“They wanna make sure you’re not crazy,” Tina said. She knelt on her knees in their master bathroom, running water for his bath. Cha-Cha sat on an ottoman near the door, one of Tina’s old bathrobes pulled tight around his frame. It was purple and his favorite since the accident.
“Ain’t nothing crazy about seeing a haint.”
Tina turned to look at him.
“Says you and your family. Sooner or later you’re gonna realize that just cause a Turner thinks a thing is normal doesn’t mean it is. Not at all.”
WEEK ONE
SPRING 2008
Swelling Bellies and Wedding Tulle
Lelah stuffed fistfuls of her underwear into trash bags. She was too busy thinking about what to pack next to be embarrassed in front of the stranger who watched her. The city bailiff seemed disinterested anyway; he leaned against her front-room wall and fiddled with his phone. The other bailiff waited outside. Lelah saw him through the front window. He did calf raises on the curb near the dumpster, his pudgy hands on his hips.
She’d always imagined the men who handled evictions to be more menacing—big muscles, loud mouths. These two were young and large, but soft-looking, baby-faced. Like giant chocolate cherubs. It had never come to this before, the actual day of eviction. Lelah had received a few thirty-day notices but always cleared out before the Demand for Possession—a seven-day notice—slid under her door. Seven days might as well have been none this time around; before Lelah knew it the bailiffs were knocking, telling her she had two hours to grab what she could, that they would toss whatever she left behind into that dumpster outside.
Humidity made her wrecked living room oppressive. It was the end of April, but it felt like June. The bailiff leaning on the wall carried a gray washcloth in his back pocket, and he swiped it across his brow from time to time. He pretended not to be watching her. Lelah knew better. He had a plan ready for if she snapped and started throwing dishes at him, if she called for backup—a brother or cousin to come beat him up—or if she tried to barricade herself in the bathroom. He probably had a gun. Mostly, all Lelah did was put her hands on the things she owned, think about them for a second, and decide against carrying them to her Pontiac. Furniture was too bulky, food from the fridge would expire in her car, and the smaller things—a blender, boxes full of costume jewelry, a toaster—felt ridiculous to take along. She didn’t know where she’d end up. Where do the homeless make toast? Outside of essential clothing, hygiene items, and a few pots and pans, she focused on the sorts of things people on TV cried about after a fire: a few photos of herself throughout her forty-one years, her birth certificate and social security card, photos of her twenty-one-year-old daughter and her eighteen-month-old grandson, Francis Turner’s obituary.
The second bailiff stopped his calf raises when Lelah walked outside with another box. She imagined that the neighbors peeked at her through their blinds, but she refused to turn around and confirm it.
“I’d give you a hand, but we can’t touch none of your stuff,” he said.
Lelah used her shoulder to cram the box into the backseat.
“I know you’re thinkin, like, if we’re not allowed to touch your stuff, then how are we gonna dump everything at the end.”
Lelah did not acknowledge that she’d heard him. She took a step back from her car, checked to see if anything valuable was visible from the windows.
“We hire some guys to come and do that part,” he said. “Me personally, I’m not touchin none of your stuff. I don’t do cleanup.”
The bailiff smiled. A few of his teeth were brown. Maybe he was older than he looked.
Back inside her apartment, the other bailiff, the sweaty one, sat legs splayed on her sofa. At the sight of Lelah he stood up, leaned against the wall once more. Her daughter, Brianne, called her cell phone, and Lelah ignored it for the third time that morning. She surveyed the room. What to take, what to take, what to take? It all looked like junk now. Cheap things she’d bought just to keep her apartment from looking barren. She snatched her leather jacket from its hook on the hallway closet door. That’s it, she thought. The only way to hold on to some dignity, to maintain the tiniest sense of control, was to leave now, with an hour and a half to spare.
Later that night, at her mother’s vacant house, she claimed the big room for sleeping.
As the youngest Turner child, Lelah had no siblings to escape from growing up, no reason to seek the cramped comfort of the big room’s walls. Still, when her older brother Troy went off to the navy, she’d expected to take his place across the hall, spend her final years at home on that narrow twin bed for tradition’s sake. Before she could gather her things to move, her mother had claimed the big room for sewing. Viola Turner claimed so little for herself, who could deny her this luxury? Not Lelah, the child who had the privilege of seeing her parents at a slower cadence. Fewer mouths to feed at the table, long-awaited fair wages keeping the bill collectors at bay. Francis and Viola were older, a bit slower getting around, but she was the Better Times Baby, something she’d known since plaits and barrettes. She’d stayed in the too-large, run-down, Pepto-pink girls’ room until she too got grown, and found a way to get gone.
That night, nearly a year after Cha-Cha’s accident, and six months since Viola went to live with him in the suburbs, Lelah claimed that long-denied right of passage. One small triumph on a day marked by defeat. She climbed the narrow stairs and creaked down the hall, using her cell phone as a flashlight, and imagined her younger self, sleepy-eyed and ashy-kneed, peeking out of the girls’ room door to watch an older sibling take quarter in the big room.
The porch light had been on when she drove up, which meant Cha-Cha still paid the electricity bill. A relief. A house with electricity couldn’t be classified as abandoned, and an individual with a key to that house didn’t fit the definition of a trespasser. She considered conducting a thorough search. It was warm enough for someone—a niece or a nephew, or, God forbid, a drug-addled interloper—to set up camp in the basement. But she was too tired. After leaving her old apartment, Lelah had driven around the city, no idea of where to go. She refused to beg Cha-Cha or one of her nearby sisters for a place to stay this time. She’d wracked her brain for an alternative solution, some cheap, temporary lodging or genius scheme to hustle up money for a new place. Nothing surfaced, so she’d waited until the sun set and driven to the east side.
The big room had its disadvantages. It was right next to the bathroom, and water knocked on the wall as it traveled through old pipes to the toilet, which continuously ran. The lone window faced the street, which in this part of the city—ever changed, further decayed between each visit—put Lelah at risk of being struck by a stray bullet, or kept awake by intermittent car horns, hoots, hollers, and alley cat screeches. But on this, the first real, spring-feeling night of the season, she thought people had better things to do than shoot up the old Turner house, and having lived here in the eighties when the final, fatal arrival of crack cowed the neighborhood, Lelah felt Yarrow Street had already given her its worst. She hunkered down on the old twin bed, shoes on and jacket draped over her torso, and fell asleep.
She overslept. She’d planned to leave at five, before the block’s working residents got up and about their business. She didn’t bother to change clothes. She hurried down the empty house’s narrow stairs.
Daylight flooding the front room halted her on the first-floor landing. Lelah knew that nearly all of the furniture in the house had been divvied up, save for the old bed and dresser in the big room, which no one had wanted. It hadn’t occurred to her that the walls would be bare too. Dozens of brown outlines on the yellow wallpaper—ovals and rectangles—highlighted where picture frames once hung. Not long ago, every descendant of Francis and Viola Turner smiled from the front room’s walls. Four generations, nearly one hundred faces. Some afro’d, some Jheri curled, some bald, more balding. Mortarboards, nurses’ scrubs, swelling bellies, and wedding tulle. A depression in the floorboards o
pposite the front door marked the spot where Viola’s armchair had stood. Lelah had spent whole afternoons on the floor in front of that chair, watching the comings and goings of Yarrow Street as her mother or an older sister greased her scalp and combed her hair. The memory made her feel safe for a moment, like maybe she’d made the right choice coming back here.
A knock at the door.
“Little Lee-Lee, is that you?” A muffled voice from outside.
A bald, spotted head and a pair of bifocals crowded the front door’s high window. Mr. McNair. Too late for Lelah to duck out of sight. She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes, undid the lock.
The door creaked open, and Lelah’s eyes focused on a pair of withered kneecaps. They looked like baked potatoes. The old man’s face loomed above her. He balanced on an upturned plastic crate, one veined arm pressed against the porch’s ceiling.
“Mr. McNair, come on down before you hurt yourself.”
Lelah gave him her hand, put her free one on his elbow.
“I only fell the first time,” he said. “Sure did hurt though.”
“See, that’s one time too many. What were you doing, casing this place for a robbery?”
“Hell, don’t look like there’s much left to take.”
They chuckled. He straightened his baggy shorts, carried the crate to a far corner of the porch.
“Your brother Cha-Cha asked me to come by here and look after the porch and yard,” Mr. McNair said. He ran a hand along the porch’s rail to steady himself. “So I come every once in a while, sweep up, make sure it looks all right.”
Norman McNair and Lelah’s father had worked in the same trucking unit at Chrysler for thirty-two years. When Francis Turner died in ’90, McNair took up the handiwork for his best friend’s widow. McNair pretended to be a serious old man, but his fondness for going around with his gnarled, reedy legs showing as soon as the weather warmed up suggested a secret whimsy to Lelah. Francis Turner had never worn shorts.
“Few weeks ago somebody was sittin in Mrs. Bowlden’s living room when she came back from New Orleans,” Mr. McNair said. “A junkie. Up in there like he paid rent, just livin the life of Riley. Eatin her food and makin long-distance calls. He come up through the basement window.”
He whistled through his teeth and shook his head.
“So I got the idea to start lookin in at your house through that top window in the door, seeing as how the curtains is always closed.”
“Looks like we had the same idea,” Lelah said. “I just came by to do a quick walk-through on my way to work. Everything looks all right.”
Mr. McNair considered this, nodded. Lelah’s phone rang—no doubt it was Brianne. She pushed Ignore.
“Well make sure you lock up real tight, cause these junkies are about ready to thaw out from the winter. Lord knows what they’ll be lookin to steal.”
The old man peered down the block, brows gathered. Lelah’s car was parked across the street from where they stood, and she could see the odds and ends of her life cramming up the windows. If Mr. McNair noticed the things on the walk over, he was too polite, or bewildered, to bring it up.
“Alright, I’d best be gettin on my way,” he said. “Tell your mama McNair says hello.”
A rash of dandelions pocked the east side with yellow. The newly arrived spring—the spots of color, the surprise of birdsong—gave the neighborhood a tumbledown, romantic quality. It reassured Lelah that the ghetto could still hold beauty, and that streets with this much new life could still have good in them. On both sides of the Turner house, vacant lots were stippled with new grass. Soon ragweed, wood sorrel and violets would surround the crumbling foundations, the houses long burned and rained away. The Turner house, originally three lots into the block, had become a corner house in recent years, its slight mint and brick frame the most reliable landmark on the street.
Lelah took Van Dyke out of the east side to 8 Mile Road, 8 Mile to Woodward Avenue and into the city of Ferndale. She considered Ferndale, with its coffee shops and pet stores, a decent place for her daughter to live alone with a baby. It was home to a sizable gay community, and the trim, muscled white boys who jogged through the nearby park posed a stark contrast to the folks she’d seen on the street on her drive over. She pulled into Brianne’s apartment parking lot at 8:45.
“Gigi!” Lelah’s grandson, Bobbie, reached his chubby arms out to her.
Brianne passed Bobbie to Lelah. “What happened to you yesterday? I called a bunch of times.”
“Sorry,” Lelah said.
“I had to ask Olga across the hall to watch him again. She’s too old to have him all day like that.”
“I got my days mixed up. I thought you were off yesterday, and then working today.”
Brianne shook her head. “I can get a real babysitter, you know.”
Lelah said nothing to this. She made to bite Bobbie’s cheek, chomping down on the air next to his face. The baby grinned, showing off two bottom teeth.
Brianne was darker than Lelah, shorter too, but with the same heavy chest. She’d inherited her slim hips from her father, not Lelah, who possessed what folks liked to call “hips for days.” Brianne reached up and smoothed her mother’s hair back. The gesture was motherly, their roles reversed. Lelah flinched before she could stop herself.
“You musta woke up late. Didn’t even do your hair. There’s some gel under the sink in the bathroom if you want.”
Brianne handed Lelah a diaper bag and turned to put her key in the car door. Her nurse’s scrubs were a deep red with small black triangles printed in a haphazard pattern throughout.
“I can’t believe you go to work in that,” Lelah said. “You look like a ninja.”
“My scrubs? What’s wrong with my scrubs?” Brianne turned back around, searched her shirt and pants for a tear or a stain.
“Nothing, they’re just tacky. Nobody wants their nurse to look like they’re headed to the club.”
“Says the woman with the winter leather on.” Brianne pulled at Lelah’s coat collar. “You know it’s supposed to be seventy-five today? I’m hot just looking at you.”
“Wasn’t hot yesterday,” Lelah said. She shifted Bobbie’s weight on her hip while Brianne put on lipstick, the same deep red as her uniform. Lelah could picture old men at the nursing home where Brianne worked planning their days around her daughter. Watching daytime TV in desperation, waiting for the moment she’d come and put her small hands on their frail bodies and make their senses jolt awake.
“Anyway,” Lelah said. “When you get your RN, I’ma buy some new scrubs for you. LPNs might be able to dress like that, but real nurses wear bright colors. Care Bears and seashells. Or maybe just a nice mint green like they used to wear back in the day.”
Brianne scrunched up her lips.
“Real nurses? So now I’m a fake nurse?” Brianne said. She sucked air through her teeth. “Why are you going in on me, Mommy? You’re the one who didn’t show up yesterday.”
“Nobody’s trying to go in on you. It was just an observation. It’s like nobody can never tell you anything.”
“I need to wash clothes, okay? These were the only clean scrubs left.”
Brianne scrutinized Lelah once more, ran her eyes up and down her mother’s body.
“We’re both tired,” she said. “But I’m serious about the babysitter thing. If you don’t wanna do it, I can figure something else out. I can’t be dropping him off with random neighbors when you don’t pick up the phone.”
Lelah forced a chuckle.
“I’m his grandmother, Brianne. You can’t threaten to fire me.”
Brianne raised an eyebrow, climbed into her car, and drove off.
Lelah walked with Bobbie to the park near Brianne’s apartment. She sat him down on a shady bench near the cement pavilion, took off her jacket. She had felt like this before, anxious, cornered, but never had it produced such an uncomfortable physical sensation. Her body ached from yesterday’s move, her skin tingled, and her
head pounded. She stood up, jogged in place a bit, and stretched. With her hands reaching upward, Lelah knew the skateboarders in the pavilion were getting an eyeful of her softening midsection, of her heavy chest straining against the awkward fit of her teal polo shirt. She bent down toward her toes, displaying her backside to the skaters as she stretched her hamstrings, and tested the limits of her tight jeans. Her cell phone vibrated in her back pocket. This surprise, coupled with gravity’s predictable pull on her bosom, threatened to topple her forward. She took a step for balance, straightened up, and pulled out her phone.
A text message from Brianne: “Was 10 minutes late to work.”
Then another: “AND I AM A REAL NURSE.”
“Huh,” Lelah said out loud. She knew all-caps was the equivalent of yelling; she’d once accidentally set her own phone to all-caps and was accused of aggression by a tech-savvy coworker. Bringing up the RN thing had been stupid, but what else did she have to talk about? Usually Lelah fell back on a report of her mother’s well-being over at Cha-Cha’s house. She’d been avoiding Viola since she got her first eviction notice, so her go-to topic was stale. She couldn’t tell Brianne that she was homeless because Brianne would feel pressure to offer her a place to stay, and Brianne needed to focus on working and going back to school.
Licensed practical nurse. That’s what Brianne was. It wasn’t so much that her daughter’s job wasn’t good enough, just that Brianne was too young to stop striving. LPNs were easily hired and fired; Lelah wanted Brianne to push for the more secure job. “A woman without no options is waitin for a man to come by and ruin her,” Viola used to say, and she was right. Lelah had witnessed too many smart, talented Yarrow Street girls sit around on their porches, looking for excitement, meet the wrong man, and end up in trouble. Not pregnant trouble, but black-eye, bad-credit, women’s shelter trouble, or worse. Lelah had married Vernon Greene, Brianne’s father, because he was enlisting after graduation and odds were good they would see new things together. Three years after marrying Vernon and less than twenty-four hours after receiving the first and only black eye he’d ever have a chance to give her, she was back on Yarrow Street with little Brianne in tow. She hadn’t even left the Midwest. The last time Lelah saw Vernon, some eight years earlier, he’d been nodding off in the freezing rain on a curb in front of a twenty-four-hour Coney Island on Harper. Maybe if she’d pushed herself harder back then, she wouldn’t be where she was now.
The Turner House Page 2