by Africa Fine
I knew Monica wasn’t buying it, but she let me off the hook.
“Tomorrow morning, and you’d better not keep me waiting.”
* * *
Thanksgiving was peaceful. Like me, Monica had never gotten along with my aunt. Since Monica used to be overweight, too, my aunt disapproved of her as well. Unlike me, Monica said exactly what she thought instead of trying to subvert and avoid. They had several tense but polite discussions—everything from politics to Monica’s dress size (back when we were both still overweight). Monica always said that Aunt Gillian meant well, but that was no excuse to let her get away with murder.
At first, Aunt Gillian showed no signs that she recognized Monica. She treated her with cool civility, as if she were a stranger instead of my first and oldest girlfriend.
“It’s just as well,” I told Monica while my aunt watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade on television. “There’s no sense arguing with an old lady.”
During dinner, we were quiet, eating the turkey and trimmings I’d ordered from a gourmet market near campus. Aunt Gillian broke the silence.
“You might be skinny now, but you’ll be fat again. I can always tell when someone’s going to end up being fat.”
I looked up, assuming she was talking to me, but my aunt was staring right at Monica. I tensed, readying myself for battle.
Monica had always bristled at my aunt’s barely veiled insults over the years, so I didn’t think she would take well to overt cruelty. But instead of fighting back, she just laughed.
“Well, Ms. Jones, we’ll see. We’ll see.”
Aunt Gillian laughed along with Monica, and I just shook my head and dug into my food.
Elaine returned the next day, so Monica and I played tennis in the morning, and then headed out to the mall to battle the Christmas shoppers. Neither of us planned to buy much, but there was nothing like the spectacle of holiday deal-hunters at the Town Center Mall for pure entertainment.
We later sat outside Starbucks sipping coffee.
“So what are you going to do?” Monica loved to start conversations out of the blue, always assuming I’d know what she was talking about. And most of the time, I knew. In graduate school, we used to let off steam with friends by playing Taboo, a board game that was a low-budget version of the $10,000 Pyramid game show we all remembered from our childhoods. Monica and I were famous for the time we won for the word “oil.” Describing the word to her using only three clues, I looked at her and said: Uter. Light. Beep. Uter was the name of her ancient, baby-blue Volkswagen Golf, which was falling apart and distinguished by a bumper sticker that professed its objection to irradiated foods. Monica tried for months to get the sticker off, having no strong feelings one way or another about irradiated foods. She finally gave up and decided that the faded sticker added to Uter’s dubious charm.
Uter was also known for a faulty oil light. At least, the light was faulty that particular day, since it stayed on and beeped at frequent intervals the entire day as we ran various errands.
Unimpressed, our friends accused us of cheating and refused to play with us unless we split up. It wasn’t cheating—it was just the uncanny ability Monica and I had to communicate and to remember things that other people never even notice.
But today, I feigned ignorance.
“Do about what?”
“About the doctor. About Jack.”
Monica assumed I was avoiding the subject, but I’d thought of little else but what she had said, and about Jack, all week. The trouble was, I didn’t have an answer.
“I don’t know, Mon. Jack’s really mad at me. You didn’t see his face—I wouldn’t be surprised if he wanted nothing to do with me.”
Monica grimaced. “Come on. Don’t be melodramatic. You and Jack have been friends too long to let the doc come between you.”
She paused to take a sip and tip her head toward a woman wearing a very expensive, very tasteless brown leather jumpsuit.
I smiled while peeking at the woman.
“Do you want to date this guy?”
“I don’t know. He’s cute. He’s a doctor. What more can you ask?”
Monica looked at me. “A lot, Tina.”
I nodded. “I have no idea what to do. So instead of sitting here talking about it, let’s go see if anything’s on sale at Coach.”
Monica smiled. “Coach doesn’t have sales.”
I stood up and grabbed her empty cup. “Okay, then—let’s go spend too much money on ourselves at Coach.”
Monica followed me, laughing.
Saturday, I received an envelope from Ohio Vital Records. It was my birth certificate. I put it on my desk, left Aunt Gillian with Elaine, and drove Monica to the airport. I was relieved when she hugged me good-bye without saying anything more about Marvin and Jack.
When I returned home, I sat down with Aunt Gillian on the back patio. I felt as if I hadn’t spent enough time with her, that I owed her more of me, even though when she was healthy, we had both been happier apart. It was a perfect seventy-degree day, and I poured tall glasses of lemonade for us.
After a few minutes of companionable silence, it occurred to me that my aunt and I had little to say to each other. Most of our interactions before had been arguments; we couldn’t even talk about the weather without fighting over which forecaster to believe. She wasn’t the same Aunt Gillian she had been, and I didn’t know how to handle our new relationship.
My aunt looked happy enough to be sitting there. She had been to the beauty salon the day before and had her still-long salt-and-pepper hair styled. She turned her face to the sun and closed her eyes, smiling at the feel of the warmth on her cheeks.
If I squinted, she looked just as she did when I was a child, lovely and self-possessed. Except on this day, she looked more beautiful to me than she had. There was no disapproval lining the sides of her well-shaped mouth. She began to hum a tune that I couldn’t make out, and I was reminded of her long-ago dream to be a singer.
Today was a good day. She was alert and aware but pleasant. I should have been grateful for days like these, days when she seemed happy, but they made me sad. This was not the real Aunt Gillian. I was never more conscious of her Alzheimer’s than I was on days like today.
As we sat there, I ran over the list from the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America in my head. One item came to mind: “7. Do cognitive stimulation activities with your loved one. Listening to music, word puzzles, and memory games can easily be done at home.”
Memory games. I turned to Aunt Gillian.
“Tell me about my parents. Tell me about Lily.”
Chapter 23
“She decided to keep the baby”
From the time she was five years old, Gillian knew something was different about her mother. Marianne Graham Jones was a tiny woman, short and curvaceous, like a miniature version of a regular woman. She dressed in the most fashionable clothes of the day, wearing elegant shoulder pads and cinched-waist dresses with sky-high, square-toed heels. Marianne grew up during the 1920s, in Baltimore’s heyday. Blacks had been a significant presence in Baltimore since the 1700s, and they fought on both sides of the Revolutionary War because the British offered freedom to escaped slaves. Even though slavery was legal in Maryland, free blacks founded churches and helped slaves escape. Marianne’s parents always bragged that there were more free blacks than slaves in Baltimore, and no other Southern city could boast the same.
In Baltimore, there was segregation, just like everywhere else, but the Grahams were among the black elite and owned a drugstore along Pennsylvania Avenue. Her parents were among the 25,000 free blacks who had populated the city in the last century, and her father worked his way up from being a dockworker in Fells Point to owning his store. They were African-American royalty, and Marianne never let anyone forget it.
Gillian was born in 1934, and by the time she was five years old the Great Depression had depleted most of her family’s finances and the world was rallying to fight Hitler. But Gillian’s m
other did not sacrifice even a bit of glamour and style. The world might have been at war, but Marianne didn’t think that was any excuse to let herself go. Gillian was a serious child, but she yearned for a mother who would play and laugh. Marianne only laughed at her own jokes and deemed her daughter’s games child’s play.
“Why don’t you go find some friends to play with? But not that little Bell girl, what’s her name?”
“Dorothy.”
“Right. Dorothy Bell. Her family is rather low class. But find one of the other girls so you can stop bothering me all day.”
She had long, light-brown hair that was almost blonde in certain lights, and she wore it around her shoulders, curled under in a romantic pageboy, or tied back and covered with a wide-brimmed hat for special occasions. Her hazel eyes were large and round, always rimmed in kohl and mascara. She could have passed for white, and in fact she had three sisters who did so. Only a slight fullness in Marianne’s lips and her olive skin tone hinted that her parents had been among Baltimore’s class of free blacks many years ago.
Marianne not only did not care to pass for white, but she in fact married the darkest man in town, barbershop owner Franklin Jones, when she was fifteen and he was twenty-five. Franklin Jones had attended Morgan State University, and there he developed the entrepreneurial spirit and confidence that made him the catch of Baltimore’s elite. Marianne was precocious and pretty, so she caught him before any of the older girls had much of a chance.
These were not the most unusual things about Marianne, not the things that made Gillian uneasy around her mother from a young age. Her ever-changing moods were what convinced Gillian that there was something not quite right about her charming mother. She worked part-time as a hairdresser for Baltimore’s black elite, claiming she couldn’t just sit inside the house and do nothing while Franklin worked all day. He thought it would be more seemly if she did stay home, but Marianne got whatever she wanted, and when Gillian was old enough to attend a private school for black girls of means and reputation, Marianne worked.
Most of the time, she was talkative, sunny, and fun. She was gregarious enough that the women in the salon viewed her as a little sister (since she looked no more than fifteen years old throughout her adulthood) rather than a competitor. But there were other times when Marianne was morose and depressed, taking to her room for days at a time without eating or bathing. No one could, or would, articulate a name for Marianne’s problem, but no one was prepared to call her crazy, since the outside world didn’t see these dark moods. Only her family knew that everything about Marianne Graham Jones was not as it seemed.
Gillian refused to pretend that everything was normal. She was the only one who voiced the opinion that her mother’s dark moods were frightening in the way they changed Marianne into a stranger. But Franklin told her to stop talking crazy, and Gillian learned to keep her distance from her mother, holding her at arm’s length and focusing on her studies and pleasing Franklin.
Gillian idolized her father. He was a small man who nonetheless towered over his even tinier wife. He was wiry and muscled, and Gillian loved nothing more than the feel of his arms around her, protecting her, loving her. For many years, she was his only child, his baby girl, and she reveled in that role. Franklin was quiet and gentle, letting his wife do the talking when she was up and caring for her when she was down. His girls, Marianne and Gillian, were his princesses, he told them often, and he treated them as such. Nothing was too expensive, too outrageous, for his girls. His barbershop was prosperous, and he made sure that his wife and daughter were outfitted in the style befitting Baltimore’s black bourgeoisie in the nineteen thirties and forties.
In 1950, Gillian turned sixteen and everything changed. During March of that year, Marianne suffered her worst episode yet, ranting and raving through the streets of their neighborhood wearing just her nightgown and a pair of snow boots. Franklin was worried, and Gillian was embarrassed. Marianne was persuaded to go to the doctor, who told her she was suffering from exhaustion due to her busy schedule of clients at the salon and the fact that she was pregnant. Marianne retreated to her bedroom after hearing the news, sobbing. Franklin was thrilled. In November, Brenda Graham Jones was born. That year, no one thought to throw Gillian a sweet-sixteen party as was the custom for her family. Everyone was too busy admiring baby Brenda.
The birth was a difficult one for Gillian’s mother. She labored for days, and passed out before she could push the baby out. Brenda was taken by forceps while Marianne slept, and it seemed to Gillian that she never truly woke up again. After coming home from the hospital, Marianne shuffled around the house, looking at the floor or staring into the air, paying little attention to the baby. Consulted once more, the doctor continued to diagnose exhaustion and prescribe tranquilizers, which made Gillian’s mother even more of a zombie who could not be persuaded to breast-feed or hold baby Brenda.
When Brenda was three months old, Gillian came home from school and found her mother dressed in her best church dress and heels, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, bathing the baby. Gillian had not seen her mother in anything other than a bathrobe in weeks, nor had she seen Marianne touch the baby in any significant way since coming home from the hospital. Gillian set down her school bag, which was heavy with homework and books, and she stood in the doorway peering at her mother. A closer look showed that Marianne was holding Brenda’s head under the water. She would never forget the serene look on Marianne’s face as she turned to Gillian and spoke.
“God told me to kill Brenda. He said she is evil.”
Gillian snatched the wet baby away from her mother, slammed the door behind her and called her father, who called the doctor. When the doctor arrived, Marianne called him a black devil and tried to scratch his eyes out. She was sent to the best mental hospital Franklin could afford, a place where people sent family members who would not, or could not, behave. Gillian saw it just once, when her father took her to visit Marianne soon after she had been committed.
As she trudged along the hallway, Gillian’s chest tightened. She hadn’t known what to expect, especially the smell. Stale cigarettes, rancid milk, something coppery and sour that she couldn’t identify. She fought the tears that welled in her eyes as her feet reached the door of Marianne’s room. She could hear the television blasting in the room.
Gillian wiped her eyes, took a shallow breath and hitched her bag on her shoulder. She brushed her knuckles against the door, waiting to be invited in. When the wait seemed as if it would never end, Gillian realized she had been foolish. Did she really expect her mother to answer the door? Sighing, she pulled open the oak door and stepped inside.
The smells of Ben-Gay, Lysol, and the musk of unwashed bodies flared her nostrils as the door slammed shut. Glancing around the shabby room, Gillian was relieved that her mother’s roommate was out, although she had left behind stains on bedsheets that had not been changed.
Someone had tried to make this horrible place a bit brighter. Homemade curtains draped the windows, and the generic pictures of wild flowers were hung on the pale green walls. Still, the room was cramped and airless, more a cell than anything else.
The room was too warm. Gillian shrugged off her wool jacket and set down her bag. She slowly walked toward her mother’s bed, being careful not to touch anything. Marianne turned to glance at her, and then returned her gaze to the black-and-white television screen.
Gillian perched for a moment on the edge of the lumpy bed. She was taken aback at the sight of the feeble woman sitting up in the narrow hospital bed. The only trace of Marianne’s beauty that remained was her hair, which was still shiny and long despite not having been washed recently.
Her face was creased and her brow furrowed, as if the program on TV was vexing. Gillian unconsciously smoothed her hands over her own slim hips as she took in Marianne’s emaciated frame in the pale pink bathrobe she had brought from home.
She watched her mother and searched for something to say. They had nev
er had a normal mother-daughter connection when Marianne was well, and now that she was confined to the sanitarium Gillian had no idea how to talk to her mother, or what to feel. More than anything, Gillian wished she were somewhere else, anywhere else. The smell was beginning to make her feel sick, and she held her breath.
Then Gillian realized that what she felt most was anger. Why couldn’t her mother have been like the other mothers? Why had she tried to do something so horrible that Gillian couldn’t let herself remember Marianne’s eyes when she had tried to drown Brenda? Why was it Gillian’s job to stop Marianne?
Gillian hated the sight of her mother.
Marianne ignored her eldest daughter during the visit, instead keeping her eyes glued to American Bandstand playing on the television. Gillian never went to see her again.
* * *
Gillian did not have the luxury of sibling rivalry, though she resented the way Franklin’s eyes lit up when he came home and picked up his beloved Brenda. While Gillian played mother to her baby sister, Franklin focused all the love he had once held for Marianne onto the baby. Gillian had never seen him so enthralled, cooing at the baby, even feeding her whenever he could. Many times, Gillian woke in the night to hear Brenda’s cries, but by the time she got to the nursery, her father was already there, holding the baby like a precious piece of blown glass, afraid to break her, afraid to let go.
Franklin used to be proud of Gillian’s academic accomplishments, bragging about her rank at the top of her class at the best high school in the city. Now he bragged about how soon Brenda learned to walk, how clear and high her voice was when she called his name, how much she resembled an angel. By the time Brenda was two, she was the spitting image of Marianne, with golden hair, tawny skin, and the ability to charm anyone in her path. Franklin never spoke of his wife to anyone, not even Gillian, although he visited her every week. In the 1950s, it was shameful to have a crazy relative, shameful to be institutionalized. Her disease had a name by then, manic depression, but only doctors and families coping with the disease knew it. Everyone else, especially blacks, saw Marianne’s exhaustion as weakness.