American by Day

by Derek B. Miller

  “Let’s get clear on the play before we take to the field, shall we? Number one: We’re going to take a ‘do no harm’ approach on this one. No theories. No wild speculations. No leading questions,” he says directly to Melinda, “and no efforts to outsmart them and make them say things that will help get Marcus off the hook. We’re here to get a lay of the land and understand why things aren’t adding up. Maybe we learn it. Maybe we don’t. But we tread softly. Gently. Gingerly. You know that word?” he asks Sigrid.

  “No.”

  “It means softly and gently.”

  Sigrid does not interrupt.

  “And so we’re all clear on my thinking at the moment: I am not convinced that a scholar on race relations or whatever she was would hurl herself out a window after the race-related death of a loved one rather than go fight City Hall. Anyone who knows anything about the history of civil rights in this country knows that people have endured living hell to get where we are today. It does not compute that a woman who has spent her career reading about abuse and self-sacrifice would toss herself out of a window when faced with more of the same. The only hint that she might have been clinical is your brother’s files. Meanwhile, he had zero credentials in psychology, and the fact that he downloaded a bunch of stuff from the internet could mean nothing more than he was trying to eff the ineffable. Or, you know, he planted it there deliberately and after the fact to cover his tracks. We’d have to check the . . . metadata or whatever the hell they do on television.”

  “Irving,” Sigrid says.

  He raises his hand to prevent her protest. “I don’t think he did that. I was making a point. The good money right now says he and Lydia got in a spat because they saw the world differently and something got out of hand and went terribly wrong. It is my experience that most acts of violence are the result of benign situations escalating into tragedy. Somehow he’s responsible and he knows it, which is why he’s hiding in the woods and trying to figure out what to do next. The part to all this I can’t understand is what on earth they were doing halfway up an unfinished building they had no business being in.”

  Melinda tucks her shirt deeper into her pants as she stands at the corner of the small property trying to decide which door to use. At her left, uninviting, is the proper and formal front door. The lawn has not been cut all summer and the flat stones are obscured by the overgrowth. The pots on the steps are cracked and empty and the doormat is rotted and weather-worn.

  To her right is a set of steps leading from the driveway to a screen door. They are shorn of paint at the edges as a thousand ascents have worn them through, exposing the soft wood at their centers and leaving them bare and unprotected.

  Melinda looks behind her and Irv nods her up the stairs.

  At the top Melinda grasps the aluminum handle of the screen door intent on opening it so she can knock on the wooden door behind. Instead she finds it held in place by a tiny slide lock woefully outclassed by the hostile world it faces.

  Irv and Sigrid join her on the landing and stand behind her.

  Melinda raps gently on the sheet metal as if to alert the people inside of their presence but not wake any listening spirits.

  When the door is opened and the screen unlatched, a tired black woman with a drawn face looks out at them. She does not open the outer door immediately. Instead she looks at the three white faces through the rusty screen. Cops on her doorstep have never had good news for anyone. Her countenance is stone behind the flimsy screen that separates them. She looks to be beyond the insincere use of words and pleasantries now; words she may once have valued for their kindness and civility. Irv removes his hat as the woman opens the door without ushering them in. Melinda crosses the threshold first, her eyes cast to the kitchen floor.

  Sigrid walks into the house behind Melinda. She looks at Mrs. Jones as she passes her. Their eyes meet but there is no connection. No unity. Sigrid has met people in Oslo who have lost family members before. But she has not met a woman who has lost a grandchild and—immediately afterward—a daughter. There is a sourness to the air inside the kitchen. Takeout foods, processed and oversalted. The woman’s face is gray. Her clothing is gray. The light from the sun through the kitchen window and the door behind her is gray. The truth of this world has leeched away all its color.

  They are led through the living room. The air is dusty with an institutional oppressiveness. The ancient shag carpet is worn bare in its trafficked paths. The window curtains are drawn.

  A silent glowing television flickers. No one is watching it.

  As Sigrid turns into the dining room she sees a table of heavy maple and two photographs in its center—a Christmas photo of Jeffrey and a half-body shot of Lydia in a mortarboard hat and a full professorial gown speaking from behind a podium.

  Sigrid has seen two photographs of Jeffrey. One from his mother’s Facebook page, which was used extensively by the media, and the other from a birthday party. In this new one he is looking down at a present he is unwrapping. He is wearing black pants and a white dress shirt, but—as with all children—he’s a bit disheveled because the shirttail has come untucked. The photo captures him at a moment of recognition; the moment he realized that the present was exactly what he wanted or else was even better. The wrapping paper blocks the view of the object, but it doesn’t matter: He is the subject. Behind him are two clapping adults whom Sigrid takes to be his parents—Lydia’s sister and brother-in-law. Their empathy is obvious. They are feeling what he feels.

  In the other photo, Lydia is standing at a podium before a microphone. She is a slight woman but one hand is braced firmly while the other gestures dramatically. She is smiling and her eyebrows are raised as though inviting her audience to accept her argument. It is the photo of a person aloft, soaring at the full height of her emotional strength and rhetorical power. Her face glows with purpose and the promise of possibility.

  A ring of votive candles burns around the photos.

  Mrs. Abigail Jones leads the three visitors to the table. Sigrid notices Charles, the father, hanging back in the hall without entering the room. He does not extend a hand to the police or to Sigrid.

  They are led to the dining room where they sit around the images of the dead. Sigrid studies the candles and wonders whether they were lit before Melinda called.

  “I never thought I’d see you again,” Mrs. Jones says, looking at Irv.

  “Why is that, ma’am?”

  “I think we both know why.”

  Sigrid touches Irv’s leg beneath the table. He is not expecting this and it works as Sigrid had hoped. Instead of responding, his confusion keeps his mouth closed.

  “Reverend Green explained the situation to us,” Mrs. Jones continues. She leans forward onto the table, her forearms flat against the dark wood. “How do you live with yourself, Sheriff, knowing that you have within your soul and your station the power to make things better, but you choose not to?”

  Sigrid has experienced these sorts of confrontations before. Junior officers freeze, and experienced but foolish ones take a defensive stance. They think their honor has been insulted, or the department, or their masculinity . . . something that turns them away from the task and back toward themselves. They forget their reason for being there. In the moment. In the job. Irv, to her surprise, does not make this mistake.

  “How can I do more to make things better, Mrs. Jones?”

  She sits back and folds her arms. It is Charles, from the doorway, who speaks:

  “You don’t want to catch who did it.”

  “Sir?” Irv says.

  “Don’t ‘sir’ me. The reverend said you have no suspects. He said you have no ideas. He said you are nowhere on this, and that it is now our job to shoulder the weight of your incompetence and laziness and apathy—your sins—and carry them like Jesus carried our sins. He says that God is once again placing the weight of our community on our shoulders, and that it is only our fortitude as a family that is keeping this city from turning into Watts,
or Detroit, or L.A. And I have to wonder, Sheriff: Why is the calm of this country always the result of black people deciding not to get angry? To turn the other cheek? James said to us that to be a Negro in America and to be relatively conscious is to be in a constant state of rage. And yet America is not enraged because we are not enraging it. We are calming it down. Eve­ry church meeting. Every town meeting. Quoting Jesus and Martin. Mothers wiping away their own tears. You studied the mind of God, Sheriff. Tell me. Tell why it is that black people’s faith always needs to be tested on both sides? Why does God take away from us, and later tell us to do nothing about it? Why doesn’t he do that to white people? Deep down, does he hate us as much as America does?”

  Abigail Jones does not turn to her husband. She does not rein him in or try to control the situation.

  “Why are you here?” Abigail asks them. “You haven’t made an arrest. You have no news for us. You’re here wanting something. What is it?”

  Irv places his hands on the table and locks his fingers together. He does not speak immediately.

  “I’m trying to understand,” Irv says softly, “what Lydia was doing halfway up an unfinished building. I can’t figure it out.”

  Charles Jones is a broad-chested man in his midsixties. Physically, he has not crossed the line into old age. He carries his weight proportionately and could shift it forward if he chose to lean into his words.

  Instead, he settles into them with the weight of iron: “You want us to think our Lydia was weak. I know what you’re thinking. What you’re insinuating. But she was not weak. She was a strong, courageous black woman. Something you can’t understand. So you put her in the only box you have for her. But even in death she fights against it. Look at her. Look at her,” he says, finger pointed to the picture. “She was a professor. A scholar. A woman who could look at words on a page and conjure up a universe. She stood on ideas the way people stand on the ground beneath their feet.”

  Charles Jones walks into the room and places his hands on the shoulders of his wife.

  “Whether she took herself into that building or whether she was pulled into it against her will, all you need to know is that my daughter was as strong in character as any person I have ever known. She was full of life. And now, as sure as we sit here, she is in heaven because the Lord God knew that Jeffrey could not be there alone and he needed looking after. So Jesus took our daughter from us to comfort that poor boy in the least harmful way he knew how, knowing that Jeffrey’s own blessed mother could not follow to look after him with two other children to raise back here in the dirt.”

  Charles Jones walks them to the door. His face is fixed and is holding back whatever he might have said next. When Abigail takes hold of the handle, he turns away and retires to the living room television, leaving his wife to see them out.

  The volume is turned up. There is an attack ad against Obama, calling him an affirmative action case and a false messiah.

  At the door, Abigail Jones takes Irving’s hand in her own. She whispers to Irv: “You are a Christian, Sheriff? Under all that? Under the uniform and the politics and the skin? Is that the man you are?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I am.”

  “My children are in heaven, Sheriff. You understand that, right? Both my babies are in heaven.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Irving says. “They most surely are.”

  “You leave them there. You leave them together. You leave them with the Lord. You understand me?”

  “I do, ma’am. I assure you that I do.”

  No children parade after the police car as it leaves the neighborhood. The radio crackles without words or news. Melinda watches the city’s skyline emerge from behind the sagging rooftops as the cars all speed up and Irv merges them onto the highway.

  “Sheriff?” she says.

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t understand why Mrs. Jones was talking to you about heaven.”

  “Because,” says Irv, “if her daughter committed suicide by throwing herself off the building, doctrine says that right now she is burning in hell.”

  A Good Burger

  Sigrid is starving, so Irv turns off the main road toward a shopping mall and pulls the patrol car up to a freestanding restaurant called the Cheesecake Factory. The building looks as new as a child’s toy, with design influences from Greece, Sumeria, art deco, and Hasbro. It’s as natural as Las Vegas and as welcoming as an airport. The franchise does not exist in Norway.

  “Cheesecake is a dessert,” Sigrid says. “I need something more savory.”

  “That’s just the name,” Melinda says as they lock the car and walk across slabs of sandstone to the glass doors.

  As they open the door, an arctic wind blasts through Sigrid’s hair and chills the sweat on her neck. A waitress in her twenties who is aggressively eager to please seats them at a round table with wicker chairs woven from plastic. She hands them a menu with two hundred items.

  “Is it always like this?” Sigrid asks Irv, flicking through the options.

  “Choice is freedom,” says Irv, putting on his reading glasses and peering down at a sea of plenty.

  “From what?”

  “Huh?” he grunts.

  “Freedom from what?”

  “I don’t understand,” he says, glancing up from the menu.

  “You can be free from something, or free of something. You can’t just be free. It’s a relational concept. So . . . choosing between the salad and the baby back ribs makes you free . . . from what?”

  “Tyranny?” he tries.

  “This isn’t a quiz,” Sigrid says. “I sincerely want to know the answer. It seems to have something to do with everything going on over here.”

  The restaurant has a split-level floor plan with two steps leading up to a sitting area with a bar. Down below there are more than thirty tables. A quarter of them are filled with families. Children are absorbed in coloring, eating, using iPhones, and spilling things. The adults are either speaking to each other, focusing on the children, or staring—defeated—toward some imagined horizon, hoping that either a new lover or else death itself will come to take them away from this shiny place.

  In this sense it is exactly like Norway.

  “You should probably choose what to eat before the waiter comes,” Irv says. “Service is great in America.”

  “No. Service has been trained to artificially increase table turnover rates to generate corporate revenue. You’ve been trained like dogs to think it’s good service, whereas it’s actually incredibly rude. I’m handed the bill while I’m still chewing.”

  “You’re one of those low-blood-sugar women. I can tell. You’re not my first date.”

  “Irv,” says Sigrid, leaning forward to keep her voice down. “Maybe you can’t see it because you’re inside it, but to the rest of us, America is weird. You have these immediate, ready-made answers to everything and most of them are meaningless and the others were designed by PR firms. Choice is not freedom. Sure, you can choose among what’s available, but what’s available was decided already by someone or something else. There are no hookers and cocaine on the menu, for example. You can’t choose those.”

  “Not here,” he concedes.

  “Really. What is this freedom thing that seems to end all conversations with you people? I’m watching the elections on TV and the Republicans are saying they want to give America freedom. Cut taxes for freedom. Abolish government for freedom. Defeat Obama for freedom. I sincerely don’t understand. Explain this to me.”

  “OK,” says Irv, rising to the challenge. “I’m going to stick with the tyranny answer. We don’t want anything imposed on us. Don’t Tread on Me and all that. Being able to choose is proof that we aren’t living under tyranny. Choice may not be freedom itself, fine, but choice is proof of freedom because it proves there’s no tyrannical imposition. The more choice, the less tyranny.”

  “But it’s an illusion, Irv. The way the goldfish is free to move to the right or the left. The fact is,
he’s still stuck in a bowl. Laws and policies and doctrine and procedure, and the powerful strings of interests and money and greed—these are what put things on the table or take them off. We live in a world shaped by things above our heads. The freedom you fought for—that we all fought for, by the way—is the freedom to shape those big things together, not to be free from them. We didn’t fight to be free of community; we fought to have one. But you Americans chose between the . . .”—she glances at the menu—“Louisiana Chicken Pasta and a Glamburger and you think you’re a bunch of cowboys.”

  Irv shakes his head. “That’s not a choice. The Glamburger, all the way.”

  Melinda nods.

  Sigrid ignores them both. “Americans have longer life spans and a lower infant mortality rate than they used to because of the directed hard work of invisible people who built complex systems that resulted in your better lives. It’s not because someone cut your taxes.”

  “You’re just saying that because you’re a commie,” Irv says, putting on his red reading glasses again. “And you’re hungry. Girls are always like this when they’re hungry. You may think that’s sexist, but it’s a battle-hardened fact and I stand by it. You should get the burger. Angus beef,” he adds, glancing back down.

  “I’m not sure if American culture is frighteningly simple,” she answers, “or overwhelmingly complex.”

  Sigrid has nothing left to add. America is not making more sense to her, but its internal contradictions are coming into finer focus. Overwhelmed by the menu, she fixes her eyes on the television screen mounted above the most well-stocked bar she has ever seen in her life. There has to be fifty thousand dollars’ worth of booze back there. The massive LG TV is tuned to sports.

  Two teams are playing baseball. She doesn’t know the uniforms and from this distance the labels are too small to read. She likes baseball to the extent she understands it. It seems a patient game that is skilled and inspired by an agricultural past. She also rented Field of Dreams a thousand years ago and liked it: Kevin Costner surrounded by corn. It was comforting for some reason. She wonders whether Marcus has become a fan of the game over the years. It isn’t played much in Norway.