Seen It All and Done the Rest

by Pearl Cleage

  MacArthur brought over my pie and coffee and I smiled my thanks, but I couldn’t stop staring at Zora. She hadn’t even looked that unhappy at her father’s funeral, but I guess that was a moment for which she had time to prepare. This was a violent disruption of her life that she didn’t see coming until she crashed into the middle of it and found herself surrounded by enough paparazzi to be a Hollywood starlet out with Paris Hilton for a night on the town. Poor baby. She didn’t even know that the worst thing you can do is try to hide your face. It just makes them more determined to get the shot of you hiding.

  The copy read: “Even in the middle of one of the most scandalous moments in Atlanta’s recent history, Zora Evans, the mystery coed of last year’s biggest, sexiest murder mystery, managed to look good enough to eat!”

  “Mafeenie, I can’t believe you’re reading that trash!”

  Zora’s voice sounded indignant and embarrassed just above my head. I looked up to find her standing behind me, frowning like she had caught me performing a very unnatural act in a very public place. She was alarmingly thin and her hair was pulled back tightly from her face.

  “My darling girl,” I said, tossing the offending tabloid aside and rising to embrace her. “You’re here at last!”

  She felt like skin and bones. How much weight had she lost?

  “And not a minute too soon,” she said, hugging me tightly in spite of my choice of reading material.

  I leaned back and looked at her without breaking the circle of my embrace. “How are you, darlin’?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, squirming a little under my unrelenting scrutiny.

  She had lost fifteen or twenty pounds easily and her usually creamy smooth complexion looked sallow and muddy. With no hair to soften her newly narrow face, her cheekbones jutted out, sharp and heartless.

  “How much weight have you lost?”

  “Can I order a drink before you begin your interrogation?” she said, wriggling free and flopping into the seat across from mine.

  “Of course you can,” I said. “Jet lag has ruined my manners! Are you starving? Order something to eat!”

  “I’m not hungry,” she said as MacArthur hurried over with a menu. She barely glanced at him. “Stoli on the rocks.”

  “Coming right up,” he said.

  Zora ordering vodka was even more of a surprise than her weight. I had never seen her drink anything stronger than a glass of opening-night champagne. The copy of Dig It! I’d tossed on the table had fallen open to the editor’s column, which ran beside a photograph of a handsome young man with big brown eyes and very white teeth. Zora tapped the picture with her fingertip.

  “I threw a drink in that guy’s face once.”

  “You did?” I was impressed. Drink throwing is a dying art in the modern world.

  She nodded. “I walked in here one day and there he was sitting at the bar watching the Braves game and drinking a beer. Next thing I knew…”

  She shrugged her shoulders as if what happened next had been beyond her control.

  “That’s a difficult gesture to pull off,” I said. “How’d it go?”

  She shook her head and grimaced slightly. “Not so well, actually. I felt a little silly afterward.”

  “That’s why it’s a hard one,” I said, understanding completely. “It always feels good while you’re doing it, but once it’s done, there’s that whole moment after to deal with when you’re standing there, still trembling with righteous indignation, and the other person is sitting there with stuff dripping off their face, looking at you like you have just lost your entire mind.”

  “Exactly!”

  I nodded sympathetically and took one more bite of my peach cobbler. It was harder to lose an extra pound or two these days so moderation was key, but this pie was too good to resist.

  “That’s why you can’t just stand there after you’ve done the deed,” I said. “Toss the drink, put down the glass, and go. One smooth motion.”

  “How many times did it take you to figure that out?” she said, closing the magazine and tossing it down on the chair beside her. It fell open again to the page that was crowded with her picture, but she ignored it, so I did, too.

  “Oh, two or three, I guess.”

  She was looking at me like she used to when she was a kid and everything that came out of my mouth surprised her.

  “What?”

  “Most grandmothers can’t critique your drink-in-the-face moves like that.”

  “I’m not most grandmothers,” I said. “And thank God!”

  She almost smiled at that, but she seemed to have forgotten how.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t get your message earlier,” she said. “My supervisor makes us turn off our cell phones if we’re talking to a vet.”

  “Good for her,” I said. “Cell phones are the work of the devil. I was doing Fences last year and right in the middle of Rose’s big scene where she finally gets to tell Troy all about his sorry self, a cell phone went off right in the front row.”

  “You make it sound like a bomb or something.”

  I resisted the impulse to tell her that in my world, it was close enough. Her tone surprised me. I had thought she would find it funny, but her response sounded more like a reprimand.

  MacArthur reappeared with a little white cocktail napkin and set her drink down in front of her. As thin and bedraggled as she looked, he couldn’t help stealing a little glance. Even on her worst days, Zora’s beauty shines through.

  “What did you do?” she said, taking a big gulp of her drink.

  “I stopped the show.”

  “Oh, God! You didn’t.” She still sounded more annoyed than amused.

  “I waited. I tried to talk over it, but it just kept ringing. Finally, I turned around and just stood there until this fool finished fumbling through her coat pockets and found the damn thing.”

  Zora took another swallow of her drink. She grimaced a little, as if she didn’t really like the taste of it, but whatever it was she did like was worth the sacrifice.

  “The worst thing about it,” I said, “other than completely wrecking my big scene, was that her ring tone was playing ‘Little Red Corvette.’”

  “I love that song,” Zora said, like I had just slammed Prince’s artistic genius.

  “I love it, too, but not in the middle of my big scene!”

  Zora drained her glass. “Did she turn it off or answer it?” She was shaking the glass gently back and forth in a gesture that reminded me of her father more than the dimple in her chin or her hazel eyes.

  “I wouldn’t be sitting here today if she had answered it,” I said. “I’d be in jail for assault and battery, and you’d be marching around with a sign saying ‘Free Josephine Evans.’”

  At least she smiled at that, but she was busy looking around for MacArthur. She wanted a refill.

  “How long have you been drinking straight vodka?” I said, knowing she was a grown woman and could drink whatever she liked, but unable to hold on to the question any longer.

  “Not long,” she said.

  “You like it?”

  “Not much, but Dad said with vodka, it’s better to take it neat so you can keep track of how much you’ve had.”

  Now I truly loved my son, but taking advice about alcohol from a man who drank himself to death seems unwise. For most of his twenties, my son thought staying drunk was the way to address the emptiness. When he married Jasmine and they had Zora, I think he hoped family would be the cure. He even joined AA and went to meetings before rehearsals, but he always went back to drinking. After a particularly horrendous weekend, Jasmine went to the bank, withdrew her half of their savings, packed up her daughter, and left. She drove to Florida and invested her money in a tiny beachfront motel, where they rang a bell every night at sunset to honor the end of another day and tended to attract a laid-back clientele of regulars who didn’t require pampering. Zora grew up there, raised by a mother who adored her and a father who visited occasi
onally.

  When he got so sick he couldn’t work, he came to the front door of the motel one evening, like he was just another traveler looking for a few nights’ rest, and never left. When he died, Jasmine and Zora invited me to come for the service and I did. We rang the bell at sunset and scattered his ashes in the ocean behind the motel. I wept a little for the distance I had allowed my work to create between my son and me. I couldn’t deny that I had chosen to live my life without making any real space for him in it. There were reasons then, and there are reasons now, but the end result was he left his daughter behind with Jasmine, the same way I had left him in his father’s care, without a backward glance.

  She deserved better, I thought that day, watching Zora standing beside her mother in a long white dress, eulogizing her father as if he couldn’t have been more perfect if he tried. The next morning, I invited Zora and Jasmine to come to Amsterdam for the New Year’s Eve celebration that would usher in the new millennium. That way, I explained, if the doomsayers were right, at least we’d be together at the end. Jasmine said that was a pretty depressing reason to fly thousands of miles across the ocean, and how about if they came because there was no place else they’d rather be? They stayed a month and the three of us got closer than we’d ever been.

  Maybe that was why the way Zora was looking so hard for MacArthur to refill her drink order made me feel so sad and so scared that I opened my mouth to tell her that whatever she was looking for probably wasn’t hanging around in the bottom of a cocktail glass, but I hadn’t seen her in so long. It would probably be better to head home and get settled in before I started dispensing unsolicited advice.

  “Well,” I said, “you’re grown. You can drink whatever you want, but can we do it at your place? I’ve had all the pie I can afford to eat, but if we sit here much longer, I’ll have to polish off the rest.”

  I spoke quickly because MacArthur was headed toward us and Zora was already wiggling her glass in his direction. My request took her by surprise.

  “What?” She looked at my half-eaten pie and back to me.

  “You ready to show me your house?” I said, reaching for my credit card as MacArthur waited patiently for instructions.

  “Oh, yes! I’m sorry. Of course we can go. Sure, sure…”

  MacArthur left us to run the card; Zora tipped her glass back one more time to sip the watery remains of her drink and stood up.

  “Is this all you brought?” she said, glancing at my small pile of luggage.

  “Travelin’ light,” I said. “Just like always.” She slung my carry-on over her shoulder and tucked the garment bag over the pulling suitcase’s extended handle like a pro. I taught her well.

  I signed the check and included a generous tip. MacArthur repaid my largesse by holding my coat in a courtly gesture I’m sure he learned from a gentlemanly grandfather or an old copy of Playboy.

  “Thank you,” I said, slipping my arms into the silk-lined sleeves quickly. Zora was standing beside the table and I couldn’t help noticing that even her hands were too thin. She looked tired and tense and irritable.

  “Excuse me, miss?” MacArthur’s voice floated tentatively in Zora’s direction. I imagined him peeking around from behind me like a kid on the first day at a new school. Zora ignored him.

  “Miss?”

  I stepped away from him and waited for her to answer.

  “Are you talking to me?” she finally said, real nasty, like even the idea of such an exchange was insulting to her.

  MacArthur was not dissuaded by her tone. He picked up the copy of Dig It! lying open in the chair beside where Zora had been sitting and pointed to the picture of her dancing ecstatically with her doomed companion.

  “Is this you?”

  Zora didn’t blink. “No.”

  FIVE

  Zora was house-sitting in the heart of West End, just a few blocks away, and she drove home down Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard, the neighborhood’s main commercial strip. It had been almost ten years since I’d been in Atlanta to handle the family business when my mom died, and I was happy to see that things still looked good around here. This community is unique. No trash in the streets, good lighting everywhere, and an absence of predators. We stopped at a red light near the neighborhood mall and there were still people shopping even though it was almost midnight. There was a line at the sub shop on the corner and at the twenty-four-hour hair salon; business was booming. Every chair was occupied as patient women flipped through old magazines and waited for their stylist to beckon.

  I always love the ebb and flow of sisterhood that forms in salons between those being served, those waiting to be served, and the anointed ones we have trusted with our crowning glory. I wear my hair short because it’s easy and I like the way it looks. Puts the focus on my face. I used to shave my head and that was always fun, although if everybody adopted such a look, stylists would have to close up shop and then where would we gather?

  The woman at the all-night florist next door to the salon was constructing an elaborate window display featuring an amazing bunch of tropical blossoms that looked like they would have been at home in a window box in Martinique. I made a mental note to visit the shop as soon as I got my bearings. I had no idea what to expect at the house Zora was watching, but there’s always room for fresh flowers. There were people visible through the windows of the West End News, browsing through the magazines or drinking coffee at the tables near the big front window. It reminded me of the International Sky Café, except I didn’t see anybody smoking. A young woman with a backpack came out the front door, looked up at the big full moon, and headed off with a private smile of appreciation.

  Zora took a left and eased the car carefully through the quiet tree-lined streets. It wasn’t the season for the famous gardens to be in bloom, but I could see them everywhere, already turned over, mulched, and fertilized in readiness for spring. A few brave souls had put in winter collards, but most of these gardeners didn’t plant until Good Friday, traditionally the day to put your plants in the ground. The woman who started the West End Growers Association used to live across the hall from Zora in her old apartment building and had a huge garden there that started on one side, wrapped around the back, and was legendary, according to Zora, for the size and sweetness of its tomatoes. Zora had sent me some great pictures of her and some other women working in that garden, and they looked like they were having a ball.

  “Is Blue Hamilton still the man to know around here?” I said.

  “He’s the one,” Zora said. “That’s his house right there.”

  She was pointing at one of the larger Victorians. It was beautifully restored and even had a little gaslight burning out front. An impressive magnolia rose up from the middle of the carefully manicured front lawn. I met Blue Hamilton in Paris once, years ago when he was married to a friend of mine. We all went to dinner and I couldn’t stop staring at his eyes. I apologized to my friend when we were alone later and she just laughed. That was before he became West End’s godfather.

  “Didn’t he get married again?”

  Zora nodded and turned onto Oglethorpe Street. A woman walking a big dog waved, and Zora waved back but didn’t slow down.

  “A couple of years ago,” she said. “He and his wife just had a baby. They’re in Trinidad for a while so Blue can help his friend write a song for Carnival.”

  That surprised me. Was the godfather finally tired of his task?

  “So who’s watching the store?” I said.

  Zora pulled over in front of another big gingerbread, turned off the motor, and popped the trunk. She considered the question and then shrugged her narrow shoulders.

  “I guess we are.”

  SIX

  When you said you were house-sitting, I pictured you in a cozy little bungalow with a manageable yard and a front porch swing,” I said as Zora gave me a tour of the place where we were staying.

  “I told you it had a heated pool, remember?”

  “But you did
n’t tell me it was so…”

  “Fabulous?” she said, borrowing my favorite word, but the fact of its fabulousness didn’t seem to give her any pleasure.

  The place was beautifully and expensively decorated in soothing earth tones with enough colorful accents and eclectic pieces of art to keep it from being boring. There were lots of windows and high ceilings, and the uniform color scheme created the feeling that one room flowed into the other with no visible effort at all. The art was mainly oversize abstracts except for the kitchen, which had one whole wall covered in photographs of smiling, healthy-looking people.

  “Which one is your landlord?” I said, stopping to look at the pictures but not recognizing anybody.

  Zora pointed to a couple standing in front of a plateglass window that said The Atlanta Sentinel in big white letters and underneath, “Tell the truth to the people.”

  “Louis and Amelia,” she said. “She’s a lawyer and he publishes The Sentinel.”

  “Is that Louis Adams?” The man’s face looked vaguely familiar.

  “Louis Adams, Jr.,” Zora said. “Do you know him?”

  “He was a couple of years behind me in high school. I remember the paper. His father was a force to be reckoned with. A real race man.”

  “Louis is like that, too, but Amelia’s teaching at a university in Beirut for two years, so Louis went with her.”

  The woman standing next to him in the picture was tall and slim with a very close-cropped haircut and a great big smile. Nobody with any sense would let that smile go off into the world alone for two whole years. Louis, Jr., sounded like the perfect combination of race man and romantic.