PART THREE
1974 - 1989
ANNE
ST. JOHN’S, APRIL 1974
ANNE’S PARENTS ARE FIGHTING. Anne lies on her stomach in bed and pulls the covers over her head but she can still hear them. There’s no yelling, just loud talking. When Tammy Simms’ parents fight, they yell at each other and her mother breaks glasses. Anne’s parents don’t ever fight. But for the last few days something has been different. On Friday her mom got a letter in the mail that made her really happy and they all went out to the Kenmount for Chinese food to celebrate, Mom and Dad and Stephen and Anne. They got Chinese take-out food too and dropped it off to Aunt Annie and Uncle Bill.
Then on Saturday and Sunday, Mom and Dad had Long Talks. Every time Anne or Stephen went in a room, Mom and Dad would stop talking or change the subject. “What are they talking about?” Anne whispered to Stephen in the back seat of the car on the way home from church on Sunday.
“Moving away,” Stephen said.
“We’re moving away? Who is? All of us?” Anne’s panic made her voice rise and carry to the front seat. Mom turned around.
“We’re not moving anywhere, Anne. Stephen, don’t get her worked up over nothing.”
Then Dad. “Claire, don’t go telling her that when you haven’t even–”
“Doug.”
Anne pulls back the covers and can hear words again. Only none of the words make sense.
“…your decision, Claire, not mine. I think it’s a mistake but it’s your mistake. You take responsibility for it.”
Her mother’s words are so fast and run-together Anne can’t pick them out. Then her dad again.
“…fine, but don’t try to cast me in some male-chauvinist-pig role because you’re too scared to take the bull by the horns and…”
Bulls. Pigs. What the heck are they talking about? Anne wishes she could slip across the hall to Stephen’s room and see if he is making any sense out of it. He’s eleven, two years older than she is. He understands a lot more things, though usually he doesn’t explain them to her. Or she could just sit there on the foot of his bed. Maybe they could turn on the light and play Battleship. It would make her feel better, just to be with someone. The words her parents are saying are not making sense. Not just bulls and pigs, but Dad said Mom was scared. That can’t be right. Mom is never scared. She is the bravest person Anne knows.
People say, “Your mother is amazing, Anne.” Last spring, when Mom had her graduation and wore the long black dress with the flat hat, people said, “You should be very proud of your mother.” Anne’s mother has been in school for as long as Anne can remember. In the day she goes to work and at night she goes to school. In between she picks up Anne and Stephen from Aunt Annie’s and takes them home for supper, except for the nights they stay and have supper at Aunt Annie’s. Those are the best suppers.
The voices get quieter. A door closes, probably the door to Mom and Dad’s bedroom. Anne lies awake and wonders what her parents are fighting over. Something to do with moving away. Why would they move? They have a house. Sometimes people move when they don’t have a job. But Mom and Dad both have jobs. Anne would hate to move. She loves her school, which is St. Andrews, and her church, which is St. James. Right next to each other, two saints. In St. John’s, which makes three. School is just ten minutes’ walk from Aunt Annie’s house and Anne can walk home to Aunt Annie’s after school as long as Stephen is with her. Then she can watch TV and do her homework and usually have a snack. Uncle Bill shows Stephen how to tie different kinds of knots and takes him out in the shed to make things with wood. Anne learns from Aunt Annie how to make chocolate chip cookies. If they moved away, they would have a different church and school and not live in St. John’s and be far from Aunt Annie and Uncle Bill. All bad things.
Later, when she goes to the bathroom, Anne stops by the door of her parents’ room. It is open a little bit, but she stands where no-one can see her. She stands there for a minute, to see if they say anything about moving away.
Mom is talking. Anne hears “…responsibilities…” and then “…Annie and Bill.” She edges closer to the door.
“Lots of people their age manage, Claire. They’re both in good health.”
“You only see what you want to see. Bill is going downhill every year. And Annie, it’s a game of Russian roulette. She has another check-up tomorrow. Seventeen years of good reports. That could all be undone in one minute.”
“You can worry about things till you drive yourself crazy, honey. But you have a responsibility to yourself too. You worked your tail off; you sent out applications. Even your cousin Valerie went off and–”
“Don’t talk to me about Valerie, there’s no comparison. A Master’s in Creative Writing? You know what that was, Doug? An excuse to go to Arizona and sit in a circle with a bunch of hippies getting in touch with her feelings. And Valerie can bloody well do that if she pleases. Harold and Frances don’t need her. She’s got no responsibilities.”
It’s quiet for a long time. Anne goes back to her room and pulls the covers up over her head again.
She wants to talk to Stephen about it, but when they get to school the next morning he takes off for the Grade Six room right away and she doesn’t see him anymore. After school he walks home with Andrew Clark and Jamie Cross, while Anne trails behind.
When they get to Aunt Annie’s house, only Uncle Bill is home. “Your mom’s taken your Aunt Annie to the doctor,” he explains. “Just a check-up. I guess you two are stuck with me for the rest of the afternoon.”
“Can we go out in the shed?” Stephen suggests.
Uncle Bill looks at Anne.
“Could I come out in the shed too?” She likes the shed, with the wood-shaving smell and the radio that plays old-time favourites on VOWR. “I could just, you know, sit and watch or something.”
When Claire and Annie come back from the doctor’s office that’s where they all are, out in the shed. Stephen is trying to build a birdhouse and Uncle Bill is sanding the edges for him. Anne sits on the floor with several small odd ends of wood, trying to build something.
“Get up, Anne, you’re sitting in the sawdust. Have you still got your school tunic on? That’s going to be filthy, you should have more sense.” Mom says these things before hello, before she even really looks at Anne. She seems more impatient than usual, jingling her car keys, looking around the shed without meeting anyone’s eyes. “Anne, Stephen, get up to the house and get your book bags and put your jackets on. I need to talk to Uncle Bill for a minute. I’ll be right up.”
As the shed door shuts behind Anne, she hears Uncle Bill say, “What is it, Claire?” in a voice that doesn’t sound like him at all.
They run up through the garden, getting their feet wet in the grass. Up the back steps and into the kitchen. Aunt Annie sits at the kitchen table, looking out the window. She looks up when they come in, and smiles. “Did your Uncle Bill take good care of you? You got sawdust all over your tunic, Anne. Is he making a little carpenter out of you too?”
“No, I was just fooling around with wood,” Anne says. She’s about to follow Stephen to the front porch where her jacket is hanging, but something pulls her back. She says, “How was your check-up, Aunt Annie?”
Aunt Annie looks startled. “Imagine you asking me that, Anne. You’re growing up so fast. Well, my check-up was fine, just fine. I’ve got to go back next week to have something looked at, just a little thing. The doctor says it’s probably nothing.”
“Good.” Anne goes over and gives Aunt Annie a quick, fierce hug. She’s not used to seeing Aunt Annie dressed up for the doctor, with a good skirt and blouse on and her hair brushed out. The only time she looks like that is sometimes on Sunday nights when Anne comes over to go to Salvation Meeting with Aunt Annie and Uncle Bill, which she likes because it’s so different from her own church on Sunday morning. On Sundays, Aunt Annie wears the uniform. Here in the house she usually has an apron on and a bandanna tied around her hair with
a few grey curls coming down on her forehead.
Probably nothing. Anne hears those words again before supper, as her dad stands at the counter making hamburgers and her mom leans against the counter talking. Anne sits in the dining room doing homework. She hears unfamiliar words: mammogram, suspicious, biopsy. Out of them she picks the familiar phrase: probably nothing.
“Well there you go,” her dad says. “The doctor thinks it’s probably nothing. There’s no reason to get all worked up about it.”
“If he thinks it’s worth a biopsy then it’s not nothing. She’s been down that road already, lost a breast, and survived. Every time she goes to the doctor I’m terrified. How could you expect Bill to cope with all that himself? At his age, in his state of health? It makes no sense, Doug.”
Anne’s pencil stops moving. Her mom’s voice sounds like it did when they were fighting last night. She sounds angry, but at who? Not at Anne for something as simple as sawdust on her tunic. She’s angry in a bigger way.
“So you’re back to square one? As far as law school is concerned?”
“Yes. Back to square one,” her mother says.
There’s a lot Anne still doesn’t understand. Aunt Annie losing a breast doesn’t make any sense. How could you lose something that’s attached to you? It’s like her mother says, Anne, you’d forget your head if it wasn’t screwed on. And she doesn’t know what law school is, or where Square One is. But the days unravel one after another and there are no more fights. Life is normal. Aunt Annie has another doctor’s appointment, but it’s in the morning so she’s there when Anne and Stephen get home from school. After that nobody says anything more about breasts or doctors, so it was Probably Nothing. Nobody says anything more about moving away either, not ever again.
ETHEL
BROOKLYN, MAY 1974
SHE HEARD JIM COMING up the back steps from the shop at four-fifteen, a quarter of an hour earlier than usual. Ethel stood at the sink peeling carrots, feeling the spidery fingers of pain shoot up the backs of her legs. Jim must feel the same way, standing behind the counter all day long. No wonder he wanted to come up early, to put his feet up and rest.
The steady rhythm of his steps was broken as he paused, turned back. Going back down for something he’d forgotten, she thought. He was getting like that, forgetful. She wondered why young Taylor still kept him on. It must have been a kindness, maybe a favour for Jimmy, who was one of his most successful managers.
From below, a voice rose to a shout. No-one ever shouted in the store. She heard the words: “Mr. Evans! Mr. Evans!” It sounded like Martin, the boy in the shop. What was so wrong that Martin couldn’t handle it himself? Then another voice, not Jim’s – loud and sharp and rough. Trouble, Ethel thought.
“Freeze! Don’t get in my way, I got a gun!”
Just like those cop shows on TV, Ethel thought. Just like the nightly news reports about crime, more of it every day, right here in Flatbush. All those foreigners, all those coloured. It wasn’t safe here anymore.
She stood crouched on the stairs, out of sight from the store, terrified. She could hear the men’s rough voices, hear them making threats and lifting things – TVs, she supposed – out of the store. If she went upstairs, she could call the police. But they might hear her on the stairs. She heard no sound from Jim, or from Martin. Of course, Martin could have been in on it all. He was coloured, after all. Maybe these were Martin’s friends, his gang members. She had never really trusted him.
Then she heard the smash and tinkle of broken glass. After that, the door slammed, with the little ping that used to welcome customers. Silence. Ethel crept a few steps farther down, almost to the door. Then she heard Martin.
“Mr. Evans, Mr. Evans, you all right? Mr Evans!”
Ethel was through the door and in the shop, not seeing the disarray, the broken glass near the door, the missing TVs and radios. She saw Martin, a short round boy whose eyes were wide with terror, shaking Jim’s shoulder. Jim was at the counter, slumped forward, his head on his arm.
He’s been shot, she thought, looking for blood, a wound, then remembered she had heard no gunshot.
Martin looked up at her, the whites of his eyes staring in his dark-brown face. He was obviously scared and truly concerned for Jim, but all Ethel could see was his black skin – the same as the men who broke in here and hurt her husband, the same as all the people who had moved in and changed the neighbourhood, made it so a decent woman couldn’t walk the streets and a decent man couldn’t make a living in the shop where he’d worked for over twenty-five years.
“Get away from him,” she ordered coldly, and went over to Jim.
He struggled to open his eyes, to lift his head. His mouth groped for words but could not form them. “Hush, hush,” she said, in a voice she had not used since the children were small. “You’re going to be all right.” She looked across at Martin, moving dazedly around the broken glass, the places where the missing items were. “What happened?” she said, freezing him with her glare.
“I don’t know, Mrs. Evans. It happened so fast. Some guys came in, they had a gun, they started taking stuff. Me and Mr. Evans, we just shut up and stood here.” His toe nudged the broken glass. “They didn’t need to break anything. One guy just kicked the glass out of the door as they were going out.”
“Just for badness,” Ethel said. “What happened to Jim?”
“He was fine, ma’am, just fine up till they went out the door, just standing there like I was, trying not to do anything that’d get them mad at us, and then…then he just went like that. I mean, he just kinda fell forward with his head on the counter like that. I was scared. I thought maybe he had a heart attack…”
Ethel’s hands were still moving gently over Jim’s head, his neck and back. “Get on the phone,” she ordered Martin. “Call the police and then an ambulance. You’ll have to stay here and talk to the police, tell them what happened. I have to get my husband to the hospital.” As Martin moved to the phone on the counter nearby she wondered what they would do about locking up. Martin hadn’t been trusted with the keys. That reminded her of something, and she said sharply, “Martin.”
“Ma’am?” He looked up, receiver in his hand, finger on the dial.
“These men…the men who broke in here. Did you know them?” He shook his head, but she pushed. “They weren’t…friends of yours? Fellows you go around with?”
He frowned; his face closed. “Mrs. Evans, I never saw those men before in my life,” he said, and turned back to the phone. She could see the difference now in his face, in his attitude. Before, he’d thought he was on her side and Jim’s, all of them victims of crime together. But she had pushed him back over a boundary, placed him on the same side as men who broke into stores and smashed windows and threatened old men with guns. Now, she knew, she could never give Martin the key.
What came to her, in the ambulance riding to the hospital, was how she had no-one nearby to call on. For years, it seemed, she had been part of a community. She had friends from home, family nearby. Church friends. Neighbours in the apartment building when they lived on Linden. Someone who could come with you to the hospital, or watch your shop for you, or just be there to help in time of need. Somehow, without her really noticing, all those people had disappeared: moved back home, moved out to New Jersey or even down to Florida. Her church had closed down, actually closed because there weren’t enough white people to keep it going, and the nearby churches were full of coloured people, so of course she didn’t go anymore.
It was a stroke, she learned at the hospital. A massive stroke, but he was going to live.
“You’ll come stay with us, with Jimmy and me and the kids,” Joyce said, patting her hand as she sat with her beside Jim’s hospital bed. Joyce was a gem, an angel, a pearl. She was here doing what Diane should be doing, while Diane was off living her fancy, high-priced California life.
Diane phoned long distance and asked if there was anything she could do. Yes, Ethel thought, you c
an be here for me and your father, beside us, where your place is. “No, dear,” she said into the phone.
“No, dear,” she said to Joyce. “Not right now, at least. You don’t have room anyway, and it would be so difficult, so confusing for the children.”
Jimmy carried his father up over the stairs the day they brought him home. And that was all they would need to worry about the stairs, Ethel figured, because Jim would never go down them again. He sat in the armchair in the living room, half his body slumped and immobile, his still-handsome face twisted, his eyes staring into a vague distance. She switched on the TV, and he focused on that.
Later, when Jimmy and Joyce had gone, Ethel brought him supper on a tray and sat beside him as she had done in the hospital, helping the fork find its way to his mouth. He tried to help capture the food, to chew and swallow as best he could, but did not acknowledge her, or her help, in any way. The doctors said they couldn’t tell how damaged his brain was, how much he understood, whether he would get back some of his abilities, or none. Several times in the hospital he seemed to be fighting for words, trying to speak to the doctors or the nurses, or to Jimmy and Joyce. Once he was home alone with Ethel, he stopped trying to talk. They sat by the blue light of the television, in their accustomed silence.
One night as Ethel picked her way across the living room, around Jim’s inert figure, she realized how many years she had spent secretly wishing Jim were gone, were not part of her life. She would never have wished him ill, never have wanted him dead – just wished for him not to be there. And now here he was – not dead, and yet not here. It was one more of God’s little jokes. A reminder to be careful what you wished for.
By the Rivers of Brooklyn Page 27