by Martha Moody
“Come in, come in.” He had brought her cookies. He held them out wrapped in a napkin. “Did you make these?” she asked.
Tuuro nodded. He had stolen the peanut butter from his restaurant and bought the baking sheet.
“There’s a war going on. Did you hear? I couldn’t take it. I went to bed.” Her eyes sought Tuuro’s. “The Grid’s hooked up with the Alliance, and the Alliance is sending troops to …” She explained the situation, down to the firefights above the Grid’s northern border and the American fighters the Alliance had shot down.
It startled Tuuro that Chelsea was presenting this as fresh information. He knew that, because of her bad eyesight, Chelsea didn’t watch the media, but wasn’t there someone else besides Tuuro that she talked with?. “But this has been happening for a week,” he said. “Don’t you have at least have a radio to … ?”
“People don’t understand me, but I don’t mind Africans,” Chelsea said. “I’ve always liked Africans. Anyway, I don’t need to know about war,” she said. “I know war. I was in Uganda when Idi Amin kicked out the white people. I was five, but I remember. I don’t tell people. When our neighbor got killed, my mother made me walk around him on the floor to get his food out of the icebox. She didn’t think they’d shoot a child.”
Tuuro was stunned.
“My parents were missionaries,” she went on, her voice bitter. She set down Tuuro’s cookies, wadded in their napkin, on a table at the base of the stairs. “The church got us out. They took us to the airport in an ambulance. An African could be bleeding on the road and there wouldn’t be an ambulance. But we went to the airport in an ambulance.”
“I’m sorry,” Tuuro said.
“Dreadful man, Amin.” She ran her fingers over the top of her head, pushing her wayward hair even higher. “I had a little African friend named Anna. I never saw her again. That’s why I was so happy about Nenonene. A true African leader. A gentleman. Oh, he’s not perfect, but …” She twirled completely around, as if looking for the way to go. “I’ve got to get to bed, Theodore. I took a sleeping pill. That thing with Nenonene and the colonel didn’t bother me, oh no. He had to do it. I know Africa.” With this she hurried up her stairs, leaving Tuuro awkward at the door.
“Goodnight, then,” he called, hand on the doorknob, thinking it wasn’t even evening, but before he closed the door behind him he heard her call his name. No. What she thought was his name: Theodore.
She wanted him upstairs. He imagined, as he trudged up the steps, that she needed him to reach something. But when he arrived he saw that what she wanted was trickier. She was standing in the center of her bedroom, her big white nightgown twisted and tangled around her, her skinny upper arms quivering and her face deformed by tears. Black streaks from her mascara ran down her cheeks and branched in her skin’s crevices. A slick of wetness shone between her nose and her upper lip. Tuuro was stricken by the bald grief of her. “Chelsea,” he said, wrapping his arms around her, feeling her face burrow into his shoulder. “Theodore,” she kept repeating, “Theodore.”
She was gripping him less tightly now, the sleeping pill kicking in. Tuuro wanted to get her into bed, but he wasn’t sure how to do this in a dignified way. He tried moving her toward an armchair, thinking he could sit her down. But Chelsea’s eyes closed and she became unbendable, and he ended up sitting down and pulling her on top of him, her fluffy hair right under Tuuro’s nose. Her body relaxed into him. “Oh, oh, oh,” she sobbed, tucking her head under Tuuro’s chin, and although he’d pictured himself holding a woman in comfort, this was not how he’d imagined it, but to his surprise this was fine. Her pink scalp smelled clean, her thin hair was surprisingly wiry, and her head on his chest was a human head and an expression, Tuuro realized, of trust. He was right, he could sustain a person.
“You’re so strong,” Chelsea whispered.
“Now, now.” Tuuro freed a hand to stroke her hair. She stayed on his lap until her head lolled and her breaths were deep and even, and Tuuro, barely able to stand, moved her from his body to her bed.
“Goodnight, little lady,” Tuuro said, and he reminded himself of the night ages before (could it have only been last summer?) he had put Nenonene’s grandson to bed in the earth. Would that this bed for Chelsea turned out better. Tuuro touched his fingers to his lips and kissed them, touched Chelsea’s forehead, then headed for the steps, leaving Chelsea’s bedroom door ajar. He sat in the living room for an hour or so, checking on Chelsea once before he fell asleep on the sofa. He awoke about midnight, checked her again (she had rolled over, which pleased him), then walked back to his own place, the apartment Nenonene paid for.
—I DO AND do and do for you, and what thanks do I get?
—I might as well sleep with a dog.
—Has Georgie called yet? (Georgie was their son.) Did you remind him about my birthday?
—Didn’t you hear me, you fat pig? Not today!
Sharis, in desperation, had started running George and Gentia’s loops with only sound, and in doing so she noticed a strange thing. Their comments often referred to arguments that had started years before. It was enough to make Sharis never want to argue.
George and Gentia exhausted her, but they were income, as well as one of the only households left in their neighborhood. On Custard Lane only two other houses appeared to be occupied. Abba had reported a woman peeking out of one; the other had a shrinking woodpile and a grill Chad and Sharis had seen smoking. But these weren’t people they knew.
Sharis tried editing a week of George and Gentia cutting out the images entirely, running only words. She hesitated to send it, thinking it was the spookiest loop she’d ever made, but in the end she pushed the button that messaged it on.
“YOU MUST MISS a woman,” Chelsea said, smiling over the rim of her teacup, and then, acknowledging Tuuro’s surprise: “Being all alone here in Cleveland, a young and attractive man like you.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Tuuro said. They were sitting in her living room after dinner, in their customary chairs.
Chelsea smiled. She lifted her chin and turned her head as if she were a modeling a hat. “I’m keeping my eyes open for you,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“Not that they’re very sharp eyes.”
They sat in silence for a moment before she set down her teacup. “Of course, an old woman gets lonely, too.”
“I’m sure she does.”
“Not for sex, exactly. For the holding.”
“I held you last week,” Tuuro heard himself blurt, thinking of his putting her to bed.
“Exactly.” She looked away. “Maybe I liked it.”
Tuuro looked into his lap. “I thought you were asleep.”
“Half asleep. Half asleep can be a memorable time.”
He couldn’t believe he was being seduced by an old lady with blue-white hair and skin the color of a peeled banana. On the other hand, he liked her. He liked holding her. She had made him for that instant—for all instants, really, since he’d met her—a real person.
“You must be very close to Africa,” she said. “You have that dignity. You have that beautiful black skin.”
“My aunt used to tell me I was Zulu,” Tuuro said.
“I thought so.”
Chelsea stood up. “Come upstairs with me,” she said, her voice almost coquettish, and Tuuro to his shock felt a familiar stirring in his groin. He rose, maybe too eagerly. “For holding,” she said.
Upstairs, she took off her clothes. She was indeed white, her breasts hanging, her belly round and drooping under a net of veins. Between her legs she was bare as a child. “Now you,” she said. Tuuro took off his clothes slowly, meticulously folding each item and laying it on the back of her armchair. He didn’t feel shy. When he was fully naked Chelsea looked him up and down. “You make me glad to be alive,” she said. Tuuro’s penis was a great streaming flag, parallel to the floor. They embraced. “Just holding,” Chelsea repeated, angling her hips away from his erection, a
nd Tuuro’s penis deflated like a popped balloon.
He found, once they were together under the covers, that he was perfectly content to be lying with her, skin to skin, her head tucked on his shoulder, as if she were very small (which she wasn’t, she was almost as tall as he was) and he was her protector. He drew his arm around her tighter. He could feel a nerve in it sputtering, a wash of numbness moving up his fingers, but he didn’t care, he would never move that arm, he would keep her close to him all night. If someone leaned on you enough to crush a nerve, ah, that was the definition of alive.
How strange this is, he thought when he was half asleep. How strange and what a blessing.
ONE SPRING WHEN Sharis was nine or ten, her grandmother tripped and broke her hip. Sharis remembered visiting her in the hospital, how a weight hung off the bottom of the bed from a cord attached to her grandmother’s ankle. “I fell on the green grass!” her grandmother had burst out, and Sharis understood that the adjective made a point, that the greenness of the grass had been astonishing, had contributed in some way to her grandmother’s fall.
Sharis noticed the green grass as she walked across her yard. Howard walked beside her, a good foot between her arm and his. Like a silent weight she was dragging beside her. Like a beaten dog that would neither leave her nor return her glance.
Tell me, she wanted to plead. Something bad happened to me once, and I told Daddy, and you know what? Daddy helped me. But she was afraid to say that. “What happened to you?” Howard would ask her, a flicker of curiosity or hope in his eyes. She couldn’t tell him. She hadn’t mentioned it for years, and never in front of her sons. They thought—with everyone else—that her parents and brother had simply died. The Short Time deaths were a cultural phenomenon pervasive enough that no one ever questioned it. “Diphtheria?” someone might ask, wincing—and the shadow on Sharis’s face was the only answer they needed.
Of course, that day when she and the boys walked to the troll bridge and ran into the woman with the baby, Sharis had told her sons that her brother had drunk poison. She hoped that they’d forgotten that. Or, more likely, that they were afraid to ask questions about it.
One hundred miles north of Dayton—just west of I-75, the highway their vehicles had taken south—the Alliance troops, fortified by the Gridians, had set up camp and were sitting. Sitting. Every day there were rumors—on the media, on messages, at the grocery store and the police station—and every day nothing happened, apart from the U.S. satellite surveillance and the Alliance troops busying themselves with whatever they were busy with, and President Baxter saying any further movement would be provocative and Baxter’s political opponents shouting what was he waiting for?
A terrible time, really. The daffodils had faded and the tulips were starting to bloom—all the fruits of her fall labor—but it was a month too early to plant for the summer (the frost date was May 15) and Sharis felt useless. The parsnips and cabbages she’d buried were gone and she’d used her frozen beans and canned applesauce and they were down to bread she made and occasional ham and endless dinners of pasta with tomato sauce. Basically no fresh food. There was a cluster of May apples in a small wood behind their across-the-street neighbors. Sharis had heard that mushrooms were often found where May apples grow, but when she looked for mushrooms, she found nothing. She sat in the woods at the end of Custard Lane with her rear cold from the wet ground and hair sticking to her sweaty forehead. Harold sat beside her. What was she thinking? She would never cook a mushroom even if she found one, because she didn’t know the ones that were safe to eat.
“Come on, Howard,” she said, pushing herself up. Howard remained on the ground with his head down, stirring the dirt with a stick. “Howard?” Chad was off making his daily rounds to the grocery story and police station, walking as usual to save on fuel. Abba and Leon were huddled together watching TV.
“Howard,” Sharis said again. She hadn’t taken him back to the counselor, afraid of what the man might suggest.
“You know what I think, Howard?” Sharis dropped to her knees beside him, and the slight wobble in his poking was the only indication that he’d heard her. “You’re perfectly safe now, Howard, because you’re with us. Those Taconoutes are crazy, Howard. They’re bad people. So whatever they did to you I think you should wall it up. Just get some rocks and mortar and cover it over. It’s like … burying weeds. You know, when they’re too stubborn to pull out. You pile stones and dirt over them. Maybe that’s not perfect but it works. I know. That’s what I did.”
Sort of. Because she’d had Chad to listen to her, to tell her she was Jacob with the coat of many colors, saved for something greater later on. And her mother had been Benjamin, Jacob’s relative who had angled to insure Jacob’s survival. Even if none of that was true, it had been useful to believe it. Sharis still halfway believed it. She owed Chad, really. For better or worse. Although this morning he’d barely lifted his head off the pillow when she told him she and Howard were going out.
She should push Chad for another recorded episode of his Dayton course.
Howard looked over at her.
“You might as well be practical,” she said. “I shouldn’t have let you go with the Webelos. I was trying to give you something extra, but no one needs extra right now. Extra’s dangerous. George and Gentia could get killed for their extra, not that it even makes them happy. And your father, he’s a good man, but he can’t get over that these days there’s not extra. He feels cheated. Leon’s okay because he doesn’t expect much. He’s like a squirrel, he runs up a tree if there’s trouble. But you and me, Howard, we think. And we’ve got to decide, both of us, to cover up the weeds and keep going. We have a lot of power, you and me. We get to make the choice.”
Howard was silent when Sharis had finished, and her head throbbed with worry. “You know I don’t have a family,” she said. “My parents and my brother killed themselves when the troops came for the Gridding. They would have been fine, but they got scared about what would happen and they drank poison.”
Howard’s gaze flicked her way. “Did your brother know he was drinking poison?”
Sharis shook her head. “No. He was little.”
“Did you drink poison?”
“No. I ran away.”
“Good.” A brief light appeared in Howard’s eye.
“My mother helped me. My mother didn’t want me to die. And I’m the same. I want you to live,” she said. “Whatever happens.”
“Okay.” Howard stood up. “Me, too.”
Sharis stood up, too, and reached for Howard’s hand. He let her take it. They walked back toward their house, Howard’s chubby fingers flaccid in her strong ones, and Sharis was afraid to speak or even look at him. After several minutes they reached their driveway. The tulips on each side of the asphalt had opened, their red heads jarring Sharis with their violent brightness. Oh, God, she thought, I should have planted white ones.
“The tulips are pretty,” Howard said.
identity, mistaken
“SHE THINKS YOU’RE my handyman,” Chelsea giggled as they walked down the street. Tuuro, a bucket in one hand and a sack of groceries in the other, had a second of unease. He straightened his back, tried to walk like Nenonene—but perhaps that would remind people of a handyman more.
But that was only one moment—a mere instant, easily erasable—among hours of comfort and happiness, of eating fried chicken and egg pie at Chelsea’s kitchen table; of lifting her chipped red teakettle, which didn’t whistle so much as moan, off the burner; of sitting in his chair in her living room watching the war on her small TV. Nights she asked him, Tuuro stayed. “Oh,” Chelsea might frown, “I hope they don’t hurt your Dayton!”—because it looked as if someone might, the Alliance-Gridians in trying to take it or the U.S. in defending it. There was even a rumor—which got a lot of play on the CAVE Network, which they watched only for minutes at a time because of Chelsea’s fear of its rude language—that the U.S. was considering evacuating Dayton’s citi
zens and destroying the city, including the Consort plant, so determined were they that the Alliance not seize anything useful.
“It’s the Gridians that make the U.S. really crazy,” Chelsea said, reaching for one of Tuuro’s cookies.
“They feel betrayed,” Tuuro said, thinking how, up here in Cleveland, sheltered under the wing of the Alliance, it was easy to refer to his fellow citizens as “they.” “Their own creation has turned against them.”
“Exactly!” Chelsea beamed. Tuuro felt his face warm. It was so like sitting with Aunt Stella, before she rose up and rejected him, and the only thing missing was that fractured sense, the pull between Aunt Stella and his great-aunt and his grandmother. In this room there were only Tuuro and Chelsea. He had no one to please but her. Many nights she talked of her memories of Uganda, the people walking with bunches of vegetables or jugs of water on their head. “Their balance! The strength of their necks and backs! You don’t see that in the descendants here. What do you think happened, Theodore? Do you think there’s something toxic in America to an African’s genes?”
“You’re highly intelligent, Theodore,” she said once. “My mother used to say that: In terms of practical thought, no one, no one, no one can beat an African.”
Was there something belittling in that repetition? Tuuro played her words back in his mind. No one, no one, no one. Yes. No. Maybe, but Tuuro didn’t care.
“HOW WERE SERVICES?” Chad asked George.
“Lovely,” Gentia gushed. “But only about fifty people. I don’t understand it. There have to be more Catholics left in Kettering.” Sharis and Chad and George and Gentia were seated on lawn chairs outside: Gentia had made an Easter egg hunt for Howard and Leon. Abba was in a chair beside the group, asleep.
Leon, plastic eggs dropping from the sides of his basket, was tearing off to a distant tree. Howard was moving more slowly. He picked up, one by one, the eggs that Leon had dropped.
Perhaps George and Gentia, Chad thought, with their distant children, wanted to pretend his family was their own. “How’s business?” Chad asked, addressing George.