The Turner House

by Angela Flournoy

  His ex-wife, Cara, had been all curves and softness. Big ass, fleshy thighs. Jillian was the first woman Troy had dated who was linear and firm. Nearly as tall as Troy at five feet ten. Like a model, is what he’d thought back at Cobo Center when they met. He watched her shoulder blades work up and down as she grated parmesan cheese onto a salad in the kitchen. Quitting the flight attendant job had stripped her of some glamour—she rarely wore makeup outside of lip gloss now, and kept her hair in ponytails more often than not. But the hours on her feet sewing in weaves, washing and flat-ironing hair hadn’t affected her posture. She was statuesque. She had the sort of even complexion—medium brown with orange undertones—that, coupled with her athletic frame, suggested continuity, an unwillingness to mottle or sag.

  “Camille tried to chat with you earlier,” she said. “I was checking my email on your laptop when she called. I told her to try again tomorrow.”

  “I’ll catch her in the morning,” Troy said. He sat on the ottoman in the living room and took off his sneakers. His nine-year-old daughter, Camille, and his ex-wife lived in Kaiserslautern, an American military community outside of Frankfurt. He’d bought her a new laptop with a webcam so they could talk for free online.

  He and Jillian ate on TV trays set up in front of the couch. Jillian associated sitting around the table every night with the strained family dinners of her childhood in Lansing, when she and her younger two sisters had to report on the highs and lows of their school days before they could eat dessert. Table or no table, Jillian had never broken the habit of recounting her day in detail. He listened to her talk about a man who came into the salon with a shopping bag full of bootleg DVDs. A customer gave him a $100 bill, expecting change, and he ran out with the money.

  “I promise you, you never seen a old-ass man move that fast,” she said. “And we tried to play the DVD he gave her. It was blank!”

  Troy laughed. They were skilled at this, being good when things were good between them.

  “We need to go ahead and start looking into flights for Camille this summer,” Jillian said. “It’s almost that time.”

  He walked into the kitchen with their dirty plates. This was their agreement: she cooked and he cleaned up afterward. He’d never made such agreements with Cara, or the women he’d dated before. He had cleaned up plenty of times with other women, but it always felt like a favor he was doing them, rather than an expected contribution. Now he felt mature enough to where it didn’t hurt his ego to clean the kitchen or fold the laundry without being asked.

  “Babe? Did you hear me?” she called from the couch. “I said it’s time to start looking for flights before they start going up.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” Troy mumbled. He sponged Worcestershire sauce and cold lamb fat from the skillet. Every summer Troy sent for Camille for a month. For three years it had been the only time he’d seen her in person. Jillian had come to look forward to the visits too. Troy knew she wanted a child of her own, a child that he was not poised to give her. Viola had always called him the Lucky Boy because he was the last son born, and Francis had tried harder to be present in his life than he had the six boys before him. They’d gone fishing on Lake Saint Clair, to countless Lions games out in Pontiac. One summer when Troy was twelve, Francis, inspired by an announcement on the morning news, had tracked down the SwimMobile for Troy and two of his friends. He dropped them off on the west side. He must have noticed their apprehension at swimming with kids from unfamiliar blocks because he’d told them, “This whole city belongs to you. Specially at this age. Don’t let nobody stop you from enjoyin it.” He’d sat in his truck as they splashed around in the mobile pool—an eighteen-wheeler with an open cargo container in the back filled with hydrant water—listening to the radio and smoking his pipe. Francis even attended Troy’s graduation from basic, something he’d never done for Quincy, Russell, Lonnie, Miles, or Duke when they finished boot camp. This extra time spent was not enough for Troy, because Francis still existed behind a wall of formality. You could not go to Francis for advice about girls, or bullies, or even siblings. He would shrug off responsibility with something like, “Your mama got a better head for that sorta thing,” or “Might as well ask Cha-Cha, what’s an old man know?” It was if his father had finally figured out the value of sharing his time with his children but not his heart. Troy tried to give more than this to Camille, via video chats, spontaneous gifts in the mail, and support of her extracurricular interests, which ranged from German and French classes to ballet. It took a lot of energy, and Troy did not think he had enough reserved for another child, nor enough money.

  “We should put her in a little summer program,” Jillian said. “She’s old enough now to do a day camp, or maybe a short sleep-away one. There’s this one in the Upper Peninsula that’s a week long about ecosystems and stuff. Maybe Cara would help pay.”

  He dried his hands and came over to the couch.

  “I met with Dave earlier tonight.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s he talking about?”

  “Um.” Troy hopped back up and went to the fridge for a beer. “Ha. It’s funny. We was talkin about my mama’s house, actually.”

  He could feel her eyes on him, even as he faced the fridge in mock deliberation (they only had Heinekens to choose from). He knew her head was cocked, that she was incredulous that he’d brought the issue up again. Soon her neck, that beautiful, elongated, near limb that had drawn him to her in the first place, would be tensing up, shrinking into her shoulders.

  “Dave knows a guy who can help with the house paperwork, but it’ll cost extra. And, um, I was thinkin maybe we could wait to bring Camille out here till the second half of the summer, like late July?”

  He turned around to find her posed just as he’d imagined.

  “What the fuck, Troy? What’s there to even . . . help with? Huh? We had this . . . conversation not three fucking days ago.”

  “Yeah, but the more I think about it, we gotta do this, Jill.”

  He sat on the couch, ignored her hostile posture, and moved in close. If they were willing to be close to each other, it could not be considered a fight yet. He put his hand on her thigh.

  “Why?” she asked. “You need to . . . to really think about why. You’re gonna piss folks off . . . damn near everybody. And the house is basically worthless. Why?”

  “Cause people like Cha-Cha and them always get taken advantage of,” he said. “So scared of breaking the rules, like somebody is even thinking about them. Wasn’t nobody thinking about us when they made these rules. But they wanna sit around and follow them.”

  There was a difference between violent, destructive crimes and bending rules that were prejudiced or predatory to start. Over the last few months, as the housing bubble burst, he’d read article after article about banks pressuring black and Latino homebuyers, even those whose income and credit scores could have warranted a better deal, into subprime mortgages. It was illegal and deplorable to steal from your neighbor, yes. Manipulating a housing system that had manipulated people who looked like you for decades? He saw no harm in that. But for as long as he could remember, Cha-Cha and Tina had acted like the integrity police. They had been above getting illegal cable installed in the nineties when everyone had “black boxes.” They wouldn’t let anyone drive their cars if they weren’t on the insurance, not even around the corner. A couple years back they had overextended themselves financially to prevent their son Chucky from filing for the unemployment compensation he was entitled to. It was a particular sort of Turner weakness: self-sabotaging self-righteousness masked as self-reliance. It made Troy sick.

  “You know, Cha-Cha’s not the only one who put some money and time into that house,” he said. “When I first got out the service, I lived on Yarrow with Mama, and Cha-Cha never came over to see how I was doing, let alone how Mama was doing. He came over to ‘handle business,’ like check on the water heater or whatever, but that’s it. And doesn’t spending time count more than his stupid money, especi
ally cause his money comes with strings attached? Like, when I was in high school I had to take the bus out to Cha-Cha’s house early every morning, and Tina would take me and Chucky and Todd to school. It’s cause they had a better basketball program over there, and by that time Kettering was a shithole. I’d wake up around six just to get there, and wait for Tina to wake up around seven-thirty and take us. I had made it on this traveling team, and I needed new team shoes and a special jersey. Daddy and Mama didn’t have the money, so they told me to ask Cha-Cha, which is what they always said when they didn’t have the money, but that’s not my fault, right? Remember I’m only fourteen, fifteen years old. The shoes and jersey were like a hundred dollars.

  “Do you know that before he would give me the money he made me get to his house at five in the morning for a month? He didn’t want me to shovel snow, or do any chores or nothing. I just had to get there at five, and he’d come down the stairs in his pajamas when he felt like it, let me into the house, then go back to sleep. And his own sons were upstairs sleep the whole time! Fuck was the point of that, huh? Even in the navy, if they made us wake up at the crack of dawn, there was a point, we did some drills or whatever. Me standing outside, I couldn’t even do my homework, I stood there on the front step looking like a fucking burglar. I know he just did it cause he could. And every day that I had to go to practice without the gear I felt like shit cause you know the white boys on the team came back with their money the very next day. You know how cold it is at three-thirty in the morning in the winter? I’d be standin at the bus stop on the east side hopin I didn’t get jumped, freezin my ass off.”

  Troy breathed quickly. The veins in Jillian’s neck relaxed.

  “I’m sorry, babe. He probably thought he was building your character or something.”

  “It’s true,” she added after a while. “The banks are being extra predatory right now. I saw it on the news. They know people can’t pay their mortgages, they knew it when they gave them the loans or let them refinance, but they refuse to renegotiate.”

  Troy nodded. He hadn’t intended to tell her about Cha-Cha and the basketball gear. It was a stupid, old, humiliating story, but it had done the job.

  Outta the Fields

  Had his childhood been a happy one? The question felt irrelevant. Cha-Cha had made it through. He couldn’t recall being extraordinarily unhappy—he was clothed, fed, never molested, and never beaten beaten. Alice had posed the question to him earlier that morning, and now he posed it to his sister Francey in her Oak Park kitchen. He lay on his stomach underneath the kitchen sink, breathing in mildew and straining to snake the plug for her new alkaline water-filtration system to a power outlet in the adjacent cabinet. Francey’s husband, Richard, had electrocuted himself as a boy by jamming a fork into a socket, and now he avoided even minor electrical work. Every once in a while Francey would call Cha-Cha over to hook up a sound system, install a new light fixture, or fix the sprinklers, and during these visits Richard was nowhere to be found.

  “What a weird thing to ask,” Francey said. “You say this woman’s black, huh?”

  “Darker than you and me.”

  Plug finally secured, Cha-Cha rolled onto his back on the tile. Francey hovered over him. The track lighting on the ceiling made her close-cropped silver afro glow. With her cat-eye glasses and sparkly green earrings, she looked extraterrestrial.

  “That’s really what goes on in therapy? They ask you to drag up a whole bunch of stuff from childhood? I thought that was just on TV. We’re so old! At some point that stuff doesn’t matter no more.”

  “I said . . . the same thing,” Cha-Cha said. He tried to catch his breath. Sweat trickled down the back of his neck. “Unless something crazy had happened.”

  “And nothing crazy did,” Francey said.

  Cha-Cha sat up, reached his hand out, and Francey yanked him to his feet. At sixty-two years old she was surprisingly strong. Stronger than he was, Cha-Cha suspected.

  “Uh-huh. But Alice kept going on about deep-seeded trauma, and how something old like that could be a reason I see this haint.”

  “Weird,” Francey said again. “We weren’t traumatized. Just poor.”

  “Right. Which means you’ve got holey socks, maybe, hand-me-downs.”

  “And you eat starchier food,” Francey said. “Lord, we ate so much greasy, nasty food growing up! I can’t hardly stand to think about it now. Just pork, pork, pork, pork. Mama cooked damn near everything with pork.”

  “Oh hell,” Cha-Cha said under his breath. Unhealthy food was Francey’s favorite hobbyhorse. There was nothing to do now but wait her out.

  “That’s why when folks say they can’t understand how I’m a vegetarian I always say I got enough meat in my system to last me the rest of my life.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” Cha-Cha mumbled. He opened Francey’s refrigerator and scanned the jugs of prune juice, carrot juice, and some sort of green juice that had separated into three distinct and disconcerting layers. If this is what it took to be as strong as she was at her age, Cha-Cha could live with being a little feeble. He settled on water.

  It had been warmer out this morning than the previous week’s visit. Alice took off her purple cardigan halfway through the session. Her arms looked soft but not flabby. She had some of the smoothest-looking skin Cha-Cha had seen on an adult—supple, with a sheen he attributed to some sort of body oil. She had a light splotch of skin about the size of a dime on the inside of her right biceps. Cha-Cha couldn’t stop staring at it as they talked. Either a birthmark or a burn scar, he figured. He’d wanted to rub his thumb across it to feel if it was smooth or textured.

  “Alice asked me if I think life would’ve been better without so many siblings,” he said.

  Francey spun around from the far counter where she’d been bent over writing something, all the while still listing the perils of pork. She hissed through her teeth.

  “What a stupid question. I mean, yeah, it coulda been better. But what do we know? What you say to her?”

  Cha-Cha saw Francey’s question for the setup it was. Outside of joking about hand-me-downs handed down for far too long, or waking up at the crack of dawn to be first in the shower, the Turner children rarely discussed the disadvantages of being one of thirteen. Scrutinizing too closely why Viola and Francis had not stopped at two, or seven, or even ten children felt like wishing a sibling never born. And yet, each child thought about it, Cha-Cha was sure.

  “I said what I always say. I don’t have time for what-ifs. Don’t see no point in it.”

  In truth, since he’d started seeing Alice, his stance on what-ifs had softened. Now he caught himself analyzing many aspects of the way he was raised, when before he would have been content to remember the highlights and skim past the rest. It seemed a self-indulgent, pointless endeavor, but he couldn’t stop. Vignettes from this time or that time kept bubbling up in his memory. The logical next step was to think about how these experiences had helped make him the person he was. What if there had only been two Turner children, or five? Who might Cha-Cha have become?

  “Remember when you and me and Mama and Daddy lived in that rented house off Lemay and Mack?” he asked.

  “Oh, the not-so-ghetto ghetto.” Francey chuckled. “We thought we had it made cause the water stayed hot, and we had our own stove.”

  “We did have it made, compared to that place in Black Bottom,” he said.

  There had been three whole years between Francey’s birth and Quincy’s, then another two before Russell was born. By five years old Francey was already the boss, never mind that Cha-Cha was older. She’d gone on to teach third-graders at various Detroit public schools for twenty-five years until she was forced to retire, her obesity having led to a string of health issues. She’d devoted a good chunk of her life to wrangling children, and now all of her grandchildren lived out of the state.

  “Plus,” he added, “Daddy stopped workin at the salt mine so he could work for Chrysler, which made him less depressed.”


  Francey frowned and picked up the magnetic dry-erase board she’d been writing on and stuck it onto the fridge.

  “I don’t know if I’d say he was depressed. Since when did you decide he was depressed? Alice help you with that?”

  The dry-erase board held a to-do list, which Cha-Cha watched Francey check off and strike through.

  Juice leftover apples ✓

  Soak and clean juicer ✓

  Kyle bday present

  Look into Head Start for Bobbie?

  Breathe! ✓✓✓✓

  Smile!! ✓✓

  Who needed a reminder to breathe? Cha-Cha was certain the last two entries were for his benefit, Francey’s way of communicating that she had larger and more important concerns than he did, or that life was too short to not smile, or to take it “one breath at a time,” or some other Francey-approved feel-good slogan. She wore black stretch pants hiked up to the middle of her loose, smallish belly, a teal tank top tucked into the stretch pants, and white aerobic shoes. Somebody’s athletic, health-obsessed granny, Cha-Cha thought. She probably weighed 150 pounds now, but just as Cha-Cha had to reconcile Viola’s current physical condition with his own memories, he often had to do the same with this thin woman before him. Francey had been large for most of their adult life, 350 pounds at her heaviest. Nearly ten years had passed since she lost more than half of herself, thanks to bariatric surgery and a lot of juice.

  “I know depression exists,” Francey said. “I’m not one of those old black ladies who doesn’t believe in mental health, but the threshold has gotta be different for different eras. Lots of folks had a bunch of kids back then; it’s just what they did. Mama was one of ten herself. And remember, Mama and Daddy’s parents and grandparents were sharecroppers. Shoot, sharecropping killed Daddy’s father. And their great-grandparents were probably born slaves. Slaves, Cha. What’s a big family and a crummy job in Detroit when you’re only two generations or so outta the fields?”