by Africa Fine
“So is that a yes?”
I looked up at my darkened house. I thought about how long it had been since I slept next to a man and about the musky scent of Marvin’s cologne. I turned to look into his green eyes, and I knew I could never date him. I would never trust his attraction, never believe that he wasn’t looking over my shoulder for something better.
When he leaned over to kiss me, I pulled away.
“Thanks for dinner.” I slammed the door and ran up to my door before he could try to convince me otherwise.
* * *
Inside, I wasn’t sure what I planned to do. I peeked in at Aunt Gillian, and then plopped down on the sofa and turned the television on so low I couldn’t hear it. Then I picked up the telephone.
“Hi, Jack. It’s me.” There was a long pause.
“Hi.” He didn’t sound angry, just awkward. He sounded how I felt. I tried not to think about what Monica had said about him being in love with me. I didn’t believe it. I was scared to believe it. I wanted to believe it.
“How was Phoenix?”
“Warm. Dry. Dull. My father somehow turned into an old man. It was the longest three days of my life.”
I smiled. “Your father is an old man.”
“Maybe so. But nobody told him to start wearing argyle sweaters in eighty-degree heat and talking with a Yiddish accent.”
We laughed, and just like that, everything was back to normal.
“I need to talk to you,” I told him.
Jack sighed. “If it’s about the whole Dr. Marvin thing, forget it. I was out of line. You can date whomever you choose—it’s none of my business.”
Disappointment flooded through me. I admitted to myself that I wanted my love life to be Jack’s business. But I knew I was right, and Monica had it all wrong. He wasn’t in love with me. We were just friends.
“You don’t have to apologize. It’s not going to work out with him. And that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. It’s about Aunt Gillian. And Lily.”
I rushed my words together, partly because of my urgent need to talk to him about the story my aunt had told, partly because I realized that the entire time I was with Marvin I was comparing him to Jack.
Jack understood. “I’ll be right over.”
By the time he arrived, I’d opened a bottle of the cabernet I knew he liked. We sat down on the sofa and I folded my legs underneath me, preparing to tell him the Story of Gillian. He listened and refilled our glasses. It was close to midnight when I finished.
The house was quiet. Aunt Gillian was sleeping, the sound of her regular breathing whispering through the monitor. The only lights in the house were the small lamp and the reflection from my neighbors’ Christmas display. They always put up their decorations right after Thanksgiving, sometimes that very night. I disapproved of the gaudy display of inflatable Santas and moving, lighted reindeer for aesthetic reasons, but I couldn’t help liking the spirit it brought to the block.
“Wow.” Jack shook his head.
“I know. I found out so much, and I have more questions than ever.”
“Like, where’s Lily?”
I nodded. “And my parents. I still don’t know much about my parents.”
Jack looked thoughtful. “Whatever happened with that trunk you told me about last summer? Did you ever look inside?”
I shook my head and smiled. “Can you pick a lock?”
Good engineers, I’ve learned from Jack, always have tools with them. No matter what, they have a love of seeing how things work.
“So you carry this toolbox in your car just in case of an engineering emergency?” I teased as I watched him insert a narrow pick into the lock of the metal box inside the battered trunk.
The lock made a tiny click and popped open. “Smart-ass, would you like to see what’s inside or not?” He handed the box to me.
I tried to smile, but my hand shook as I took the box. I took a deep breath and opened it. The first thing I saw was a sheaf of papers, folded and stuck together. I opened it. Jeremiah’s name was at the top of the page, and the text had been typed on an ancient typewriter by someone who either never made mistakes or had fixed them all. It was a short story about a little girl.
“He only talked about writing stories for other people. He never talked about his own writing.”
“Let’s read it.”
I held the papers and he read over my shoulder.
* * *
Grace
By Jeremiah Jackson
On the first day of kindergarten, Grace woke up an hour before her mother could come and gently shake her awake, before her father could promise his famous whole-wheat pancakes for breakfast.
Tiptoeing through the house that was just big enough for the three of them, she thought about her new role as one of the big kids. She would ride the yellow bus. She would carry a lunchbox. And she would wear leather shoes with hard soles. She begged her mother to let her wear the red velvet dress usually reserved for church. It was not velvet weather. The August heat created a haze along the Milwaukee streets, but her mother agreed that Grace could wear red velvet on her first day of school. Her mother even attached her favorite pin—a white bunny with pinkish ears and a wide grin—to the straps of the jumper, just above the button on the left side, just as she liked it.
During the back-to-school shopping trip, Grace had begged for black patent-leather shoes—with heels. But her mother stood firm in the belief that a four-year-old girl had little use for heels. The compromise was plain black Mary Janes—no heel. That wasn’t too disappointing, since she got to wear her hair down instead of braided. Braids were for babies.
She felt an inch taller and a year more mature every time her mother slipped the hard-bristled brush through her hair. And when she looked in the mirror, Grace fell in love. Her hair waved around her face like folds of black silk, touching her shoulders before whispering across her back. It was the first time Grace understood why people said she looked just like her mother. She understood why men stopped to stare at her mother in the…. Her skin was several shades darker than her mother’s, more like caramel. Her hair curled tightly, not hanging straight to the small of her back like her mother’s. But seeing herself in that mirror, on the first day of school, she felt a bit of the magic her soft-spoken mother held in her dusky brown eyes.
“Where’s Grace?” her father had joked at the breakfast table. “Annie, what happened to our little girl?” He looked at his wife with mock concern.
“Daddy!” she giggled, accidentally spitting pancake crumbs onto the table. “I’m right here!”
Her father glanced at her in confusion. “Last night I put my little girl to bed. She had braids and wore Wonder Woman pajamas. I don’t know who you are, ma’am, but you’re a grown-up lady. My Grace is a little girl.”
She grabbed her daddy’s hand and shook her head, excited. “No, Daddy, look, it’s me! Even though I’m a big girl now, I’m still Grace!”
Earl peered over his wire-rimmed glasses. “Well, I didn’t even recognize you!” He laughed and hugged Grace. “You look lovely, pumpkin. You are going to be the smartest, most beautiful big girl in kindergarten, right Annie?”
Her mother smiled gently and brushed up the pancake crumbs.
“You better believe it!”
She beamed at her parents and ran to grab her lunchbox off the counter.
During the drive to Holy Angels Catholic School, she sat with her nose pressed against the window of her mother’s red Thunderbird. The air-conditioning coursing through the car allowed Grace to blow steam on the window. She tried to draw shapes on the window before her breath faded away. She wished the drive to kindergarten wasn’t so long.
In front of the school, she wiggled out of her mother’s grasp and bounced out of the car with her new backpack. She skipped into the school yard, swinging her head from side to side so she could feel her hair swish and rustle around her ears, singing:
Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack
With silver buttons, buttons, buttons
All down her back, back, back
But her throat dried up like a piece of stale toast as she looked around the vast yard. There were kids everywhere. Hundreds, maybe thousands of kids. Big kids. Much bigger than Grace. They sat underneath tall oak trees. They trampled the soft grass in the field. They crowded along the stairs to the school.
None of them witnessed her loose, flowing hair. No one said anything about her red velvet dress. No one even noticed her as they continued with their games of tag and kickball, hopscotch and marbles.
She stood there for a moment looking for any friendly face. Finally, in the corner of the yard next to a patch of drooping tulips, Grace spotted a group of four brown girls and she walked over. She reasoned they would welcome a new friend, especially one with red velvet and swirling hair. Why wouldn’t they? Grace was always looking for new friends.
“Hi, I’m Grace. Today’s my first day in kindergarten,” she announced. Three of the girls just looked at her and smirked. The tallest one stared down at Grace without smiling at all. She wore brown khaki shorts with big flowers on the pockets, a white eyelet shirt with a Peter Pan collar, and brown sandals. No heels. Her skin was dark brown and ashy, as if she had been rubbing dried mud on herself. Her hair was short and messy, twisted into tiny braids that circled her head haphazardly.
“We’re in first grade,” the tall girl sniffed, turning back to their game. They were taking turns grabbing each other’s hands and scratching. She watched silently.
“Wanna play?” the tall girl asked, her lips curled up at the ends. Grace nodded.
“Hold out your hand.” She hesitated briefly before reaching out to the girl. As the tall girl held their hands together for a moment, Grace noticed how small and yellowish her hand looked next to the other girl’s mahogany fingers. Just as she relaxed her palms and smiled, the tall girl made deep, moon-shaped dents on Grace’s knuckles that bled immediately. She couldn’t remember anything hurting as much as this. She felt like throwing up as the tall girl wiped Grace’s blood on her dingy shorts and gave the other girls high fives. Grace pulled away from the tall girl, stumbled and landed butt-first on the damp grass, leaving grass stains that could never be removed from the red velvet. In tears, she groped her way off the ground and ran into the school, leaving their laughter behind her.
“I thought you said you wanted to play!” the tall girl cackled.
Grace couldn’t wait to get home and be comforted. Her father offered to go down and warn those little girls and their parents about hurting his little girl. Her mother baked her chocolate-chip cookies and told her that everything was going to be all right. She also retold the story over and over, to family, friends, and when Grace was older she suspected her mother told the story to complete strangers as well. Her mother believed this story taught a lesson. Grace later thought that her mom just couldn’t decide on what that lesson was.
“Grace, she was much smaller than these girls, just a baby really—she had no idea how things worked, so she chose some friends. Unfortunately, they were the wrong kinds of girls, you know what I mean, so they hurt this tiny child who never did anything to them,” her mother recounted at Grace’s eighth birthday party.
“The girls, they came up to my Grace and scratched her for no reason, but my Grace, she held her own, marched right into that school and didn’t worry about those ragamuffins,” she gushed at Aunt Lacey’s Christmas dinner the year Grace turned twelve.
“When those nasty girls—they were in what, the fourth or fifth grade, right Grace?—scratched my baby, you know what she did? She scratched right back,” her mother crowed at Grace’s high school graduation.
But Grace’s mother was wrong. It wasn’t a story about a helpless girl. It wasn’t a story about a determined girl. And it wasn’t the story of a tough girl. It’s just the story of Grace, who still thinks twice before she reaches out to strangers.
“I like it,” Jack said when we finished reading. “That little girl sounds tough, like you and Gillian.”
I frowned. “Aunt Gillian and I aren’t anything alike. Anyway, I wonder why Aunt Gillian kept this story all this time. She made me think she hated Jeremiah.”
“Well, at some point she must have loved him. That doesn’t just go away.”
I nodded. We looked inside the metal box again and we found a smaller black velvet case. I thought of Russian stacking dolls as I showed it to Jack.
“What do you think it is?”
He raised his hands in the air, palms upward. “I’m an engineer, not a magician.”
I laughed and shoved it into his hands. “I’m scared to open it.”
Jack opened the box. It contained a ring with a single tear-drop diamond.
“A ring,” I said, snatching the box from Jack and looking for a note, or anything that could explain it.
“An engagement ring,” Jack noted.
“From Jeremiah again?”
Jack shook his head. “Who knows?”
I looked outside at the blinking Christmas decorations for a long while. Jack put his arm around me and we sat watching the inflatable snowman bob in the mild wind and trying to come up with an explanation for the ring and the story. I woke up the next morning to the sounds of Elaine’s key at the door. Jack was asleep next to me, his head on my shoulder, his arm still around my waist.
Chapter 25
“Are you a quitter?”
Aunt Gillian fell and broke her hip on Christmas Eve. Elaine was spending the holiday week with us, sleeping in the guest room, and helping me bake cookies in an effort to make this Christmas seem like the ones I’d always craved. Christmas had always been the time when I most missed having parents. I’d watch other kids shopping with their mothers, ice skating with their fathers, and I missed what I never had. I watched Miracle on 34th Street every year and believed that was how real families celebrated the holidays. I listened to the Jackson 5 Christmas album and wished I had so many brothers and sisters, who would share the joy of the season with me, sing carols, leave cookies for Santa Claus, who we would believe was real.
Aunt Gillian always did her best to make the holiday festive, inviting over neighbors and acquaintances for tea on Christmas Eve, urging me to invite friends over every year. But I never had many friends, and the people from the neighborhood always seemed a bit startled to be invited to the home of a woman who, for the most part, refused all but the most superficial interaction with them. I always believed she was doing it for my benefit, to make up for the family I didn’t have, to make up for the social life that eluded me because of my weight. Christmas Eve also happened to be my birthday, so the yearly tea doubled as a birthday celebration that only Aunt Gillian and I knew about, since I forbade her from announcing it to our guests.
After hearing Aunt Gillian’s story, it occurred to me that those Christmas Eve celebrations were also for her, to fill the gap left by her own family. I still had no idea what happened to her father, Franklin, and I had no idea how my mother came to be in the Midwest with my father when, as far as I knew, she had grown up in Baltimore. But what I did know about my aunt was that her family had not been what she wanted, or needed. We had that in common.
So I baked cookies, bought red and green sweaters for Jack and Elaine to wear (Elaine loved hers; Jack claimed not to look good in hunter green but wore his anyway), played Christmas carols, and tried to create the perfect Christmas. I was doing it for myself, but I was also doing it for Aunt Gillian, although I wasn’t sure she would know what was happening. Over the last month, her moments of lucidity decreased, to the point where she spent most of her days in the amiable state of passivity that made me long for the old Gillian. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I spent my days preparing for finals and the end of the semester, and my evenings trying to talk to Aunt Gillian, to coax her into telling me more about herself, about Lily, about my parents. Some nights, she looked at me
with no recognition at all, as if I were a stranger who was making unreasonable demands on her time. Other nights, she knew me but refused to talk.
“Ernestine, what have I always told you about living in the past?” she asked me one evening after I asked about Lily. “What’s done is done.”
The comment had finality to it, barring further questioning. I decided on a different approach another night. We were in Aunt Gillian’s bedroom, and I was helping her into her pajamas and tying her hair into a scarf to prepare her for bedtime. This was one of the nights when I was familiar to her, and I could feel her shoulders relax under my touch.
“Whose engagement ring is that in the box?” I thought that if I asked her in a way that suggested the continuation of a previous conversation, it might jog her memory. My aunt looked at me and smiled.
“It’s mine. Ernest gave it to me.”
She began humming that same Billie Holiday tune that she had sung when she first moved in with me, her face set in a distant smile that suggested memories that pleased her. I frowned. She was confused again. Why would my father give Aunt Gillian an engagement ring? I wondered as I helped her to her bed. I feared that her disease had given me a gift in the story she had already told me. But it might also have robbed me of what I truly wanted: to know who I was.
Christmas Eve morning, Aunt Gillian was watching television on the sofa, and Elaine and I were quiet as we worked in the kitchen. This was one of the many things I liked about her. She was great to talk to, but neither of us felt an obligation to fill the silence when we were together. The only sounds in the house were the chattering and giggles of the hosts of The View, which Aunt Gillian liked to watch every day. Before Alzheimer’s, I was certain that she would have hated Star Jones and the rest, but now, their cackling voices soothed her in some mysterious way.
As Elaine removed the first batch of cookies from the oven, I went to the living room to check on my aunt. Jack burst into the foyer and into the living room, holding an enormous bouquet of flowers and a giant balloon with the number “35” written in festive lettering. He began singing before I could yell at him for reminding me of how old I was getting. My mouth fell open as Monica followed him through the door, adding her voice to an off-key rendition of the birthday song. Elaine, who had walked up behind me, began clapping and laughing along with Jack and Monica at the surprised expression on my face.