Implosion

by Elizabeth W. Garber

  Junior year continued after the January 1970 break, but my day was punctuated with tourniquets tightened around my arm, the prick and shove of the needle, blood filling more tubes. Now every four hours. Checking to see if my kidney was still seeping blood.

  My mother called one morning. “Oh sweetie, I feel so bad. I can’t make it today. I’m got two final exams before I have to race home for the boys.”

  “I’m okay, Mommy.” In the hospital, I’d started calling her Mommy again, not Jo. “Do great on your exams. I’m so proud of you. I’m studying the college guide book you gave me. There are so many cool colleges.”

  “That’s great. I’ll see you in the morning and you can tell me about them.” Then she added, her voice hopeful, with a forced cheerfulness. “I think your dad will be able to come by after work today, if his meetings don’t go too late.”

  All day I waited.

  After lunch, my nurse helped me go for a walk. I shuffled in slippers, tried to hold onto the totally embarrassing jonnie, with my other arm connected to a stream of tubes on the IV pole she pushed along. My back ached where I’d hit the telephone pole, my stomach hurt from no food for days, and my legs were wobbly, but I was proud when we reached the window at the end of the hallway. I sat in a chair to rest. The hospital was on a hill. Below me, like a scale model of a mismatched toy city, was Mount Auburn, with beautiful old mansions turned into offices, streets of old brick row houses, and just beyond, the University of Cincinnati. My dad’s high rise dorm was rising to tower twenty-seven stories over all of this. Someday it would be covered with mirror glass, and would look sleek and silvery like in the architectural rendering at Dad’s office. But now it was a tower of empty spaces, a grid of empty rooms. Cranes on the top floor hauled up piles of materials and took them to different levels. They were under a deadline to be ready for students next year.

  I showed my nurse, a stocky black woman. “My dad is the architect of that tower. If he’s not too busy, he’ll come visit today.”

  She nodded, “You must be proud of your dad. That’s really something.”

  I studied the grid of streets, finding the curve in William Howard Taft Road where his office was upstairs in the brick house with the turret. I was pretty sure I could see the roof.

  “All right honey, we’ve got to get you back to bed. Don’t want to wear you out.”

  All that long afternoon I read about colleges. I found the ones my mother’s parents and siblings had gone to. Like memorizing nursery rhymes, I had learned to recite their colleges and where they were professors. The names of colleges were like pearls in a fine necklace: Amherst, Oxford, Kenyon, NYU, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, with Harvard the diamond at the center. My aunts went to Swarthmore and Mt. Holyoke, but then they got married and that was it. Even my grandmother had a masters in Philosophy and English from the University of Michigan.

  In that family, my mother was a disappointment. Her academic family was terribly upset with her leaving college. Years later, helping my youngest brother, Hubbard, learn to read, she discovered someone who struggled with reading the same way she had. The words flipped around the page for him like tiles falling off a Scrabble board. Meeting with his teachers year after year, she ignored the ones who said that he was lazy and lacked incentive, and found the ones who understood. Now there was a name for this. Dyslexia. They taught her how to tutor him. She sat with him every night at the kitchen table until he was able to read on his own. Her reading and writing improved, until she had felt brave enough to go back to college.

  She went to village council meetings to practice taking notes, certain that she could learn to listen and write at the same time. At first she came home in tears, ready to give up. She persevered, coming home exhausted, but she kept going until she could take notes. Now she was enrolled part-time at the University of Cincinnati, coming home with heavy books which she faced each night as we washed the dishes. Her typewriter clicked late into the night as we fell asleep. She asked us to listen to her papers, embarrassed at first to read out loud to us, faltering over the words on paper splattered with white correction blots.

  At first Dad thought this was a good idea, finishing her degree. She could get a part-time job, help out with the family bills. But when she wasn’t always there cooking meals and landscaping when he wanted her, when she wasn’t at his beck and call, he grew impatient, demeaning, putting down her classes and dreams of a degree.

  We were watching our mother grow up, her voice becoming more certain, impassioned with her studies in criminal justice. She would be the first woman in her family to have a career, to put her education to work. That was how important a college education was. I couldn’t wait to start myself.

  The winter dark came early. I heard the rattle of china and food trays, but I still wasn’t allowed to eat. I glared at the IV tube. It sure didn’t feel like it was giving me dinner. I glanced toward the door, dreading another blood draw, but there was my dad, wearing his Brooks Brothers suit with a yellow plaid bow tie.

  My heart leapt and I started chattering with excitement. “Hi, Daddy, the doctor told me my kidney is getting better. I’m hardly peeing any blood now.” I wanted his approval that I was doing a good job. I was getting better so I could go home, so he didn’t have to worry about me. I wanted to please him but he didn’t looked pleased.

  “I watched Sander Hall from the window today. I can’t believe how tall it is.”

  But he didn’t respond by telling me about how construction on the tower was going, or his meetings at the office. Standing at the foot of my bed, his eyes were not kind behind his black glasses. He didn’t sit down next to me, or take my hand. He glanced at the college guide on my lap.

  I picked up the book to show him. “I’ve been reading about colleges all day.”

  He grimaced. “I’m sick of college students. I’ve been on campus all day. They are just filthy bums or women’s libbers. Graffiti everywhere. That campus is a pig sty.”

  I tried again cheerfully. “I’m thinking about a small college. Have you heard of Bennington in Vermont, or Reed College in Oregon? I think I want to study Sociology or Psychology.”

  He scowled and almost spat his words. “Don’t get any ideas about going to some liberal college where people waste their tuition on protest marches. I’m sending you to Katherine Gibbs Secretarial School in New York. Then you’ll have a way to work your way through school, just like I did during the Depression.”

  Stunned, I stared down at my book, incredulous. Me, a secretary? Never. Did he think I wasn’t worth going to college? Who did he think I was?

  I had no idea the extent of the recession of the 1970s that was coming. I didn’t know that architects felt how the economic winds were blowing sooner than most anyone else. If only he could have said, “we.” As in, “we” need to start thinking about how we are going to pay for college tuition. If only he could have said a storm is coming and we have to figure out how we will get through. But “we” was not in his vocabulary; sharing information and working together was not in his training. So much pain could have been avoided if he could have let down his walls of control. But it was too late. A guerilla war was already underway, in our house and across the country. We were children in training to become snipers, getting ready to join the army of the young, preparing to bring down the old order. The conflict was inevitable, tragic, and essential.

  When I looked up, he spoke sarcastically, “Your mother’s so busy with college, she doesn’t have any time for me and the boys. We’re left to fend for ourselves.”

  Then he glowered down on me in the hospital bed as if he had just remembered why he had come. “But the worst is, I won’t tolerate you turning your mother against me.”

  I was stunned, and cried, “What did I do, Daddy? What did I do?” I searched my mind trying to think. We sometimes complained about my dad, but didn’t everybody?

  He glared at me. “You had better stop it, young lady. I won’t tolerate this!” Then he turned and
left. I never found out what sin I had committed. Without knowing it I had become complicit with a revolution, but when he cross-examined me, I still felt like an innocent, meekly denying I had done anything wrong.

  I stared at the empty doorway listening to his quick sharp footsteps fading down the hallway. What had I done? My body ached. I felt cold all over, and shivered. I pulled the college guide to my chest like a blanket to warm me. I would go to college, no matter what. He wouldn’t stop me.

  Elizabeth and Alvin, 1970

  FIRST LOVE

  Architecture is a matter of “harmonies,” it is “a pure creation of the spirit.”

  —LE CORBUSIER, TOWARDS A NEW ARCHITECTURE

  A GYMNAST WITH MUSCULAR SHOULDERS AND A slender waist, chestnut-brown skin and a quick flashing smile, Alvin was pursued by boy-crazy white girls in angora sweaters who wore lots of makeup and frosted nail polish. They oohed and aahed over his body, whispering to each other. They passed him notes in class in their curlicue handwriting, pink ink on notebook paper. I read over his shoulder. “I’m lusting after your body. Want to meet after school?” Alvin blushed, crumpled them up and glanced at me, embarrassed.

  I was the Twiggy skinny girl with no bra and tortoiseshell glasses, and one day in study hall, he gazed at me with relief, sighing, “I never thought I’d find anyone I could talk to about the Tibetan Book of the Dead.” We fell in love talking.

  We’d become friends in college-track English and Trig. We waved our hands in the air, answered questions, researched on note cards, and competed in reading races with each other. While our English classmates groaned after the teacher passed out 900-page copies of Drieser’s An American Tragedy, Alvin and I raced each night to see how many pages we could read. One night I fell asleep happy, sure I was in the lead, but he stayed up late and woke up early. When the buses discharged crowds of students to surge through the entry hall, we found each other. I crowed, “I got to page 580.”

  He grinned. “Sorry kiddo, I’m at 614.”

  I pretended to glower. “I’ll get you next time.” Laughing, we raced off to our first class, comparing notes on the story. The novel’s tragic twists of fate became our comedy as we predicted the plot and decried the despicable hero.

  HIS SHORT AFRO glistened as the ceiling lights on our porch illuminated his ascent up the stone steps to our front door. Early evening in February after dinner, I’d sat at the round kitchen table near the glass wall waiting for Alvin to arrive. It seemed everyone else in my family was also watching for this young man who was coming over to study with me. At sixteen I’d never gone out on a date or had a boy come over. “We are just friends,” I assured my parents at the dinner table. “We’ve been studying together in study hall.”

  Hubbard called out, “I’ll get it,” and ran to open the door. Alvin greeted Hubbard warmly, before my father walked up, blocking Alvin’s way into the room and kept him standing in the open door. Dixieland jazz was playing on the huge sound system so loud he had to speak up to be heard.

  Alvin put out his hand. “Hello Mr. Garber, I’m Alvin McClure. Elizabeth invited me over to study.”

  My father shook his hand, and didn’t say his usual ‘call me Woodie.’ “I hear you are a gymnast. I used to do gymnastics when I went to Walnut Hills years ago.” This was the best college prep high school in the Midwest, located in Cincinnati.

  Alvin lit up. “I went to Walnut Hills too, my mom too. I was on the gymnastics team.”

  My father startled. “You went to Walnut Hills? Well,” he faltered, “Well, did Elizabeth tell you my father designed the Walnut Hills campus in the thirties?”

  “No! How cool. Such a classical design. I love the library the best, like Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.”

  Woodie opened the door wider, finally allowing Alvin to enter the house, closing out the damp cold air that had blown in as they talked. But he blocked him from entering the Great Room where I waited at the kitchen table over my books. The questioning resumed. “So what are your events?”

  “I started gymnastics in third grade where they started us out in the old German style, probably how you learned, with hanging rings and rope climb. I like parallel bars and hanging rings best.”

  Woodie immediately launched into his best events. As he rattled off competitions and coaches, Alvin nodded at the right pauses, intensely aware at sixteen of holding his own power with this barrel-chested man who was competing to best him at every stroke, like a pissing contest. He observed this man was an authoritarian of the “old school,” a know-it-all. He’d never had a white man take this stance with him before and he stood his ground.

  Woodie ended, “I got us a set of parallel bars and a horse that we keep out on the side porch so my kids can get stronger. My son, Wood, is starting gymnastics but he’s just not applying himself worth a damn.”

  Finally my father let him pass into the Great Room. After Alvin glanced around the brilliantly lit room at the floating sculptures, the huge circular orange and red woven rug, the mahogany grand piano, he turned and beamed a warm smile to my mother. “Wow, this room is way cool.”

  “I’m glad to meet you, Alvin. It’s great you’re helping Elizabeth with her trigonometry. I don’t have a clue when it comes to math.”

  My father interrupted. “I’ve been too busy with work to help. Besides, I can’t stand the way they teach New Math. Mumbo jumbo if you ask me. Why don’t you both sit here at the kitchen table so you can get some work done.” He shouted to Wood at the other end of the long room, who’d been buried in a book, oblivious to everything going on. “Wood, why don’t you turn the music down so people can concentrate around here.” My brother looked up confused, as if he’d been startled from another world, but jumped up immediately to obey. To Alvin, it was clear that this man was a bully who browbeat his children into submission.

  My mother excused herself. “I’ve got homework too, for my class on Saturday,” and she went into my parents’ room.

  Dad said, “I’ll finish up the kitchen,” which allowed him to hover across the open kitchen counter a few feet from where we tried to chart out sine and cosine waves on graph paper. He wiped down the stove and counters with excessive vigor while lecturing us on how we needed to learn how to clean better.

  I finally asked, “Daddy, could you be a little quieter while we are trying to study?”

  He finished cleaning, picked up the latest Time magazine with The Band on the cover. He came over and asked, “So young man, are you into this kind of music?”

  Alvin looked up at the cover of a group of long-haired musicians. He’d already seen the two ten-foot shelves of record albums next to the Eames chair. “The Band’s doing some pretty interesting stuff, but seeing as you like jazz I think you’d really like Chicago, a cool new band with a strong jazz and Latin beat.” He turned to me. “We really like their song ‘Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?’”

  I nodded. “I think you’d like it, Daddy. But we’ve got a test in the morning.” I could see my dad was trying to show he was hip, but he wouldn’t leave us for a moment. Finally he walked to the other side of the room, settled into his leather chair, feet up on the ottoman. His bald head gleamed, as his hand tapped and his head bobbed out the complex rhythms of Earl “Fatha” Hines on piano.

  We tried to plot pencil lines on graph paper while the vast room spun around us, the bright lights bounced off the glass walls, the oiled walnut cabinets glowed and the jazz throbbed like a heartbeat in a New York club. Absorbed in his magazine, Dad would call out “Oh yeah” after particularly fine moments from the keyboard. Alvin and I slipped each other quick glances as we made an effort to work out the formulas we needed to know. At eight thirty, he glanced at his watch. “I better get home before my mom gets on my case.”

  I walked him to the door and we smiled shyly, saying, “See you at school tomorrow,” before my father leapt to his feet, stumbling as he walked to the door.

  He orchestrated a vigorous hand shaking “Thank
you, young man, for giving my daughter a hand at her homework. Here, I’ll turn on the spot lights to light up the drive. Watch out on your bicycle, there are some deep ruts.”

  As Alvin started down the stairs, he called after him. “Maybe you could give Wood some pointers on the parallel bars if you come by another time?”

  Alvin turned and looked up at him. “I’d really like to do that.”

  A FEW DAYS later at dinner, my father asked, “So what does Alvin’s father do?”

  I explained that his father had died when Alvin was five. His father had started out working for the post office. I looked at my mother. “You told me that the post office and being a porter on trains were the only professional jobs open to black men back then.” Alvin’s dad had worked full-time and went to college and law school at night. It took him sixteen years. He became the first black legislator in the State of Ohio.

  My mother asked, “What was his name?”

  “Alphonso Bruce McClure. What is so sad is that he died right before the election for his second term. He was even a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1956 in California. Even though Alvin was only three, he remembers the long train ride out west and the crowds cheering Ike at the Cow Palace.”

  My father’s face was impassive hearing about Alvin’s father. He didn’t comment or even show interest. He started complaining about construction on Sander Hall, how the contractors were behind schedule. But I wondered if he realized then he was up against more of a challenge than he’d thought. My father and Alvin, like boxers, were sizing each other up as they edged around the ring. When the fight finally began, it would be a battle of wits.

  The similarities between our fathers was part of the unusual comfort Alvin and I discovered as we became friends in study hall. We were both the oldest children of accomplished older fathers who had married young wives. Alvin asked, “What’s this thing about marrying younger women? I don’t get it.” We rolled our eyes, both agreeing that we wanted to be with someone who was our equal.