But the closed door that was now in front of Laurel shocked her. Roberta knew she was coming, she had called and told her, so this was obviously some sort of statement that she wasn’t welcome. Laurel stared at the door. Wasn’t welcomed or wasn’t believed? How many other times had she called and not come? Or come and not stayed? Laurel couldn’t count the uneaten dinners kept warm on the back burners, the freshly made beds not slept in because her business plans had changed and she was just “passing through.” Her hand reached for the latch to push open the door and hesitated. How many times had there been just no time for the woman in this house? The answer made her release the latch: just one time too many. And so she would have to knock like any unexpected visitor and hope to be invited inside.
Her jeweled hand balled into a fist and she struck the wood so forcefully the door rattled on its hinges. The silence that followed threatened to suffocate her as she grasped the door frame and pounded again. She forgot that her long wait could be credited to the dawn of Roberta’s eightieth birthday, and that the stoic lines of the face she finally saw were the result of most of those years spent rarely smiling about anything. Roberta’s pleasure was usually registered in her eyes, but they were covered now with the gray film of age and were shaded by the drawn blinds in the house.
“I ain’t deaf, but I would be if everybody who came here banged on this door like you,” she greeted Laurel.
“Well, can I come in?” Laurel massaged her knuckles as she moved past the widening door into the front room. The shadow’s made it seem small and dingy as she tried to adjust her vision to the shapes around her. “And can I give you a hug?” She could feel the bones’ fragile outlines as she wrapped her arms around the woman’s shoulders. “Aren’t you glad to see me?” She leaned back and smiled into Roberta’s stony face. “You don’t seem to have much to say.”
“Because you done asked three stupid questions in just as many seconds.” Roberta released herself. “And when you get to be my age, you learn not to waste your breath answering them.”
Laurel watched as she shuffled back to her easy chair, the sound of the felt house slippers blending with the shadows in the room. She faded into the corner behind the side of the chair, leaving Laurel standing helplessly in the center of the floor. She looked around the house with a growing despondency—the old gas stove with totally empty burners, the wooden kitchenette, the braided rugs separating the kitchen from the sitting room. Behind those closed doors would be two closet-sized bedrooms and a bath. It was little more than a shack. And the place had the smell of old age about it—that inexplicable mixture of dry sweat and moist saliva. But what had she expected? What in God’s name had she hoped to find here?
“If you standing there thinking about lemonade, it’s in the icebox. And bring me a glass while you at it.”
The voice came out of the past, melting the distance between them. She rushed to obey and do her part in recapturing the magic. Inside the refrigerator, the thick discs of lemon floated in the cut-glass pitcher with a clarity that made her want to cry. It would be sweet, sticky sweet, the way Roberta never drank it. The ice cubes were still blocked and solid, put in and timed so they wouldn’t dilute the syrupy liquid before she came. The room was dark, and as long as there were no mirrors, she might be able to believe that it was made for the little girl who had just ridden up that road on a bicycle. The little girl with two thick braids who dreamed of swimming in the Olympics. As she turned to swing open the cabinets and grab some glasses, the rows of canned food hit her between the eyes like a sledgehammer. Moving quickly to the next set of doors, she found sacks of flour and rice.
“You’ve changed the cabinets,” she cried out to the darkness and slammed the door shut.
“Miss, my cups and glasses are where they been for the last thirty years. If anything’s changed, it ain’t them.”
Laurel gripped the counter and concentrated—the far left, that’s where they were. Why did she think the right? “I don’t know why you have it so dark in here, it would confuse anyone,” she said aloud to cover her growing panic as she banged through the cabinets. “And don’t tell me it’s because it’s cooler that way, because it’s not. I sent you an air conditioner years ago which, Daddy told me, you gave away. That’s not fair, and you know it. You give away my air conditioner and then keep this place pitch-black and expect people to find things.” Her voice was an octave higher when she finally discovered the glasses. “And you had the door shut when you knew I was coming. You never shut the door. But what do you care if it would hurt my feelings.”
Her hands trembled as she gave Roberta the lemonade.
“I ain’t got to sweep your feelings off my floor like I do the dust that would blow in here on a dry day like today.”
Roberta watched her as she sat down in the chair, crossed her legs and began to swing them like the short ticks of a clock. Laurel took two long swallows and turned the wet glass in her hand repeatedly.
“But you ain’t come here to talk about my cleaning habits, or the way I keep cool in the summer.” She leaned over toward the young woman. “Why did you come, Laurel?”
There was a long pause, and then her voice was barely a whisper. “When people are in trouble, don’t they go home?”
Roberta covered her clenched hands gently. “But this ain’t your home, child.”
“I know.” She nodded as her tears further distorted the strange shapes in the darkened room. “But, Grandma, when people are in trouble, don’t they go home?”
So Laurel went home. And home was Linden Hills. If she had any doubt, she could look at her driver’s license, or call up the post office just to be sure—722 Tupelo Drive was where her mail had been sent for the last ten years. Not that the carrier needed the house number: everyone knew that the twelve-room stone Tudor had belonged to the Dumonts for over sixty years. The four bedrooms and three and a half baths could boast of nothing but the sweaty backs of lawyers on their sheets and the grime of government officials swirling down their drains. Laurel’s husband had kept the tradition going by combining both of those professions: the first black D.A. in Wayne County, hand-picked to be the next state attorney general. And he had chosen the only type of woman his family would have accepted. Laurel came with the Dumonts’ ingrained prerequisities: she was sepia, stunning, and successful. She walked into a house that was complete, and could think of no major changes to make. The couple had everything; she had to believe that because everyone told her so. And with so much in that house, they didn’t miss each other as they both stumbled on their way up, not realizing that their stairways weren’t strictly parallel. Slowly, deceptively, the steps slanted until the couple’s fingertips could just barely meet across the chasm. They might have discovered it sooner, but for years they could still see each other clearly as one packed the other’s bags to catch a plane or Metroliner, listened to the other’s speeches for that crucial meeting that always seemed to overlap a birthday, a vacation, or an anniversary. And since their hands were grasped so tightly on their respective set of stairs, it wasn’t until they had nearly reached the summit and had time to pause that they realized they had been moving together but away from each other. The gap wasn’t large, but it was enough to keep their one free hand from touching, regardless of how they strained.
Some women would have filled that space with children. Then each could have grasped the infant’s hand and let it masquerade for the flesh of the other. But Laurel filled it with the only two things she could honestly associate with home. After seven years, she had made her first changes in the Dumont property: she turned the den into a music room and installed a diving pool. Howard didn’t protest the carpenters tearing down walls and ceilings to put in shelves and speakers for her hundreds of classical albums and tapes. And seeing that she had purposely designed it to leave room for only one chaise lounge didn’t bother him much because he knew how she liked to be alone with her music. But the garage had to be moved and the entire backyard excavate
d for the style of pool she wanted. If they built a normal-size pool, there would be space for landscaping, garden parties, and barbecues. That sort of an arrangement would be a business asset for both of them, but few people were trained like her to use a thirty-foot diving platform. And when they had children, wouldn’t it be better—and safer—for them to be in shallower water at first? But he knew by then that his words were spoken across a void that would preclude any children. So if there was a pool, there might be a chance for a family; and if there was a family, there might be a home. When they both happened to be at 722 Tupelo Drive, they would make love on the chaise to her string quartets, and in the summer he would watch her swim. Too late, they both realized that music and water just weren’t solid enough to bridge their gap permanently. Laurel’s pool and music room hadn’t turned 722 into a home; they only gave her an excuse to return there.
She returned to Tupelo Drive that summer after leaving Roberta. And she stayed. Dressed in either a silk Japanese robe or a terry-cloth wrap, she spent the late summer and early autumn on the chaise lounge or diving platform. She began by telling the office that she needed an extra week off and then an extra month. Finally, she let her answering service intercept all their calls. Her decision not to move a step outside that property grew into inertia and, ultimately, fear. She became terrified that new words or new places would be lurking traps to keep her away from what she was seeking. Georgia wasn’t her home, nor Cleveland or California. They had been only way stations that she had passed through. The thought of her dislocation was stifling; the number of places she couldn’t claim, dizzying. She had stopped at them all only long enough to get her picture taken. And just maybe if she could freeze reality around her now, she’d know where she belonged. And with that reference point—with any point at all—she could discover what had gone wrong. So she desperately clung to the two things that had felt right for most of her life. When it became too cold to swim, the music got so loud it was deafening.
She thought she heard Howard say that he was leaving to think things over, that he had tried to reach her, but she just didn’t seem to care anymore about him or their home. Yes, he had definitely mouthed the word “home,” because she remembered that it fit so well with the rounded tones coming from the oboes. The piccolos then kept time with his trembling bottom lip. She had just let herself go all to pieces. What did she plan to do about her job, her career? How long did she think she could stay away and not be replaced? If she needed professional help, he could get it for her. She couldn’t keep herself locked away like this forever. Look at him, dammit. Something had gone terribly wrong. Her laughter reached the pitch of the violins. Had he disturbed her for that? For that illuminating piece of information? If he couldn’t come up with any sharper observations, he’d never make attorney general.
She couldn’t hear the doors slam, to the music room, bedroom closets, or front hall, but she assumed they must have because his clothes and books were gone. And she couldn’t hear the file of visitors who came all through the late autumn: her father, half-sister, and stepmother. The neighbors from Tupelo Drive mouthing concern or curiosity above the volume of her music until they tired of the competition and went away. She didn’t have to worry about hearing Roberta.
Roberta came in mid-December and just stared.
Laurel looked across the room from her chaise and there she was, sitting in a straight-backed chair she had dragged in from the dining room. Laurel said nothing but didn’t have the pleasure of feeling that she was ignoring Roberta. Hands folded in her lap, she calmly allowed the crashing cymbals and thunderous piano chords to wash over the printed housedress and worn-down slippers. She only moved when the doorbell rang, quietly disappearing to return again and take up her vigil. They spent the entire day like that together. Finally, Laurel rolled over and switched off the system.
“Well, have you heard enough?” She spoke without looking at the woman. “I’ll run down the program for you. The morning began with Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor. Then there was Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto in G Major followed by Brahms’s First Symphony. We started the afternoon with Chopin’s Fourth, Twenty-second, and Twenty-fourth preludes. Then moved into Tchaikovsky—his Fifth and Sixth symphonies, I played the Sixth twice. And for the last three hours it’s been Mahler—I especially like his work. Did you notice that I’ve spliced the tapes, so there’s absolutely no break between the last and first notes of his Eighth and Ninth symphonies?” She continued to talk into the ceiling. “I hope you’ve come to discuss what you’ve just heard, because beyond that I’ve nothing to say to you or anyone else.”
“I heard enough the first five minutes I sat here. And the rest of the time was spent trying to make sense out of what I was seeing.” Roberta’s voice was even and slow.
“I don’t care what you were seeing. You saw what all the others have seen: a woman who just doesn’t want to be bothered. Can’t everyone understand that? I just want to be left alone.”
“You said you was willing to talk about that music. Well, what I was seeing was what I was hearing. I can’t pronounce them names like you, but that last man—the one you say you like so much?”
“Mahler. Gustav Mahler.”
“Yeah, him.” Roberta nodded. “It’s a might bit different from Bessie Smith, Billie Holliday, or even Muddy Waters.”
“I’ll say.”
“I can hear them starting from the same place, though.”
“The same place? They’re worlds apart.”
“No, they in the same world.” Roberta shook her head. “They all trying to say something with music that you can’t say with plain talk. There ain’t really no words for love or pain. And the way I see it, only fools go around trying to talk their love or talk their pain. So the smart people make music and you can kinda hear about it without them saying anything. You can hear the hurt in Bessie or Billie and I just kinda wish that I’d come here and found you playing their stuff, ’cause that man you seem to like so much—that Mahler—his music says that he ain’t made peace with his pain, child. And if you gonna go on, that’s what you gotta do.”
“So running out and buying the records of women who were drug addicts and alcoholics would help me, right? Women who got their identities through a crop of worthless men they let drag them down? All that moaning about Jim Crow, unpaid bills, and being hungry has nothing to do with me or what I’m going through.”
“You ain’t going through nothing much more different than what they went through.”
“It’s a lot different. But how would you understand?”
Roberta narrowed her eyes. “I guess what folks say is true then. It’s lonely at the top.”
“It’s damned lonely.”
“Well, Bessie and Billie are telling you that it ain’t so crowded at the bottom, either,” Roberta snapped. “You think you done found a special music to match your misery. A misery you got somewhere in the head. No, you ain’t never had to worry, like a lot of us did, about Jim Crow or finding your next meal, but if that’s all you hear in them songs, then you don’t know as much about music as you think you do. What they say is one thing, but what you supposed to hear is, ‘I can.’” Roberta came and stood over her. “‘I can,’ Laurel, that’s what you supposed to hear. It ain’t a music that speaks to your head like some of this stuff you been playing, or to your body like that rock music of these kids. But it speaks to a place they ain’t got no name for yet, where you supposed to be at home. Open up that place, child. ’Cause if you don’t, there ain’t never gonna be no peace—with the love in your life or the hurt.
“Remember what you asked me this summer? When people are in trouble, don’t they go home? You came looking for it back there, but Georgia wasn’t really home for you. It was just a shack where you had learned to be at home with yourself. And I had prayed that when you grew up, you would carry that away with you. If you feel you’ve lost that, Laurel, you didn’t lose it in Georgia and so there weren’t no point
in coming back there trying to find it.”
Laurel’s face was closed and stony as she kept it turned away from the woman.
“Yeah, I forgot. You said you only wanted to talk about this here music, and I got a little off the track, didn’t I?” Roberta sighed. “Well, I done exhausted myself on that subject.”
She returned to the hard chair with a slight limp, and grimaced as she sat down, grabbing her back. “I’m plain folk, and I ain’t educated. I’d be the last to deny that. But I’m willing to learn, and I’m ready to sit here—today, tomorrow, for as long as it takes. Baby, get up and put something else on by that Mahler man. Maybe this time it’ll get a bit more clear, and I can find something else to say to you.”
Laurel did get up. She wrapped the robe around her and went and kneeled in front of Roberta, taking her hands. But she felt even that didn’t place her low enough, so she sat back on her thighs and looked up into the woman’s face.
“Where do I begin, Grandma?”
“The beginnings are gone, Laurel. But we can start with today and what you got around you.”
“What day is it anyway?”
“It’s December sixteenth. And there’s nine more days till Christmas. If we start now, we can have us some kind of holiday—surprise everybody. Get us a tree, and the fixings for a big dinner. You can cook for an army in that kitchen of yours, but I brought my own candied fruit and spices.”
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