by Pearl Cleage
That’s when I saw the car parked out front. There it sat, a good foot and a half from the curb; the same dirty green Chevrolet that had taken Zora to the wedding had now delivered her safely home. Of course I was relieved, but the last person I wanted to see tonight was a fool who didn’t even know that it’s always bad manners to sit out front and blow your horn for a lady.
I stopped in front of the house and smiled at Louie. “This is me,” I said. “Thanks for the walk.”
“My pleasure,” he said, touching the brim of his hat. “Good luck with your house.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Good luck with your kitchen.”
“Good night, then.”
“Good night.”
He stood there while I strolled up the walk, climbed up the steps. I turned at the door to wave. He touched the corner of his hat and headed off down the street. Maybe Zora was winding up her weekend and her friend would be leaving now. Maybe we could still take that swim together.
No such luck. When I stepped inside, there she was, lying on the couch next to the fool I’d seen in the front seat of the car on Friday. He was shirtless and shoeless with one hand holding on to the nearly empty vodka bottle and the other hand holding on to Zora. There was an open pizza box on the coffee table, two roaches in the ashtray, and two big water tumblers that I assumed they had been using for their cocktails. They were both out cold.
The television was playing the late-night videos where the girls all look like strippers and the guys all look like gangsters and nobody seems to be having any fun, although they are all working really hard to make you think they are. For a minute, I just stood there looking at the two of them, wondering what the appropriate response might be. The way I figure, I had three options. One, I could wake her up and demand an explanation of such low-class behavior; two, I could wake him up and offer to kick his little ass if he ever showed up around here again; or three, I could go upstairs and close my door and deal with it tomorrow when she was sober and he was history.
To my credit, I took option three. It wasn’t easy, but I turned off the TV, locked the front door, went upstairs, put on my pajamas, brushed my teeth, said my prayers (just in case), got in bed, and turned out the light. A lot of good it did me. Lying there in the dark, I was so aware of the two of them sprawled out downstairs that I couldn’t relax. It was almost as if she wanted me to find them. She knew I’d be coming home late from Abbie’s and there was no way not to see them on my way upstairs. What did she expect me to do? Ignore them? Be the outraged grandmother who would throw him out and force her to do the right thing? Pack my things and carry my meddling ass back to Amsterdam?
I had just about made up my mind that I was going to have to go back to option one and wake her up, when I heard a noise in the hallway. I sat up and listened. Someone was passing my door, headed toward Zora’s room, but it only sounded like one set of footsteps. Had she left him downstairs to sleep it off alone? I slipped on my robe and stepped out into the hallway.
Zora’s door was cracked and the light was on, but there was no sound. Something didn’t feel right to me, and when I padded down to her room on my bare feet and peeked in, I could see why. Her friend, still sans shirt and shoes, was standing in front of her dresser examining a watch Howard had sent her from Paris. He picked it up, turned it over, and held it in his hand with a little smile like he had found something he liked.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I said, too indignant to be afraid.
He turned around so fast he staggered a little bit, still too drunk to count on perfect balance. “Jesus! Who the hell are you?”
“I’m Zora’s grandmother,” I said.
His eyes flickered over my body in a way that made my skin crawl, then he smiled. “You don’t look old enough to be nobody’s grandmother.”
“What are you doing up here?” I said, rephrasing the question he had yet to answer.
He looked around the room like he was almost as surprised to find himself there as I was and then decided his best course of action was to lie. The only problem was, he didn’t have one.
“She…uh…wanted me to get…her watch for her. Yeah, she wanted her watch.” He tried another grin on me.
“All right,” I said. “This is what you’re going to do. You’re going to go back down those stairs, put your clothes on, and get out of here.”
“You ain’t gotta get all bent out of shape,” he said. “Zora invited me.”
“Well, I’m uninviting you,” I said, wishing I was strong enough to pick him up and toss him bodily out into the night. “Get your things and get out now.”
He frowned and it dawned on me that I didn’t know a thing about this man, standing there in my pajamas, ordering him around like I was the assistant principal who had caught him between classes without a hall pass. “And what if I don’t?”
Something in his half-drunk defiance made me mad. Damn danger. I just wanted him out. “Then the police will help you. I’ve already called 911.”
That was a lie, of course. I hadn’t called anybody, but he didn’t know that and the idea of the police being on their way had the desired effect.
“Well, fuck it then,” he said loudly, brushing past me and down the steps. “Fuck you and fuck your drunk-ass granddaughter.”
The noise woke Zora who was struggling to arrange her rumpled clothing more appropriately as I followed him downstairs into the living room, watched him pull his shirt over his head, and stuff his feet into a pair of white tennis shoes.
“What’s wrong?” she said. “What are you doing?”
“Ask your granny,” he said. “She the one called the cops.”
Zora seemed to see me standing there for the first time. “Mafeenie, what’s going on?”
“I found your friend upstairs in your room going through your things.”
“Going through my things?” She turned back to him, confused. “You were going through my things?”
“I was looking for the bathroom,” he snarled. “When here she come talkin’ about callin’ 911.”
“They’re on their way,” I said, pulling my robe tighter around me, pressing my advantage.
“You know where the bathroom is down here,” Zora said. “I showed you where…”
“Okay, I was takin’ a look around,” he said, grabbing his 76ers Starter jacket off the floor. “Ain’t no law against that, is there?”
“Taking a look around at what?” Zora said, still sounding confused.
“Nothing, okay? Nothing! I’m outta here.”
I resisted the impulse to throw something as he headed for the door. Maybe I should have gone with my instincts, because he stopped as he stepped out onto the porch and looked back at us with a sneer.
“Both you bitches can kiss my black ass!”
And with that highly unoriginal exit line, he trotted down the walk, jumped in his car, and headed off down the street, squealing his tires as a final goodbye. I closed the door and looked at Zora.
“Did you really call the police?”
I shook my head and started collecting the detritus from the living room. “No.”
She just stood there in her rumpled clothes and watched without offering any assistance. Fine with me. I was too mad to talk to her now anyway. I headed for the kitchen, clutching the pizza box and the two supersize cocktail glasses. Zora trailed behind me with the Stoli bottle. I stuffed the box in the trash and rinsed the glasses in the sink.
Zora sat down at the kitchen table. “I’m sorry if I offended you, Mafeenie, but this is my life.”
“It doesn’t have to be.”
“Oh, yes it does,” she said, her voice getting louder, slurring the words. “It does because it is. This sorry, sordid, scary mess is exactly the way I’m living. This is it, Mafeenie. Welcome to my world.”
She was trying to be defiant, but she only looked sick and sad and unhappy, just like her father had at the end. Full of self-loathing and self-pity and straight vodka, and all
of a sudden I got mad again. Really mad. This child seemed to think she was the only person in the world whose dreams hadn’t come true in a timely fashion. The only one who felt lost and scared and alone. Looking at her sitting in this beautiful house, in a place where she was safe and warm and protected from everything except gossip, I couldn’t help thinking about Louie waiting in that filthy water for two days, hoping somebody would find him before he suffocated or drowned or went crazy. I couldn’t help thinking about all the time and energy and love she was wasting just because things turned out to be a little more complicated than she thought they would. She owed herself better and she owed me better.
“Let me tell you something,” I said. “This is not your world. This is no world at all. I came here for two reasons, to see you and to take care of my business with that damn duplex. But before I will watch you do this, I will burn that piece of house to the ground, catch a plane back where I came from, and let you drink yourself to death alone because this…this…is just bullshit!”
And it was. All of it. Zora looked like I had slapped her across the mouth, and it made me feel so bad, I wanted to take her in my arms and apologize and tell her everything was going to be okay, the same way I had wanted to tell that kid on the elevator that the shot he was headed for wouldn’t hurt on its way to healing. But that would have been a lie, so I left her sitting there, went back upstairs to my room, got into bed, pulled the covers up over my head, and wept.
It seemed the sanest possible response. I’d only been back a week and everything was shot to shit. If this was life in America, they could have it. I’d had enough.
TWENTY-FOUR
At two thirty, I heard Zora come upstairs and take a long shower. I got up and went to sit in the chair by the window. I hadn’t slept a wink. The yard was dark. There was no moon showing and very few stars. I closed my eyes and called on every spirit I could think of to help me help Zora. It was too easy to carry out my threat to leave her. All I had to do was hop on a plane and never look back. But what kind of granny did that make me? The one who could teach you how best to toss a drink in somebody’s face but didn’t have much practical information when the going got tough. The one who only knew how to love you when it was easy, but left you to figure it out for yourself if things got a little messy. That wasn’t who I wanted to be, but I wasn’t sure if I knew how to do better. So I expanded my prayer to include a promise that if Zora would let me get close to her, I’d never push her away again, even for a second.
At three fifteen, there was a soft knock.
“Come in,” I said, and Zora pushed the door open enough to stick her head in.
“You awake?”
“Sure, come on in.”
She had washed her hair and brushed it out into a soft cloud around her face. I recognized her blue silk pajamas as a pair we had bought two summers ago in Paris. She had grown a few inches since then and the pants were definitely high-water, but I knew she had chosen them to please me.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I just couldn’t sleep.”
“Can I sit with you for a minute?”
“Of course.”
She sat down on the floor right next to my feet and hugged her knees against her chest like she used to do when she was a kid.
“Are you cold?”
“No.”
We sat in silence for a minute, earlier events hovering between us like a ghost. At least she didn’t smell like vodka and cheap grass anymore. She smelled like talcum powder and toothpaste. I reached out and stroked her hair slowly, gently. We didn’t have to talk at all. Her being here was enough. She leaned her head against my knee and sighed.
“You’re not really going away, are you?”
“Not until you throw me out.”
“Good.”
I kept stroking her hair. Even bohemian grandmothers like me know the power of a laying-on of hands.
“I want to tell you what happened in Birmingham,” she said.
“All right.”
I kept stroking her hair. She sighed again and snuggled a little closer to my knee. She was silent such a long time I thought she had changed her mind. When she did start talking, her voice was so quiet, I held my breath so I wouldn’t miss anything.
“The night before the wedding, we all got drunk,” she whispered. “We were dancing and listening to music and acting crazy, you know.”
I didn’t know, but it was a rhetorical question so I didn’t say anything.
“Then the bride threw up and passed out and then Jabari and I had a big argument and he passed out, too. That left me and his brother up all by ourselves. That’s when he…he showed me his penis.”
She was quiet again for a long time. I took a deep breath and tried not to say, He did what? Being the Las Vegas of grandmothers sometimes means you hear stuff you wish you hadn’t, but that comes with the territory.
“He said he’d been clipping my pictures out of Dig It! for months and fantasizing about me while he had sex with his fiancée. He said if I didn’t want to…touch it, I could just watch him and that would be almost as good. I told him to go to hell and he got mad and started threatening me, so I locked myself in the bathroom until Jabari woke up.” She hugged her knees a little tighter. “I wanted to come home right then, but Jabari was the best man so he wouldn’t leave and I didn’t have any money, so I stayed, too.”
In what parallel universe does he qualify to ever be called “the best man”?
“So we went to the wedding and then the reception and…I was drinking a lot to get through it and he was just drinking because that’s what he does. But all the way home he kept apologizing and saying how sorry he was and when we got here, he asked if he could come in just for a minute so we could break bread, that’s what he always says, ‘break bread,’ so I let him come in and then he had a couple of joints and I had the rest of that vodka, so we just started doing all of that…and I…I didn’t even remember you were here.”
That’s when she started crying. Big, wracking sobs that shook her whole body against my leg.
“I’m sorry, Mafeenie. I’m so ashamed. I never meant for you to see me like that. I’m not like that!”
I reached down then and pulled her to her feet and then drew her down onto my lap like she was five years old and needed me to kiss a skinned knee.
“Shhhh! Hush now,” I said. “Hush! It’s over. It’s all over, I promise.”
She put her arms around me and buried her face in my neck. Her long legs were dangling to the floor and I’m sure we looked as awkward as we felt, but it didn’t matter. I held her like a baby and just let her cry. After a while, she stopped sobbing but she didn’t move, so I kept rocking her. Gradually, her breathing slowed down and she sniffed loudly and sat up.
“You okay?” I said.
She nodded and sniffed again.
“There’s a box of Kleenex on the nightstand,” I said, realizing she had put my left leg to sleep. I rubbed some feeling back into it while she blew her nose loudly and sat down on the bed. “That’s too far away. Come closer.”
She dragged the little desk chair over and sat facing me. We were sitting in front of the window, and in the darkness the glow of the pool seemed almost otherworldly. Our knees were touching lightly and I reached out for her hands.
“Listen, darlin’,” I said. “The world is a very big place and maybe, maybe neither one of us is supposed to be calling this little pitiful corner of it home.”
“What do you mean?” She sniffed again.
“I mean there’s nothing to keep either one of us here if this isn’t where we want to be. We can fix up the house, sell it to the highest bidder, pack our bags, and hit the road.”
“Sell the house?”
“It’s just a house,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“It’s your inheritance,” I said. “I’m sure if you are.”
“Oh, Mafeenie,” she whispered, “can we really go
away?”
“We can do whatever we decide to do,” I said, “but there’s one thing we have to be clear about.”
“What’s that?”
“This is a choice we’re making based on who we are and what we want. It’s no good if we’re just running away. If that’s all it is, then they’ve won and we’re just a pair of scared little rabbits looking for a place to hide. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” she said softly.
“Good.”
“How soon can we go?” Zora said, like she was ready to leave right then.
“As soon as we can get the house in shape so we put it on the market and Howard can get things back on track at the theater.”
“When will that be?”
“Any day now,” I said.
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
“Can I sit on your lap again?”
“I can do better than that,” I said. So she slept in my room that night like she used to in Amsterdam. I think we both needed that closeness. She went to sleep before I did and I watched her face in the darkness until I felt myself fading, too. I whispered my thanks to whatever gods were listening, and slept like a baby.
TWENTY-FIVE
When Aretha came by to pick me up in the morning, Zora had already headed off to work and I was preparing myself for a first look inside. The thing about the house is that it isn’t just a piece of property to me. It represents my connection to a long line of women for whom home ownership was a requirement. My mother was a member of a large, messy, matriarchal clan whose family herstory begins with the story of an enslaved ancestor forced to bear the master’s child. When the baby’s facial features precluded the possibility of denial, the mistress of the plantation grew increasingly agitated at her presence until the master packed up our ancestor and her daughter and drove them to the outskirts of Montgomery, where he deeded them a small house and set them free.