Everyday People

by Stewart O'Nan

  It was true, Vanessa thought on the bus, but what other way was there to think? How did you even think at all, all the different factors that went into it? It seemed too huge a concept to grasp, and she shook it off and studied the plastic ads above the windows. Be All You Can Be. Learn Computers at Triangle Tech. Like her mother would ever let her. Outside it was nice, the light still lingering, pretty. And it was just her first day. It was only going to get worse.

  Rashaan was in the living room, gnawing on his plastic snap-together blocks in front of the TV. She picked him up and nuzzled him—pudgy and so smooth. Those big cheeks. He giggled and then hiccupped. “Did you miss me? Did you miss your mama?” He smelled of fabric softener and curdled milk, and she set him on her hip.

  Her mother had kept her supper in the oven. Vanessa thanked her, and her mother just said, “Uh-huh,” meaning she’d have to thank her again later, at length. She looked tired; she still had her nametag on and the white Nikes all the nurses wore. Vanessa sat Rashaan on her lap and picked at her chicken.

  “Everything go okay?” Vanessa asked, meaning with Miss Fisk. She watched Rashaan, and they were lucky—she always did a good job, it was good for her after Bean—but the other day she’d left a cake in too long and the fire department ended up coming.

  “She’s fine. How was class?”

  “Good,” Vanessa said.

  “I hope you had fun, because I wasn’t having any fun here, let me tell you. First thing I did when I came home was make supper. I’m still not done cleaning up and I haven’t even started the laundry.”

  “I can do that.”

  “You’ve got to eat, and then you’re taking care of him. He’s been a little devil since I picked him up. Oh, and his father called. Twice. He wants you to call him.”

  “Thanks.” She kept eating.

  “Are you going to call him?” her mother asked.

  It was none of her business. All she knew was that they’d broken up a month before the accident, and Vanessa wanted to keep it that way. His father —she was the only one who called him that. Vanessa looked up from her string beans, and her mother looked away, all salty, like she’d done something to her. Why did it always have to be like this?

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “Suit yourself,” her mother said, and went to change.

  Vanessa sat there chewing, staring at the sampler on the wall. Bless this house. What was she supposed to say to Chris? After Rashaan, he hardly came around. He still loved her, he said, but the way he said it made it clear he hadn’t planned on being a real father, that he thought it was a trap. It was a mistake, and she would have to pay for it, simply because she was a woman. How many times had her mother warned her. “You are not going to be like those Coleman girls dropping babies when they’re sixteen and living sorry lives. You’re not from that kind of people.” Vanessa never brought up her father, the fact that he left when she was just a baby, went off to Grenada and got killed, one of only three Americans. The odds were ridiculous. A stray bullet, a ricochet. The Marines called, and the Pentagon. Her mother kept his picture on her dresser, and one Veterans Day took her to plant a little flag at the cemetery. She wanted Vanessa to have what she’d lost—a man to help raise her baby, a real family, college, a chance to get ahead. It seemed she’d thrown everything away by keeping Rashaan. Like her mother said, it was too late to put him back now.

  Her mother returned in a powder-blue housedress and slippers, the belt knotted floppily at the waist. “Don’t you have homework?”

  “Just some reading.”

  “You need me to watch him?”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Because I will. I’m just going to be watching TV.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “Okay, baby. Don’t stay up too late.”

  “I won’t.”

  Her mother said this every night, even though she knew Rashaan wouldn’t be down till eleven. Half the time he was up again at two, needing to be rocked. She didn’t even have to turn the light on anymore, knew the exact number of steps to his crib, already had a clean spitcloth draped over the arm of the rocker. Sometimes that was the best time, there in the dark with the streetlight in the window, his lips tugging at her little finger, and sometimes it was the worst. She’d think of Chris alone in his room, stretched on the bed where they made love those cold mornings, cutting school, and she’d picture his legs beneath the sheets, growing thinner, the muscle leaving him. “My pearl,” he used to sing after they made love, “my precious little girl,” coming on just too smooth so she’d laugh at him. It was good then, what he’d bring out in her. And then she’d think of Bean and of Miss Fisk not even crying at the funeral, how she didn’t let anyone help her back to the limo, slapping at Mr. Spinks the director’s hands when he tried to take her arm. All of that was history.

  Rashaan grabbed one of her string beans and crammed it in his mouth.

  “Why you little crumbsnatcher,” she said, and swooped in and kissed him on the ear so he giggled.

  She finished her plate and rinsed it in the sink, the water calling her mother out of her room. “You do your homework and don’t worry about this mess,” she said, and Vanessa knew better than to argue, just thanked her again and unzipped her backpack.

  She’d found the Du Bois used at the campus store, a yellow sticker on the spine accusing her of being cheap, announcing it to the world. It was a cracked softback copy from the sixties. The Souls of Black Folk: A Negro Classic, the cover said. She gave Rashaan his blocks and opened her notebook on the kitchen table, but when she turned to the introduction she saw the pages were covered with highlighter, whole paragraphs double-underlined, the margins busy with scribble. Beside one line, the previous owner had written: Bourgeois elitist garbage. It looked like a woman’s writing, curly, the e’s nearly circles. Some revolutionary sister, she thought, and wondered how long ago she’d written it.

  There was a name inside the front cover—Mary Durham—but no date. It could have been this spring or 1969. Maybe there were clues.

  The introduction said the book was an argument against segregation, against Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist position. Black men needed to assert their rights as citizens and demand the government honor the constitution. The very best men would form the Talented Tenth of the population and lead the rest of the people forward.

  It was all underlined and highlighted, the yellow going dingy with age. No women in the struggle? Mary Durham had written. Forward into what?

  Good questions, Vanessa thought.

  The book itself was actually pretty boring, Du Bois going on and on in this stiff official voice, but Mary kept things interesting. White patriarchal / Black matriarchal stereotypes, she wrote. Reality a combination.

  Rashaan scratched at her ankles, trying to climb her shin. Ten-thirty and she’d only read twenty pages. She wanted to watch TV. She remembered Professor Muller’s question. Was Du Bois of this country or just in it? She thought she should choose a side and start collecting evidence, but with every new idea he seemed to switch. He wanted the people to become part of the nation, to be respected and accepted as men. So were his dreams of the country even if he wasn’t? But didn’t he know that?

  She quit around midnight, getting Rashaan down, then going through the apartment, shutting the lights. Her mother’s light was on, and the TV, but her mother was asleep on top of the covers, the clicker in her hand. Vanessa slid it out of her fingers and turned off David Letterman.

  “Bedtime, Mama.”

  “What?” her mother grunted, “I’m watching,” and sank back again. Vanessa helped her get under the covers, then went to the dresser to make sure her alarm was set. Beside it leaned the picture of her father in his dress blues, the Marine flag in the background. He looked older than twenty-three, but only because she knew he really wasn’t. She used to stare at his picture after school when her mother wasn’t around, as if by concentrating harder she might get to know him better.
She tilted the frame to the light, hoping she’d find some hint of her own face in his, but she never could. High cheeks, even teeth. He’d come from Youngstown, his father a shop foreman for U.S. Steel until the Southside closed down. Good, solid people. She knew his birthday and the day he was killed. She knew her mother was ashamed they’d never married, which Vanessa thought was sad. Now she set the picture down again, the white-gloved young man smiling grimly back at her, a warrior. In five years she’d be twenty-three.

  Rashaan was already asleep, and she slipped her cold pajamas on and got in, then lay there listening to him breathe. Of this country or just in it. In her cedar chest her mother had a flag neatly folded in a triangle, a box of medals lined with red crushed velvet. She turned on her side and looked out at the streetlight, starlike behind the gauzy curtains, and wondered if Chris was awake. Probably watching his little TV, smoking up some of Nene’s weed. He loved the Sci Fi Channel, and MonsterVision on TNT. Their one year together they must have seen every horror movie that came out, every trip to the theater a test of her nerves. When she jumped or sucked in her breath, he just laughed and held her closer. He and Bean knew all the directors and their movies, the history behind everything.

  It would be easier if he was straight shiftless, she thought. She knew him better. He was so proud of his art—his writing, he called it. You could see it in everything he put up, in the colors and all the details, the way it jumped off a wall. He was the one who should be going to college. So what if it was his own fault, it didn’t make it any easier on him, stuck in that chair.

  You’re afraid of him, she thought. Of the chair.

  Maybe.

  The same way he’s afraid of you and Rashaan.

  No, it’s different.

  How?

  Because he didn’t want us to start with. It’s only now, after everything.

  It’s only now that you don’t want him.

  That’s not true.

  You’re still afraid of him.

  “Maybe,” she said, and Rashaan stirred. When she looked, the curtains seemed to move, just like in one of Chris’s movies.

  Then she was afraid of him.

  In the morning she didn’t remember how she’d figured it out, or exactly what it meant. She took Rashaan over to Miss Fisk, holding on to that one thought, and at work it made her forget her orders. As usual, the Pancake House was crowded with students. The entire breakfast rush she threaded her way through the tables, apologizing, the coffeepot heavy as a bowling ball. She always wondered where these kids got their money from; was it all their parents or did they have jobs? Some of the other girls were students, but they never lasted; Vanessa didn’t consider what they did real work. They had a choice. She didn’t.

  She didn’t recognize any of her new classmates, which was good. The orders kept pouring in; Lainie was keeping her tables full. Her top was spotted with drips of syrup, and every few minutes her hand caught on one and she had to dab at her shirt with a wet napkin. She was supposed to be thinking about Du Bois, she’d even brought the book to look at during break, but instead she found a chair back in the little dead end by the coat rack and sat there with her feet up and her eyes closed, listening to the other servers push through the swinging doors, the jingle of the silver in their bus boxes. If college would get her out of here, then it was worth it.

  And how long would that take, one course at a time? It was stupid; her mother had to know that.

  Her mother had a double shift, and Chris was on the answering machine, saying he’d try later. Miss Fisk said Rashaan wouldn’t eat his strained peas. “He was just fussing all day long,” she said. “Could be he’s coming down with something.”

  “He’s not allowed,” Vanessa joked, and when they got home, took his temperature. It was over a hundred, but there was no way she could take tomorrow off. She found some children’s Tylenol in the bathroom; it was only a month past the expiration date. She figured that meant when you bought it.

  She was cleaning up from dinner when the phone rang.

  It was her mother, checking in. “We’ve got a head-on coming in from the Parkway,” she said. “I wouldn’t expect me before midnight.”

  “You be careful,” Vanessa said, thinking of the dark parking lot behind West Penn. When she hung up she realized she’d forgotten to ask her to pick up some more Tylenol. She was relieved when the phone rang again, thinking it was her mother.

  “Nessie,” Chris said, all happy. “I finally caught you.”

  She crossed her arms, cocked a hip—instant attitude, and she knew it. “Why do you keep calling like this?”

  “Because I miss you. You know that.”

  “Why now?” she said. “Why didn’t you miss me before?”

  “Before.”

  “Yeah, Chris—before. Remember?”

  There was silence, and she let it ride, shaking her head. Outside, Tony the candyman’s truck jingled by, enticing some Colemans. Sometimes she wondered if Chris would ever grow up. Rashaan held on to her leg so she couldn’t pace.

  “I remember,” he finally said.

  “So?”

  “So I’m sorry, all right? What do you want me to do, take it all back, make everything the way it used to be?”

  No, she thought, that’s what you want.

  “Look,” he said, “I just want to see you and Rashaan, all right?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I miss you—I already said that.”

  “Wouldn’t be because you’re feeling sorry for yourself.”

  “A little, maybe. I don’t know. I’d just like to see you.”

  “How’s U doing? I saw him in church the other day.”

  “Oh yeah, he’s saved now. He’s okay though. I don’t know, there’s a lot of things that don’t make sense lately.”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “So like, you think we can get together or what?”

  “I’m working all week. I’ve got night class now too.”

  “Miss Fisk told my Moms. She said it was like nursing school.”

  “It’s one class at Pitt.”

  “How you like it?”

  “It’s okay. It’s only one class.”

  “But shit, you’re in college. That’s all right.”

  “Yeah,” she said, almost believing it, and she found she wasn’t angry with him. She jiggled her leg to give Rashaan a ride.

  “So maybe Saturday, you know. We could do whatever, doesn’t matter. Take Rashaan to the park or something.”

  “Will you stop calling all the time?”

  “’f I can see you.”

  “Promise,” she said, and laughed, but then after she hung up she was sure it was a mistake.

  She didn’t touch the Du Bois until she got Rashaan down, giving him the last of the medicine. She had to finish the first six sections by tomorrow night. A lot of it was about education. He sounded like she imagined Professor Shelby did. The function of the university is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization. She had her notebook open to a clean page, her pen lying across it. When she woke up it was still there, her mother just closing the door.

  She tried to skim it at work and then on the way in to class, finding a bench on the lawn outside the Cathedral of Learning. It was a huge Gothic tower, fifty stories straight up, a black stone rocket. Inside were rooms dedicated to all the nationalities that made up Pittsburgh, even a new African room. She bent her face to the page, learning about the education of the race, the early teachers in the South and the rise from enforced illiteracy, then Tuskegee and Atlanta. It had to do with her being here, at Pitt, as if all those years of history ended with her sitting on this bench, reading this book, and it was her job to carry on the tradition. For a minute it all made sense, it all seemed possible. For a minute she understood why her mother made her go.

  Professor Muller was there again. This time Sinbad sat i
n the front row, getting in his comments on Du Bois. Vanessa sat near the back, afraid of being called on. The discussion was good. The professor and Sinbad had a lot to say that Vanessa hadn’t even seen in the reading. And the professor seemed to agree with him: Du Bois was in this country, he only wanted to be of it, something the Africanist movement would later criticize him for. For most of the class they talked about the reconstruction of the South and the role of state governments in denying the freedmen their voting rights. She should have taken more notes, she thought. She should have read it slower.

  “Okay,” Professor Muller said, “your assignment for next time is,” and wrote ORAL HISTORY on the board. She wanted them to interview someone about their experience as an African American. Tape-record it, then edit it down.

  Someone raised a hand. “What if they don’t consider themself African American? What if they consider themself Black?”

  “That’s fine,” the professor said. “The whole idea of oral history is self-definition.”

  It was past time, and people started getting up, the room filling with the noise of chairs.

  “One more thing,” the professor hollered, so everyone stopped. “Who you interview. This is important. I want you to interview the oldest person you know.” She scrawled it across the board, part of the chalk breaking off and falling to the floor. “Again—the oldest person you know. Any questions?”

  Immediately Vanessa thought of Miss Fisk. It was a good assignment. It was way easier than reading.

  In the elevator Sinbad had nothing to say, and she realized she hadn’t thought of Chris in hours, or even Rashaan, his fever.

  Miss Fisk said it would be fine. She didn’t have any plans tomorrow afternoon, if that was all right. She promised she’d try to remember. It was hard when you got to be her age, but she’d try. Some days were better than others, she said, and Vanessa didn’t have to say she wouldn’t ask anything about Bean.

  “How was class?” her mother asked.

  “Good,” she said, and told her about the assignment.

  “What are you going to ask her?”