Speaking of Summer

by Kalisha Buckhanon

  “I had a similar experience as you,” I shared. “I know you turned the key in your ignition, sat, waited. Would you’ve come out on your own?”

  She didn’t hesitate: “Nope. Not at all. You ain’t the first to ask me that.”

  I told her the full of it.

  “Well, for me, it was going to the roof of my building. Middle of the night. Coke. Booze. I called myself jumping. Nothing happened. Nothing more than a neighbor saw me and called authorities. I wound up in a hospital, just out of my mind. The worst part is I froze my bare feet and ass off. I crawled down a fire truck ladder in a nightgown, no panties on, the wind blowing all my business out to Harlem. And the same roof door I went out was still open all along. Why didn’t I just turn around and walk down?”

  “We people do some dramatic things,” Barbara said.

  “Yeah,” I laughed. “We sure do.”

  SIDEWALK FLOWERS I PURCHASED CONGRATULATED me on attending the meeting, shunning alcohol, and catching my Summer tendency in action. Shop window lights seemed turned up. Strands of hair in people’s heads distinguished themselves. Sign lettering was sharp. Every single car, truck, or cab on cramped streets stood out in its own right and not as part of one choked mass. I concentrated on oblivion to men’s oohs and aahs, when their instant smiles let me know I turned them on. I brushed off their shifted tones—more high-pitched and straining for charm—as they handed me my bags, train pass, or street food.

  Asha’s door had been silent when I passed it on my last few outings. I could have imagined a man snake into her sidewalk-level window. I preferred more than corroded thoughts now. Maybe she was out canvassing for clients or herbs in Chinatown, still hustling even this late. I wished her somewhere arm in arm, hip to hip, or sage pose to dog pose.

  As always, I heard the sport of family and nesting on the second floor. On impulse, I knocked. I knocked again, louder. Then I clanged the bell.

  The nerdy man gripped a cordless phone to his cheek when he opened the door. I was grateful. My mission was not to linger, only to present and announce the new, quieter person I would become from now on. A second impression.

  “Hi.” He looked much older than his wife, or maybe he didn’t cover his gray.

  “I’m your neighbor, upstairs?”

  “Yeah, sure,” he grinned. “How’re you? Nice flowers.”

  “Thank you. Oh, and good.” I felt it was true. “I came by for your wife. She here?”

  “Not at the moment. She’s, uh, at some event . . .”

  “Dad! The cabinet door fell off again!”

  “Just a minute, Sean!”

  “I wanted to tell her thank you for stopping in to check on me a while back,” I said. “There’s just something about going through old things, not wanting to do it, but having to. Well, let’s just say it took me until this afternoon to put the mess back together.”

  I leaned on my right side with my arms folded as I explained.

  “No worries,” he said. “You don’t even want to see our place right now. I’d invite you in, but you’d think we were the Addams Family.”

  I put up my hands: “No, no. It takes time. I’ll let you get back to your call.”

  “Stop by anytime,” he waved. “One of us is usually here.”

  This mission of apologies, for Autumn and not Summer, would have to be done in tandem with clearing the aftermath of the weeks before. My apartment was still flipped inside out, its disarray and uncleanliness bubbled up like a cut freshly splashed with peroxide.

  I met the bright star’s glare on the sheet over the padlocked rooftop’s entrance. It was at once an unmanned garrison erected by compassionate homeowners thrust into the new position my occupancy demanded, and a shrewd measure against a tenant family’s lawsuit. Fran had renewed my lease in the winter, without hesitance. Their tolerance of my late payments, their wider smiles, the cleaner hallway, and the extended conversation of the last nine months was their version of caretaking for a girl whose only family seemed to be a mother they saw once or twice before she passed away. Their service, as Frank told me.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  It took a few years for Cole Murphy to bring less gifts and more of his paperwork to our house, for us to alphabetize, double check, and put in folders. Sometimes, if Mama was more interested in a TV show or phone call, he called her “woman” in a not-nice way. She would go out for cigarettes sooner than her usual stop in the mornings, at the first gas station in town. Grandma stayed out of the times Mr. Murphy said “Grace” like it was anything but.

  Cole Murphy claimed things I didn’t know were not true: “You know” and “She knows, too.” I knew his spiky chin irritated my neck. I knew I did not like the smell of his lips on my skin. I used the seat of my father’s motorcycle to ease the ongoing pull starting underneath my navel and moving down to where I met the seat, alone and thinking of the boys my age instead of an old man; Mr. Murphy interrupted this. He offered to clean out that shed after its worn-out years, as Mama’s little artist place turned to history’s dumpster.

  Unsoaked brushes hard as peanut brittle. Paint containers stuck together. Glues spilled in lumpy mounds. The kiln would not power anymore. The pottery wheel was rusted. Its grind was sharp. The roof leaked.

  “I can fix it up for Autumn, Grace. Put a nice big desk in there for her, and some bookshelves . . .”

  I said I did not care. But this is what twelve-year-olds say about everything. Mama told him of her husband’s motorcycle: “Don’t touch that bike.”

  Over the summer I turned thirteen, a little more of the shed’s mess organized inside or wound up at the curb for garbage day. Mama called my disinterest in her boyfriend’s efforts “unappreciative.” Grandma insisted he was wasting his time: “Put yourself a pool table and darts out there for your man friends.” He did not have too many. My silence over his version of a boy’s tree house ended his nonstop talk of it. He even got on his knees to plant the hardy annuals around the shed’s perimeter: petunias, marigolds, geraniums.

  Over the same summer, I wrote a letter to the Hedgewood Sentinel. A response to their daily classified ad for carriers. A young man in glasses named Jason answered my letter. He drove to Trummel Lane in a rusting red truck. He brought a map, paperwork, a satchel, perforated collection tablet, and stapled guidebook. Mama, Grandma, and Mr. Murphy watched him orientate me. Portly and bald, he sweat so badly Grandma took to wiping his glasses and neck with a napkin as he explained financials. Mr. Murphy grilled him on it all. My independent contractor status. My biweekly paycheck from the Sentinel. My gross payments. My eventual net profits. My penalties for nonpayment for pre-purchased newspapers I was to own and be fully responsible for. I was an entrepreneur, already, according to Jason. I was proud.

  Mr. Murphy said I could use his renovated shed for my “business office” and library in one. I would not. I stopped going in. On Sundays, the newspapers came at dawn instead of the afternoon. The edition tripled in weight and size, for a grueling carry. I had to make two trips back home to pass them all. But the more I told Mr. Murphy no—to his offers for takeout or a new outfit or field trip money—the more I could meet him at the eye. I could back away when he came behind me or on top of me.

  It was really just one time that Cole Murphy sat me in the rocking chair.

  I planned a new Sunday morning strategy: to stay awake until 4 a.m., when the Sentinel’s delivery truck threw tightly wound newspaper bundles on my yard. Then I could pass, skip church, and sleep in. One midnight, I needed a new cup of coffee. At thirteen, I could not stand the taste then. So I wanted ice cream in the cup like a hot root beer float.

  Maybe he heard the television on, or the wood dining room doors open and shut. I was mixing coffee and ice cream together in one gooey swirl when his gremlin feet slapped the kitchen floor. The only other noises were the hum of the oven light, and a ticking wall clock shaped like a breadbasket.

  “It’s almost one o’clock in the morning, young lady,” was his opening
.

  “I know what time it is,” and I was mad. He was ruining my plan. I threw the mug of butter pecan ice cream and coffee down at his feet.

  “You need to clean that up.”

  “You need to go home.”

  “This is my home.”

  “It is not. It’s our home.”

  The standoff was brief, the solution ill-timed. I was not big enough, or ready, yet. He lashed out to grip my right arm. His rough nickel-size fingertips fastened my elbow. He pulled me back and forth as I kept my feet square in one slippery linoleum tile. So he moved his big fingers to my waist, and pinched at my gut. He slid me through the kitchen door into the dining room. The closest thing to throw me down on was the rocking chair. It cracked under my weight. I wanted my church shoes on, so my feet could bang on the hard floor and Grandma could come down to yell at me about waking the devil, to catch the one already up. His grip was hard, his spittle was hot, his face was knobby and mean.

  “Cut that noise out,” were his words. “Right now. You want your Mama to know about this?”

  He pressed me down with one hand and took the other to the string of his night pants, to fiddle with the knot. The rocking chair tipped back so far I almost fell over in it. He clinched the back of it so it would not crash into the china cabinet and break the glass with my head, right in front of the pretty brown doll, still there from the first birthday he gifted me on.

  We stopped moving, for a while.

  “I’ll tell,” I hissed. I twisted my face from side to side as he brought the fat weight up from thin checkered pants he eventually gave up on unlacing and just tore.

  “I’m telling . . . I’m telling.”

  Mr. Murphy stopped it all after he saw hatred pucker through splashes to my face.

  THE ROCKING CHAIR BECAME A relic of our past life as the first three in the house on Trummel Lane, now boiling down to a grayed twosome. Mama and Mr. Murphy became more left unsaid, outings less frequent, and affection down to helping with zippers and neckties. My room stayed in place as I wanted it, but I could not forget its switched usage: less a girl’s palace and more a salvation from straitjackets, strange doctors, and medication.

  Mama blamed it on something else. My smart mouth, disinterest in church, fanaticism over school, my temper, funny moods, and bad attitude were all her fault for not taking me to my father’s family enough. We had a tense negotiation for me to stay in Illinois rather than go—at eighteen—to the East Coast all by myself and so far away from them. So then her cover to remain blind to her man messing with me was “that White folks’ school.” She claimed if she was firm that I stick around my own people, I would not be so “strange.” Mama said if she had not bought the house on Trummel Lane, she could have saved the life insurance to send me to a Black college.

  I would be “happy.”

  I was happy. I made myself so, as a harlequin with confidence and work ethic.

  I walked on with a cracked skeleton of happy beneath my perplexed secrets and simmering rage. I basted in a forever-poisoned girlhood. I detested Trummel Lane, small-town bars, and fast-food summer jobs under supervisors who were shocked when I said I would not return to be a manager. I moved into a suite of four women, in an old hotel on Lake Michigan converted to a dormitory. I was no stranger to living with alien life forces, so it went well. The skeleton grew flesh and color again. Its blood rushed back. I talked of books and images and politics and my own perspective. I continued to write the longest papers and finish the books first. I came in with no plans or ideas for my future, no prepared props to self-aggrandize along with the others. But eventually I saw a statistic. Most schools had a four-to-one ratio of English to art teachers. So it seemed safest to fall back on what I knew I could manipulate quickly and cheaply. Words needed just a keyboard or pen, not supplies and space I’d have to buy.

  By senior year, I stopped coming to Hedgewood. Grandma, put into words like “slow” and “silly” and “tired,” became a subject of my and Mama’s every phone conversation to recap our days, weeks, and then whole months we did not talk. Mama drove up to all my little events at the school, but did not stay long. She went back to my dorm room, pale children and weed smoke and sex acts carrying on around us. She thought the wan, blond mothers of my short-term friends threatened to turn her against me with every low-key Carly Simon and Carole King song I wanted to let play on our car radio. She drove up to take me to dinner once and I called her music “sad Black woman songs.” We argued, and I avoided seeing her until my college graduation day. Relatives accustomed to Autumn being “away.”

  Grandma’s domain became the Hoveround Mr. Murphy paid for. She went down to mashing food flat and laughing at unfunny things. She asked “Who?” and “What?” and “Where?” to any statement, even when no questions were involved and we repeated for her. And I could not form a straight narrative. My confession to her trickled out in fragment sentences before I retreated to my old bedroom on nights Mr. Murphy knew I was back, so he scared away to his own home on opposite outskirts.

  Strange with me.

  Funny acting.

  Kind of touched me, once.

  Well, maybe it was more than once.

  Isn’t good to Mama.

  Wasn’t good to me.

  Did things.

  Showed me his . . .

  On the last morning I saw her alive, she chuckled my redemption over a bowl of grits: “I never did like that motherfucker.”

  We buried Grandma on her life insurance policy Mr. Murphy paid the premiums for. Mama named Mr. Murphy a pallbearer, an “honorary” son. I stayed home during her funeral. Across the foot of Mama’s bed I found the maroon blanket Grandma crocheted for us the year it all started. I took it away with me.

  “CARING FOR A PARENT IS hard in the best relationships,” Noel sympathized. “Your mother’s illness did bring you two closer, but unresolved conflict was your burden to live with. Maybe Summer’s feeding ground. Have you thought to write Mr. Murphy a letter?”

  “What would I say?” I asked, my voice sharp and strained.

  Officers Jackson and Torres were still there, smiling at me at the front desk, in total acceptance or peace or awareness that I never had a real missing person case and I was the last to know. I paid attention to other clients who came before and after me now, in wait for “Detective” Noel Montgomery. Unshaved men, hobbled women, kids whose hard lives showed in the weight of their eyelids. Some had keloidal wounds and unkind smells. I simply braved the posture to always appear as the “Strong Black Woman,” put back together with practiced habits, but just as broken as the rest.

  “You can tell him how you feel, and you did not like being assaulted,” he said.

  “I could not begin to express it. And I don’t think he can read anymore. Or, maybe he can do that. I’m sure he can do that. We can always do that, can’t we?”

  “I sure hope so,” Noel said. “It depends on what his specific conditions are.”

  “Well, I’m sure no sunny volunteer would finish reading any letter I had to write to him. It would be no love letter, that’s for sure.”

  “Confronting your attacker might be—”

  “There’s no need to confront!” I yelled. “It does no good, now. He ruined my childhood, messed it all up. And it messed up my adulthood too. I’ve gone broke. I messed up my relationship.”

  “Autumn, anyone can expect some serious life changes after a parent passes on.”

  “Yeah, but not like these.”

  “I’ve wondered if I should have handled your case differently,” Noel said. “There are guidelines, but no playbook. I’m not perfect. It seemed like being Summer’s hero was the only way you wanted to open up about why you thought to end your life. I felt it was best to help both of you in the process. When I saw it was only one of you, I was at a loss on what to do.”

  “None of this is your fault,” I told him.

  “Not necessarily my fault. Just my professional bad call.”

 
“You just met me. Anybody who messed me up did it well before then, or you wouldn’t have met me at all.”

  “Well, thank you. That’s good to hear.”

  Noel Montgomery knew when to pause so I could think, when to sip water or turn over the hourglass once our time long expired, a kindness I could never repay.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  My lighting was streaks of noonday. My subject was myself. I lie on my bed with my camera to rove over every stretch mark, ripple, patch, mole, scar, and hair on my body. I concentrated mostly on my face, as the real me and not a motif, facing the world in my hurt characters. Though I smiled just to see what my smile looked like when I was alone, and it was only for me. I reviewed the shots and the face they arrested. I was more manly and chiseled than I ordinarily saw myself as, baby face no longer, real woman poised to take its place. The silver was not as threatening as it appeared in other women’s newly graying hair. Depending on the angle or side, favor ran the spectrum of both sides of my family. Aunts and cousins I had not seen in years greeted me in my poses.

  I rose from bed and pointed my Canon EOS camera at my nude figure reflected in the bathroom mirror, The Persistence of Memory behind me, in both indictment and diagnosis. My color was uneven throughout the length of me. Gradual shading changes left my thighs a chestnut color while my chest was sunny brown. My breasts were dainty, in proportion. I snapped this woman over and over, seeing her as fuller and more mature.

  As Autumn alone, I used the digital camera when I needed to add original images to websites and blogs. It found its way to Summer’s hands when I had flights of fancy that I was, like my mother, an artist just waiting to be discovered, if only I had the time and connections to make it work. I collected my tries in the notebooks, binders, and journals I stacked in between my “sister’s” expensive, weighty photobiographies and art books. So much money spent, wantonly, over the years. I discarded these things, like Christmas toys missing batteries in the boxes; I did not have what it took to power the work beyond aspiration and self-medication. Summer’s habits enlivened me where Autumn died. I had no plans to correct the unfulfilled wish. Now, everything was so airbrushed, computer-generated, retouched, and devoid of sense that I felt great compassion for the people not knowing how to act or treat each other. So, in actuality, I fit in all along. Nobody was used to looking at real people anymore.