Just when it felt like the old, suffocating loneliness from Kansas City threatened to smother her, Tina’s hairdresser invited her to New Dawn, a church in Southfield with a young pastor and a bevy of ways to get involved. When she talked to prospective members now, Tina liked to say that the Word drew her in, but the people closed the door behind her. She’d found a place. A decade had passed and Cha-Cha still called her involvement a phase. But how else would she have been able to give all that she continuously gave? Organizing quarterly birthday parties for the legion of Turner grandchildren and great-grandchildren, pretending to be just as “in” with the family as always. Her crown would be in heaven.
Tina went to Viola’s room with a bowl of oatmeal. She didn’t knock. Viola slept on her side facing the far wall. Tina set the oatmeal down on the nightstand and put a hand on the pillow next to Viola’s head. The pillowcase was damp, perhaps from sweating, or could it have been from tears? She leaned over and looked at her mother-in-law’s face. Without wakefulness to animate it, it was easy to see how this face had made its way into the features of her thirteen children. There were Russell’s long eyelashes, Lelah’s high forehead, everyone’s small nose with its delicately flared nostrils and shallow arch. Cha-Cha’s thin lips, the top one just a touch more brown and the bottom more pink. Tina was not blood, she knew, but Lord, how she loved these people! So much sometimes it made her ashamed. They were hers. She didn’t let the move to Franklin Village push her out of the family, and she decided she wouldn’t let Alice Rothman do it either.
She cracked Viola’s window on the way out of the room. Whether she had been crying or sweating, fresh air would do her some good.
CHA-CHA HUSTLED THROUGH the lobby of Alice’s private counseling consortium, into the elevator and out to Alice’s floor, past the young female receptionist who never asked him whom he was there to see. He had never shown up unannounced, but it didn’t occur to him to wait for Alice to come out of her office. He had forgotten his printouts, and he cursed himself for this mistake. He knocked on her door.
Alice opened it. Her mouth was full of food, her office empty.
“Charles,” she said. “It’s lunchtime. What’s going on?”
Her standing there, surprised, worried, her hair pulled up into a type of high, fluffy halo that he’d never seen before, made Cha-Cha both regret coming there and desperate to touch her. Just some physical contact to confirm that they were indeed friends. That she would see him through this thing. He hugged her before he could stop himself. A chaste church hug, his pelvis as far away from hers as possible. Alice patted him once on the back but was otherwise still.
“It’s alright,” she said. “Please come inside.”
Cha-Cha forgot to drag his customary armchair into the room, and once inside he couldn’t bear to walk back outside to get it; he might have lost his nerve and run out of the building. He collapsed onto the fainting couch, let his cane fall to the carpet, and told his story for the third time that day. Unlike with Tina and Viola, he was precise as possible with Alice, preempting questions by including what he had done beforehand (a little haint research, babysat his grandson); what was on his mind right before he went to sleep (the Yarrow house, his grandson’s preoccupation with the word stupid, an email from Russell announcing another visit); and even what he’d eaten for dinner (hot wings, not as spicy as he would have liked). These details came out in a torrent, and for most of the telling he kept his eyes closed. When he reached the end he looked over at Alice.
“Well,” she said.
“Well?”
Alice spread her fingers out on her desk. She looked exhausted.
“I’m concerned, Charles, if you want to know the honest truth.” She did not blink as she looked at Cha-Cha. Was that fear he saw in her eyes? Or was it just an intense effort to remain detached?
“I feel responsible because I encouraged you to explore this haint situation further.”
“Oh, I don’t blame you,” Cha-Cha said. “I know maybe having to remember certain things helped me see it again, but now I’m pretty sure it’s always been around.”
“That’s the problem, Charles. It was unprofessional of me to allow you to indulge in these hallucinations, but now I think we need to start a more constructive dialogue.”
“Hallucinations? What are you talking about?”
The look he’d seen a minute ago was indeed detachment; that mask of professional indifference that Cha-Cha feared Alice would wear before he even met her. Here it was. It had been underneath the surface of her all along.
“Again, I apologize for not calling them that sooner. You’re holding on to these visions, which are essentially hallucinations, for a specific reason, and unless we speak about them in the correct terms, I don’t think things will improve. There are techniques we can utilize, more direct approaches that I now feel I should have implemented sooner.”
Cha-Cha sat up as straight as possible on the chaise.
“I’m not hallucinating a damn thing!” he said, then, “I’m sorry for raising my voice.”
“It’s fine,” Alice said.
“Listen, I had things to show you. I printed out some research I been doing, stuff I found about haints online. A lot are individual testimonies, but they prove that what’s happening to me isn’t so crazy.”
“Charles, I really am sorry,” Alice said, and she did look pained as she spoke. “But I think it’s dangerous to keep discussing this haint as if it’s real. It is clearly real to you, but the goal has to be to get you to a point where you don’t need to believe in it anymore.”
At sixty-four years old, Cha-Cha could count on one hand the number of times he had ever cried. When he was nine and Marlene was a newborn, she’d contracted a kidney infection and Francis sat the children down to tell them she would likely die. Cha-Cha had held the baby girl three, maybe four times, and the only remarkable thing he recalled was her skin; she was the darkest of his siblings yet. The thought of a casket small enough for a baby had made him weep. Quincy, Francey, and Russell had wept as well, but Francis shot Cha-Cha a look across the kitchen table, a look that told him to pull it together and be strong for the younger ones. Cha-Cha cried again in 1973 when Edgar Bullock, his best friend and first roommate, was killed in Vietnam, just days before he was scheduled to come home. The last time Cha-Cha cried was more than thirty years earlier, when Chucky was born. It was the only time out of the three when he hadn’t been at all ashamed. If he were younger, perhaps, or the son of another man, Cha-Cha would cry now. At the very least he should leave this woman’s office, he thought. Alice suddenly seemed ignorant, and much, much younger than she was. But who to tell next? Where to go with a story this incredible? Cha-Cha searched his mind for the right face and drew a blank.
“Charles?”
He’d been sitting quietly for nearly a minute.
“I understand if you’re upset with me,” Alice said.
“Who are you, Alice?”
“Excuse me?”
“Who are you? I’ve been telling you all about myself, my family, hell, even personal things about my marriage. I figure I should at least know some basic facts about you before I listen to anything else you have to say.”
Alice straightened up in her seat.
“Me as a person? That’s not how this works, Charles.”
“You know what?” Cha-Cha said. “I find it funny that all of a sudden you’re all about rules. Few months ago you were lying to Chrysler, encouraging my ‘hallucinations.’”
“I’ve got nothing to explain to you, Charles.”
“No, you don’t, because I’ve got Google like everybody else. I’ve seen your parents.”
Alice’s eyes widened for a moment, then she began straightening the pens on her desk.
“So you’ve seen my parents. My parents are white. What does that have to do with you and the things you need to work through?”
Cha-Cha stood up to go. Why had he trusted this woman so quickly? Because
he was lonely, and because she was beautiful. He could see her beauty even now. It was there in her worried eyes and smooth, nervous hands. In the way her plump lips pulled back tight when she was upset. He’d felt so fortunate to have a young, good-looking woman pay attention to him that he’d never fully analyzed what it meant that she charged him a fee for this attention, and that her reasons for seeing him might differ from his own.
“You damn near seduced me,” he said.
Alice opened her mouth to object, but Cha-Cha continued. “You had me up in here thinking you cared about all of this shit, this stuff going on in my life. Making it seem like this was more than another check for you.”
“Charles, I think you should take a minute to calm down.”
“I couldn’t figure what you could possibly want me in here for,” he said. “Not my brilliant conversation, I know that much. I guess you just wanted to know what it was like, huh? To grow up around your own kind. Or maybe just what it was like to grow up black and poor.”
“Charles,” Alice said.
“Stop saying my gotdamn name. I’m the only person in here.”
Her nose crinkled up as if she might cry, but the moment quickly passed and her face glazed over with detachment again. Cha-Cha walked toward the door.
“I’m not a lab rat, or some stupid monkey in a cage.”
He shut the door behind him, but he could still hear her say, “I never thought you were,” as he exited the waiting room.
Corned Beef and Cabbage
The story of black Detroiters and corned beef is nearly as fraught with racial tension as the story of the Pilgrims and corn. Long before European immigrants gave up fighting to keep the newly arrived black masses from becoming their neighbors, they were working next to them at the plants, distilleries, mines, and government agencies that made the city hum. It was easier to sustain hate for a monolith than to keep hating Earl from two spots down the line (even if you called him Nigger Earl, Mavro Earl, Mulignan Earl, or some other epithet when he wasn’t around), so tenuous friendships were forged and eventually recipes shared. Add to that the scores of blacks working in all manner of domestic and food service in the city, and an unintended result was that the Negro transplant had occasion to pick up new cuts of meat at the butcher. If black folks in the Southwest lay special claim to their own offshoot of Mexican food (and they do; think tamale pies, enchilada casseroles, and the like, all sprinkled with Lawry’s, pork added where it wasn’t before), then their midwestern cousins maintain a similar toehold in the world of brats, beer, and brisket.
Lelah felt she did not deserve nor could she feasibly manage a real relationship, but that didn’t stop her from trying to make what she’d started with David closer to her ideal. To this end, she offered to cook, to show up at David’s house during a respectable hour and make the two of them a proper meal. Corned beef and cabbage.
For the past week, their relationship had centered on simple, hungry lust. Sex for the sake of it. She’d slept over David’s three times. It was as if she’d suffered from scurvy and that chance meeting with him was a booster shot of vitamin C. She dissected their meetings after she left him, ran their touches and jokes through her mind too many times. She tried to ration this reminiscing but could not. It had been too long. His mustache on the ridge of her top lip when they kissed. The way he pulled his mouth away from time to time and breathed into her neck, as if the kissing itself was too much and required breaks. His elbows and knees the same color as the rest of him because he was dark enough for that, for very little wear or discoloration to show. She hoarded these details. She was here and already in the future looking back at here. Editing, perfecting, reliving it. She feared what lay around the corner, what two weeks, a month of their coupling might mean. Lelah and David were what Brianne would have called hanging out, messing around, hooking up. Two adults over forty couldn’t do that for long without one of them asking what’s what. At the very least David would want to see her apartment, catch her in a lie or two. And that would be terrible. Lelah preferred to leave David’s apartment while he showered—a self-preservation tactic, so that she would never be asked to leave—and she took meandering routes back to Yarrow. She had no reason to suspect he would follow her, but there were only so many main thoroughfares on the east side and not much traffic. How terrible to be caught at the wrong intersection with him.
The beef was in its pot, the cabbage cut and cleaned, the pickles sliced. Lelah joined David on the living room floor in front of the couch. She grunted as she settled next to him.
“I’ve never met a grown man who liked the floor as much as you do.”
“It’s my back,” he said. “What I get for slouching my whole life.”
He sat cross-legged with his back flush against the couch. His knees jutted out and made him look froggish. Lelah couldn’t manage to sit cross-legged for long, so she folded her legs under her. The TV was on ESPN, but David had it on mute.
“This how you meditate, down on the floor?” Lelah asked.
He raised an eyebrow at her.
“How’d you know about that?”
“I’m nosey,” Lelah said. “And I can read. Those CDs on your nightstand.”
“I don’t think Troy even knows I meditate.”
“Troy wouldn’t care. Or he’d just care long enough to make fun of you.”
“Ha. Probably.”
“I didn’t think it was a secret cause the CDs were out in the open. Nobody’s supposed to know?”
He put his arm around her. The smell of him was clean and unfussy. She’d found no cologne in his apartment.
“Not everybody gets to come into my bedroom, Lelah.”
She rolled her eyes at this. He kept meditation CDs on his nightstand, and the small bookshelf in there was full of motivational books about making money, like Rich Dad Poor Dad, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and even a few touchy-feely talk show favorites. He seemed to be very interested in fixing himself as well as fattening his wallet, in finding out how to make concrete adjustments for the better.
“So why do you do it?” she asked.
“Do what?”
“Meditate. What do you get out of it?”
“Nothing,” David said. “I don’t necessarily get nothing out of it.”
But the set of his mouth suggested the contrary. Maybe this was none of her business. After all, hooking up required keeping personal revelations to a minimum, didn’t it? To hell with that, Lelah decided.
“When’d you start doing it? I’m not trying to make fun of you. I just . . . is it religious? I remember Angela Bassett in What’s Love Got to Do with It? when she dumped Ike and found Buddha. You remember she had that chant? That’s ignorant, I know. Are you even supposed to say ‘found’ Buddha like folks say they found Jesus? I bet not.”
David laughed.
“Nah, it’s not religious.” He flopped one of his legs on top of hers. Heavier than it looked. “It’s just a long story. You really are that nosey, huh?”
“It’s like a sickness. Comes from being the youngest.”
“Alright, fine. So I met this girl when I was in San Diego and we got married. She was from out there. She had a big Filipino family, and I got along with everybody pretty good. I used to play basketball with her cousins. She was even close with my mom, even though she wasn’t black and my mom is old school, you know.”
Of course Lelah felt jealous listening to him. Of course she felt ridiculous for feeling this way. She tried to imagine a petite Asian woman with light brown skin next to David. She could and she couldn’t.
“Anyway, after like two years we were ready to start having kids, but I didn’t wanna be gone on tours and stuff with a baby, so I started thinking about getting out of the service. This was like, ’96, ’97. Long story short, I volunteered to go back on a ship to try to stack up some money, and I ended up cheating on her when I was away, and I told her about it. Maybe if we had kids she would’ve stayed, but we didn’t. I quit
the navy and moved to LA for a little bit, but my money was low, so I moved back home.”
“And the meditating?”
“Yeah, I bought a tape at this African marketplace when I first moved to LA, and I been doin it ever since.”
“Why?” Lelah asked again. David spoke as if this was the logical next step after his wife leaving him, but it wasn’t to her.
“Cause it worked? I don’t know. I was tired of feeling like everybody hated me, like because I had fucked up in this one way her whole family was done with me. The tapes helped.”
“With what?”
“With being alone, I guess.” He shifted his leg on top of her. “If you can get used to being alone, sitting quiet for a long time with just you, then you can do anything.”
This sounded like a line out of a self-help book to Lelah, or the type of easy solution they pushed at GA meetings.
“So why do you need to meditate to get that? Isn’t it just gonna happen regardless? You get older, you get divorced or whatever, and then you’re alone. It just happens.”
The pot of water for the cabbage boiled over and hissed on the stove. David lifted his leg to let Lelah up. She went into the kitchen and turned the fire down.
“Yeah,” he said. “But that’s not the same as being alright with it. I bet we both could name a lot of people who aren’t alright with it.”
“Mmm,” Lelah said. She wanted to say something about how when you have a child it changes the way you feel when you’re alone, how you are never alone in the same way again because there is a live, independently thinking part of you out in the world that you can never fully push out of your awareness, even if you try. She did not say these things to David; he mentioned that he had wanted kids, and he had none.
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