“I just think people aren’t looking at the bigger picture,” Dan had told Justin. He’d knocked on five different doors and been met with five different versions of not now.
“Might be that it’s too soon to tell what the fallout is, Dan.” Justin adjusted his belt over a midsection of considerable girth. Dan had always believed Justin May’s name suggested a youth that had abandoned Justin some years earlier. He had a trim, white beard and thin, tidy, white hair, with eyes the color of twilight.
“Yes, but this is unprecedented. This is . . . ” Again, Dan wasn’t sure what to call it, how to define it. In a way, he realized that he felt slightly less vulnerable than he might have otherwise, simply because so many of them were in the situation together.
“It is, Dan. But I think that’s exactly my point. To think about it too much’ll scare the hell out of people.” Beyond Justin’s door, a maintenance man pushed a gray, plastic garbage bin on wheels, rumbling as it passed by on the brick floor.
“Not thinking about it seems worse. We need to talk about it, don’t you think, Justin? What about the FBI? Is this big enough for their involvement?”
Justin laughed out loud. “The FBI?”
“Justin—”
“Listen, Matlock. I appreciate what you’re asking, but you’re pissing on the wrong hydrant here.”
Dan slumped against the doorframe. “You’ve got nothing to say?”
“Is this on or off the record?”
“Off.”
“Off, then.”
“No, wait. On. On the record.”
“On the record? This is Oak Park.”
“Okay, now off.”
Justin had smiled. His phone rang. “Off the record? This is Oak Park, Dan.”
Dan left Justin’s office and simultaneously saw Alicia sitting on a bench in the atrium and thus not waiting in the car, and then Summer Schumerth, the Oak Park Outlook’s new “investigative” reporter. Summer was fresh out of j-school at Northwestern and wore her glossy brown hair in an earnest bun. Though she was only twenty-three, she had the demeanor of a middle-aged executive, all straight lines and hardness. She wore fall colors in the spring, oranges, browns, ochers. Dan offered an enthusiastic wave from across the large atrium, and then, when she seemed at first to ignore him, he waved both his hands in a kind of desperation.
“Summer! Hey, Summer! Over here . . .”
She finally turned her head in his direction. He could just make out her features through the plastic, green tropical plants under the atrium’s skylights.
“Dan Kowalski!” he reminded her. Then, after she just stood looking at him, he said, “Your colleague. At the Outlook.”
“Oh, yes,” she said as Dan walked toward her. “You write the Life and Letters column, right?”
“That’s right.”
He’d reached her and was aware of Alicia, a dozen feet away, watching him in profile. Unlike his, Summer’s notepad was filled with blue ink. She noted him glancing at it and moved to hold it to her chest.
“So, you’re snooping around,” Dan joked. Then, when she didn’t answer: “Got any good scoops?”
“Seriously?”
He laughed awkwardly in what surely sounded too much like a snicker. Why had he gone so far out of his way to talk to Summer? He neither knew her nor was particularly interested in getting to know her. A strange inkling told him it was simply because he was in plain view of Alicia, whose shoulders slumped. Even her jawbone somehow looked angry to Dan.
“I’m covering the burglaries, Dan.”
Dan went silent. Of course she was covering the burglaries. She was the investigative reporter. Had he even been considered for the story? he wondered. And now here he was, the victim, the calm in the damn center of the storm, and she was standing before him with a page full of notes.
“Care to give me a quote?” she asked.
Dan smiled at her. An inauthentic smile, tinged with a mixture of sadness, jealousy, and incredulity. He put the cap on his own pen, closed his notebook. Was he beaten? Was he giving up?
“Sure, why not? Here’s my quote, Summer: Why do we feel so above it all?”
“We, who?”
“Why do we feel like these things can’t, or shouldn’t, happen to us because a small group of people were innovative and progressive forty years ago?”
“To whom are you referring?”
“Why do we think those people gave us a license to live as if they’d paid the tax for our lives, too? As if we don’t have a part in our own undoing. I mean, really, come on . . . all that stuff that was taken? All that stuff? It was stuff, right? It was shit.” He could sense a shift in Alicia, sitting up straight now. Listening.
Summer was writing furiously, shaking her head a little, not entirely sure what Dan was even talking about. A pigeon landed on the skylight above them with a loud plunk, as if it’d been bullied there by other pigeons.
“Stuff! Stuff we had, stuff we owned. Stuff everywhere! If we didn’t have it, there’d be nothing to take, right? But here’s the rub. We’re still the haves. Take our shit and we’ll still be the haves. I mean, that’s crazy, isn’t it? We don’t want to believe it. We want to meditate and do yoga and eat our vegetables and tell ourselves we aren’t the haves. Or we don’t have to think about being the haves because you only think about haves when you’re a have not, right?”
Dan dropped his pen, or it fell out of his hand. He hadn’t noticed, but the light tap on the floor drew Summer’s attention away from him momentarily.
“Or maybe a few of us do think about how we’re the haves,” Dan continued, “but the haves with social conscience, right? And this makes our having okay. But you know, all we lost, honestly, it really was just shit, Summer. Just crap. It wasn’t like our houses burned down, like we’d lost family albums and that fucking Bible from our great-great-grandparents, and our kids’ baby books. That stuff hurts when you lose it, but our stuff? Shit. The haves. What they really have are secrets. You know what I feel, Summer whatever-the-fuck-your-last-name-is? I feel free. I feel like if they hadn’t taken it, I could give it all away. You need a TV? I had a great flatscreen. Nice fucking piece of kit. See my wife over there? Her parents gave it to us. Gave. That’s a euphemism. But maybe this is the news flash. Maybe all that yoga and meditation and all those fucking vegetables are all part of the haves. They fucking make us the haves. They make us who we are.” Dan was breathing heavily, frustrated by his inarticulate way of asking forgiveness. His way of giving it all back, everything he’d accepted from Alicia, everything he’d accepted from his fucking father- and mother-in-law. The flatscreen and the goddamned floral sofa set and the car. Even the house. Everything. He’d give it all back. Maybe even his wife.
“I’ll . . . try and pull something out of that,” Summer said, trotting away from him the minute he stopped for a breath. He barely noticed her leaving. He was suddenly aware of tears, rolling down his cheeks, a sensation he couldn’t ever remember having as an adult. This, he realized, was what it felt like to feel. He turned, making no move to wipe his face, no attempt to calm his ragged breath, and there was Alicia, staring at him. His wife. The woman he wasn’t sure had ever compelled him to feel in the way that this moment had, full of something. Full of anything at all. Alicia Dixon cum Kowalski. Ponytail, wisps around her face. Tanned. On the thin side. Light brown eyes like clay. Standing now, arms wrapped around herself. Watching her husband quietly cry, and she did the same right alongside him.
Neither of them noticed Michael McPherson come in the revolving door at the back entrance to Village Hall, followed by Arthur Gardenia, Helen Pappalardo, and Paja Coen, as Étienne Lenoir walked out.
Wordpress Blog, April 7, 2004, http://resmgr.wordpress
.com/2004/04/07/truth-of-diversity-hurts:
The Truth of Diversity Hurts
By Lola LOL, Anon., Resi
dence Manager just west
of Austin
Well, I don’t know how to tell you this, Oak Park, but the truth hurts. Maybe Shakespeare could put this better than me—in fact, I’m sure he could—so rather than try, I’ll just give you a few spoonfuls of my building’s statistics:
➢Demographic breakdown of building:
• 32 units. 1 Pan-Asian. 5 African-American. 26 Caucasian.
➢Noise complaints in past month: 3
• 1st offender, treadmill on 3rd floor (Black. Woman. Single.)
• 2nd offender, dance instructor holding class in living room on 2nd floor (White. Man. Single.)
• 3rd offender, born-again Christian speaking in tongues on 1st floor (Black. Woman. Single.)
➢Police called by resident manager in past three months: 2
• 1st offender, crack addiction—taken from residence to psychiatric unit in restraints (Black. Girl. Teenager.)
• 2nd offender, dealing drugs—taken from residence to juvenile detention center in handcuffs (Black. Boy. Teenager.)
➢Late rent in past three months: 2
• 1st offender/repeat offender. Still living in unit (Black. Woman. Single.)
• 2nd offender/repeat offender. Evicted (White. Woman. Single.)
➢Fire in past four years: 1
• Offender, postcoital cigarette on mattress in laundry room (Black. Boy. Teenager with unidentified girl.)
➢Failure to take garbage from back deck to alley Dumpster in past month: too many to count
• Offenders—black, white, woman, man, single, married, teenager.
➢Demographic breakdown at last resident manager Sunday brunch:
• Of 32 units, 7 attended: 6 white, 1 black.
➢Demographic breakdown of tenants who attended last week’s monthly building-wide walk:
• 4. White.
• Number of rehabbed apartments: 28
• Number of units not rehabbed: 4
• Number of blacks living in units not rehabbed: 4
• Number of whites living in rehabbed units: 26
• Number of “other” living in rehabbed units: 1
• Number of complaints from tenants in non-rehabbed units to get units rehabbed: 3
I’ve been a resident manager in a building for four years now, going on five. You all know this. I write about it all the time! The rodents, the cockroaches, the parties, the gardening, the mopping and the sweeping and the apartment showing, and the moving in and moving out, and the lockouts, and the heat, and the air-conditioning, and the parking and all the follies and foibles of living in and managing a multi-unit residential building in this wonderful community we all call home. You’ve read about them all.
But I don’t tell you about the real stuff. The hard stuff. The truth.
Diversity Assurance. Yes. I’m part of it. A BIG part of it. And I have to say that from a philosophical standpoint I am a believer in it—but a believer with one sweeping caveat:
Because we don’t have something better.
Is my building diverse? Yes, indeed, it sure is, Dear Reader. I’ve convinced whites and whites and more whites that this is a safe and lovely community to make one’s home in—and I believe that. Five years ago, I was the third white tenant to move in. The demographics have shifted that much that quickly.
But what happens when one of the four black tenants who’ve all lived here more than fifteen years comes to my apartment with a complaint? Or for one of my quarterly Sunday brunches (to create community)?
Well, they see the truth. They see the beautiful hardwood floors I have, the new paint job, the newly outfitted kitchen. They see the rehabbed apartments that their landlord creates in part from their rent and in part from this village’s grants program. And what do they think? Do they understand that in order to have a rehabbed apartment, they’d actually have to vacate for a month or two? No, they don’t know that until they’re told. And then, say they’re willing . . . do they understand that their rent would increase by fifty, sixty, seventy percent? No. They don’t get gentrification, which is really what D.A. is most of the time. This, Readers, is what they get:
Who’s living in those nice rehabbed apartments?
. . . Everyone but them.
We have one rehabbed apartment with an African-American—a resident at a nearby hospital who is friendly to me, but not “friends” with me, and who appears to work 20 hours a day. This makes me sad. Just one. But I’m told I’m doing a good job; I’m told my building demographics mirror the country at large and that is the point. But the demographics don’t take into account the staggering difference between standards of living of those in rehabbed units versus those not (who, admittedly, pay far less in rent).
I’m not saying it’s not complicated, and I’m not saying we should kill D.A. But I am saying that if the Village of Oak Park thinks there’s community here—real community, where we rely on each other, where we have each other’s backs—then they’re probably living in a dreamscape.
I don’t know the answer. I don’t believe we’ve found it—in D.A. or anywhere. I know what happened on Ilios Lane isn’t something that should be pinned on the residents of the west side—even if it was residents from the west side who did it—and I know Oak Park isn’t nearly the racial panacea that it believes itself to be—and that exists on both sides, blacks and whites. Because the blacks who live in my building and see my rehabbed apartment and curse at me when I call them to take out their garbage? They don’t want to hang with me any more than I want to hang with them. They don’t rely on me any more than I rely on them. Call this racist. Call it honest. Call it a factor of economics and culture and age, too. Call it all these things, because it probably is.
I wish it were different. I wish they were different. I wish I were different. I try. I truthfully, even in my darkest moments, believe I am trying. But mostly, I wish we were honest enough to come up with something better for ourselves, for all of us than, well, than our own devilish human nature.
Peace out, Readers.
~Lola “LOL”
Chapter 32
3:38 p.m.
Susan McPherson was having trouble breathing. Her face was wet and her eyes were nearly blinded by tears and she was insanely thirsty. The boys were still following her. Why hadn’t she told them off? Why hadn’t she shouted, What the hell do you think you’re doing? You think you’re funny? Go home to your mothers.
Why hadn’t she done what would have come so naturally in another place, with other boys? Other—she could not quite bring her mind to form the word—white boys, other white neighborhoods, where she was aware of the power brought by age. Here is the single thought that formed, as she ran, as she heard their laughter and hooting at the tears she could not contain: Who am I kidding?
All those years believing that proximity meant something, that her home just three blocks from the west side in any way at all resembled the west side. She’d driven through here. So many times she’d avoided the Eisenhower Expressway on the west and driven into the city down Chicago Avenue, down Lake Street, down Madison or Washington, and never once did she lock her car doors because she believed herself aligned with these people. She thought her life had been devoted to living among them, when, it was so terrifyingly clear to her now, she’d never even walked among them.
How could she have missed this?
The boys will get tired of her. The boys will get bored. If she yelled at them now, it would only highlight her weakness, her fear. The boys will slowly fall away like wolves, she thought. One after another. Just one. Just one needed to leave.
Imagine yourself running past the manicured lawns and mansions of Kenilworth, past the bank and then the Lake Theatre and all the way east past the library, she told herself. She wasn’t far. She’d run here, after all, carried by her own t
wo legs. That was the beauty of the grid system that was Chicago. She simply had to go west. But cul-de-sacs. Those could surprise you, and if she ended up turning down a cul-de-sac with an apartment building at the end and an alleyway the only escape, she’d be in real trouble. Stop your fucking crying, she told herself.
She ran past crumbling brownstones, large brick apartment buildings with busted windows and broken bottles sprinkled across the entryways. There were dirt lawns, no flowers, no children on the sidewalks pushing themselves on wobbly scooters. Through a few windows she could make out the flashes of television sets as she passed, she could hear the bass thumping of rap and hip-hop. She tripped in a pothole, landed hard on her foot, righted herself. The boys shook with laughter. She ran past an abandoned brick building with multicolored asphalt shingles. She slipped on a flattened paper sack from McDonald’s, righted herself. Chain-link fences waist high ran along the sidewalk in front of nearly every house. But she heard no human sounds, save for the boys following her, collapsing with laughter. She could feel her leg muscles starting to vibrate from the effort, feel her lungs straining with each breath. Such thirst she had! How much longer can I run? She had to extricate herself. Go west. Surely Michael would be worried. Mary Elizabeth would be home from school. Was she closer to Oak Park in the west, or the Loop to the east? Garfield Park. There was a botanical garden there. If she could just get there, someone would let her use the phone. Let her sit down. Offer her some water.
How can I be lost in a grid? she thought. How can I be lost so close to home?
Chapter 33
3:48 p.m.
Étienne saw Michael McPherson entering through the revolving door at the police station as he was exiting, and he offered a tentative smile.
“Where were you?” Michael’s body was rigid, the tails of his beige trench coat flapping in the breeze. “Yesterday afternoon, where the hell were you?”
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