Everyday People

by Stewart O'Nan

“I don’t know,” Vanessa said.

  “I’d ask about her family, the people she came from.”

  “That’s good.”

  “And maybe how they made it through the Depression.”

  “Let me get a piece of paper,” Vanessa said.

  Rashaan’s fever was gone; he was eating again. After dinner she was working on the list when she heard the electric bells of Tony’s truck. She thought it was almost fall and that she wouldn’t have many more chances to see him, and she patted her pocket for some money and scooped Rashaan up and ran down the stairs and outside.

  Tony’s old truck was parked across the street, Tony around back of it, hunched and reaching into the freezer. The truck was from the thirties, its fenders curved, its grille a fence of chrome. The visor above the front window was red, white and blue, the rest of the truck white, with faded stickers of all the different treats. When she was a little girl, the Bomb-pops were just a quarter, and you couldn’t finish one before the juice melted down your arm; now they were eighty-five and half the size.

  There wasn’t much of a crowd, just some Colemans. Tony had a white shirt and pants on, his white apron over top of it, white gloves. His eyebrows were bushy and gray, his ears furry nests of hair, and his lips always looked wet, as if he licked them. Vanessa was surprised to find she was taller than he was, his hunch more pronounced now, painful to look at. He seemed to have gotten old while his truck had stayed the same. He dipped his arm in and pulled out an ice-cream sandwich for the Coleman in front of her.

  “Vanessa Bopessa,” he said, “and Rashaan Manon. What can old Tony get for you today? Bomb-pop? Cap’n Crunch bar? Strawberry, your favorite.”

  “They still make those?” she asked.

  “No, I’m just kidding.”

  She ordered a Creamsicle and a Tootsie push-pop for Rashaan, then stood on the sidewalk with a hip cocked, helping him eat it. The Colemans sat on the steps of their building, ranking on each other, dripping sticky dots on the stone. She remembered those summers when every day ended like this—her and Taniquah and Bean and Chris hanging around on parked cars while the locusts droned. Tony would run a Dove bar over to Miss Fisk sitting on her porch. When it got dark they played flashlight tag and Terminator. It wasn’t that long ago, she thought. Where had it all gone?

  Tony served everyone, making change from his apron, then came over to socialize. Was everything all right? Everyone all set? He was like a bad magician, someone’s nutty grandfather, so goofy you had to like him.

  “How’s Renée?” Vanessa asked.

  “Good, good. She’s at the William Penn now. She likes it. You?”

  “Still at the Pancake House. And going to Pitt part-time.”

  “Good school. I took a lifesaving class there, long time ago.”

  “Oh yeah?” Vanessa said, and he started telling her about it—the pool and the other students and the smell of chlorine, and suddenly Vanessa wondered if he was older than Miss Fisk. He was white, so it didn’t matter, but she wondered. She couldn’t imagine him swimming, leaving the gym in winter with his hair still wet. He had this whole life behind him she knew nothing about. A family, a history. She would never know it, she thought, and now she wanted to. He was sharper than Miss Fisk, who sometimes forgot what she was saying. Vanessa would have to ask her just the right questions.

  “Well,” Tony said, “I got a lot more stops,” and waved good-bye to Rashaan. “Study hard.”

  “I will,” Vanessa said.

  She did that night, staying up with the news to cut down her list of questions. At work she added some of the old ones in again, and came up with some new ones, so that when she sat down with Miss Fisk late that afternoon she had more than when she started.

  Miss Fisk was ready for her, a leather-bound photo album laid out on the coffee table. She’d made a pitcher of lemonade and a plate of gingersnaps. The lemonade was fine, but when Vanessa bit into one of the cookies she realized that some ingredient was missing. She covered her surprise by taking a big sip.

  “Let me make sure this is working,” she said, and turned on the recorder. “All right, the first question I’d like to ask you is about your family.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “Your mother, what was she like?”

  Miss Fisk rocked back like she was thinking. She closed her eyes and then opened them again, smiling as if proud that she’d remembered the answer. “My mother was from Carolina. Columbia, South Carolina. Her grandmother on her mother’s side was a slave and her grandfather was a sharecropper. After the Surrender they set up their own place outside Decatur, Georgia. That’s where one of the big slave markets was, in Decatur. That’s where they met.”

  Vanessa checked to make sure the tape was running. Once Miss Fisk got going, she tried not to interrupt. Miss Fisk was saying exactly what they’d been talking about in class—how her great-grandparents had been burned out by the Klan and headed north, chopping cotton for traveling money, how her grandfather was the first man in the family who could read. Everything they did seemed heroic, an endless struggle, and Vanessa thought of how exhausted she was, how she counted on the fact that there was just one more day till the weekend. In a way it didn’t seem real to Vanessa, all this history. It was strange what you didn’t know about a person, like last night with Tony—all the things behind them.

  “Now my father,” Miss Fisk was saying, “was just like your daddy. Talk? He could talk a cat into a bath. I have never heard a one of those so-called preachers spill it the way those two could. Didn’t they know it too. They’d go on for hours right there on that porch. You could come in and cook dinner and go out and they’d still be bumping their gums.”

  It couldn’t be right, Vanessa thought. Her father was just a boy when Mr. Fisk died. Miss Fisk noticed her reaction and paused, just a second, as if trying to figure out what she’d said. She shook it off, leaning back and remembering again.

  “Yes indeed. And talk about handsome. My Lord that man was sharp. When he dressed for church, the whole street would turn out just to look at him.”

  Vanessa wanted to stop her, to ask her if it was a mistake, but she was off in another direction. She didn’t mention him again, and she didn’t say anything about Bean, but Vanessa expected that. Maybe the older history was, the easier it was to talk about.

  She mentioned it to her mother that night while she was working on her report. She brought the recorder into her bedroom where she was watching TV. “Listen to this,” she said, and played the tape.

  “Now my father,” Miss Fisk said, “was just like your daddy.”

  Her mother listened, squinting, trying to make sense of it. She looked up at her like Vanessa might have an answer.

  “I’m getting worried about her,” Vanessa said. “I don’t know if I want to leave Rashaan with her.”

  “She is slipping a little.”

  “But she knew Daddy, didn’t she?”

  “Not well,” her mother said. “She met him a few times.” Vanessa filed it like a clue. It was the most she’d said about her father in years. She wanted to sit down on the edge of the bed and turn on the recorder and ask her mother what she meant: not well, a few times. When? Where? Why only a few? Instead she went back to her room and sat at her mother’s ancient Apple II, typing with two fingers while Rashaan watched her, clinging to the side of the playpen, every once in a while calling out, reaching for her. It was three when she finished, Rashaan whistling under his quilt.

  The next night Professor Muller was late. The class muttered and buzzed. In the front row Sinbad fumed, shaking his head like it was typical. Vanessa was ready to defend her; she’d been on time both times before. Maybe she had babies to take care of. It was five after, seven after, but no one moved. Maybe it’s a test, Vanessa thought, how long they’d wait.

  At ten after, the door opened and in walked a short orange man with a gray goatee and a briefcase fixed with duct tape—Professor Shelby. There was a smattering of applause, led by Sinbad,
which the professor quieted with a wave of a hand. He was almost bald and wore a deep green suit, its lapels cut in the wide style of the seventies. He popped the locks of his briefcase and opened a notebook, went to the board and wrote EVOLUTION.

  “What does this mean?” he asked, and though five or six hands went up, he answered it himself, going on about white biological theories of inferiority, filling the board with dates and definitions. Vanessa didn’t follow all of it, thought maybe another book had been assigned. Everyone else seemed to understand, nodding along, laughing at his bad jokes.

  He added an R to EVOLUTION and went on for the rest of the class, rambling about active versus passive resistance, about Touissaint and Nat Turner, Angela Davis and George Jackson, chalking names and philosophies and linking them with a confusion of arrows that Vanessa tried to duplicate in her notebook. She was still writing when the bell rang.

  “You should have the James Weldon Johnson read for next time,” he said, and started shoving things into his briefcase.

  Nobody moved, and he looked up, puzzled.

  “Professor Shelby,” Sinbad said, “what should we do with our oral histories?”

  The professor looked at him like he’d never heard of them. “Just hold on to them for now. We’ll go over them Monday if we have time. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

  Then why did I bother, Vanessa thought, but in the elevator no one complained.

  “How’d it go?” her mother asked.

  “It didn’t,” Vanessa said, and told her the whole story.

  She had reading to do, but she didn’t feel like it, not after class, and she watched TV with her mother and Rashaan until it was time for bed.

  “You said you’re taking him to see his father tomorrow,” her mother asked, and now Vanessa was sorry she’d agreed to.

  “We’re just going to the park.”

  “Give him my best.”

  “I will,” Vanessa said, knowing Chris would ask after her. He was like that, polite; it was another thing her mother liked about him. Vanessa had liked it too; she wasn’t sure why she found it tiresome now. From the dresser her father smiled down, and she thought she was a coward.

  She got ready for bed and then lay there trying to sleep. It wasn’t that she was afraid of him, that wasn’t it. She didn’t know what it was.

  In his crib Rashaan hiccupped and woke up and called out for her, not quite a cry. She lay there a minute, hoping he’d go back to sleep. When it was clear he wouldn’t, she got up and picked him up and sat down in the rocker.

  “Hush now,” she said, “hush,” and rocked him against her.

  Outside, the streetlight burned in the trees, the shadows of leaves shifting on the wall. Rashaan was quiet, only the swishing of the wind. She thought of tomorrow and the park, of her father sitting on the porch in Miss Fisk’s memory. She thought of how little she knew about anyone. What could she honestly tell Rashaan about the people he’d come from? That was the lesson class had taught her. Which professor didn’t matter. Tony, Miss Fisk. She would have to learn her own history first, she thought, ask questions, find the truth out for herself.

  She caught herself rocking and stopped, but in a minute she was doing it again. She put Rashaan down and got in bed and listened to her heart throb in her ears. She wasn’t going to sleep, she decided, and clicked on her bedside light. She found her backpack and the book inside it and sat there tailorseat on her bed reading, leaning in to circle an idea, to underline a sentence, to puzzle over a word. Suddenly she needed to know everything.

  THE HAWK

  ON THE SIDEWALK in front of Miss Fisk’s, Harold Tolbert stopped and took the cigar out of his mouth and looked up at the moon, then stood there a while as if searching its face for answers. “Hunh,” he said, remarking on a crater round and sharp as a smallpox scar. The moon itself was nearly full, just a lip missing. It seemed too close to Harold, a fat gold coin in the cold night air, peeking over the row of town houses across the street, painting the leaves of Miss Fisk’s hedges silver, throwing his shadow halfway to her porch. Hunter’s moon, his father would have said. He’d have to wait a day to wish on it proper.

  And what would he wish for, for Chris to get his legs back? For Eugene to stop acting all God-struck? For that mouthy little fool Bean to come back from the dead? Or—honest now—would he betray all of them just to be with Dre again?

  He wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure of anything anymore. For now he was relieved to be alone, out of the house. He was even glad, for the moment, not to be there yet, faced with Dre.

  He breathed out a blue cloud. Around him, Spofford was dark and quiet, a few upstairs windows filled with a cozy yellow light. He liked the night, and finally being away from the brightness of the living room, the stupidity of the TV. He’d waited till Jackie left for choir practice, Eugene for his meeting, then told Chris he was going for a walk. Stretch his legs, he said, maybe pump an Iron at the Liberty. Now ain’t that a bitch, a grown man needing an excuse to leave his own home. He was like a prisoner, he’d have said, if his own son hadn’t just been released. No, it was like Dre was always saying—he was a free man, no one was forcing him to stay.

  And what could he say to that? They both knew Dre was right, that it was up to him to pick up and leave, and they both knew he wouldn’t do it. After the thrill of finding each other, after the stolen days off spent in Dre’s bed, everything came down to the one decision he didn’t want to make.

  Not, as Dre accused him, because he was afraid of admitting what he was. No, Harold Tolbert had always loved men. He thought it was from his mother, her harshness, and from boxing, all those winters spent in steamy gyms admiring the courage and physiques of other boys and then young men like himself. The sleek, hard muscle. The agility and will. Behind the locker-room ass grabbing and towel snapping, there was something deeper—the comfort of brotherhood, he supposed. The possibility of being fully understood. And physically too. After a fight he always wanted some, his blood still jumped-up, filling him. He remembered making love in the stalls and showers with Mason, who won too, usually, his lip cut from knuckles and the gloves’ laces, the anger and triumph still in his eyes. Only when you conquered could you surrender so completely, totally give up control. No woman would ever know that with him, only Mason. In all his years, Harold had never been loved so well, and now, nearing fifty, he feared he never would be again.

  He wouldn’t leave though. Dre could make him feel cowardly for staying, but he couldn’t make the reasons go away. It had nothing to do with Jackie. Chris needed him, and Eugene. If he wasn’t much of a husband, he was still trying to be a father. He had an obligation to them.

  “An obligation not to be a faggot,” Dre would say.

  And again, what could Harold say? Yes. Maybe so. How could he explain: His life wasn’t just his.

  “You can at least be a man and tell her,” Dre said. “You can at least do that.”

  A train called in the distance, its trucks clattering high in the sky. A fast freight off to Cincy, Cleveland, Toledo. He knew he should get moving. Friday choir practice was only two hours long and he’d already wasted ten minutes wandering around thinking. He wished it was like at the beginning, when they hardly talked. First thing in the door, they kissed and whisked each other’s shirts off, tumbled into bed. There was talk afterward, a necessary sharing of histories. Dre had discovered himself late. The first time he made love with another man he couldn’t stop laughing. “I was so happy. Finally, after all the awful times with girls my own age. I didn’t know it could be like that.”

  Harold laughed, recalling his own astonishment, the sweetness of giving everything. Then why was he disappointed it had been an older man, a janitor at that? Did he see himself as part of a rough trend? Dre thought it was funny that Harold was a grandfather. He and Mason had come to each other as innocents, twins, their secret shared, their fumbling unsure. It was a kind of miracle it worked at all. This was different, and both he and Dre knew it.
Their need wasn’t equal.

  They talked until they were ready again, and then talked after that, but that first month it was lovetalk, not this constant arguing over why they were together, whose fault it was, what they were supposed to do about it now.

  “Do you love me?” Dre would say, and Harold would honestly say yes. It made Dre curse and slap his pillow. “How can you lie there and say that and then leave me by myself? Every night you leave me. Do you know how that feels?”

  It feels terrible, Harold said. It feels terrible knowing I have to leave you. Should I just not come over then? Should we just stop?

  He’d offered this before, a way out, a retreat. After a while, Dre accused him of really wanting it to be over, as if Harold had gotten what he wanted, had only come for the one thing. His youth. His beauty. Now he was bored with him, was shucking him off like a spent condom. Was it true? At times, straining against Dre, feeling as if his very skin would split, he remembered Mason, the mildewed, cobwebby stalls and lime-crusted pipes. Blood in his mouth, ears open, terrified someone might come.

  “I don’t understand why you’re here,” Dre said. “What do you want from this?”

  Harold wasn’t sure. The question silenced him, and his silence frustrated Dre. Love? Sometimes it seemed an honest answer.

  “You’re asking me to love you but then I can’t rely on you. Like last Saturday. When I need you, where are you?”

  Exactly, Harold thought, walking under the moon. “Nowhere,” he said, and turned the corner onto Allegheny. Across the street, Dre’s windows were lit.

  They’d agreed not to see each other. Dre laid out his logic bitterly, making it seem inevitable. “How long?” Harold asked, thinking a week would be good, just a test to see if they could stay apart that long. “What’s the point then?” Dre said, and Harold came up with some excuse even he didn’t believe. He couldn’t process the thought of not seeing him again. It seemed a waste, an opportunity squandered. Wasn’t there some other way? “No,” Dre said. “We keep going in circles. Don’t come back unless you’re ready to do something.”