“I’ll sweep up this glass,” Sarah said, walking back towards the kitchen.
“I’ll help,” said Paul, following her.
Without Pastor Goode's head to go upside, or George to harass, Regina lost interest in the scene downstairs and went on back to bed.
George loved and hated the sound of his bedroom door closing behind him. The catching of the latch sounded like privacy and exposure at the same time. He liked knowing there was somewhere in the house he could go without Regina being able to follow him. Even in her craziest moments, even on her hardest Saturday mornings, she never dared come into his room, never dared push him that far. It had been she who, long years back, had kicked him out of the bedroom they had shared. George had been angry about it then. And hurt by it, though he would never admit to that and have Regina know for sure that she could hurt him, which would surely make her try more often. When she’d kicked him out of their bedroom, saying that she just wanted to be by herself for a while, to try to deal in solitude with what had happened to their son, it had represented a change in their marriage that was different from all the other changes that had come over the years, something clear and final about the way they would go on from that point, inhabiting their house and their lives. Any love that had still lived then, any love that had still pulsed and breathed, even shallowly, between them, had died that day, that too-hot, hazy day when where George slept, and everything else in the whole world, had been altered without his having a say. At least he liked to pretend he had not had a say. In the years that followed, though, he had developed a ginger appreciation of his solitary space, coming to know it as a refuge, a sanctuary when other sanctuaries had fallen away, where he could shroud himself, ball himself up into the tiniest thing. Still, whenever he closed the door behind himself, whenever he blocked out Regina and the world, he had the feeling that something was being revealed, too, and that was this: that George Delaney needed to hide. That he needed to become some tiny thing. That there was something to be shrouded from. And something to be tiny about.
He heard Regina walk past his door just a handful of seconds after he closed it, her slippered footsteps slowing right outside the door, and he imagined her straining to hear what he might be doing, what he might be thinking, tucked inside his privacy. He felt a sputter of hatred for her—not a surge, just a sputter—as he heard her open the door to her own bedroom.
George got undressed, shedding himself of the clothes he’d worn to work the previous morning, the slate grey slacks that were standard for city workers in the streets department.
Standing at his bedroom window, he thought about the vagrant at the trashcan and wondered why he'd gotten so out of sorts about some old bum in a brown coat. He spent so much of his mental energy trying not to think about his father, and even more of it trying not to think about his son, yet, on an ordinary morning, under a same-as-always sky, they had suddenly careened into his psyche from either side and smashed head-on into each other in his mind. He still felt rattled. He took a drag off his cigarette, the thick smoke stinging his eyes, and peered down into the quiet street below, wondering which of their neighbors had thrown the brick. It may have been Pastor Goode, but he had rarely ever done things like that himself. Skulking around in the dark and chucking bricks through windows was the sort of thing the preacher had usually inspired others to do. As he watched the street below, George saw a figure appear, coming from the corner at Fifty-Eighth and walking down the middle of the street. In the dark, he couldn’t see who it was. The figure slowed its pace and looked right at the Delaney house. George frowned, and reached for his pants, in case he had to confront the brick-thrower. But the figure quickened its pace again and walked on down the street, rounding the corner at Fifty-Ninth and disappearing from George’s sight.
Sarah cleaned up the broken glass, Paul moving the sofa so she could sweep behind it. When it was all swept up, he got a piece of cardboard from a box at the top of the basement stairs and taped it into the broken pane. “That’ll do for now, I guess.”
Sarah stared at the cardboard, a hard look of frustration on her face. She was two years older than Ava, and although there was a sibling resemblance, Sarah was thin and stick-like where Ava was thicker and curvier. She had a hard edge to her personality, too, Paul thought, that Ava did not have.
"I hate them," she said. "Everybody on this block. I hate every last one of them."
"They aint done nothing like this in two years," Paul said. "No letters. No calls. No sermons in the street."
Sarah just stared at the cardboard, looking angry and sad, and Paul patted her shoulder.
When he climbed back into bed, he snuggled up close to Ava. She, indifferent to all the commotion that had gone on, was deep in a restful sleep.
Ava awoke again at just after nine in the morning, brought out of sleep by the sound of her mother’s haunted mumbling coming down the hall. Regina, who was always Crazy on Saturday mornings, could be heard from her bedroom at the front of the house, all the way to Ava and Paul’s room at the back. Glancing at Paul, who was snoring softly beside her, she got up, pulled on jeans and a blouse with ruffled sleeves, and tiptoed out of the room and down the stairs, being careful not to draw her mother’s attention. She went to the living room and pulled back the front curtains to let in some sunlight. The cardboard taped into the window caused her to pause only a moment before she turned and walked through the dining room into the kitchen. Once there, she opened more curtains, the rain-cleansed sunlight splashing itself onto the dull red wallpaper. She made coffee, then went into the dining room, where she got out the ironing board and iron, and set them up by the dining room table. The basket of clean laundry she had left on the table the day before was still there, and she pulled out one of Paul's work shirts and began to press it.
When her sister, Sarah, came downstairs, she walked right by Ava without a word, on into the kitchen. After a while, she came back into the dining room with a cup of coffee and sat down at the table. "Pastor Goode’s up to it again."
Ava folded a just-ironed skirt and asked what had happened that morning, and when Sarah told her about the brick through the window, she said, "So, that's what that noise was."
Sarah sipped her coffee and looked thoughtful. "Just when Mama was thinking about moving.”
Ava slipped a skirt over the top of the ironing board. "If Mama was ever willing to move, we'd have been gone years ago.”
Sarah shook her head, "Only ‘cause they tried to force us out. Scare us out. She didn’t want to give Pastor Goode the satisfaction. But when they stopped, she started thinking about going. I saw her reading the paper one day, a while back, and she had circled some things in the real estate section. She don’t want to be here no more than they want us here.”
Ava knew that Sarah was wrong, that Paul had been the one circling things in the real estate section. Sarah wasn't a person you could disagree with casually, though. She took any contrary opinion, no matter how reasonable, or gently expressed, as a personal attack. So, Ava just kept on ironing and said nothing more.
A little while later, their mother came down the stairs, still looking disheveled, with a sweater on over her nightclothes and a large sunhat on her head.
"You gone do some gardening, Mama?" Sarah asked her.
"I think my tomatoes is ready," Regina said, heading for the back door.
There were no tomatoes. There wasn't even a garden. But Regina disappeared through the back door looking determined.
"Daddy was out all night again," Sarah told Ava.
Ava folded the skirt she had just ironed and laid it on the table with the other pressed garments.
"Where you think he go all the time?" Sarah asked for the thousandth time.
Ava shrugged. "Nowhere. He just don't want to be here, I guess."
"Well, that's obvious, Ava," she said, rolling her eyes. "But he got to be going somewhere 'til after four in the morning. You don't want to know?"
Their father spent a
t least a couple of evenings a week away from home. Often, after dinner, he would tell them he was going out for a while, and they wouldn't see him again for hours. Sometimes Ava heard him returning at nearly dawn. It wasn't a new thing. It had been his habit for a long time, years, though Ava could not remember exactly when it had started. "I guess I'm just used to it," she said to her sister.
Sarah frowned. "You the least curious person I know."
Ava didn’t think she wasn’t curious. She just didn't have the appetite for other folks' business that Sarah had.
"You used to poke your nose into everything when we was kids," Sarah said.
Ava did not think that was true.
When the doorbell rang, both sisters were startled by the sound.
"Ignore it," said Ava, sure it was one of their neighbors trying to start some more trouble. "They'll go away afterwhile."
From the kitchen behind them, they heard the back door open and shut with a thud.
"Shit," Sarah said. "Mama must’ve heard the bell.” She hurried past Ava and the ironing board, disappearing into the kitchen.
The doorbell rang again. Ava frowned and tried to just keep on ignoring it, but when it rang a third time she put down the iron. When she got to the front door, she peered through the glass pane and saw a woman standing at the edge of the porch, her back turned, looking out at the street. She could not see the woman's face, but nothing about the back of her reminded Ava of any of their neighbors on the block. Cautiously, she pulled open the front door and pushed open the screen door, just as the woman turned and came forward, smiling, saying, "Good morning," and Ava, for no reason she could name just then, reached out with both hands and took hold of the woman's face, and kissed her.
When their lips touched, Ava tasted color. For many seconds they stood there like that, one woman with her mouth pressed against another woman's mouth, in the doorway, until, finally, the woman took a step back from Ava, just as Sarah came through the kitchen door, following an excited-looking Regina. When they got to the foyer, they saw Ava standing there with the strange woman, both of them looking oddly satisfied.
Regina stared wide-eyed, not at the stranger, but at her daughter. “Ava?” she asked, as if she weren’t sure. She got close to her, peering into her face, searching, and after a moment she said, “Oh. I thought that was you.”
“It is me, Mama,” Ava said.
“No, I mean the other you. The first you. The one you used to be.”
Sarah eyed the woman at the door. “Who are you?”
“I’m looking for Paul Holly,” the woman said, sounding a little flustered.
“Oh. You a friend of his?” Sarah asked.
“I’m Helena. His sister.”
She looked nothing like her brother, Ava thought. While Paul’s face was round, hers was thin and high-cheekboned. His brown eyes looked nothing like hers, which were startlingly green. While he was slightly short for a man, she was slightly tall for a woman, and had long fingers, while her brother’s were stubby and meaty. He was handsome, but she was strange-looking, and had very short, very kinky hair and glasses that looked bottle-thick. But the greatest difference, and the most obvious one, was the severe difference in their complexions. Paul was brown. But Helena was black.
Very black.
Black as forever, Ava would say of her, years later. Black as always.
***
When Helena crossed the threshold into the house, Ava felt the temperature rise. The chill that had held in the corners since the previous night’s rain, that had penetrated the wood floors and clung to the gray-red wallpaper like an invisible frost, melted away in a moment. Ava felt it instantly, a sudden warming on her skin, as if she had just left the shade and walked out into the sun on a hot day. She looked at her mother and sister and she was sure they felt it, too. Regina took off her sun hat and used it to fan herself. Sarah unbuttoned her housecoat and pushed up its sleeves.
“I’m sorry to drop by so unexpectedly,” Helena said. “I would have called, but I didn’t have a phone number.” She set down the suitcase and black leather portfolio she was carrying.
For a moment, they all stood there, hot and silent. Then Sarah, who was grinning at Helena and almost bouncing on her heels, said, “Aint this something? Paul's sister.”
Helena looked uneasy with all of them standing there watching her, especially Regina, who was peering at her as though she was a strange plant that had suddenly sprouted up in the middle of the foyer. “Well,” Helena said, “I mean…is Paul here?”
“He’s sleeping,” Ava said. “I’ll go get him up for you.” She moved towards the stairs.
“Sleeping?”
“Yes. He worked all night.”
“Oh,” she said. “Wait. Don’t.”
Ava stopped.
“I really shouldn’t have come without calling. But I didn’t have a number.”
Regina squinted at her. “You said that already.”
She frowned. “Did I? Well, I just hate to wake him if he’s been up all night. To tell you the truth, I think seeing me will be enough of a shock to his system without him being half asleep on top of it.”
“Don’t wake him, then,” Sarah said. “He’ll probably be up in a little while. Why don’t you come in and wait?”
That idea made Ava feel suddenly lightheaded. She leaned against the wall and tried to steady herself.
“I wouldn’t want to put y’all out,” Helena said.
“You wouldn’t be,” Sarah insisted. “Would she, Ava?”
Ava tried to say, “No, you wouldn’t be,” but her words came out all jumbled.
Sarah frowned at her. “It’ll be nice to have company. Won’t it, Mama?”
Regina was still peering at Helena, her eyes moving over the woman’s face. “Black, aint you?”
Sarah put her hands over her face. “Oh, God, Mama.”
Helena gave Regina a strained smile and said, “Is something burning?”
They all sniffed the air.
“It’s the iron,” Ava said, and she hurried out to the dining room, glad to have an excuse to get away.
She found the iron face down on a pair of Paul’s work pants. It had scorched through at the edges, melting a triangular black burn into the material. She turned off the iron and stood there looking down at the ruined slacks, the hard smell of singed polyester in her nose.
She did not understand what had happened in the doorway. The feelings that had rushed through her the moment she saw Helena, feelings she could not name and did not recognize, still lingered, and she found it hard to breathe in the suddenly-hot house. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, trying to get more air into her lungs. She could hear Paul’s sister’s voice floating in from the foyer. She slipped out into the kitchen, but the voice followed her, and after a moment Helena came into the kitchen, with Sarah leading the way and Regina following half-interestedly behind. Ava moved to the counter and wiped away some crumbs that weren’t there.
"This is my sister, Ava,” Sarah said. “Your brother’s wife.”
There was a flash of surprise in Helena's eyes when Sarah said the word wife, then she smiled, the most tense, uncomfortable smile Ava had ever seen, and said, "It's good to meet you,” holding out her hand for Ava to take.
Ava came forward and took Helena’s hand and tried to say, “It’s good to meet you, too,” but the words came out all jumbled and wrong again.
“What’s the matter with you?” Sarah asked her.
Ava didn’t answer. Instead, she offered Helena coffee, very slowly, so the words came out right, and Helena said yes, she would like some, and that she took it black. Helena sat down at the table and Sarah sat beside her. Ava got a mug from the cupboard and filled it, and her hands shook a little as she handed it to Helena.
"How long has it been since you saw your brother?" Sarah asked. She was perched on the edge of her chair, her whole body angled towards Paul’s sister.
"Eighteen years."
&nbs
p; "Paul told us you got split up after your mother died. Sent to different relatives."
"Oh,” she said. “Well. We did get split up. I was twelve. Paul was fifteen."
“Have you been in Philadelphia all this time?”
Ava had never known Sarah to be so friendly to anyone. When she had first brought Paul around, five years ago, Sarah had looked him up and down as if he were the most shiftless-looking Negro she had ever seen. It had taken her months to warm up to him and it was at least a year before Ava could say for sure that Sarah even liked him.
"I was here until I was seventeen,” Helena was saying. “Then we moved to Baltimore. I’ve been there ever since.”
"But you back here now?"
She shook her head. "I'm on my way up to New York. I just stopped by Philly so I could see Paul."
"Well, he’ll be up soon,” Sarah said again.
Ava looked at the clock. It was only ten-thirty. Paul wouldn’t be up for hours. “Maybe I should wake him,” she said.
Sarah glared across the room at her. “You should let the poor man sleep, Ava.” Then she smiled at Helena. “We was just about to start breakfast. We'd love to have you.”
Helena glanced at Ava, then shook her head. "I really don't want to put y’all out anymore than I already have."
"You haven’t," Sarah said. “You family. Aint she, Ava?”
“I guess so,” Ava said.
Sarah beamed, making her sister’s strained smile look all the more uneasy.
George had not heard the doorbell. Deep in sleep when Helena came, he had been dreaming a familiar dream, an old dream, about an abandoned factory by a train track, and he awoke feeling shaken and disoriented. He could smell breakfast cooking and could hear the very faint sizzle of cooking grease, and he remembered where he was, and that it was Saturday morning, and he settled himself deeper into his mattress and put his pillow over his head. He did this upon waking every Saturday morning, to block out the sounds of Regina’s craziness coming down the hall, wafting under his door like cigarette smoke and filling his space like a toxin. He could remember, though it had been a long time ago now, that Saturday mornings in this house had once been happy. In their first years on this block, when their family was unbroken. George would always sleep in and Regina would, too, when she didn’t have to work too early. They would give themselves those two or three hours not to worry about Ava and what she might be up to. Falling in and out of consciousness, they would whisper to each other, “You think everything alright?” “Sure, I don’t smell nothing burning.” “We should get up and check on them, huh?” “Yeah, in a little while.” These things sometimes said while cuddled close. Other times, as in summer, when the room was hot as hell, said from as far apart on the mattress as they could get. Often, the sound of screaming, or glass breaking, or even suspicious quiet, would finally pull them reluctantly from their bed.
The Summer We Got Free Page 2