Elsewhere, California

by Dana Johnson

  “There’s no need for Massimo,” I say, but I don’t believe it. I’m lying. I know: When Massimo comes home to find that someone has come into his house and taken what has belonged to him, to us, and I have waited all day long to tell him, have not filed a police report, have not taken action, he will be in a bewildered rage, so mystified that he will be pulling at the curls on his head, asking, “Why, Avie? Please explain this to me.” So many times I have disappointed and infuriated him because I could not answer that one question.

  Brenna touches my shoulder. She says, “Massimo is a pain in my ass, but it will be worse if you don’t call him. He’ll get pissed and want to call the police and make it all worse.” Make it all worse. And there it is. Both of us know who has come into the house. I had told her about the calls from Keith, and now I know that she knows. She says, “He can’t just come into your house and take things,” and pauses, as if waiting for me to disagree, knowing I won’t. And it’s true, I’m thinking, Maybe it’s a good thing that he has come and taken what he wanted. To consider this relaxes me, like pain medication finally taking effect, slow increments of peace between the pain. After all, Brenna and I were sitting around a pool in the middle of the day, a workday. Lazing, listening to music and singing together, laughing. The two of us, not three. The air conditioning was humming quietly. We were laughing, and I had my mind on the showing tonight, seven hours away, trying, as always, to close the door on my cousin. A door. I think about this door, and it is never a solid, heavy door made of wood like the one he walked through today. But instead it is a sliding glass door with a screen as well, a door that slides open, Keith standing on the other side, me standing back from the screen pretending that what is on the other side of the screen is something else. A chair maybe. A bench. But not a person.

  “Avie. Do you hear me talking to you? What are you looking at anyway?”

  And now it is me staring off into space. Until this moment, I have not really been looking at anything. “Nothing,” I say. “I’m not looking at anything.” But this isn’t true. On the white wall in front of me, where Keith and I used to be, there is nothing, yes. The portrait is gone. But the outline of it is there, the faint brown coloration containing what could be a smooth, white canvas. Clean.

  12

  BRENNA AND I sit outside by the pool, too uncomfortable to stay inside, though we have not said so to each other. Brenna sips her Red Bull and vodka, and I am still on my first and only glass of wine when Massimo’s silver BMW eases up the driveway. As soon as his plane landed, after I called Massimo, I made Brenna promise. I said, “Please. I don’t have the energy for what you two usually do.” “Fine,” she had said in a flat voice, and I could tell she was not thinking of Massimo at all, but of Keith.

  The car door opens and closes with a muted, sucking sound, not the bang of a door connecting to its other parts of metal. Massimo loves this, the quietness of his car. Everything hums or quietly clicks as if padded. I don’t know why, but both of us stand as he comes in through the gate. His round golden green eyes shift from me to Brenna and back to me. He comes to me, and I know that he wants to hug me, but something stops him.

  “You are sure.” He squeezes his car keys, and some of them stick out from between his fingers like weapons. “You are okay.” He looks at Brenna but then his eyes come back to me. “Both of you.”

  “Yes,” I say, and Brenna says, “Uh huh,” and because she answered him I know she is trying and because Massimo asked if she is okay, too, I know he is trying. But some things about each of them will always make it hard for them to get along. For Brenna, the things she can’t stand about Massimo aren’t who he is as a man, a person with heart, blood, brain, bone, and muscle. But rather, it’s the details of the things he owns. She hates that he drives a car that doesn’t make noise, that his shoes are the kind of shoes that OJ wore, not because he killed his wife in them, but because they are so expensive. “Only a true idiot would pay that much for shoes,” Brenna had said when Massimo asked if I knew where his Bruno Magli’s were one day. She said, “At some point a shoe is just a fucking shoe to keep rain and dirt and shit off your feet.”

  For Massimo, this is the problem with Brenna: Life should be beautiful, and should be lived beautifully. Her Red Bull and vodka are laughable. Her “uh huh” is coarse and unpleasant, does not show impeccable manners like my “yes” does. Now, he takes his cigarette from his shirt pocket and lights it, squinting his right eye out of habit, not because of the sun. “Okay,” he says, “let’s see what this is.”

  Brenna and I lag behind, scared of something that is not there. The day has made us wary, but Massimo doesn’t hesitate and he isn’t bothered by what he sees. Maybe it’s because I’ve told him what to expect, what’s missing. If you know what to expect to be missing, when you see that it’s gone, it’s okay because you’ve been prepared for the loss. On the phone, I said that I wanted to wait until he got home to call the police, but now that I see that he doesn’t seem to be upset, I will ask something more. His eyes travel around the room, falling on furnishings, taking inventory. He frowns, pulls a chair from underneath the table just off the entranceway, sits down and taps his cigarette into the ashtray, a misshaped, glazed bowl the deep orange of a tangerine. My failed attempt at pottery.

  “Why didn’t they steal this?” He holds it up and grins at me, and the dimple just underneath his right eye never fails to charm me. So many good times have come with that dimple, and it is only lately that I recall the bad times, how things didn’t fit the way they should have fit. The way I used to make them fit, just to get along.

  Brenna snorts. She and Massimo, two of the many things that don’t fit, at least agree about the ugliness of my ceramics. When Brenna laughs, he looks at her as if he’s forgotten she’s in the room with us. She stares at him a little too long without a smile on her face, the two of them in a silent face-off. I say, “Do we have to call the police?” Massimo shakes his head, puts out his cigarette. “Of course we call the police. Why wouldn’t we call the police?” His eyes shift from me to Brenna, and suddenly, he’s looking at the blank space on the wall before him in the foyer.

  “Your cousin did this,” he says, finally saying the thing that Brenna and I did not. He folds his arms across each other, spreads his legs, and slouches down in his chair, settling in for a fight. “Avie. Come on. Really. I’m supposed to let some—” He stops, reaches into his pocket for another cigarette but doesn’t light it. He holds it delicately between his fingers and tries again. “We can’t just let him come in here and walk away with whatever he wants.”

  Brenna, who has been so good, just like she promised, comes to the table where Massimo and I are sitting and leans up against me, resting her arm on my shoulder. Lightly she places her other hand at the base of my neck. Her hands feel like the whisper of a scarf settling on my skin. Massimo refuses to look at Brenna, but instead looks at me, his eyes flashing with decisions. I reach across the table because I want to take his hand in mine. I turn his hand over and pry open his fingers so that I can place my fingers on top of his and grip them. But he pulls away, puts his unlit cigarette in the ashtray before him, and makes his hands into tight fists on his lap.

  I wish these two people would know the things about each other that I know, the things that would change them from ideas to people. Massimo and I, when we first met and were getting to know each other, were just ideas to each other. But now we know better. Once you know someone’s story, or even pieces of it, it’s hard to dismiss them to pretend you know all there is to know about a person. I know this about Massimo: The hand that pulled away from mine is the softest hand I have ever felt, man or woman. Massimo’s hands are the hands of a man who used to be a carpenter. Hands that should be calloused but are not. He built things as a young man in Abruzzo, before making his way to Rome and then, eventually, making the difficult journey to America, to who he is now. Before, though. Before, he built beautiful tables and chairs. Houses. He used to steal whe
n he was a boy, running the streets with a “fuck you” ready for anyone who told him to stop. He couldn’t be at home, because at home, his father beat him and beat him, for just the smallest of things. Nothing, they had nothing, just a simple life with simple things. His uncle Nuncio tamed Massimo by asking him to sand the legs of a table he was building. “You should have seen Uncle Nuncio,” Massimo said, the first time he told me the story. “Hands so rough they felt like pieces of rock trying to find their way out of his palm. Beautiful things, his hands made, Avie. I was too stupid to see, until I made something not even half as beautiful. But my chest: Out. So proud.” “But how are your hands so smooth?” I had asked, unbelieving. I took his hands and kissed the palms, took one hand and placed it on my breast. “Beeswax,” he said. “I coated the handle of my hammer and tools in beeswax to keep my hands smooth so that now,” he ran his hands over my hip, up my side, and over my breasts, “I can feel you and you feel me. Not hard things like rocks.” He held up his palms like something had disappeared from them, like magic. Hands. Because his father’s hands harmed him, Massimo has never struck anyone, no matter how angry he gets, no matter how much he rants and throws things, destroying objects rather than people. Anyone who looks closely, into his eyes, can see traces of pain, a man holding off heartache with the pursuit of grandness, by acquiring still more things. Brenna will not see this pain, thinks I am making excuses, that there are many people far worse off. But it’s not that his pain is more valuable than Brenna’s or that mine’s more valuable than hers or that Keith’s has us all. Just look at a person holding his heart in his hand, with parts of it torn up, as his way to explain something—that’s all I am asking of anybody.

  “He didn’t always have money,” I said to Brenna at the beginnings of her hating Massimo. “He wasn’t always a lawyer. He used to be a carpenter.”

  “Yeah, but so?” Brenna had said. “Look at him now. He’s a motherfucker.”

  And Massimo is always considering Brenna, what he sees as her rude intrusions on what would be an easier life with me if only she weren’t around. Massimo understands little, though I have tried and tried to tell him. Look at her hands. She’s like my sister. Even without Keith in common, she and I would still be family. Still, he has no interest in what Brenna and I have in common. What he and Brenna have in common. And if he ever does, she makes sure that his interest doesn’t last long.

  The light has shifted in the house. Massimo’s watch says three o’clock, and I have so many things to think about. “Baby,” I say. “Can we just take some time to think about this for a while?”

  Just wait.

  I SWEAR TENNESSEE reminds me of Little House on the Prairie in places, because we have to go up a really small road to get to Granny’s house, a road that has two lines in the road, with the grass coming up between the lines. Every summer I come, I think I’m lucky that I can always come back to this place. Brenna is so jealous because she is stuck in West Covina. She says it’s bogus I’m going to be gone for most of the summer. I asked Mama and Daddy if she could come, and Daddy said No. No way in the world. The country is good, but there is something about it. I already told you. I like the way the woods look. Looking at them is okay. I just don’t like to be in the woods. Daddy says I’m already a city person, that I like too much noise, that I can’t even run barefoot on the rocks and dirt, that I’m scared of every little bug that comes my way. It’s too late for you, Ave, Daddy says. L.A. done run the country out of you. Should have been born in the country like Owen. But Owen don’t fit in Tennessee neither. He always acts like he is bigger than the place and everybody in it, and anyway, that’s not it. Just because I’m the only one in the family not born in Tennessee. He doesn’t know that there are a lot of ways to be in a place. How I like to walk by myself, or sit on the porch and play music, or just listen. Listen to the way people talk. I like the way people sound in the South. The way they tell a story. Make it seem like you’re inside the story, like you’re there, like you are them. Like I wasn’t born in California, even. Like maybe I was born here. But the woods are different. I stay away from the woods.

  IT’S JUST THAT the trees are like a scary movie. In scary movies, people always get caught in the trees. People are always chasing you between the trees. Like in Roots. That show scared me. Kunta Kinte runs and runs and runs through the woods for nothing because you know he is going to get caught. When it first came on, I wasn’t sure I wanted to watch it, but I had to because if I wanted to watch TV that’s all there was. Roots. Daddy said, Avie needs to know her history, and Mama said, We don’t know all that much ourselves. But after that, I didn’t want to know all that much about history. I didn’t know. When was this slavery? How long ago? Mama said, A long, long time ago, Avery. And Daddy said, Not that long ago. I was wanting to believe Mama, but usually, Daddy is right about these kinds of things. He said, Ain’t no need of you worrying about that now, Ave. It’s over now. That made me feel a little better. But I still don’t know. When did it begin? And why? When I asked Daddy, he said, Some people just don’t like black folks, Ave. But to me, what kind of answer is that? And then I think, Maybe that’s why at school Harry is always messing with me, not just because he’s a dumbass.

  So that’s why I’m not all that excited to pee in the woods, but there is nowhere else to go. We are almost to Granny’s house, and I have to pee really bad. Keith too. Both the cars pull off to the side of the road so we can go. It’s getting dark and I don’t want to go in the woods, but we have to go deep enough so that can’t nobody see us pee. We stand far enough apart so we can’t see each other, but I keep calling out, Keith, Keith are you there? I can hear him, but I hear so many other things, too. It’s so loud here in the dark. Bugs that sound like a bunch of ten speed bicycles speeding at the same time. And birds that make so much noise, sound like they are screaming and saying, Who? Who? Hey, Keith calls out. I hear something. You hear that? I hear something coming at me, he says. Mama yells from the car, You all better stop playing and come on here. But something’s breaking the branches and I hear running, so I holler and Keith holler and I’m running for the car calling out, Keith are you behind me? Are you out there? Hurry. Hurry. Run. And he says, I’m right behind you fool. You better run Avery. You better run, because I think I see ghosts.

  WE DRIVE OUR cars up the road and you can see the holler, that’s how they say it. Holler, not hollow, and it looks deep like a V. When we drive up the hill, getting close to Granny’s house, I love the sound of the rocks underneath the tires. I never heard that sound in L.A. Never hear it in West Covina. Crunchy. It sounds crunchy like something being crushed, or even like something is boiling and boiling. It is so hot. Maybe something is boiling. I ask Owen, Do the tires sound like they crunching or boiling to you? He squints his eyes at me like, Stop asking stupid questions. For real, I say. Tell me. Crunch, stupid, he says, and then the sound stops because we’re here.

  It’s like everybody is trying to get out of the car at the same time. I push the seat forward so I can climb out from the back, and Mama’s not even all the way out of the car yet. Wait, Avery, she says. Let me get out this car first! Aunt Judy comes running out of the house first, with her hair cut short like Mama. And then Uncle Cesar with his big afro and pick in it, wearing one of those button-up shirts he always has on, and then Uncle Laughlin with his limp because of his accident when he jumped in the creek that didn’t have enough water. Aunt Judy screams when she sees me and Owen, Oooh that boy getting as tall as his daddy! Avery looking like Darnelle’s picture! Then she sees Aunt Janice and Keith and screams some more, Girl you done gained some weight! Keith you better come over here boy and give your auntie some sugar. And then she says, Hey Darnelle, and her smile isn’t as big when she looks at Daddy. She still gives him a big hug and when she lets go she shakes her head, smiling. I say, Where Tina and Joe and them? and Aunt Judy waves her hand. They around here somewhere, probably doing everything but the right thing. And I want to go find my cousins b
ut I don’t know where to look, so I stay with Mama. Me, Mama, and her sisters sit on the porch and watch Daddy, Owen, and Uncle Cesar drive away. To run the streets, Mama says. But I know different because Daddy told me. He likes to come home to see his people, his friends, his cousins, and so that is where they’re going. He never sleeps when we come because he tries to see everybody he’s ever known, it seems like. It seems like he doesn’t want to miss anybody.

  I don’t care about them. They are missing out because the porch is the best place to be. Tennessee is the only place I have seen porches in real life, and it’s my favorite thing about Granny’s house. No porches in L.A. No porches in West Covina. Only concrete or yards. You have to be careful, though. You have to watch the nails that stick up. And pieces of wood that’s about to crack in half if you step on them too hard. And another one of my favorite things changed. You used to be able to lean out the window and practically be on the porch, but now the glass is broke out of it and they got cardboard in the window so you can’t lean out. The porch leans to one side, too, and now they got bricks underneath holding that part up. But that’s nothing. If you scream, Hello, the holler will answer you back from across the way, Hello, hello, hello. And you get to hear Mama and everybody talk about stuff they don’t care that you’re hearing about, even if they say you are only eleven years old and too young to hear about grown folks’ business like Charlie, Nancy’s girl across the way that come up pregnant because she is just as fast as she want to be and Johnny B up the road act like his wife don’t know he running around with that light-skinned heifa up at his job and Owen think white women special since West Covina and Daddy don’t never be home no more and Avery getting fat but at least she ain’t fast.