The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

by Dinaw Mengestu

  Less than twenty minutes after the first police car arrived, the entire scene was over. The family had packed up what they wanted and left the rest of their belongings either in the apartment or strewn over the sidewalk and street in a block-long trail of clothes, shattered glass, and worthless paper. The crowd moved on, but no one was ready to surrender quite yet. They slowly worked their way over to my store, where they released some of their long-held frustration in a whir of junk food. I knew every face at least by sight, but at that moment no one acknowledged me or said a word in my direction. When the crowd moved on a few minutes later, my register was fuller than it had been in days.

  The next three days saw two more evictions. These were conducted secretly, early in the morning, when no one was around to witness them. The crowd came back nonetheless, a blend of middle-aged and unemployed women, men whose careers depended on the odd jobs they bounced back and forth between, and teenage boys who had nothing better to do than stand around and righteously declare that what was happening was indeed fucked up. The crowd gathered in the circle spontaneously in the aftermath of each eviction and grew larger over the course of the afternoon as people came out of their homes to take part in what was happening. I watched them from my store and waited for them to come in, and they did. People came in waves and bought bags of pork rinds, cans of sweet soda, beer, and plastic-wrapped pickles. I heard rumors of letters that were going to be written, protests that could be staged, and meetings that were being planned. An air of conspiracy was slowly building, and even if it never amounted to more than indignant chatter, there was a sense that something drastic was lying on the horizon.

  Those three days were a boon for my little store. It was almost like old times, with my register ringing and a buzz of numbers and voices constantly floating around in my head. I made enough each one of those days to walk home at the end of the night grateful and relieved. America was a beautiful place once again.

  I didn’t know any of the people who had been evicted, but after the second eviction, I did go out of my way one night to pass by each of their homes to see what they had left behind. It was late enough so no one was around. I took my time and rummaged through the dirty clothes lying on the ground. It didn’t matter where you lived, or where you came from, or how far you had traveled, somewhere near you someone was on the run. I pitied and resented those people, whoever they may have been, for being chased out of their homes, perhaps in part because I felt even then a similar fate waiting for me once more.

  I kicked a faded white cotton T-shirt with holes near the bottom across a frozen stretch of dead grass, and then turned around and walked back to my apartment.

  A few days after that last eviction, Mrs. Davis came into my store carrying a stack of flyers under her arms. A community meeting was going to be held in a church basement with the neighborhood’s councilman. She placed one flyer on the counter and tapped it twice with her finger. I couldn’t help but smile as she pushed the flyers toward me. I knew that there were patterns to life, but what I had never understood until then was how insignificant a role we played in creating them.

  “We need as many people there as can make it,” she said to me.

  PROTECT OUR NEIGHBROHOOD

  NO MORE EVICTIONS

  She had spent all afternoon walking around on her arthritic joints passing around those handwritten, misspelled copies to every friendly store and building she knew. The bottom of the flyer was signed The Logan Circle Community Association. I had never heard of it before. Perhaps it had always existed, but more likely than not, it had been created on the spur of the moment by Mrs. Davis and the other widows of the neighborhood. The name carried a certain natural legitimacy to it, which was important if you ever wanted anyone to believe you.

  Mrs. Davis handed me a stack of flyers.

  “Here. You can give these out to people when they come in the store.”

  She caught my smile.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Of course I’ll pass them out.”

  “And you’ll be at the church on Wednesday night.”

  “Yes. I’ll be at the church.”

  Mrs. Davis took her leave of my store and me with all of the dignity she could have created for herself. She took a carton of milk with her for the road. She drank it by the gallon every week to strengthen her bones and fight her arthritis. I suspected that she washed her face and hands in it as well. Some people grow old passively. Others, like Mrs. Davis, are committed to battling any and every obstacle that approaches them, regardless of how ridiculous or impossible.

  I waited until she was safely out of sight before I threw out all of the flyers she had given me.

  The Second AME Church was located two blocks south of the circle in the middle of a street that, up until a couple of years ago, was known for the casual ease with which drugs were bought and sold on it. The block still retained more than a few remnants of its old splendor, including two abandoned Victorian mansions that were now being slated for historic preservation. The Second AME Church dated back to the late nineteenth century. A massive gray-brick building that sat on the corner of the block, it had passed through Methodist, Baptist, and Episcopalian hands before being abandoned in the 1950s. For nearly two decades the building sat empty, deteriorating year by year with the Victorian mansions that sat just up the street. Finally, in the 1970s, the building was bought by the AME Church from the city for twenty dollars. Money came in from both liberal and conservative politicians to pay for the new wooden pews, and to fix the broken stained-glass windows and the cracked steps leading up to the church. The congregation swelled through the ’70s and early ’80s. When I first moved into the neighborhood, my store was packed on Sunday mornings with black women in their elaborate pastel Sunday hats and men in their best and brightest suits. Even after most of them drove back to their homes in the suburbs or in less run-down parts of the city, some of their affluence still seemed to linger in the neighborhood. The foreign crowds began to thin out with the rapid deterioration of an already broken neighborhood. The congregation grew smaller year after year, until the church became what it is today—a meetinghouse for the neighborhood’s widows and lonely old men.

  The meeting was being held in the church basement, in a room built to hold two hundred people, on one of the coldest nights of the winter so far. At least a hundred folding chairs were set down for the night, neatly split in two halves by a wide aisle large enough for strollers and wheelchairs down the middle. In the corner, right by the entrance, fifty more chairs were stacked on top of one another. There was a fold-up table in the front, with one seat in the center reserved for the neighborhood’s city councilman. It was empty as well. I arrived at the meeting twenty minutes late. Not counting Mrs. Davis and four other women who were sitting in the front row, I was the twenty-third person there.

  I was counting the heads from the back of the room, noting the familiarity of certain people just by the way they sat in their chairs, or the way they wore their hair tied neatly in a bun or carefully slicked back, when I noticed Judith sitting in a row all by herself in the middle of the room. She was the only white person there. No one had seen me come in, and for a few minutes I considered simply turning around and leaving. All that time I had spent waiting for her to return, and now here she was, exactly where I least needed or wanted her to be.

  Had Mrs. Davis not stood up to address the crowd, I would have slipped back out the door and returned to my store, where I could have sat comfortably alone through the night, but she saw me the minute she turned to face the crowd.

  I took a seat in the back row by myself.

  “I can hardly see you all the way back there, Mr. Stephanos,” Mrs. Davis called out.

  Besides Naomi, she was the only person I knew who called me Mr. Stephanos. There was something friendly and yet mocking in the way she said it, something akin to the way you can occasionally hear a mother refer to her son as a “big boy.”

&nb
sp; Judith turned around in response to Mrs. Davis’s scolding to see me sitting nervously in the back. I stood up. Judith moved her coat off the seat next to her. Mrs. Davis caught the gesture and followed me with her eyes to see where I was going to sit. It had become that type of meeting. I saw that now. Poor Judith. She didn’t know what she had walked in on. All she had seen was a chance to demonstrate her high-minded concern, her belief in participatory democracy and Emersonian ideals.

  I took my time gathering my coat and scarf. There were definite sides, and the people in that room were all waiting to see which one I was going to choose.

  I smiled warmly at Judith as I passed her row. She turned her head in the opposite direction and threw her coat back over the empty seat. I walked all the way to the front. I took a seat in the first row, on the opposite side of Mrs. Davis and her committee. I focused all of my energy and attention on a flyer posted in front of me for a potluck dinner being held in the church the following week. I read the words over and over—Join Us for a Special Night of Food and Friends—like a prayer that, if said often enough and with the proper conviction, could bring the world to a complete stop.

  A dozen more people trickled in behind me, bringing the grand total of people in the room to less than forty. Everyone in that room, with the exception of Judith, had lived in this neighborhood for at least as long as I had. A few of the younger faces in the crowd had still been children when I moved in.

  Mrs. Davis began the meeting by thanking everyone for coming. She apologized for the missing councilman, who, according to her, had just phoned to say he had an important meeting with the mayor that was going to run late. She paused briefly after she finished that last sentence—a meeting with the mayor—so we could understand her proximity to the great powers of the city. One of two things was inevitably true: either the councilman had actually called and said what Mrs. Davis had just told us, or he had never been asked to come in the first place. There was a rehearsed and scripted quality to Mrs. Davis’s speech that convinced me the latter was true.

  “We’re all concerned about the direction our neighborhood is moving in,” she began. As she spoke she moved quietly, almost imperceptibly, from one side of the room to the other. Her small feet shuffled like sandpaper across the yellow linoleum tile with every word she spoke.

  “I can’t even begin to count how many old friends I’ve had to say good-bye to in the past six months. These are people just like you and me. Some of them have been living here their whole lives just to find that one day they can’t afford to pay the rent. I don’t have to tell you that this isn’t right. We all know that. Now it’s up to us to figure out what we’re going to do about it.”

  The crowd was more than receptive to everything Mrs. Davis had to say. The last line received a long hum of appreciation that was followed by whispered comments of approval. After a few more words, Mrs. Davis opened the meeting to anyone who wanted to speak. The grievances and frustrations came quickly. Some had to do specifically with the changes in the neighborhood, others were more general and came from a deeper, longer-standing frustration with life. One older man, dressed in a shabby navy blue suit that had grown too large for his body, talked about his wife, who had passed away three years ago, and the children who never came to visit. He said what was happening to the neighborhood wasn’t right, but it was impossible to tell anymore where the disappointments of his life ended and those of the neighborhood began. Another woman, young, or at least desperate to seem so, with a black and blond weave that roped down to her waist, complained about her neighbor’s boyfriends, who came in and out of the building at all times of the night. As she spoke, she rapped her long plastic nails against the chair in front of her so that each word was punctuated with the click-clacking of her nails on metal. When the speeches came back to the neighborhood, the people’s anger was barely disguised. I don’t know who used the word “they” first. It might have been Mrs. Davis, or the woman with the blond and black weave who rapped her fingernails and spoke furiously. Once the word entered the meeting, it seemed to trail onto the end of nearly every sentence. I don’t know who they think they are. What are they doing here anyway. They have their own neighborhoods and now they want ours too. It’s bad enough that they have all the jobs and schools. I was convinced that if given enough space and time, a conclusion would have been drawn that held “them” responsible not only for the evictions in the neighborhood, but for every slight and injury each person in that room had suffered, from the children who never made it past junior high to the unpaid heating bill waiting in a dresser drawer.

  Judith sat through the speeches with her legs crossed and her chin resting on her hand. Every time someone spoke I turned around farther than necessary just so I could catch a glimpse of her. She kept tucking and untucking that same strand of hair behind her ear. A few times she caught me watching her. I wanted her to wave or smile at me, but instead she quickly turned her head in another direction, as if she knew that I would have done exactly the same.

  She was implicated in every recrimination. No one addressed her directly, but more than a few of the people who spoke that evening turned toward her. Finally Judith raised her hand to speak. It wouldn’t have been like her to sit passively through any debate.

  She stood up to address the crowd.

  “I’ve only lived in the neighborhood for less than half a year now,” she began. “But I share the same concerns as you.”

  She didn’t get any further than that. She paused just long enough in between her sentences for someone in the crowd to yell, “Shut up.” She wavered for a second. She gripped the chair in front of her and seemed briefly poised to continue on with whatever she was going to say, but the moment passed. She sat back down and crossed and uncrossed her legs. All eyes, including my own, were still trained on her. Mrs. Davis hurried to resume the meeting by announcing that a petition to the city council had been drawn up. She asked everyone to read it carefully before signing.

  We, the long-time residents of Logan Circle, oppose the further exploitation of our community by developers. We demand that the city council oppose any further development in Logan Circle that jeopardizes the livelihood of the current residents. We demand that the city council investigate the illegal evictions by corrupt landlords.

  The petition circulated quickly around the room. No one had to read beyond the first sentence. When the petition reached Judith, she graciously received it and passed it back to the woman sitting a row behind her.

  Another meeting was announced for the second week in February. Mrs. Davis assured the crowd that if there were enough signatures on that petition, the mayor himself would be here for that one.

  There was no distinct ending point to the meeting that night. People just began to stand and walk around the room as the petition circulated from one hand to the next. Judith gathered together her coat and purse and briskly walked out. No one but me seemed to notice or care. After she left, and everyone in the room except me was standing, Mrs. Davis came over to me and kissed me on the cheek.

  “I wish it hadn’t gone that way,” she said. “That woman’s going to go home and think we’re a bunch of ignorant fools.”

  “No, she won’t,” I told her. “She’s better than that.”

  I left Mrs. Davis with the intention of taking a slow, long walk home around the circle. When I neared my house, though, I saw that Judith’s porch light was on. Its warm glow stood out from the harsh streetlights and extended over just barely onto my house. She was sitting on the top of her steps, bundled up in a coat, smoking a cigarette whose smell cut straight through the cold emptiness of the air.

  “I thought you had quit smoking a long time ago,” I said.

  “I did. But sometimes you get lonely and there’s no better company in the world.”

  “I didn’t know you were back in town. You should have come by the store and said hi.”

  “I got in a few days ago, but I’ve been busy. I’ve barely been home at all s
ince I got back. Naomi was having such a nice time with my sister and her kids that I didn’t want to rush back here. I forget sometimes that she’s just a kid.”

  “Is she already asleep?”

  It’s funny the gestures we come up with to avoid saying what we already know to be true. Before answering, Judith dutifully extinguished the cigarette into a bowl by her side. She rubbed it into a pulp and then blew the last stream of smoke into the steps. She cast aside a strand of hair that had fallen in front of her face.

  “I left her in Connecticut,” she said. “I transferred her to a boarding school up there.”

  I didn’t try to hide my disappointment, but even if I had it wouldn’t have mattered. It would have shone through anyway.

  “She wanted me to give you something.”

  She stood up and went into her house. I followed her only into the hallway. She came back a second later carrying the large white box with the red bow that Naomi’s father had sent her.

  “Naomi already opened it,” she said. “She wanted to give it to you right away but I wouldn’t let her. I didn’t think it would be decent. Once we decided she was going to stay in Connecticut I couldn’t refuse.”

  “It’s from her father.”

  “She hardly knows him anymore. And what she’s seen, she’s not too fond of. According to her, he has bad breath. He met us in Connecticut. I told him about you and Naomi in the store together and he said, ‘Fine, let him have it, if that’s what she wants.’”

  “Does he?” I asked her.

  “What?”

  “Have bad breath?”

  Judith smiled.

  “He likes to smoke cigars. He was the perfect academic that way. A terrible husband, but a great economist.”