Speaking of Summer

by Kalisha Buckhanon

  No intruder.

  Perfume bottles glimmered on the overstocked lingerie chest. I remember splurging on Juicy when it first came out. But I never took to it. I went back to Red Door. Quaint pewter frames possessed small photos. A maze of beads, silver and gold ropes, shells, clasps, bangles, and balls made everything on top crooked and vulnerable. I walked around to look at all the pictures on the walls.

  Grandma’s only time in her life in the newspaper: a black-and-white photo of her young on Easter, in a yellowed obituary clipping I’ve kept since college.

  Mama’s cursive “love you baby,” razored out of a Hallmark card and set off by papier-mâché.

  Two college graduation pictures: me and Mama standing in front of a table of champagne glasses and silver trays with strikes of sunlight, and a silly close-up of me with my tassel blocking one eye as I sipped bubbly.

  A dainty, super-glued collage of remnants Mama passed into my hands one by one, her every explanation accented by a wheeze: my first three fallen baby teeth, a braided lock of my baby hair, the hardened button of skin from my fallen navel, the cross from my christening locket, the ribbons from my cream baby christening gown.

  All was mine.

  I saw a peach stone statement necklace from Avon, mail-ordered in secret and delivered to my hands. It was Mama’s last Christmas present to me.

  Hoopy and dangling and big earrings, all false precious metals. I remembered when and where I bought them: Claire’s, Walmart, Carson’s, Ricky’s, a vendor on Fifty-First.

  A black velvet box of diamond studs, from Chase. To me. My last birthday.

  I opened the closet, to a disarray of shoes unpaired in Rubbermaid containers and a shoe rack of smashed heels, laundry bags packed so thick they could have held hidden bodies, blouses with the tags still on them.

  I began to yank clothes off the hangers in examination and identification and recall.

  Poncho: J.Crew. In Chicago. Sometime during that one job that actually paid me well, but was boring as hell and the blond supervisor sat too close to me.

  Le Suit sets. Four of them—in neutral colors, for that deprecating fling with interviewing I gave up on. Pre–“business casual” jackets: muddy tweed, pinstripe, houndstooth.

  Khaki sundress, beads at the bottom and a matching hat pinned to its straps: Jamaica, that trip where I screamed at the atmospheric distortion that was snorkeling.

  Black Michael Kors blouses from the editorial department’s sample closet at Noire Magazine, the one time I was let in before I was let go.

  A sleeveless mahogany satin A-line dress for my cousin’s wedding.

  The cotton candy–pink cowl-neck light cashmere sweater I wore on a date with a high school basketball coach I met at the gym, who took me walking on the river near Battery Park and bought me fruit we nibbled in his Jeep before he tried to take my panties off while the wife he told me he did not have kept calling his cell.

  The black and blue Gap blazers, button-downs, and soft V-necks I stocked up on with a blessed employee discount from one of my first jobs in New York.

  The thin-striped and flower-touched church dresses, forgotten and stiffened behind club clothes with sequins and sparkles. Monochrome, patterned, polka-dotted, blocked.

  No matter. I knew it all well.

  I tore it all down, hanger by hanger and piece by piece. The more I presented me and only me to myself, the more a concavity opened inside my stomach. For each piece, I told its story to myself: all mine, none Summer’s. The garment’s history never had her name, her hands, her money, her lingering, her selection. I saw my hands, my fingers, and my smiles. I saw symbols of everyone but Summer: my friends, my mother, my grandmother, my aunts, my uncles, my cousins, my neighbors, my coworkers, my exes.

  I heaved the laundry bags onto the floor, crushed sports bras and crumpled yoga pants and sticky T-shirts. All mine.

  Suspended purses and bags on hooks—leather, pleather, and vinyl together with straw, fabric, and hemp separate—netted together by the straps. I jerked them all loose at once. I tore them open one by one as I recounted the class, festival, date, party, job, gala, barbecue, beach, vacation, and situation each represented in my life.

  My wardrobe covered the floor, from the wall to the bed. I dragged the next laundry bag and a container of shoes near the windows. I upheaved both. I sat in the middle of the mess of mildewed clothes and funky shoes, identifying each piece. I launched a stiletto at the sheetrock wall. It poked through. I beat tennis shoes onto the floor. I flapped at my shoulder with flip-flops that smelled like my favorite lotions. I hurled rock-hard square heels of work loafers at the windows. A pane cracked. I continued with softer shoes, bags, and belts.

  I writhed in the middle of it all, holding up shirts with stains; I remembered the exact wine or tomato sauce spill. The moment the buttons popped skittered across my mind, usually a man or my failure to be on time responsible for it. The promises to sew the tears here and there played back in my head. I smelled the moment when I made the wedge and dots of a hastily set iron pucker up rayon and satin. Even some tulle. It was all me, and all mine. None of it was my sister’s.

  Control.

  I had no taste for ice cream. Meat would have to be thawed. Pizza would require the oven. Hot Pockets and chicken potpie boxes tumbled out of my freezer. I threw one of each into the microwave. I put my face under the faucet and ran the water into my mouth, wetting my chest and shirt. The stewy, cheesy smell flared my hunger. I opened the microwave to resettle my dinner. I closed the door and restarted the microwave.

  Go look in the storage, I heard Summer say, just like she was calling from the bed.

  “The storage,” I said back to her, the sister who loved her canopy bed and walked our halls and woke for water in the middle of the night and straightened picture frames.

  She was all in there. She had to be. Everything we put down there together would be there still: primer and solvent jugs, the warm-weather clothes she never got a chance to pull out again, the paintings, the extra bedding. Fran never changed those locks. I just had to put on some shoes and climb down to the cellar to see it all. I breathed, finally: once, hold it, let it out, again, hold it, let it out, again, hooooold it, let it out. Breathe.

  Of course. I laughed out loud. And I turned to my door with my presentable self intact and composed. I opened to a woman standing squarely in front of me.

  I staggered and cried out. Shock obstructed what may have been a piercing scream.

  “So sorry!” the woman said. “We’re just wondering if everything was okay up here.”

  And then I recognized my downstairs neighbor. Or rather, her voice I heard outside their door and through my floor.

  “Why wouldn’t I be okay?” I stammered.

  “Autumn, right?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “We heard a lot of noise.”

  She held out her hand. I crossed my arms.

  “I’ve been here almost two months,” she continued, “and it seems we’ve never formally met. I’m Maria. I’ve heard a lot about you from Fran and Gregory.”

  “I work from home, so I stay in a lot,” I said. “I’m cleaning out my closets.”

  “Oh, I don’t blame you,” she chuckled. “For both. You know, staying in or cleaning out closets. We still haven’t unpacked.”

  I pat down my shirt. She saw me with no lip gloss or public face or other preparations.

  “Well, I’m Maria. My husband’s Charles. Our son is Sean, and if you ever—”

  “I’m sorry, but I’ve got something cooking.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  She backed down the landing, waved good-bye, and stopped once more.

  “Glad to know you’re okay.”

  “I’m perfect.”

  I shut the door.

  My microwave hissed from its corners. I tapped it open and grabbed the food without potholders. I burned my fingers. I shook and sucked them quietly. I did not yell or stomp. Maria was most likely shak
ing up a martini now, to give a full report on me—down to my nipples through a wet T-shirt and hickeys on my neck. I had no desire to add to it.

  After half the food, and with awareness that my every move was background music to strangers beneath me, I quieted. I slowed. I stood in the middle of my living room and inventoried its auras—of me, only me in body. Anyone else was in spirit and mind.

  The living room window overlooked 149th Street and all its windows. I heard shuffling below, light and normal, like I awoke to on mornings in the house on Trummel Lane. Bamboo cubes, piled in the corner, stood out in a grim living room. Light bulbs felt too harsh. Moonlight would have to do. It was a late August night when the humidity was high. But the breeze still gave me chills. I wanted the maroon blanket Grandma crocheted for us both but Summer took all for herself. The blanket was in the Lane cedar trunk, in my old bedroom, rolled up with mothballs and waiting for the winter.

  I walked down a hallway lined with overstuffed bookshelves and picture frames in the spaces between, holding sets of eyes I was scared to face.

  Summer came back. She was here, in my bedroom. Back. She’d slipped in so quietly. And I wasn’t even mad.

  She stretched my sheets tightly over the top corners of the mattress for me. Then she patted the mattress like an old rug in need of a good beating. She didn’t have to turn to know I stood in the doorway, watching her.

  She stopped tidying to go to the cedar trunk, to pull out the maroon blanket.

  I gathered it. She turned to peeling off grimy pillowcases for crisp ones. I stared at her there, unafraid, only interested. I waited for her to turn to me. She kept on her merry way.

  So I went near the kitchen edge, to see a color photo of me, Mama, and my grandmother. Grandma looks off-camera. Mama blows up a balloon. The balloons are not pink. They are darker. Blue, or green. I know it is my tenth birthday. By myself, I blow out a single candle on a birthday cake. Mr. Murphy took the picture.

  I walked down the hallway with the blanket around my body, then underneath me. I sat on the hardwood floor with sketchbooks, fat and skinny journals, and loose papers.

  This corner I sat in now had been my mother’s private nook, her version of her shed back in Hedgewood, when she had her own home and a car and other things to do besides pass away.

  My mother was the artist in the apartment, the maker of so many pretty faulty things I kept out and put away and wanted to create also, in her footsteps but also in my own way. And, desperate for money, I had peddled them to fair-weather friends.

  Now, my only support was a tough exposed brick wall. I opened a neat little journal with a crocheted jacket. Mama made it for me, out of a thick scarf Grandma once made for her. I read my work.

  “Summer is a missing vulnerable adult who may have depression or require medical attention. She was last seen on December 19th or 20th in her brownstone apartment in Harlem. She accessed the building’s roof and never returned inside. Summer changes her appearance frequently. She is originally from Hedgewood, Illinois.”

  The handwriting looked familiar. I chose to trust it, and read and see more. And the more I read and saw, the more I came apart to know.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I was a bad artist and not-so-bad writer, so the latter became my predilection, if not my downfall. But I really wanted to be like my mama, Grace Contessa Spencer.

  My father’s motorcycle was off-limits to me, parked between misshapen boxes and old furniture in the backyard shed, left to rust and collect webs I tore off at the start of winters when the spiders started to dry up or die. His helmets were gone, because a cousin took the collection without Mama’s permission. We heard my aunt pawned the helmets. The cousin further offended Mama—he would still ride a motorcycle knowing her husband crashed on one. Daddy’s rescue rope, breathing apparatus, boots and vests rested neatly on a shelf near his fishing poles, and luggage full of the better clothes Mama never got to Goodwill.

  She explained she was out there making “art”—on a Kmart easel, with Farm & Fleet house paint but real sable brushes, palette knives, flea market clay, an old kiln, and a pottery wheel her old community college art department gave away. She said an artist is what she was supposed to be, before she married. Instead she started at the water plant, joining my father to backbone the world in the working class. By the time he died, she had moved from the tunnels to the phones. She showed me how to run the wheel because I liked Ghost. I wanted to do that Demi Moore thing, too. Single-serve booze bottles trolled the shed. Virginia Slims butts covered the floor. She sometimes came in from the shed crying to her room or obnoxious ranting and pointing at Grandma. A retired day care center cook who looked like she would have been fast friends with Quasimodo, proud to sport orthopedics or sit with her legs open to slumped stockings, Grandma always won the case.

  “I ain’t gonna argue with you, girl,” was the judge cracking the gavel, to adjourn us until the next time.

  The only constant man in our lives was Mama’s brother. But he stayed in the bars after he left the water plant tunnels Mama started in. He still picked my mother up to go to work every day. He stopped coming in to say hi to Grandma every morning—just honked from the curb. My mother saved up enough for a Chevy that would be more reliable on our rural roads. Then, we never saw him at the house but on Mother’s Day. He brought a new woman with him every year. Her sister Aunt Mae was haggard with five kids, two jobs, and one mysteriously employed husband I gathered was worse than Mama having zero. The oldest kid, a girl, was on “that shit.” Her two little sons lived with us once, before the state of Illinois came to monitor them back with my aunt. More often than their names, I heard Grandma call my aunts “them heifers.” My uncle blanketed under the lowered expectations men enjoy. He never called us, but Grandma never called him names. If he was on the phone, my mother or grandmother would talk to him for hours and hours like his biggest fans.

  So my place was in the shed if my mother was not there. In it, I sat on top of the motorcycle and made the vroom vroom noise, until I dribbled spit. Then I climbed down to make shapes on any scrapped canvases or with wet clay: butterflies, unicorns, hearts, and stars. I gave the shapes to Mama and Grandma, along with uprooted dandelions I eventually figured out became slimy stems and browned puffs right after I presented them.

  Once in a blue moon, a shoved-off cat knew the direction but not the way home, and became my pet for a while. No one else with me—no friend, no tagalong, no sister. Girlhood was lonesome.

  I am a good student. I am quiet in church. I know my Easter speech. Yes, I brushed my teeth for real. Yes—ma’am—I washed off my feet before I got in the bed.

  We three moved out of “town,” away, rifted and elusive in a wily threesome combined to one baby lotion, White Shoulders, and Bengay scent. The back kitchen rotated its smells: hot dogs and Salisbury steak TV dinners on Mama’s bad days, pound cakes and Crock-Pot chili on her good ones. Nobody ever stopped by for long, if Mama wasn’t giving something for Grandma or me. And those gatherings always started and ended in daylight. Our two-story stucco house was off desolate roads with no street signs—just little white posts with tiny black letters a driver had to turn on brights to see. Mama met her old friends from high school and the community college at bars, basement parties, and barbecues in town. She went to the Y to swim, but she wouldn’t take me because if my hair got wet, it would ruin the crinkle or the straight she spent her Sundays on.

  Our neighbors were all White, a few Indian and Hispanic. We recognized their children when it was time to trick-or-treat. Otherwise, seasons determined our relationships: waves and hellos when the temperatures revolved into times to plant flowers, trim hedges, water lawns, rake leaves, clean windows, clear gutters, stretch tarp, and shovel snow. Mr. Johnson, widowed and married to his two girl German shepherds now, came from across the street to help if Mama and I struggled with shovels or the lawn mower, even though he was old and ancient with blue dots and green lines in his ghost-pale face, and we did it fa
ster. But, he said, “I’m a man.”

  Mr. Murphy’s entrance to life is fraught with presence, stiff with blocks in space, a sudden cutout in my storybook house. Mr. Murphy shifted the terms of our life. We rearranged our gentle bickering, brief silent treatments, rollers in our hair all day, open bathroom doors, shoes left here and there, dishes unwashed, same TV channel for days, toenail clippings, wind passing. Mr. Murphy retouched our life. He made us women: primped, pruned, on polished toes, dressed, and never not busy.

  At first, he stood up in our living room. He called my mother “Missus Spencer,” her married name still. He stuttered when he presented prices for his wares: much better life insurance and burial insurance, at a special price, supposedly just for us. We could even buy our caskets in advance. Grandma sat in the rocking chair beside the china cabinet. Mama and I sat at the dining room table with the man.

  He was “Mr. Murphy,” not “Cole.”

  If he sat down, he asked if he could sit, at first. He asked for everything: water, another piece of cake, more coffee, the telephone, the bathroom. Somewhere along more visits they started to tease him: “Gone on ’head” and “You know where it is” and “You know better now to get it yourself.” “Help yourself,” even. He was not married to another woman I knew, or family by way of kids who called him “Daddy.” I never saw him at church. And he went out with my mother without me, without Grandma, and maybe I was too young and Grandma was too old to go. Mama began to disappear nights. Grandma started the maroon blanket on one of them. Grandma never explained or accounted for the absences. I would have to ask: “Where’s Ma?”

  On days I wanted to spin the pottery wheel or see what I was going to wear for the next week, to messy the closets and drawers and put them back together again, my mother was not there. Grandma was unanimated at night, with her housedresses open and the phone in her lap. Color drained from the big television; she watched The Honeymooners, Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock, I Love Lucy, and Andy Griffith. So we, too, separated. I stretched over my homework and notebooks on Mama’s queen-size bed, to absorb her in all the shows we would have been flipping in color: Carol Burnett, Good Times, The Jeffersons, One Day at a Time, and Laverne & Shirley. Sometimes I awakened to her next to me watching the news, sometimes in the morning. She still drank her Lipton’s, with no bottle next to it anymore.