by Africa Fine
“This chicken is terrible, too rubbery,” she complained one night. “You always were a terrible cook.”
Food was a recurring theme in both her complaints and compliments. I had made her the same meal the week before and she loved it. Of course, she thought I was her personal chef that day.
“I’ll try not to make it too rubbery next time, Aunt Gillian.”
She tsked. “Why bother? Just bring back that nice woman who cooked for me last week. She knows how to make baked chicken.”
I soon realized that it was futile to point out that I was that same woman who had cooked for her last week.
The fascinating thing was that she always recognized Jack. Or at the least, she was always happy to see him. After a while, I wondered if she remembered who he was, or if it even mattered. When Jack came over, she acted as if he was her date, batting her eyelashes and flirting. I always cringed, embarrassed, but Jack always went along with her moods.
“Be careful, or you’ll end up married to a seventy-year-old woman,” I joked.
He smiled. “I always wanted a sugar mama.”
I met Aunt Gillian’s demands for complicated and unhealthy meals, changing her outfits according to her whims, chauffeuring her to various doctor appointments, and acting as her own personal servant. She had been with me ten days when things came to a head.
“I need my cigarettes.”
I was running a bath for her when she spoke from the doorway of the bathroom. This was the first time Aunt Gillian had mentioned the cigarettes. I had never admitted to finding them, and I had assumed that she had accepted my denials. It was hard to tell whether she remembered all that now, but I’d had just about enough of being ordered around in my own home.
“Pardon me?” I turned, plastering a courteous look on my face to hide my annoyance. I had heard her, because she had shouted her demand. As usual, she wore only one of the two hearing aids she needed.
“Go get me some cigarettes.”
I couldn’t stop the frown that creased my forehead when I heard this revised demand. I hoped she would forget about the supply of cigarettes we found (and threw away) in her house, since as far as I knew she hadn’t had any in weeks.
“Cigarettes?” Maybe if I kept playing dumb, she would let it go.
“You heard me.”
I turned back to the tub and shut off the water, feeling with my hand to make sure it wasn’t too hot. I considered whether I should contribute to a bad habit, and then she said it.
“You heard me, you old cow. I need my cigarettes!” Now shouting, my aunt swayed in the doorway as if she were about to lose her balance. I jumped up to grab her so she wouldn’t fall and she swatted me with her purse. I caught it midair with one hand and turned her around with the other, guiding her back toward the sitting area. I guided her into the soft leather recliner and ignored the indignant look on her face.
“Now look, Aunt Gillian,” I began, holding up a hand to silence her. “I’ll cook for you, bathe you, welcome you into my home. I’ll even let you call me an ‘old cow,’ since we’re family. But I will not have you smoking in my house. I don’t care how old you are and how long you’ve been smoking—you’re not going to do it anymore. Not as long as I’m in charge.”
She glared at me, and I wondered which part of what I’d said had stung the most.
“You’re not in charge,” she said, her lips curled, her nostrils flaring. But her voice was weak and too soft to match her words.
I wanted to smile, but didn’t. “Oh, yes, I am. And the sooner you get used to it, the better. You have to let someone else take care of you for once in your life.” I softened my voice so she would know that my words weren’t motivated by spite. “And that someone, like it or not, is me.”
There was a long pause, and she looked at the wall for what seemed like forever. Then she cleared her throat and struggled to her feet, waving off the arm I offered as support.
“You’ve always been bossy. And stubborn. Can I take my bath now, or do you want to yell at me some more?”
I laughed. “Do you want bubbles or not?”
Another important element of my new life as Aunt Gillian’s nurse was time. I had lots of it on my hands, more than I’d ever had in my life. I was left to my own devices between meals and caretaking. Under normal circumstances, my own devices would lead me to lounge and read, or to grade papers when I was teaching. But whenever I sat down with a book, the birth certificate I’d found in Aunt Gillian’s house called to me. Or, at least, that’s what I told myself when I unfolded and looked at it every day.
Lily Jones was born on February 28, 1960, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. No one had ever mentioned anything about us having family in Milwaukee, but then again, no one had ever mentioned Lily at all. This didn’t seem like the kind of thing that would slip someone’s mind, especially if that someone was my aunt and she had had a real daughter out there somewhere to mold into the debutante I would never be. It was obvious that Lily was just another secret that my aunt had kept from me. But this was so big that it made me crave the answers to the questions I’d always had. If Aunt Gillian never told me she had a daughter, what else had she kept from me? About my parents? About me?
Every time I touched the delicate parchment paper, I wanted to ask Aunt Gillian about it, to shake her awake if need be to get answers. But I knew that wasn’t the way to get information from my aunt. Lily’s birth certificate had my mother’s and Aunt Gillian’s maiden name, which raised even more questions. I knew my aunt had been married by that time, but I didn’t know when she got divorced and changed her name from Gillian Jackson back to Gillian Jones. The father was listed as unknown.
Each time I unfolded the paper, I thought of more questions without answers. It wasn’t long before I tried to change that.
One Saturday afternoon, I called Jack. I wanted him to help me, but he was less than enthusiastic.
“I hate to say this, Tina, but maybe you should just leave well enough alone.”
I frowned. “Why? Don’t I have a right to know?”
“Doesn’t your aunt have a right to her own secrets?”
Jack was infuriatingly sensible.
“I’m not trying to force her to give up her secrets. I just want to know if I have a cousin out there somewhere.”
I did plan to confront Aunt Gillian with whatever I found out. But this wasn’t just about her secrets. This was my family, too.
“Are you sure you just don’t like the idea of unraveling a real-life mystery? Maybe you’ve got too much time on your hands.” I could hear the smile in his voice.
I snorted. “Can you blame me? You try spending all day at home taking care of a cranky old lady.”
“No thanks.” He paused, and his voice turned serious. “You know, you could hire someone to take care of her. Since you won’t put her in a home, I mean.”
“I can’t do that. She needs me.”
He cleared his throat. “You don’t think you deserve to have a life, too? One that isn’t limited to cooking for your elderly aunt?”
I sighed. “What life?”
“Dating, being young, enjoying yourself.”
Dating whom? I thought. Jack and I never talked about our romantic lives. I didn’t have one, but I was sure he did. Sometimes, when I called him at night, he didn’t answer, and when I asked where he had been, he acted cagey and vague. Sometimes he smelled of expensive perfume, and sometimes he disappeared for entire weekends. If I’d asked, he would have been honest and told me everything. That was his way. But I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know. I liked to think of Jack as mine, even if it was just a fantasy.
I held up my hand, as though he were in front of me.
“Okay, truce. Let’s get back to the birth certificate. Let’s say you’re me, and you planned to ignore the sensible advice of your sensible friend. How would you go about finding out more about your cousin Lily?”
With a resigned sigh, Jack replied, “Well, you don’t have enou
gh to go on to get anything useful off the internet, and you probably don’t want to spend money on a private investigator just yet. Have you looked through that old trunk you’ve got in the attic? Maybe there’s some information in there.”
“For someone whose policy it is to leave well enough alone, you sure know how to be nosy.”
He laughed. “Call it a gift.”
One of the only times Aunt Gillian had ever talked to me about my parents was when she gave me an old trunkful of my father’s things.
“Most of the time, it’s the women who keep a hope chest,” she told me when I was fifteen years old, pulling an old trunk out of an unused closet at the back of the house. “But your father was the one who liked to save everything.”
I was sitting cross-legged on the floor next to the closet, examining the battered trunk. I rolled my eyes at her use of the outdated term “hope chest.” Aunt Gillian clicked her tongue.
“If you don’t want it, then I’ll keep it.”
I jumped to my feet. I craved information about my parents, and I regretted challenging my aunt.
“I want it.”
She nodded. “Good. Your father would have wanted you to have it.”
It was an old Army trunk, battered and scuffed, covered with stickers and strange markings. My aunt had always kept it in the closet, saying she didn’t want to be reminded of sad times. I’d always been fascinated by the trunk. A few years before Aunt Gillian gave it to me, I had discovered it in the back closet one day when I was snooping around, looking for some clue that my aunt had once been young. Its lock was old and rusted and held fast until Aunt Gillian gave me the key. I hoped it would hold secrets, information or mysteries that would reveal who I was and how I’d come to be. But it held a small metal box with a sturdy lock I couldn’t pick no matter how hard I tried. My aunt claimed she had never seen the smaller box and refused to speculate as to its contents. Once the trunk was mine, I filled it with my own childhood secrets: a perfect white marble that I found at the park playground, the diary I’d gotten for my eighth birthday but had never written in, the wrappers from the Twinkies I was forbidden to eat.
I’d forgotten about the trunk until now. I once again thought the small metal box it held might hold answers to my questions. I kept the trunk in the attic over the garage. It was a Friday, and I waited for Aunt Gillian to go down for her nap before I went looking for it.
I had a thing about spiders and ants, any kind of bugs, so I felt more than a little revulsion as I pulled down the attic ladder and climbed up. My need for answers outweighed my squeamishness, so I held my breath and flipped the light switch. I hadn’t been up there since I moved into the house years ago, and I’d forgotten what I’d deemed so unimportant as to be stored with the bugs and critters. Storage containers were stacked against the walls, and although the attic air was dusty and stale, I saw no signs of life beyond spider webs.
I found the trunk under bins marked “Tina’s old clothes.” The words were written in Jack’s handwriting. Months ago, we had argued about me keeping the clothes after I had lost all the weight.
“You’ve lost all the weight, and kept it off,” he said, ever reasonable. “You should throw all this stuff out.”
I had nodded as if I agreed with him, and, in theory, I did. But every time I tried to put those old clothes in a bag for Goodwill, something stopped me. I couldn’t explain it to Jack. They were a part of me, a reminder of how far I’d come. I couldn’t let them go.
“I need them.”
“You need to throw them away and embrace being thin and healthy.”
I shook my head and tried to smile, but instead I burst into tears and ran out of the room. When I came back later to find Jack and apologize, he and the clothes were gone. He’d left a note on the kitchen table.
“Sorry,” it read in his neat block print.
I couldn’t resist peeking inside the storage bin. When I opened the top, it was as if the ghost of my former self floated out. I pulled out an old lavender sweater and held it up to my body. I could fit two of me in it now. There were huge pairs of jeans in there, folded as if they were waiting for me to bring them back to their rightful place on my closet shelves. I touched my waist, now taut from daily workouts, and I felt like crying.
I closed the container of clothes and moved it aside. The trunk was built solid and had always been heavy, no matter what was inside, but I managed to drag it down the ladder, through the garage and into the kitchen. There I stood, brushing off my hands and looking around for a place to keep it, a place where it would remain private, at least until I’d had a chance to look inside.
Before I could settle on a place, sounds of Aunt Gillian stirring came over the monitor. I shoved the trunk back out into the garage before hurrying down the hall.
Chapter 14
“Ten weeks is a long time”
My failed liaison with Jack was typical of my adult dating disasters. I’d grown smarter about many things in my life as I aged, but men and relationships were not among those things. Four months before I went to see Aunt Gillian, I was in the middle of my Slave Narratives seminar when I felt the prickle of discomfort that told me I was being watched. Of course, in a class of twenty-five students, I was always being watched by those listening with intensity and those pretending to do so. I was used to that kind of scrutiny. But I was aware, and always had been, of being watched in a more personal way. I’d learned the hard way back in high school that it was better for people like me to fly under the radar—there was less chance of ridicule and harassment that way. Now I still felt most comfortable when people looked through me rather than at me.
Without missing a beat of the lecture, I looked around the small seminar room filled with long tables and uncomfortable chairs, wanting to find the culprit and at the same time wishing he or she would just go away. But high school had also taught me that knowing the enemy was better than being surprised. I saw the usual faces, whose names I had yet to learn, and none of them would meet my gaze. Except one.
He sat straight in his seat, a sharp contrast to the others who sloughed in various poses of indifference. He was a tidy dresser, wearing a golf shirt tucked into his jeans. Jeans that were pressed, I noted, with sharp creases up the middle of the legs. I wondered at this. What college student wore golf shirts and creased jeans?
He looked young, maybe twenty or twenty-one at most. The seminar was available to juniors and seniors, and I had found that only the most ambitious of seniors took the class because I required too many papers. So he was a junior, I figured. Perhaps an overachiever, I thought, glancing again at his creased pant legs.
He sported a shock of wild, curly hair that surrounded his head like a fluffy brown cloud. He nodded as I lectured, his hair bobbing away as he moved his head up and down. There was a sweetness in his face, with clear, honey-brown skin and cheeks filled out in a way that reminded me of the way boys looked before they sprouted mustaches and muscles.
I was disconcerted by the way his gaze never wavered when I looked at him, looked away and back again. I wanted him to look away, to be embarrassed, to stop watching me as if I were fascinating. I didn’t want to be fascinating. I just wanted to be left alone.
I frowned at him and continued my lecture, refusing to look back at him for the rest of the class, even though I could feel his eyes on me the entire time. When the class ended, I looked up just in time to see him smile at me as he handed in his paper. Andrew Hopeman. I nodded at him and turned to the next student. Andrew Hopeman wanted something from me. The question was, what?
* * *
Later that day, I had a number of student conferences scheduled. When the last student left, I returned to the paperwork on my desk, wanting to get out of the office as soon as possible. It was a beautiful February day, the kind of day that reminded me why I lived in South Florida. I thought I might go for a run, or convince Jack to join me for dinner at an outdoor café on the water.
I was alone for just a
moment before I heard the door creak open. I looked up to see Andrew Hopeman smiling down at me.
I looked down, shuffling the papers in front of me. I always got flustered when people were interested in me, for whatever reason. It was a residual of being fat, or being an outcast. Too much attention was never a good thing for a fat girl. It meant ridicule was on its way, sooner or later. Even though I was no longer overweight, my thinking hadn’t caught up with my body.
After a few seconds, I looked up, smiling my best I’m-in-control smile. I gestured to the seat in front of my desk and waited as he adjusted his body to the uncomfortable chair. I was determined not to speak first, lest I reveal my discomfort.
“Hi, Dr. Jones. I’m Drew Hope,” he said, holding out his hand. I shook it, noting that his hand felt soft and cool.
“What can I do for you, Drew?”
Drew’s smile broadened. “I need a tutor.”
We looked at each other for a moment. I pretended to mull over his request, but I wondered why he called himself Drew rather than Andy or Andrew. Did this say something about a person? I knew a guy named Drew in college, and I hated him. He was in my freshman-year political-science class, he was a Republican and I had recently discovered that I was among the most liberal of Democrats. One day he proposed that people on welfare were lazy. I had called him a fascist.
This student neither looked nor sounded like that guy; still, the name rubbed me the wrong way.
“You want me to find you a tutor?”
He shook his head. “I want you to tutor me.”
I raised my eyebrows. “I don’t usually tutor my own students, Drew. If you need help with something specific from class, well, maybe I can direct you to one of the graduate students,” I said. His smile faded.
Drew cleared his throat. “Well, that’s the thing, Doctor. See, I want to study slave narratives in graduate school, so I wanted to talk to someone with a lot of experience so I can do well in this class and get ideas for my senior thesis.” He rushed his words together, and for the first time since he had entered my office, Drew looked as uncomfortable as I felt.