by Africa Fine
On nights when I was feeling cynical and bitter, I thought that I was just another project for Jack. Engineers live to fix things, to build things up, to make them better. Why wouldn’t the same apply to people? Maybe I was broken.
Chapter 2
“Lily Jones”
Jack came up Aunt Gillian’s stairs, already sweating and complaining that he didn’t like parking his car in this neighborhood. I sighed, trying not to be annoyed. “This neighborhood” was a series of tree-lined streets in East Cleveland that had seen better days. The houses were tall and built just a bit too close together by city planners in the last century. If you looked down the street and squinted, you could imagine that they had once been considered grand residences by their original owners. Now they were more neglected than imposing. Although I’d grown up in this house, I didn’t know much about the history of the area. That was what things were like when I was a child. Always look forward, my aunt said. Never dwell on what can’t be changed. I could see her point, but I believed this was an excuse telling me next to nothing about my parents, our family, her ex-husband, or anything else that had happened before I was born.
The neighborhood itself predated Aunt Gillian’s arrival in Cleveland, but whatever stood here before had been razed, replaced by a series of colonial revival homes. Her house was two stories high and sat up on a hill. I remember as a child feeling that it was the biggest, loneliest house in the world. The house was made of bricks that used to be vibrant and clean but had faded over the years to a dull reddish brown. Aunt Gillian kept the shutters on the symmetrical windows painted a pale yellow, the same color as her kitchen walls.
I always liked the outside of the house, with its tulips planted in the narrow side yard and rose bushes that brightened either side of the ornate wooden door. But once inside, I always felt out of place in the foyer, where my aunt had precise places for hats, coats, shoes, and umbrellas. God help you if you put something in the wrong place. The formal living and dining rooms were filled with dark, heavy furniture that Aunt Gillian polished to a high shine. These pieces too often revealed the prints of my small fingers, and on the weekends I was required to wipe away smudges and even the thinnest layers of dust. I wasn’t allowed to sit on the white living room sofas, and Aunt Gillian maintained the room’s white carpeting in pristine condition.
The kitchen was the only place on the first floor where I could lower my guard even a bit. Even so, being there meant doing dishes, sweeping the floor, and listening to lectures on nutrition and diet. She believed that children should be of use from an early age. I always wished she believed less in work and more in play.
My bedroom was the place in Aunt Gillian’s house that I could call my own. Abdicating control of at least one area of my life, my aunt had given me free rein to decorate it for my twelfth birthday. She took me to Dillard’s one Saturday afternoon, hoping I would choose peach-colored linens and photos of flowers for the walls. Peach, she had told me many times, was a demure and appropriate color for any young girl, especially someone with my skin tone. This was one of many sore points between us: where she was fair-skinned with long, straight hair, I was dark-skinned with nappy hair that just wouldn’t grow. She always seemed annoyed by this, which I never understood, as even in the few black-and-white photos I had of my parents, my father had my skin tone and hair.
I didn’t choose peach. I picked deep golds, hunter greens, and dark reds. I could tell by the look on my aunt’s face that she hated my choices, but she paid for sheets, a comforter, curtains, and all the accessories (which included a poster of Michael Jackson I knew she found tacky) without a word. I loved my room. On that birthday, she had given me the greatest gifts: freedom and silence.
My aunt’s house was much the same as it had always been, but the neighborhood was changed for the worse. Cleveland always had its black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods, but black didn’t necessarily mean poor when my aunt first moved here. Back then, this neighborhood was a haven for the black middle class—those teachers, doctors, and business owners who had formed their own insulated community. Before blacks and whites were mandated by law to share the city, there existed two Clevelands. From the little my aunt had told me, they coexisted in relative peace for years. Then came civil-rights marches, and later, angrier, desperate protests in the form of riots. My aunt’s East Cleveland neighbors began to change. Those blacks who could afford to move, did. Those who stayed were not teachers, doctors, and business owners. They worked for a living but, according to my aunt, were of a lower class. They held service jobs and had no appreciation for what it meant to be a member of the black bourgeoisie. Aunt Gillian always seemed shocked that many of her neighbors not only didn’t understand what it meant to have middle-class values, but they didn’t aspire to better themselves at all.
My aunt never wanted to leave her house, even as the neighborhood deteriorated. This was her dream home, and no one would take that from her. So she stayed, and disapproved. And each year, she had her shutters painted pale yellow.
The rest of the block had not fared so well. Jack turned up his nose at the dilapidated houses with peeling paint and overgrown yards that surrounded my aunt’s home. The neighborhood was more dangerous now, with drugs changing the character of the young people who lived here with their aging parents. They took advantage of cheap rents and advancing senility to sell weed and crack from one house to another.
It was ten o’clock in the morning. There were pockets of young men standing at the corner in front of what used to be Jones Liquor but what was now a Quik Stop convenience store. Their faces serious, they held bottles in paper bags, preparing for another long, hot day without jobs or hope.
I was no happier than Jack to be back here, but I still managed to be offended. I accused him of worrying too much about material things.
“No matter where we go, you make it your business never to set foot anywhere where the median household income dips below $100,000,” I teased him.
* * *
He shrugged. “Look, I’ve been poor. I know what it feels like, and I never want to feel that again. And when I’m around poverty, it brings all those feelings back.”
I scoffed, and he said it was because I had always been pampered.
“You call living with my aunt being ‘pampered’?”
“Economically, yes.” He smiled at me. It was an argument we had had before, and we were long past the point where either of us got mad about it. His middle-class elitism reminded me of Aunt Gillian. I called him materialistic. He called me idealistic.
“The rental car will be fine. You set the alarm, didn’t you?”
Just then a car alarm—not ours—went off. He rolled his eyes. “It better be,” he muttered, wiping his forehead. He stalked into Aunt Gillian’s bedroom to begin packing.
A moment later, he called to me. I went into the bedroom and was almost knocked backward by the smell, a mix of urine and dust. It looked as if the room hadn’t been cleaned in years, and it smelled as if Aunt Gillian hadn’t changed her sheets or washed her clothing in about as long.
“She told me she had a girl come in to clean every week,” I said, my voice weak. There was a thick layer of gray dust over every flat surface, and unidentifiable stains dotted the threadbare carpet. The bathroom door was ajar, and I wondered what horrors lay behind it. Tears came to my eyes, and Jack walked over and put his arm around my shoulder.
“You couldn’t have known it was like this, Tina. She wouldn’t let you know.”
I knew he was right, but the guilt remained. My tears wet the front of his shirt, but he kept holding me, patting my back, until I could stand on my own.
“Maybe you should let me do this part. You can go down and pack up the kitchen or something,” Jack said, squinting at my tear-stained face.
I knew that the last thing he wanted was to clean an old lady’s house. He was a good man, dependable and strong when I felt weak and unsure.
I shook my head. “I’m
okay. Let’s just do it and get out of here.” He nodded and handed me a box.
* * *
A list of the items found in Aunt Gillian’s house:
• A large bottle of cheap brandy hidden at the back of the closet
• Several cartons of cigarettes
• A flattened, dead mouse
• $3,753 stashed in various pockets, purses, and old coffee cans
• A gun
• A birth certificate for a child I never knew Aunt Gillian had
* * *
I was surprised to learn that my aunt smoked. I’d never seen her do it, nor had I ever smelled any evidence of the habit. It was strange that she had kept this secret from me. I shouldn’t have been so shocked. I have since learned that Aunt Gillian was a woman who kept many secrets.
As for the other items, I wondered why a grown woman living alone felt the need to hide her liquor in a closet. It seemed bizarre to hide so much cash around the house when I knew she had bank accounts. It’s hard to say which was more alarming, the birth certificate, the dead mouse, or the gun. There was no telling how long the mouse had been lying underneath her bed, or how it had been flattened. I wondered whether that was a part of the house’s odor. I wondered what fate its brethren had met, since one mouse meant others were nearby. Mice are not known as a species of loners. I shuddered at the thought of Aunt Gillian living among them, sharing space, food, air. It hit me just how old, maybe senile, she must be not to have noticed this, or to have tolerated it. Jack grabbed the mouse using half a roll of paper towels. He looked at it for a moment, and I wondered what he was thinking. But he didn’t say a word, just placed it in a plastic garbage bag and went on.
The gun was something different altogether. It was in Aunt Gillian’s underwear drawer between the long slips and the girdles. I let out a sharp yelp when my fingers touched the cool metal barrel.
“What? What now?” Jack rushed over, maybe expecting another mouse or worse. I pointed to the gun, not wanting to touch it again. He made no move to pick it up. We just stood there, peering into the drawer.
“What kind is it?” I asked Jack. Guns were something I assumed all men knew about.
“How should I know? I’ve never even seen an actual gun.”
He had a point. He may have grown up in the less desirable neighborhoods of St. Louis, but he wasn’t exactly the kind to know about guns.
I cleared my throat. “I guess we should do something with it.”
“Something like what?”
“I don’t know. Take it to the police?”
I had no enthusiasm for this idea even though I knew it was probably the right thing to do. Like many black people, I’d known enough people who had been in trouble with the police to have formed an instinctive aversion toward those who protect and serve. I knew that all cops weren’t bad. That didn’t mean I wanted to saunter into a police station with a gun that could have come from anywhere and could have been involved in anything before it found a home between Aunt Gillian’s lacy unmentionables.
“On Law and Order, they always suspect the person who touched the gun last,” Jack said. We looked at each other and giggled. We weren’t the kind of people who thought television had anything to do with real life. But he had a point.
“Why don’t we just put it in a box along with her papers and files and figure it out later.”
Jack nodded and wrapped the gun in a beige half-slip before picking it up and carrying it over to a box. He looked at me and gave me a crooked smile.
“No fingerprints.”
After the shock of the mouse and the gun faded a bit, it was the birth certificate that intrigued me. Lily Jones. A girl with no middle name, weighing eight pounds nine ounces, born at Milwaukee County Hospital on February 28, 1960. Father unknown. Mother: Gillian Jones. How was it that I never knew Aunt Gillian had a child? Where was she?
This wasn’t the first time I realized how little I knew about Aunt Gillian’s life. I grew up with her, but she was a mystery to me. It wasn’t just that she kept secrets about her past, but she also kept herself distant from me. I had no memories of us laughing together, of times when she ever seemed like a mother to me, although she was the only mother I had ever known.
The little I knew about our family made me feel as if I didn’t quite know myself. I had assumed that things would always be this way. With nothing to go on, how could I discover my past when Aunt Gillian was there to block me at every turn?
But the birth certificate gave me some hope. Maybe it was a way into my family’s past, a way to finally find out what Aunt Gillian always insisted was better left behind.
I had no intention of asking Aunt Gillian about the mouse (on the chance she didn’t know), the gun (I believed I was better off not knowing), the money, the cigarettes, or the brandy. But I knew I had to talk to her about this Lily that I had not known existed, my cousin. I took a long look back at the house before I closed and locked the door.
Chapter 3
“I was fat, and I wasn’t cool”
For most of my life, I was fat. And I don’t mean fat as in a little chubby around the middle, or needs to lose ten pounds. I was, in a technical, official, life-threatening sense, obese. I’m five foot five, and I weighed more than 200 pounds. I can’t be more exact than that, because once the scales tipped over 200, I stopped weighing myself.
As a child, I was just plump. And plumper. And then plumper, until Aunt Gillian took it upon herself to remake me. She still served meat, but there was only baked or boiled chicken available instead of the steak she favored.
“You must watch your weight, Ernestine. You don’t want it to get out of control,” she warned me one evening when I was thirteen years old. It was clear that she already thought things were well out of control, but she was being polite. We were sitting at the dinner table, where I had already devoured my salad and a small helping of plain rice, no butter. I was staring down at the table, pushing the chicken around my plate and dreaming of a large plate of spaghetti covered with parmesan cheese.
“I’m still hungry,” I muttered.
“What? Speak up, Ernestine. You must enunciate if you want people to pay attention to you.”
That, I realized, was a fundamental difference between us. I didn’t want anyone paying attention to me. I’d already suffered enough under her scrutiny. I wanted to be left to my reading and the stories I wrote in secret when Aunt Gillian thought I was asleep.
I knew better than to repeat myself, but my aunt sat stern and still, waiting for me to demonstrate improved diction.
“I’m still hungry.”
I didn’t even have to look up from my plate to feel her frown.
“Nonsense. Now, if all you’re going to do is play with that chicken, then get up and come help me clear the dishes.”
I could feel my stomach grumbling for more food as I carried the plates to the kitchen sink.
I’m not sure that was the true turning point for me, although I remember it as such. It seems to me that after that night, I ballooned from a chubby girl into full-fledged fat, and no amount of disapproval, cajoling, or demanding by my aunt could turn me back.
By the time I was fifteen, I was faced with the 80s culture of cool juxtaposed with my own extreme uncoolness. I didn’t see what all the fuss was about LL Cool J. I didn’t know the words to any Run DMC song. My hair was of the tightest nap, so tight it wouldn’t take a relaxer or a curl, so I wore it in a tiny, unfashionable afro. I wore shapeless sweatshirts over jeans, hoping they would make me look less fat.
Sometimes, I tried to fit in. I tried to hide the fact that I had a boy’s name, but at the start of each school year, my teachers would remind everyone by calling out my full name. People looked at me as if I spoke Portuguese whenever I said something was “fresh.” It was 1986. I was fat, and I wasn’t cool. So I became smart.
Being the smart girl was my defense against my schoolmates, who laughed when I talked, saying I sounded like someone’s mo
ther trying to be fly. On Friday nights, while my peers drank peach schnapps they had stolen from their parents’ cabinets and groped each other in darkened corners, being the smart kid kept me company. Being the smart girl got me into Georgetown, geographic and emotional worlds away from home. Being the smart girl meant graduating with honors, going to graduate school to study African-American literature, becoming Dr. Jones to a generation of college students who knew nothing about my struggle to be cool.
There was a time when both my aunt and I hoped I would somehow turn out to be one of the popular kids. When I was a plump twelve-year-old, Aunt Gillian, former belle of Howard University, current envy of every woman she passed in the street, decided it was time to pass on a few of her beauty secrets. I sat down at the kitchen table, my aunt’s makeup and hair-styling products at the ready, latex gloves on her hands as if I were going into surgery.
“Maybe if we tried a different kind of relaxer, one of these new ones they have on the market,” my aunt said, a tight, critical look on her face as she picked at my uncooperative kinks.
I nodded, hopeful. Two hours later, I heard her gasp as I washed out the chemicals and my hair pulled back into itself like a turtle, and the small, unfashionable afro reasserted its dominance.
“A little eyeliner, some lipstick, and you’ll look just like Janet Jackson,” Aunt Gillian promised. An hour later, I still looked like me.