“You want to go somewhere?” Deacon Brooks had asked.
George blinked. “What?”
He moved closer, put his hand on George’s hip. “I know somewhere we can go.”
While they fucked, George thought of Pastor Goode and the rest of those hypocrites, and thrust harder, and when he came it was with a feeling of power. Seconds later, though, that feeling was replaced by a deep loathing, not of that church or its parishioners or pastor, but of himself. He’d pulled up his pants and left without a word, without ever looking at Deacon Brooks, only hearing him say, “Don’t go,” as George walked back up the basement steps.
He had returned, though, and frequently, over the seventeen years that had followed.
Lying there next to Butch now, staring up at the harsh light bulb, George felt restless. He elbowed Butch in the back. “I’m leaving,” he said.
Butch did not stir.
George got dressed and left.
Walking down Spruce Street, he heard footsteps behind him, and when he turned to look he saw a shadow move between two parked cars. When he passed the same man digging through the same trash bin as he had a couple of nights before, the man grinned, holding his arms out. “Son! It’s me! Come on give your daddy a kiss!”
***
The next morning, Ava awoke to a familiar song of summer: the melodic whirring of a box fan. She half-opened her eyes and saw it sitting in the open window of her bedroom, the early morning light that streamed through it being cut over and over by its metal blades in such quick rotation that the light appeared undisturbed except for a faint trembling. She lay there in her bed, held in half-consciousness by the lull of the fan, and tried to recall the dream she’d been having, parts of which still clung, sticky, to the edges of her brain. A dodgeball game. A fat, red, dimpled ball, almost spongy in its texture, almost juicy in its bounce. The closeness of friends. And the threat of older girls and boys who could not resist the urge to use the ball as a weapon, to try and hurt as many people as they could. She tried to remember the details of the dreamed game, the who and when, but they slipped through her waking-up mind like water through a colander. Uncatchable.
By the time she got downstairs, everyone had gone to work, and Helena was the only one left in the house. Ava found her in the kitchen, rummaging around under the sink. “I’m looking for tools,” she said, when she saw Ava.
“Tools?”
She nodded. “A hammer. Some nails.”
Ava crossed to the sink, opened one of the lower cabinet drawers, and pulled out a tool box. She sat it down on the floor between Helena and herself, took out a hammer and a box of nails and held them up.
“Excellent,” Helena said, taking them. “I thought I’d repair some of the loose floorboards in Sarah’s bedroom. I was worried I was keeping everyone up last night with my pacing.”
“I doubt it,” Ava said. “We’re used to creaking floors around here.”
“Well, it’ll make me feel better anyway.” She stood up and headed for the door.
“I’ll help you,” Ava said, grabbing a second hammer from the toolbox.
There was a moment of hesitation, only a moment, Ava was sure of that, but it hung there between them, weighty as a half a minute. Then Helena said, “Alright.”
They worked from opposite sides of the room, the banging of their hammers filling up the nervous quiet. Every few minutes, Ava glanced over at Helena and tried to think of something to say as they slowly made their way towards each other at the center of the room.
“You’re a good cook.”
Helena looked over at her.
“Those crab legs were really good. I’m surprised you’re not married. Doesn’t every man want a wife who can cook?”
Helena laughed. “I’m not sure I can say what every man wants.” She took another nail from the box and eyed the next floorboard.
“Why aren’t you married?” Ava asked her. “I mean, do you want to be?”
She shook her head. “No. I don’t.”
“Why not?” Ava knew several women Helena’s age who were not married, but all of them talked about how much they wanted to be. “You’re not one of those women’s lib types, are you?”
“Not really. That movement’s not really about us, is it?”
Ava had no idea what that movement was really about. She tested the soundness of another floorboard, leaning her palm against it and pressing her weight onto it. It squeaked loudly beneath her.
“I guess I just like my freedom too much,” Helena said.
Ava hesitated. She wanted to know about Helena’s life. She felt she needed to understand everything about her, so that she could discover the one thing that was causing all these changes in her, but she didn’t want to push too hard, to pry. “Tell me about the last person you were with.”
“Why?”
Ava shrugged. “I’m curious.”
Helena laughed. “Alright. The last man I was with was a science teacher at my school.”
“What was his name?” Ava asked.
“Frederick.”
“Frederick. The science teacher. My. He sounds…interesting.”
Helena laughed. “Well, he was a little nerdy, I guess.”
“So, then you like teacher types?”
“I think I like different things in different people.”
“But you didn’t want to marry him? Frederick?”
Helena shook her head. “Not even a little bit,” she said, and they both laughed.
Later that afternoon, they walked over to Sixtieth Street, so Ava could purchase a new pair of shoes for work. The neighborhood was humming with activity, the traffic heavy, buses and cars and people moving in a steady stream down the narrow blocks. The shoe store was air-conditioned, and Ava and Helena lingered inside longer than necessary, trying on shoes they didn’t intend to buy. Helena put on a pair of red heels and sat with her legs crossed and her head thrown back, like a picture in a fashion magazine, and Ava laughed, while the salespeople whispered to each other and threw Helena distasteful glances.
On their way back home, Helena asked, “What about you, Ava? Why did you get married?”
“That’s what people do,” Ava said.
“But what was it that first attracted you to Paul?”
Ava thought about it. “He was there.”
Helena looked at her, her head tilted to one side.
“What I mean,” Ava said, “is that he was always there. He came into the cafeteria where I work three or four times a day. Half the time, he didn’t even eat anything. He just sat there in the corner, smiling at me. He did it for months, I guess—that’s what he told me later—but I didn’t even notice he was there for the first half of it.”
Helena looked surprised. “He must be a very patient man, my brother. He wasn’t that way when we were young.”
“Tell me about when you were kids. Paul doesn’t talk a lot about it.”
“I don’t blame him,” Helena said. “There’s not a lot of good to say.”
They walked past a small store, out of which the aroma of fried food wafted, and two young men standing outside it watched them as they passed, their wide eyes fixed on Helena, as if they’d never seen anything like her.
“We had it pretty rough,” Helena continued, either ignoring or not noticing the stares. “Our father wasn’t around much. He’d show up once every couple of years and talk like he loved us and wanted to be with us, and he’d take us camping or skating or something, and then he’d disappear again.”
“That must have been hard for you.”
“Yes. For Paul, too.”
“What about your mother? Paul told me she drank.”
“Oh, she drank, alright. Like a fish, as they say. She drank herself to death, as a matter of fact. Very slowly, though, so she still had plenty of time to fuck up her children.”
“How did she fuck you up?” Ava asked.
“She was not kind to us,” Helena said, “after she started drinking.
She yelled a lot. Constantly. She berated us, told us it was our fault that our father didn’t want to live with us. She told me it was my fault, because I was so black. She beat us. Luckily, she was so drunk so much of the time that we could outsmart her and get away before it got too bad. Sometimes. Other times…” Her voice trailed off.
What Ava wanted to know, what she had really been asking, was in what way Helena had turned out fucked up, what was fucked up about her.
“I clung to my brother,” Helena was saying, “and he clung to me.”
“It’s good you had each other,” Ava said.
They were coming up to the corner of her block, passing by the church, and Ava suddenly remembered something. Herself, as a girl, standing in front of the church, with her brother. They were holding hands. Another girl stood before them, a big girl with a mean face, and she was angry, and her hands were balled into fists. Geo was scared. Ava could feel his hand trembling inside hers. She was entirely unafraid herself, though, even as the girl raised her fist. She saw Pastor Goode standing on the church steps. She peered at him, unsure whether he was part of the memory, watching the three kids but not intervening, or if he was really there, watching her walking by with Helena.
“Do you see him?” Ava asked Helena. “Pastor Goode? Do you see him there?”
Helena looked over at the church, then back at Ava. “Yes, I see him.”
Ava nodded.
“What’s wrong?” Helena asked.
“Nothing,” Ava said. “Let’s just get home.”
Neither George nor Paul was home that evening, so it was just the four women together again. After dinner, they sat in the living room watching The Flip Wilson Show. At the first commercial break, Helena excused herself and went to smoke a cigarette. Halfway through the show, when she had not returned, Ava went to find her.
It was a warm night and there was barely a breeze. Helena sat on the top step, her back against the splintered wood railing. When Ava came out of the house, Helena said, “I know Paul probably asked you to look after me, Ava, but you really don’t have to.”
Ava sat down. “Don’t you like Flip Wilson?”
“Yes, I do. I was actually thinking of one of my students. He used to do impressions of all Flip’s characters. He’d come in the next morning talking like Reverend Leroy or Geraldine.” She laughed.
“It sounds like you loved your job,” Ava said. “Why’d you leave?”
She sighed. “It was time to move on.”
“What does that mean?”
Helena laughed. “I don’t know. It’s the only thing I can ever think of to say. I was fired.”
“Oh!”
“You’re the first person I’ve said that out loud to,” she said. “You won’t tell Paul, will you?”
“No.”
Helena looked at her, expectantly. “Are you going to ask me why I got fired?”
Ava shook her head. “No. But if you want to tell me, you’re welcome to.”
There was the sound of a door opening and they both turned and watched a middle-aged woman coming out of the back door of the house to the right of them. She was carrying a bag of trash, which she put into a can beside her back porch. When she looked over and saw Ava and Helena on the Delaneys’ steps, she frowned and shook her head dramatically, before going back inside.
“That’s Sister Hattie,” Ava said. “She used to be our Sunday school teacher.”
Helena frowned. “Isn’t it strange living around these people and being so cut off from them at the same time?”
Ava didn’t want to say that she hadn’t really thought much about it, though that was the truth, because she didn’t want Helena to give her the same look she had given her when she said she hadn’t thought about Paul’s feelings regarding children. So, instead, she said what she thought about it right then. “Yes, it is.”
“Are you and Paul really going to move?” Helena asked her.
“I’m not,” Ava said.
“Does Paul know that?”
“I’ve told him a hundred times.”
“And why won’t you?” Helena asked.
“I can’t. It’s just not something I’m able to do.”
Helena sighed. “What happened to your brother, Ava?” she asked, the question coming out slow and cautious. “Do you mind my asking? Are you able to talk about it?”
“I don’t know,” Ava said. “I’ve never tried. I’ve never had a reason to.”
“Not to your family?”
“Well, they were there. They know what happened.”
“What about Paul?” she asked. “You must have told him about it.”
“I didn’t have to. Pastor Goode did it for me. I’m sure he thought it would run Paul off.”
“In four years of marriage, you’ve never discussed it?”
“Not really.”
Helena looked perplexed. She studied Ava’s face for a long moment, then said, “Well, if you want to tell me, you’re welcome to.”
She smiled and Ava smiled back.
The back door opened and Sarah came out of the house. “Y’all missed it,” she said. “He did Geraldine.”
“Is it nine already?” Ava asked.
“Mmm hmm.”
“It’s my fault,” Helena said. “Ava was just trying to keep me company out of a feeling of obligation and I talked so much she missed Geraldine.” She shrugged. “Come have a cigarette, Sarah.”
“I don’t want to interrupt,” Sarah said, already coming out onto the porch. She took the cigarette that was offered and sat down between Helena and Ava on the step. “What was y’all talking about?”
“What were we talking about, Ava?” Helena asked.
“Not talking about things.”
“That’s right. Is there anything,” she asked Sarah, “you’d like to not talk to us about?”
Sarah frowned. Already the two of them had a private joke.
“I’m sorry,” Helena said. “I’m being silly. How are you, Miss Sarah? How was your day?”
“Wonderful,” Sarah said.
“As good as that?”
“Yes,” she said. “I…I saw the fire-eating man.”
Helena clapped her hands together. “Did you?”
“I did.” She hadn’t.
“Tell us,” Helena said. She leaned over and looked past Sarah at Ava. “Do you know about your sister’s fire-eating man?”
Ava did not know of any man who could be called her sister’s anything, fire-eating or otherwise. She shook her head, no.
Now Sarah wished she hadn’t said it. She had panicked when she saw the two of them together, connecting, and she remembered how interested Helena had been in the fire-eating man, and blurted out that she had seen him. And while the idea of sitting there telling some elaborate lie to Helena was one thing, because at least she would be rewarded for her deception with Helena’s interest, sitting there telling it to Ava, who could rarely muster enough attention for anything to qualify as being interested, would be nothing but tiring. Already, Ava was brushing ash off her skirt and looking like she couldn’t care less.
“Well,” Sarah began, looking at Helena. “I took a long lunch today so I could go down to Penn’s Landing and see if he was still there.”
“And he was? After all this time?”
Sarah nodded. “Still in the same place and everything.”
“Did you talk to him? Tell me you talked to him.”
“I did. I introduced myself and asked him how he did all those tricks without burning hisself to a crisp.”
Helena laughed and Sarah laughed with her, enjoying her own story.
Ava, sitting there fiddling with a loose thread at the hem of her skirt, thought she heard a strange something in Sarah’s voice.
“He said it was just so many years of practice,” Sarah went on.
“Did he remember you?” Helena asked.
Sarah nodded. “He said he remembered me coming around a few years ago, and asked why I stopped. I
told him I changed jobs.”
Ava thought maybe there was a tinny-ness in Sarah’s voice, a flinty little something. It had been a long time since she had really listened to the sound of her sister’s voice.
“We talked a little while,” Sarah was saying. “And he asked if I’d come down and see him again when I get the chance.”
Now that she really listened, Ava was sure there was a flinty little something and, thinking more about it, she remembered that, years ago, when she had regularly listened to the sound of Sarah’s voice, that tinny, flinty thing had only ever been there when Sarah was lying.
“You’re making this up,” Ava said, suddenly, after not having spoken the whole time.
Sarah turned and glared at her.
“I can hear it in your voice,” Ava said.
Sarah looked at Helena, who said, “Ava, she’s not. She told me about this man before.”
“I don’t know what she told you before,” Ava said. “But she’s lying now.”
“I am not lying,” Sarah said, through clenched teeth.
Ava was not trying to hurt Sarah. It had not yet occurred to her that her sister was lying for a reason, and nor had it yet crossed her mind that being called out on the lie would embarrass and humiliate her.
Helena put a hand on Sarah’s arm. Tears welled in Sarah’s eyes.
It was only then that Ava realized what she was doing. She looked at her sister. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Sarah got up and stalked back into the house, slamming the screen door as she went.
Ava felt terrible. She really hadn’t meant to be so inconsiderate, so thoughtless. Still, she didn’t understand why Sarah would tell such a strange, pointless lie. For attention? Was she that desperate for attention? She tried to remember whether Sarah had always been that way or if, like herself, like their mother, she had changed after Geo’s death, but she couldn’t. She sighed, thinking of the toll it had taken, a toll she had probably never had a chance to appreciate, and still, probably, couldn’t. She felt suddenly, deeply sad.
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