looked in my direction.

  “So why don’t you go with one of them fifteen white boys?” Jay asked.

  “Because,” Mel said, “there ain’t one I even like.”

  “Why not?” Jay asked. “Why don’t you like white boys?”

  “’Cause they’re a bunch of scared rabbits. And anyway, I’m all the way in love with Tremaine.”

  I would have pulled her down and kissed her if Jay weren’t there, but I didn’t want to make him jealous. He hadn’t had a girlfriend, black or white, in six months. He claimed the black girls at Mumford, where we went to school, weren’t black enough. Not even the darkest ones.

  “Let’s go somewhere,” I sighed. I didn’t feel like sitting around refereeing all night.

  “I’m broke,” Jay said.

  I wanted to say, We could cut down what’s left of your mom’s chandelier and hock it. I wished things were the way they used to be, when we could joke about anything.

  “We could go to the playoffs,” Mel said. “They’re free.”

  “What playoffs?” I asked.

  “Between Highland Park and Dearborn,” Mel said. “They playing at the fairgrounds tonight.”

  “No shit,” I said. “You didn’t tell me that.”

  Mel shrugged. “We make it to the top every year in basketball, ’cause they lump us in with the suburbs. Every year we get our asses kicked in swimming, but in basketball, can’t nobody touch us. Only this year, we playing Dearborn, and people be saying them Arab boys is tough.”

  “Hell, let’s go then,” I said.

  I figured Jay wouldn’t want to be seen with us, but he decided to come along and watch Highland Park play. Considering his new logic, I’m sure he thought Highland Park was a cooler school than ours. Both were nearly all black, but Highland Park was poorer than Mumford, and to Jay, poorer meant blacker.

  ⊙

  The minute we stepped out the door, Jay’s face took on a moodier look—a scowl instead of a frown. He wouldn’t sit up in the front of the station wagon with Mel and me, but slouched down in the back, chewing on his middle finger, his other hand shoved into his suit coat pocket, feeling on a piece of chandelier or chicken bone, I guessed, or maybe that switchblade of his. I knew he was worrying about showing up in a black place with Melanie, being seen with a white girl by a bunch of bloods.

  I went to turn the radio on, then drew back my hand. Mel’s parents weren’t poor, but like a lot of white people, they were cheap, and in their new Chrysler wagon, there was just a flat, blue piece of plastic covering the slot where the radio should be. When we first discovered this sad lack was the only time I heard Mel curse her parents, under her breath.

  Mel backed out of the driveway and drove the two blocks north from my house to Eight Mile. “The Mile,” people called it, as if there were no other mile roads. Eight Mile was wider than Seven and Six, but more important, it was the dividing line between Detroit and the suburbs, the designated border between black and white, an eight-lane street blacks weren’t supposed to cross. Mel drove north to The Mile, turned east, and took it over to Woodward, then drove south on Woodward to the fairground entrance.

  I don’t know whose idea it was to build the state fairgrounds right in the city of Detroit. I never questioned it as a kid, though I did think it a strange place when my mom or auntie took me there. I’d go on a couple rides, then walk around gawking at all the white farmers and their cows. They also had weird chickens with mops of feathers growing out of their little heads, and humongous pigs with what seemed like twenty teats, but the strangest and most disturbing thing I ever saw at the fair was a man in the freak tent who was called “the frog boy.”

  He was a light-skinned black man with a deformed body and a normal head. In my memory, his face looks exactly like Malcolm X’s—maybe because of the glasses he wore, his red-toned complexion, and the intelligence of his expression. His body was on the small side, and he had these little, tiny arms drawn up close to his chest. His legs were small and deformed, too, but bigger than his arms. He was squatting on
the ground with his legs bent outward and double like a frog’s. He squatted there, describing to the audience his “half-frog, half-boy” body and life, and as I listened to him talk—in this deep, fake, bullfrog voice—it was so obviously a bunch of crap; in two seconds flat I could see he was in no way part frog. Likely the only true thing he said was that he was thirty-three years old.

  I left that tent without stopping to look at the other freaks, not even the white Siamese twins, which was what I’d gone in to see. When I came out into the daylight my auntie looked at me and laughed. “What’s wrong with you, Tree?” she said. “Something in there scare you?”

  That night I couldn’t sleep because I kept thinking of my father. My mother had tracked him down a year ago. She took me along with her, somewhere north of Eight Mile, where the houses sat far back from the street and the lawns looked soft enough to sleep on. We walked up the stone steps of a big house in this rich neighborhood. My mom rang the bell—a fancy chime, not a ring or a buzz—and a white woman with a brown mole on her chin answered the door. My mom asked to speak to Josh Logan, and my dad came up behind the white woman and said, “I’ll take care of this, Lois.”

  He came out onto the front porch, closing the door firmly behind him. I think my mom and I were the only ones in that whole suburb who knew he wasn’t a white man. He gave my mom all the money in his wallet—a bunch of twenties and some ones—and said he would send her a check soon. He told her not to come there again, but to call him on the phone next time she needed anything. I was eleven years old then and tall enough to look him in the eye. But he only glanced at me once and then looked away without smiling. His dark hair was straight—what black people used to call “good hair”—and his eyes were large and hazel and shining with fear. Despite my brown skin and nappy hair, I looked a lot like him: same thin lips and broad cheeks, same big, gold-flecked eyes that showed what I was feeling. I hadn’t seen my dad since before Christmas, when he left for work one day and just never came home. I wanted to sidle up close to his chest, feel his big hand come to rest on my shoulder. But he stepped backwards into the house and shut the heavy front door. My mom went alone another time to see him, but he was gone—a real white man and his family were living in that big house.