Seen It All and Done the Rest

by Pearl Cleage

  “So they left you holding down the fort?”

  “Well, they had another woman staying here, but her reserve unit got called up for Iraq,” Zora said, as we walked from the kitchen back to where my bags were still standing by the front door. “Want to see your room?”

  “Absolutely,” I said, “And then I want to see that pool you promised me.”

  She bumped my big pulling suitcase up the stairs behind her while I brought up the rear with my carry-on and the garment bag. I followed her into the third door on the left near the end of a long hallway. It was a lovely, peaceful room. All blond wood and beige comforters. Over the head of the bed was another one of the abstracts that I had noticed downstairs. This one had lots of turquoise and other shades of blue. It was like having a little unexpected piece of sky in the room.

  There was a rocking chair by the window and a small table and chair in the corner. The curtains were closed, but Zora put my bag beside the bed and went over to pull them back.

  “Come look,” she said.

  I tossed my things on the bed and went over to stand beside her. Below me, I could see the meticulously landscaped backyard, which boasted not only some of Georgia’s famous pines but a few hardwoods and a magnificent magnolia every bit as impressive as the one we had seen in Blue Hamilton’s front yard around the corner. A stone walkway lit by small lanterns wound its way from the back porch steps to the pool, twinkling mysteriously in the darkness. I’d have to get closer to see the mermaid, but it was beautiful, even from a distance.

  “It’s almost too beautiful to swim in,” I said, already looking forward to dipping my toes in the warm water. “Almost!”

  Zora seemed pleased that I liked the room, and she smiled at me for the first time that night.

  “Thank you, darlin’,” I said. “It’s perfect.”

  She let me hug her, but I could still feel the tension in her body and she didn’t hug me back with much enthusiasm. I gave her a quick peck on the cheek and then released her.

  “Do you want me to help you unpack?” Zora said, opening the closet to reveal a row of padded hangers and one of those canvas shoe organizers swinging on the back of the door.

  “I’ll do it later,” I said. “Where’s your room?”

  Zora hesitated for just long enough to make me wonder why. “Down at the other end of the hall,” she said, but she didn’t offer to show it to me.

  “Long hall,” I said.

  “My room’s a mess.”

  “This is Mafeenie, darlin’. I don’t give points for neatness.”

  “That’s not how I remember it,” she said. “The same summer we had that pool, you used to check under my bed every single day to be sure I’d swept.”

  That must have been one of my best acting jobs ever. She still didn’t suspect anything!

  “I wasn’t looking for dust, darlin’. I was checking for snakes.”

  “Snakes?”

  “Howard found a good-size green garden snake curled up under his bed the first week we got there. The caretaker said they were just looking for a cool spot and that they weren’t poisonous, but the only way I could get Howard to stay was to promise to check under every bed every day to make sure there weren’t any more snakes.”

  “And you never told me?”

  I grinned at her indignation so many years after the deception. “I just did.”

  Zora looked at me without blinking for a minute and then she started laughing. It was so good to hear the sound of it that I started laughing too and once we got started, we couldn’t stop. I laughed so hard my sides ached. Zora had tears running down her cheeks, and we still couldn’t stop laughing. I sat down on the edge of the bed and tried to get myself together. Zora’s laughter had segued into a slightly hysterical chuckle.

  Now this was more like it! We always had fun together. Whatever funk she was in would just have to find another place to spread its gloom.

  “If I had known that was such a funny story, I would have told it an hour ago,” I said.

  Zora was still grinning. “You should be ashamed, Mafeenie. You deceived an innocent child.”

  “I apologize,” I said. “But if I had told you what I was really doing, you would have packed your little suitcase as fast as Howard did!”

  “You’re right,” she said. “I just can’t believe the two of you kept that secret for this long.”

  “My ability to keep a secret is legendary.”

  “What about Howard? He tells me everything!”

  “I threatened his life.”

  “Why? We could have found another place for the summer.”

  “Not one with a pool, speaking of which…” I stood up and reached for her hand. “If you’re not going to show me your room, then how about introducing me to that mermaid?”

  “You got a deal,” she said, not letting go of my hand when she stood up. “Mafeenie?”

  “Yes, darlin’?”

  “I’m sorry for being such a bitch at Paschal’s. I’m really glad you’re here.”

  “Me, too, darlin’.” And this time when I hugged her, she hugged me back tight.

  SEVEN

  Zora made me a cup of mint tea, poured herself another vodka, and took the bottle with us when we headed outside. Of course, I clocked it, but I didn’t say anything. She led the way down the small path from the house to the pool. It was past midnight and the air was cool enough to justify the two Mexican blankets Zora had instructed me to scoop up from a big basket near the back door.

  The area around the pool was tiled in the same shades of deep blue as the painting over my bed, and at the bottom there was indeed a beautiful, life-size, brown mermaid whose long black hair curled around her face and spread over the floor of the pool in tendrils that seemed to ripple gently in the soft light. In one hand, she held a large conch shell and with the other, she covered her pubes delicately, demure for all her nakedness.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said, walking over to stare into the mermaid’s black eyes and admire her mysterious smile. I wondered if she ever disengaged herself from the bottom of that pool when nobody was looking and did a few languid laps in the moonlight. “Is there a story?”

  Zora shrugged. “Some rich white guy built it to impress the neighbors.”

  I didn’t belabor the point, but I knew there was more to it than that. Why a swimming pool rather than a Cadillac? Why that particular blue for the tiles? Why a mermaid and why was she brown? The old Zora would have enjoyed speculating on the options with me, but this bony stranger seemed almost bored with the beauty in her own, albeit temporary, backyard.

  We pulled a couple of the striped canvas pool loungers as close as we could to the edge of the mermaid’s domain, each holding our drink of choice as we gazed into the water. Zora had placed the vodka bottle carefully out of sight, but we both knew it was there. We just sat there for a few minutes, looking at the mermaid. The ice in her glass tinkled softly, but I tried not to focus on it.

  “I’ve really missed you, Mafeenie,” Zora finally said into the stillness.

  “Me, too, darlin’,” I said. “I can’t believe it’s been so long. How are we ever going to catch up?”

  “I don’t know.”

  There was a slight tremor in her voice and I wished suddenly that I had called her more often in the months we’d been apart. I’m old-fashioned when it comes to personal communications. I know e-mail is faster and cell phones are omnipresent, but I don’t like either one. The intrusion of electronic devices always annoys me so Zora and I tend to write long letters in between visits, but not lately.

  “Maybe we should just go for it,” I said.

  She looked at me with some apprehension. “How do you mean?”

  “Just start talking. Don’t try to organize it or anything. Just tell me what your life has been like since the last time I saw you.”

  She laughed a little, but it wasn’t a good laugh. “Well, my life has been pretty shitty since the last time I saw you.”


  “All of it?”

  “Not all of it, I guess.”

  “Okay, good. Go on.”

  She hesitated. “Should I talk about the shitty part first or the other part?”

  “Start with the other part. It gives the shitty part too much power if you put it right out front. Tell me the good stuff first.”

  “Okay.”

  Then there was a very long pause. I pulled my blanket a little closer around my shoulders and waited. There was no hurry, but the longer the pause went on, the more concerned I got. I took a deep breath, savoring the smell of the mint tea, enjoying the warmth of the cup in my hands, admiring the mermaid, trying not to rush the moment.

  “I think I should start with the shitty part,” Zora said finally.

  “Why is that?”

  “It’s easier to remember since there’s a lot more of it.”

  Poor baby, I thought. You’ve had a rough time. “Good enough. So tell me everything.”

  She hesitated again. “All of it?”

  “I can stand it if you can.”

  “I’ve never really talked about all of it.”

  “Well, here’s your chance,” I said.

  Another pause, not quite as long as the other one, but long enough.

  “I don’t know where to start.”

  Zora never had any problem talking to me. We had covered every imaginable topic during our summer road trips from her mother’s spirituality, to her father’s demons, to her first period. Nothing was off-limits and she knew whatever she shared with me, stayed with me. I was the Las Vegas of grandmothers.

  “Start with the trip to D.C.,” I said, “where you first met the guy.”

  Zora’s antiwar activities had taken her to Washington for a conference, where she met a young army deserter who was fine enough to attract her attention at the train station, which set the whole thing in motion. They talked over coffee and she gave him a number in Atlanta to call if he ever needed some help dealing with the army, although by the time they parted company Zora was already smitten with his conman’s charm and hoped he’d call for more personal reasons.

  When he showed up in Atlanta, broke and jobless, he started cruising the gay clubs as a hustler for hire. One of his customers turned out to be the son of a popular politician, who had an oblivious wife and an adorable two-year-old child at home already. After only one disastrous date, where he ended the evening so drunk he could hardly make it home, Zora realized the guy was not the conscience-driven antiwar hero she’d convinced herself he was, and cut him loose.

  His reaction was to seek sex and solace in the arms of a young prostitute who counted among her regular customers a gangster who was more possessive than made any sense, under the circumstances, and who shot the poor boy dead in a loft belonging to Mr. Married-for-show-only. When the cops arrested the young husband and father, all hell broke loose, and Zora blamed herself.

  Zora looked stricken. “You know about that?”

  “Your mother told me that’s where you met him, and I know you were trying to do something good and that it ended badly.”

  I also knew it had been a rumormonger’s mother lode. Atlanta hadn’t seen anything as juicy since a popular race leader’s coke-dealing girlfriend was arrested after assaulting his wife on his mother’s front lawn. That one had included love letters signed in blood and mountains of drugs, but this one involved the suicide of Blue Hamilton’s right-hand man, the secret life of a mayoral front-runner’s bisexual son, the confessions of a stripper named Brandi, and a cold-blooded murder masquerading as a crime of passion. Jasmine told me Zora was cast as the hazel-eyed beauty whose antiwar activism was, as one Dig It! headline screamed, “more deadly to a young soldier than the bombs of Iraq.”

  “That’s pretty much everything,” Zora said in a small, tight voice.

  “That can’t be everything,” I said, “because there’s nothing in there to make a woman lose thirty pounds, ruin her complexion, and start drinking vodka at all hours.”

  She drained her glass defiantly in one big gulp and looked away. “Would it be better if I was only drinking at lunchtime?”

  It was time for some tough love. “It would be better if you would let that young hustler who got shot rest in peace and let the old fool who killed himself find his reward in paradise.”

  Zora sat up then and turned toward me, her lovely face a thunder-cloud. She took a deep breath and I realized I had gone too far. Tough love is one thing but I was definitely dippin’.

  “Mafeenie,” she said, her voice like ice, “you know I love you and I’m glad you’re here, I truly am, but I’m going through some things right now that you can’t be part of. You can’t figure it out for me and you can’t fix it. It’s my stuff and I’ll deal with it, but you have to respect my boundaries, which I know is not your favorite thing, but I really need my space right now. Okay?”

  I wondered if she’d given this same speech to Jasmine, who, being the progressive mother that she is, probably felt bound to respect it. I, on the other hand, had no intention of staying out of Zora’s business. I claim grandmother immunity anytime it comes to Zora’s mental health or physical safety. This was obviously one of those times. Of course, I didn’t have to tell her that.

  “Okay,” I said. “I promise not to meddle.”

  “I’ll hold you to it,” she said, still sounding firm.

  “How about this,” I said, hoping to lighten up the moment. “If I don’t keep up my end of the bargain, you have my permission to throw me into that beautiful pool.”

  “With all your clothes on?” I could almost hear a small smile.

  “Every stitch.”

  “It’s a deal.” She held out her glass and I clinked it with my cup to seal the deal.

  She leaned over to refresh her drink with another splash of vodka and settled back in her chair. “Your turn.”

  “Well, like I told you on the phone, I’m lying low for a while so Howard can mount a big campaign and bring me back in triumph,” I said.

  “Absence makes the heart grow fonder?”

  “Exactly, plus I need to check on the duplex. The new people who are supposed to be handling it keep giving me the runaround.”

  “Mom said they stopped sending checks.”

  This was the first I’d heard about any break in payments to Jasmine. From the beginning, I’d directed the company to send any money they collected in rent straight to her for Zora’s education. I’d never needed it to live on, and since my son didn’t have any life insurance, I was glad I could pick up the slack.

  “Since when?”

  “Right before I withdrew from Spelman. I guess that’s why she didn’t tell you.”

  “Well, she should have.”

  “She said they sent a letter that said nobody was living there, but as soon as they got some new tenants, they’d be in touch.”

  “That’s almost a year ago.”

  At six hundred dollars a month for each apartment, that was almost fifteen thousand dollars that they were explaining away so casually. What were they trying to pull?

  “Don’t tell her I told you, okay?” Zora said. “I didn’t mean to start anything.”

  “You didn’t start anything,” I said. “But it’s time to get this stuff straightened out. They’re fooling around with your inheritance.”

  Zora laughed a little hard laugh when I said that and sat up. “Well, tomorrow’s my long day, so I’ve got to get some sleep….”

  “I thought today was your long day.”

  “We’re really shorthanded at the center,” she said. “More and more of these guys are coming back every day, women, too, and they need somebody to talk to.”

  Zora had been working for a veteran support group at the Morehouse School of Medicine, but her boss fired her after her name popped up in the paper one time too many, so she had found another, smaller group to work with. They seemed to specialize in long hours.

  “What do they talk about?”


  “They used to talk about benefits, housing, taxes,” she said, letting go of my hand and standing up. “Now they want to talk about their bad dreams. About what they saw over there. What they did.”

  No wonder Zora was depressed. Listening to war stories all day and drinking all night. This was no way for her to live.

  “I’m working on a project that’s really going to help a lot.”

  “What’s your project?”

  “I’m putting together a website where the soldiers can be in touch with counselors at our place twenty-four hours a day by using an interactive feature on the site,” she said. “Late at night is the worst time for most of these guys. That’s when their dreams wake them up and they need somebody to talk to right then, but we’re closed, so most of them find a porn site, which, trust me, is not the best antidote to war dreams. If I can get it all worked out, they’ll be able to talk to us live 24/7.”

  I admired Zora’s dedication to her work and her skill with the computer. I don’t even own one. The only thing that worried me was the work itself. Zora was channeling other people’s nightmares for a living and I could see it was taking a toll on her.

  “You have to be careful with a job like that,” I said.

  “I know. My boss always says when you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks long into you.”

  “Your boss quotes Nietzsche?”

  “He used to be a philosophy professor over at Morehouse, but he lost the stomach for it.”

  “For philosophy?”

  “For Morehouse.”

  Many Spelman students, matriculating on an all-girl campus, have ambivalent feelings about their brother institution, an all-male enclave just across the street from their elegant, tree-lined campus.

  “Tomorrow’s my day to open so I’ll be out before seven,” Zora said. “And I’m trying to get a presentation together about the new website for a conference here this weekend, so I won’t be home until after ten. I’m sorry, but I warned you it was going to be crazy!”

  “No problem,” I said, admiring her commitment to the difficult job she had chosen. “I’ll use the time to explore the neighborhood and get my bearings.”