by Lenzo, Lisa;
Recently, Nicole and her husband were returning home from our parents’ condo with two loaves of German stollen that my mom had made for Nicole’s husband’s family. Nicole grabbed up one of the round loaves from the backseat as a homeless man approached.
“You can’t give that away,” her husband objected. “It’s a Christmas present. And not your Christmas present.”
Nicole rolled down her window, held out the bread, and said, “Here.”
The man looked down at the foil-covered round loaf that Nicole thrust into his hands. “What is it?” he asked.
“It’s stollen,” Nicole said.
“It’s stolen?” the man asked.
“Yes,” Nicole said. “Take it. It’s for you.”
Looking stricken, the man backed off from the car window holding the loaf on his open hands as if it might be a bomb.
We laugh at this story, and then we laugh some more at the events of the evening. But as I look out at the lights of downtown, at the radiant glow of the Renaissance Center and the flashing neon of Greektown, my thoughts darken. I see the homeless man, our valet, being questioned at the station, insisting to the police that he isn’t telling a story, that he doesn’t have the twenty and he hasn’t stashed it anywhere. I know that they don’t believe him, and I am hoping they haven’t mistreated him, trying to get at the truth.
I’ll Be Your Witness
I ran into Delia last night at the corner store near my house. She walked up behind me and touched my arm while I was waiting in the checkout line. “Tiff!” she said. “Girl, you look just the same!” I didn’t tell her that almost everyone calls me Tiffany now. It felt kind of good hearing my old nickname from Delia. But I also felt a pang, as if Tiff and Dee-Dee were girls we’d known who had died.
Delia’s voice had gathered rust in the ten years since I had last seen her. Her body had widened from scrawny to average, and she’d dyed her blond hair bright blue and cut most of it off. “You still living in Highland Park?” she asked.
Highland Park, where we grew up, is a little city inside Detroit. Struggling even when we were young girls, Highland Park has since fallen on far harder times.
“No, I’m here in Ferndale now,” I told her.
“Good for you!” she said. “So what else is new? What you been up to? Married? Got a job?”
“Not married,” I said. “I’m working at the Ferndale Library.”
“Tiff the librarian!” Delia said. “Wouldn’t you know it. Meanwhile I’m selling beer—and mopping it up from the floor.” She laughed and made a face. Delia explained she was working at a bar on Nine Mile, the Stop Spot Lounge, a few blocks from where we stood. I’d seen it, but like most bars, dive or otherwise, I’d never been inside it.
We made our purchases—Delia bought cigarettes and a fifth of whiskey; I bought a quart of orange juice—and then we moved our conversation outside. It was a cold November day, but Delia stood with her vinyl jacket unzipped. She told me she’d moved back to Highland Park a month ago, after her second divorce. I hadn’t heard about the first divorce or her second marriage—all I’d known was that Dee had eloped to Ohio ten years ago when she was seventeen, long after our friendship was over, and shortly after that her mom and her brothers had moved out of the city, too. I’d spent my own time away: six and a half years at college in East Lansing, living with roommates and then my boyfriend and then with just my tortoise and my cat. But all I told Dee was that my mom had moved from our old house in Highland Park into a Southfield apartment, and that I’m renting a small house in Ferndale that I’m hoping to buy.
“You should come down to see my house,” Delia said. “Well, it’s not really mine. Belongs to my new boyfriend. Or new ex-boyfriend. Whatever, you should see the crazy place he built. It’s in Highland Park, but on the other side of Woodward from where we grew up.”
“Maybe I will sometime,” I said, taking a step backward down the cold sidewalk, hunching my shoulders against the wind.
“Okay,” Delia said. “It’s been great seeing ya! Keep in touch.”
“It was good seeing you, too,” I said, which was partly the truth.
Ordinarily things would have ended there, as chance encounters with past friends mostly do. If we ran into each other again, she’d have said: We should get together. And the next time, if there was a next time: We really should get together! And then we never would.
The truth is, I’m not like most people when it comes to being social—I prefer spending my free time with books. With people there’s just too much chaff—a person might say one interesting thing in an entire hour—whereas with books, at least the good ones, they’re engaging page after page. And if I change my mind about a book, I can put it down with no hurt feelings. I do try sometimes to be more social. At my job, for instance, and I also volunteer at Ferndale Elementary, listening to first-graders read. In the evenings, though, I’d rather be alone, with no one for company except Flannery my cat and Alice my tortoise, both of whom are quiet and serene.
But after Delia and I said good-bye, I couldn’t get my car to start. My used Escort—all I can afford on my librarian’s salary—has turned out to be a piece of junk.
“Hey,” Delia said. She’d pulled up alongside me and was leaning out the window of a battered Jeep.
I looked up and over at her, my hands gripping the wheel. Then I tried the starter again.
“Girl,” Delia said, “if it ain’t turned over by now, it ain’t gonna. Hop in. I’ll run you home.”
“It’s not far,” I said. “I can walk.”
Delia’s eyes did that thing that people’s eyes do when they realize they’re being shut out. It’s as if a clear but impenetrable glass shield slips down. This had happened before with me and Dee, when we were twelve. I wanted to stop it from happening again. Except for my ex-boyfriend, Dee is the only close friend I’ve ever had.
“Wait a minute,” I said, and I scrambled out from behind the wheel, grabbed my jug of juice, and hurried around to the Jeep’s passenger door. Delia leaned across and let me in.
When I’d got myself situated on the high seat, she glanced at my hand clutching the jug’s plastic loop. “Well, you’re all set for the evening,” she joked. “Kinda hard to tip and swig, though, ain’t it?”
I smiled, and, wanting to act as if I wasn’t the same staid person she’d left behind, I uncapped the jug and tipped it back, feeling silly yet proud as the cold juice went down that I could drink like that and not choke.
Dee laughed. She’s got this laugh I’ve always envied: loud and happy, head thrown back. My laughter is soft and stilted, if I laugh at all. Sometimes, to let people know I get the joke, I’ll say, That’s funny.
“Mind if I smoke?” Delia asked.
“No,” I lied.
“Good,” Delia said, “since it’s my truck.” She laughed again, and lit a cigarette. “How about,” she said, shifting into gear, “’fore I run you home, I take you down to Highland Park to see my house? You don’t have a hot date tonight, do you?”
“No,” I said. I hadn’t had a date of any sort since college, and even then, they were hardly dates—just my boyfriend and me hanging out together, eating endless bowls of ramen noodles.
“You’ve never seen a house like this one,” Delia said. She threw the spent match out her window; as she worked the cigarette pack back into her purse, I tried to think of a polite way to decline. Then she grinned right at me and said, “Or read about one like it, either.”
Her words zoomed me back to when we were kids: Dee-Dee pounding up the stairs, throwing open my door. She knew where to find me—on my bed or in summer on the floor, always reading. “C’mon, Tiff,” she’d say. “Let’s do something.”
Sometimes we’d go down to the kitchen and fix something to eat: Kraft mac and cheese, or a Kool-Aid cake—our own invention. Or we’d beg a few quarters from my mom to spend on candy at Ali’s. Or we’d just set off, without quarters or a destination, searching the streets and all
eys for whatever we could find: mulberries, empty pop cans, baby birds fallen from their nests. People always said, “You ain’t sisters? You look just like sisters.” Because we were white and always together, I guess, and we had the same thin bodies and same long, straight, thin hair, though Dee-Dee’s was dark blond and mine was dark brown.
Now Delia flicked her short blue hair out of her face. “So, what do you say?” she asked. “Want to see my new place? You don’t have to worry about crime—almost everyone has left Highland Park, including the criminals!”
I looked out through the windshield at the gray street, feeling the cold orange juice through the plastic against my skin. “Sure,” I said. Flannery and Alice could eat a little later for once, and so could I; my chicken chili and new Atwood novel could wait.
“I’m not gonna drive past our old houses,” Delia said. “Yours is boarded up, and the roof is falling in—did you know that?”
I told her I didn’t; I hadn’t gone back to look.
“And mine,” she said, “mine isn’t there at all anymore.”
Delia drove east on Nine Mile, then south on Woodward Avenue, which was packed on both sides with trendy shops and upscale restaurants and bars. Crossing Eight Mile, we passed out of Ferndale and into Detroit. The businesses here were fewer and older, with empty, abandoned spaces between them; then came the closed-down fairgrounds on our left and Palmer Park on our right. Driving further south, we crossed Six Mile, and then we were in Highland Park. First we passed a cluster of adult theaters and bars, then a Glory Grocery and a tire store. Just past the viaduct was the first factory Henry Ford ever built—closed for decades, it was still standing, though a lot of its windows were broken. Then Delia turned off Woodward onto a side street. I expected to see plenty of boarded-up houses—although I’ve only ventured into Highland Park once since I left, I’ve seen photos and news clips—but what surprised me was how many houses were totally gone. We’d pass a few blocks where the single houses and two-family flats were in various stages of decay—along with a number that were fairly well kept—and then there’d be a block, or even two, with no houses at all. When we reached Delia’s current street, at the end of the first block, there was a cluster of four or five well-cared-for homes, with mowed lawns and scrolled burglar bars covering the windows on the first floors. But up and down the rest of the street, there wasn’t a house in sight, and what had once been individual lots had blurred into a single vast field.
It had grown dark since we’d set out. There were no streetlights and, without houses, no porch lights, but there was enough moonlight to see by. In the middle of the second block, Delia brought the Jeep to a stop. The weeds rose high, brown and brittle, and the street and the sidewalk were almost entirely rubble. Here and there, a few scrub trees had grown fairly tall—trees-of-heaven with their angular branches, clumps of sumac with dark red horns. “Cozy little house in the middle of nowhere,” Delia said. She looked at my puzzled face and laughed. “It’s built underground, like a bunker,” she explained. “Remember Chuck Slater?”
I shook my head.
“Neither do I,” Delia said, and laughed again. “He was ten years ahead of us at school. But, well, when I got up here, I was living with my aunt, looking for a better place, and Chuck invited me to stay with him.” She lit another cigarette. The Jeep idled in the road. “I wasn’t here but a week when Chuck took off—up north somewhere, to join a survivalist group. I’m trying not to take it personally.”
She pulled the Jeep up to the disintegrating curb and turned it off, and we clumped through rubble and dead weeds and brush to a steel door leading down into the ground. “Kinda creepy,” Delia said. “But safe.” She smirked. “That is, unless Chuckie comes back. Oh, don’t worry, he wouldn’t hurt you, Tiff. Or me, either. But trespassers? Watch out. He’s kind of paranoid. Couple months ago, he shot this big fat groundhog, swore the government had had it bugged. Sliced that poor animal into a hundred pieces looking for the hidden microphone.”
“I didn’t know there were groundhogs living in the city,” I said.
Delia snorted. “You call this a city? They turned off the streetlights. They turned off the water! They closed down the high school and threw out all the books.”
I’d heard about that—it was all over the news. Even the United Nations had gotten involved, as if Highland Park and Detroit were third world countries. Most but not all of the shut-off houses had running water again, but a lot of the streetlights were still dark, and others had been removed, lampposts and all. Thousands of books, including irreplaceable ones on Highland Park and Black History, had been thrown like rags into a dumpster. Some but not all of those books had been rescued by a local historian.
Delia looked around at the weeds rising up all around us with a twisted smile and said, “Chuck should invite his survivalist pals to move down here.” Then she unlocked the metal door and pulled it open, and we walked down cement stairs into a central room, and from there into a room Delia called “the pantry.” It was constructed of cement blocks and lined with shelves stacked with cans: mostly beef stew, but also kidney beans and ravioli. And there was one whole wall of Kraft mac and cheese, with gaps here and there like missing bricks where boxes had been removed. “Grab a box,” Delia said. “Oh, c’mon, take one from the bottom.”
I pulled one out slowly, without bringing the wall down, and Delia cheered and clapped.
We fixed the macaroni like we did when we were girls, taking turns with all the steps, but we had to use a gas-powered hot plate to cook the elbows and mix in powdered milk instead of fresh. Then Delia opened her fifth, and though I rarely drink—you know people like me, the maybe-a-glass-of-wine-with-dinner types—I took a swig and then some more. I couldn’t help shuddering and shaking my head like a cat whose face has gotten wet. But I liked how it felt warm in my throat and then glowed like a small fire all the way down to my belly.
We ate mac and cheese and talked about old times: “Remember when we were coloring on the floor in your bedroom,” Dee said, “and the door was off its hinges, and one of us nudged it, and it came crashing down on our heads?”
“One of us?” I repeated.
“Girl, don’t blame it on me,” Dee said with a smile. She stabbed another bite of the neon orange elbows and washed them down with whiskey. “Remember when I shoplifted those two bikinis,” she said, “and then ditched them behind a counter before the store dick could find them on me, and he didn’t believe you when you said you hadn’t taken either one? Remember that?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said, unable to keep from smiling, too, although my feelings about stirring up the past like this were mixed.
“And then when your ma came to pick us up,” Delia said, “the dick told her that the blonde—me—seemed to regret what she had done, ‘but the dark-haired one, she’s a hard case, I’d watch her if I were you.’” We laughed, but I felt something like a shadow stretch across my inner vision. I’d forgotten the detective’s warning, but now his words rang true, except that the dark thing in me that needed watching had turned inward.
“Speaking of trouble,” Delia said as if reading my mind, “what about men? What’s the story on that?”
“No story,” I said, looking down at the backs of my hands, at the table, at the bright orange elbow noodles glowing in the light thrown by a small lantern. Delia waited for more, but I kept quiet. I’ve had only the one boyfriend, the one in college, and when he left me after two years, I went into a downward spiral from which I didn’t think I’d recover. First I stopped going to classes. Then I stopped eating meals. Then I even stopped reading the books that had always been my solace.
“You’re right,” Delia said at last. “Men. We should save our breath on that topic.”
We talked some more about old times, and we finished the macaroni, and Delia finished the whiskey. Then we climbed back up out of the ground, and she drove me home in one piece. “Keep in touch!” she yelled from her Jeep as I opened my front door, mak
ing Alice scrabble for a corner and Flannery streak from the room.
⊙
Now it’s morning, and I’m standing in the kitchen of the house I’m renting and hoping to own, a vinyl-sided house with its four walls above ground, surrounded by other tidy houses and mowed lawns for blocks around, and here comes Delia, striding up my walk. As soon as I see her, my heart sinks. Tiff and Dee-Dee are dead, and I don’t think I want to try to revive them. Neither do I want to start over from here. But Delia’s on my front stoop, and what else can I do? I open the door and let her in.
“Girl,” she says right off, “I need you for a character witness.”
“Want something to drink?” I ask. “Though all I have are coffee and juice.”
“I’m all set,” Delia says, easing onto the couch and slipping a flask from her purse. She’s wearing a short, black crepe skirt with a pink leotard and tights, red bra straps jutting from the leotard’s scoop neck. On someone else it would look crazy and cheap, but on Delia it comes off as stylish and cute. “You know what I just found out?” she says, taking a sip. “I’m pregnant again.”
“You are?” I say stupidly, wondering what she means by “again.” She didn’t mention any children last night, and I saw no evidence of any at her ex-boyfriend’s bunker. But of course, abortion or miscarriage could account for that.
“No lie,” she says. “About seven weeks along.”
“You shouldn’t be drinking,” I say, surprising myself by speaking up.
“You’re right,” Delia says. She stands, her skirt rustling against her tights. “Where’s your sink?”
I look around to make sure Alice isn’t underfoot. That’s another reason I don’t like guests—people are blundering and don’t watch where they step. But Alice is smart: she has tucked herself out of sight and is probably also closed up inside her shell.
I lead Delia to the kitchen, feeling like a modern-day Carrie Nation. She upends the flask over the sink and says, “My whole life is going down the drain.” Her bracelets rattle like chattering teeth as she shakes the bottle dry. Then she straightens up, flips her hair out of her face, and says, “I need to get my child back.”