by Roxane Gay
What’s going on? Monique asks, as you rest against an oak stump. She smiles. In 1981, she poured sugar in various gas tanks, and then told the uncles it was a case of ornery white men. Girl, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, she whispers, clasping your face between her hands. You attempt to smile an answer, but then the bile comes back up. Monique looks into your eyes, unwavering. Exactly what kind of bun, she asks, do you have in your oven?
Melitta
There was a story before Long Island. In it, El boarded the plane with the Melitta in her suitcase.
She’d never been on a plane before, had never been spoken to by a stewardess bearing peanuts and napkins, had never left her home in the night like some common criminal. The stewardess brought around a cart of drinks, but El shook her head; all she could think of was Bobby, waiting for her at the end of the line, opening his arms to her so that she could melt inside. Liquor on the breath could possibly prevent that melting. The third time around, however, El gave in and said she would just adore a gin and tonic. She’d been gone from the Laboe farm for a little over six hours. Though her suitcase—the one from her dead father—was stowed solidly underneath her seat, she imagined she could hear the Melitta dishes clinking softly against each other.
El had taken the dishes in the middle of the night as her mother slept. She’d lifted the tea and coffee pots from the cabinet in the basement kitchen and wrapped them in a cotton nightgown, stowed the cake platter at the bottom of the suitcase, hoping the cushioned lining would prevent it from breaking. During the fourth gin and tonic, El gazed again out the window and imagined she saw the chocolate-wafer edge of America.
They landed sometime in the early day. The waiting room was loud, strewn with paper cups and newspapers. The sounds of planes overhead rattled the chairs. She stood looking for help, for Bobby, but there was nothing. Eventually, El slumped into a chair attached to a miniature TV; she was hungry and thirsty and tired. To watch the television cost two quarters per fifteen minutes, but since Bob had told her she wouldn’t need any money once she arrived, she’d only packed an emergency five-mark bill.
The clock on the wall moved slowly; next thing, it was eight and the sky outside the plate glass was pure black. The janitor sweeping at her feet told her it was time to close this waiting area, that she would have to go to Arrivals. He showed her to the escalator. Good luck, ma’am, don’t let nothing happen to you.
But she nearly toppled down the moving stairs. Her suitcase seemed heavier than before.
She felt tears form. This country, it was so loud, so ugly, so wildly placid. She wanted to find a stewardess and ask how she could return to Germany—to Laboe on the Baltic—because was this how they did things in America? The man who swore his devotion—vanished like a ghost?
At the bottom of the moving stairs, she quickly saw Bob. Now Elspeth.
He looked much different than she’d imagined him since their fifth meeting five months ago: gaunt, mustached, palpable. No longer Bobby Lee—she saw immediately that he was to be called Bob. Now Elspeth.
He reached out a hand to her. No embrace, no tongue in her ear, no touch of her breasts. In her mind they were practically married, she’d run away to be with him, had taken her future wedding dishes without permission. She expected Bob would at least put his hand under her elbow, leading her the correct way into the future. But instead, he walked in front of her toward the luggage carousel; and when they got there and stood side by side, and she reached over to caress his cheek, Bob stepped back and frowned. Now Elspeth. Isn’t it enough you made me look all over the damn airport for you? Don’t you know I have better things to do? Plus, I had to get up and go to work this morning, unlike some people I know who spend their days drinking cocktails on Lufthansa jets.
His voice was so different from the voice he’d used in the aerograms, the one that began each letter with Baby or Darling or Sugarpie and ended with Forever Yours. His last letter, dated April 29, 1961, had begun Dear Sugarpie, I saw you in my dreams last night. As the luggage began to tumble onto the carousel, Bob took out a cigarette. Life in America was tough, he said, did she think she could make it? Did she bring any money? If she didn’t think she could make it, she might as well get back on the plane.
El didn’t know why they stood there; she already had the yellow suitcase in hand. As if reading her thoughts, Bob quickly tossed his cigarette. He led her to the exit by her hand. All the while never looking her directly in the face. Had she ever seen a cockroach, he asked, because his mother’s apartment, it was a cockroach paradise. His mother’s apartment—you couldn’t call it a honeymoon suite unless you were crazy—was only one bedroom, with him on the couch, and collards and chicken-fried steak three times a week. Pork chops and gospel radio on Sunday. He hated it, sometimes. But that was what was on the table.
Did she think she could handle that—black life?
Baby, we will live off a love, the letter from April 29 insisted.
Bob wiped his forehead with his shoulder, and El then noticed the large perspiration stains in the armpits. He noticed her looking. Been hot as hell, he said. Here in America, summer’s no joke. My mother has a Westinghouse fan, yes. But no air-conditioning, if that’s what you’re expecting.
The letter from April 29 had ended with the words I don’t know if you will want me once you are on these shores, but I will pray every day that you will. Forever Yours.
They walked out to the parking lot under a half moon. Bob swung the suitcase into the trunk, and just then she thought she heard the platter crack, the little lids of the coffee and tea pots clatter together. What in the hell you got in there, Bob asked, laughing, as he started the car.
The drive was bland, a few lights sparkling over Jamaica Bay.
Corelle
Monique makes sure you can stand on your own (how no one else saw you throw up is a mystery) and then leans you against a pine tree, saying she has to go back inside for just a minute; she’s afraid Kate (a white girl from Duke who has forever and a day wanted to experience this kind of family reunion) might have fallen prey to her cousin Stanley. You haven’t seen Stanley in years, Monique whispers. But he’s still the same. Thinks he’s gone get his hands on Kate. But that’ll only happen after I get my hands on her.
You’ll love Kate, she says. You’re different.
She hurries off in a cloud of roadside dust and pollen. You imagine Monique finding her white lover and kissing her under a pile of stale pillows, in a wrought-iron bed, under dozens of family photographs—the ancestors. Forgetting about you for whole hours. When you attend their commitment ceremony three years later—only one uncle will come to the church where two females are saying “I do”—you notice the same crystals of love in her eyes, the same spike of deliverance as you see on this day, the last reunion you’ll ever attend.
Dime Savings Bank Account-Opener Bonus Set
You were ten years old when you told your mother about the nighttime touching. She rolled her eyes into her head, as if this were the straw that literally broke the camel’s back. How could he do this to me? she blurted. Then: Oh, baby.
It was nothing more than a few weeks’ worth of touching. The moon came out from your Mother Goose window and stared in shock. His finger didn’t even make it in all the way. Do you like this, your father asked. No, you answered. It took another five and a half weeks for him to get that through his head.
Ach du meine Güte! Heaven, hear me.
Your mother said she would leave him, take you and your brothers back to Germany. There was no way she could stay with a child molester. A monster.
Heaven, don’t stop hearing me!
But then weeks, more than a year passed.
Ovenware Brown Ten Piece
When they entered his mother’s apartment on Hoyt Street, Bob set the suitcase down. The shower was running, and a woman’s voice sang the sweetest melody El had ever heard. The only way that we can survive, we need the Lord on our side!
Bob kissed El on her f
orehead and said, More of this later; he pointed to his lips. The woman in the shower called out to Bob to make his girl comfortable.
Bob took the salami out of the suitcase, holding it to the ceiling. You know, he said, we got food over here too. No need to drag this sucker clear across the world. This here salami is Italian food. What’s a German girl doing with Italian food?
El fell on the plastic slipcovered couch and rubbed her eyes. Her stomach growled. And she fell into a faint, a short deep sleep. No dreams whatsoever. Minutes later she woke up to Bob’s mother applying a cold washcloth to her face. What did you eat, baby? You bony as a bird.
El slowly raised herself and shook her head; she didn’t know enough English without her pocket dictionary to tell the woman that in fact the only thing she’d eaten all day was four gin and tonics. I got a pork chop in the icebox, his mother said. Let me go and heat it up, baby.
Bob turned away. But El could see the Army still left over in his bones and she felt his anger. Mama, he said. We don’t want that country food. Let me show my girl what we got to offer in Brooklyn!
And despite his mother’s protests, he lugged El back out in the car again; it was nearly 11. Her eyes were fully open as she rolled down the window. By now, her mother would probably be pulling her hair out, weeping with utter and relentless despair. That’s how El liked to imagine her: writhing in regret. Her mother had once denied knowing that the Jewish girls who came by after the war were starving. They looked fine to me, she’d said, giving all the crab apples to the horses. Bob pulled into a restaurant that had a window on its side and a sullen girl stuck in that window. Hello my name is Maryann and welcome to Jack in the Box and can I take your order? Bob grinned at the girl, then turned back to El; Dry your eyes, girl, he said. You making me look bad.
They ate in the car while listening to Ray Charles on the radio. When they got home, his mother greeted them at the door in a caftan gown. El had never seen anyone so smart, a woman who looked like a magazine. You will make my son very happy, Barbara said. She kissed El’s ears with lips that felt like firm pin cushions. Bob’s mother was thirty-six years old.
She served El a slice of sweet potato pie on a chipped plate with cornflowers around the edge and spread out a blanket on the couch. It’s not a fold-out but I hope you will be comfortable, she said. I don’t believe in young folks pretending marriage. It’s my church upbringing, but don’t even mention the word church to Bob! Do, and he’ll give you a mouthful.
She embraced her full-on, a mother’s hug. Bob’s told me only a little about you, so tomorrow I hope you’ll fill in all the blanks, Barbara said. And that was the very last thing El heard.
She felt herself lifted into the air. She felt herself descending into the ground. After so many years of no dreams, she was bombarded that night by pictures she hadn’t seen for ages. Cows, fires, birch trees, coins.
Dreams are nothing but random images, an elderly Polish doctor would tell her years later. This is how they do things in America.
Fiestaware
They want to be nice to you, all these relatives at the reunion in Spring Hope. Cleopatra and Susie and Katrina and Shequanna and Betty. Horace and Clotilda and Tanya and Dove. They want to be nice, in spite of the way your eyes are your father’s eyes, your nose flat brown and wide as his. When you talk, even the younger cousins say they can hear Cousin Bobby’s voice come alive in yours. You know these kids have never met him, that they only know him from tall tales. Still, you laugh when they say that if he were to step foot on Grandma Elldine’s land, they would kill him with a hatchet.
They can’t imagine, these young cousins say, what it would be like to live in California and never see North Carolina again.
No, they will have to carry me out, one eight-year-old boy announces.
The sun is starting to set over the field. You breathe in this air: a hint of sulfuric chicken farm, a drying watering hole but evergreens as far as the nose can smell. A hint of thimbleweed out the corner of your eye.
You loom alone at the picnic tables like an unlit candle. The women and the uncles are discussing an evening service at the Baptist church. Ancient Hattie Mabel wonders if you’d like to come. It’s about time you learned the words to all the songs they sing.
But then, deus ex machina, Cousin Meggie comes running from her pickup. A giant cross plops between her breasts.
Sasha Jean, she cries. I been praying you wouldn’t forget me!
1964 World’s Fair Commemorative
She is as round as the proverbial barrel, and yet she moves storklike from the truck between the fading aunts and uncles. You’ve thought about her for years but haven’t picked up a pen or tapped on a keyboard. What would those hicks have to say to you? your father once asked. What would they have to say to anybody?
You stopped seeing him, despite his letters, his infrequent calls to your college dorm, your first apartment in Manhattan, your sublet in the Bronx. When you turned eighteen, you announced you were never going to see him again, and he laughed. Sasha, he said. People make mistakes. People get over things. It’s the course of life. Grudges are about as real as cotton candy.
But you kept true to your word. Years passed—and then you received notice that he’d died in his sleep. Next to Faith Akintola. In front of her favorite show: Luke and Laura, escaping on foot over the top of a jetliner. In the middle of the ocean. During a lunar eclipse.
Meggie squashes you with treacly hugs, doesn’t wait for any answers before immediately asking after your mom. Her skin is as light as a white person’s; her eyes, round and small (Mongoloid, your father once said), literally sparkle as she talks. She says your mom’s name, and her face is quickly awash in tears—she apologizes for not sending any kind of note when she heard of your mother’s death. Victuals always heal a broken heart, she says, leading you to the table with the hot sauce steak and loading another plate high. Crispy kale and artichoke hearts. You want to tell Meggie that now you officially belong to her, to them—what use is a girl without a parent to stake her in the landscape? But she is eyeing you up and down; too skinny, she concludes. Your mama would not be happy.
When you shake your head, Meggie frowns. Your mama was the best thing that ever happened to this earth, she says, waving over Aunt Quincy and her bowl of spicy pork barbecue.
Hutschenreuther
El awoke the next Brooklyn morning not on the sofa but on a huge double bed. Striped sheets had crumpled under her armpits; a thin blanket straggled at her feet. El felt a terrible, lovely ache in her shoulders, in between her legs. Music sounded from the kitchen, from a radio on the table; later in the day someone would say, You mean you never heard gospel music before? Lord Have Mercy!
A car horn screeched the sunlight into her eyes. Bob, she called.
Royal Doulton Knock-Off
Later that day, El would sit in the front pew of the First Church of Christ on Avenue J and nod along as the choir sang, “Going Up Yonder.” She would be next to her future mother-in-law; her husband was at home, looking out the window.
The church mothers would cast glances her way, happy that a white person had finally sat in the pews without looking over their shoulder. The pastor, Melvin K. Ritter, commanded the congregation to stand and be thankful; El liked this. She liked standing and begging, slowly, not too fast, the pure act of supplication, of asking things of someone who might just actually fulfill her deepest wishes. Just before his final sermon, he introduced Bob’s bride-to-be to the entire congregation.
Child’s too small, said one church mother in the pew behind El. Better put some meat on that skeleton, said another, smiling at Bob’s mother. Them Krauts do indeed have it bad, after all this time.
When the sermons were done (there were five in all), the church people went to the basement and sat at a long table in front of several platters of minute steaks, cornbread stuffing, and okra; many wrinkled hands took hold of El’s, wishing her the best with Bob. Lord knows other girls have tried to get him to c
hange his ways, the hands told her. Hopefully, El would be the lucky one.
Sango
You and Meggie head to the watering hole—Monique has texted that she will get there as soon as “lovingly possible.” Meggie blushes as she stuffs her phone into her bra. She says she’s all right with two ladies in love even though there is something creepy about it.
You enter the woods—about a half mile in is the bluestone watering hole, the one that is said (by Aunt Vitrine and others) to contain healing liquids. The trees hang low, and you notice that it is dark but not pitch; you can still find your way. You’d hoped for complete darkness—what would they say when they learned you hadn’t said a proper goodbye to the man? Down here, everyone deserves a proper goodbye, hated or no.
You hope for one of those legendary water moccasins to snake its way to your ankle and take out a huge chunk.
Would it be wrong to tell them that the last time you saw your father, you said nothing specific? That the words forgive and forget never made it past your lips? That you engaged the reams of selves who came before you—the little baby in the carriage, the kindergartner, the science project acolyte—and told them it was time to close up shop, as though your father had never ever existed? He once was alive, and was all things to those former selves. You, on the other hand, despise that idea. Was it wrong to turn your head away from the phone the last time he called? Was it wrong to crunch up the letter in which he explained he’d suffered a major heart attack and needed just a touch of kindness? You hate him for keeping your mother, and you hate your mother for having been kept. You have his last will and testament sewn into a seam of the blouson, sort of like the way slaves traveled with their papers. You’d read about slaves in the fifth grade. Your father tested you on their names for a social studies test. He patted your head when you got the answers correct.